Biden's New Deal

Biden’s main challenge will be to maintain unity in his camp, which is threatened by the ideological divergences between the party’s progressives and centrists. While climate activists applaud the plan’s initiatives, they also criticize it as being largely insufficient, with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez leading the critique. At the same time centrist Democrats have expressed concern about certain measures, notably on the fiscal front. Biden can afford to lose no more than 3 votes in the House of Representatives, and none at all in the Senate. Meanwhile, on the Republican side McConnell immediately denounced the bill as a "Trojan Horse" for the more "radical" priorities of the Democratic Party. The GOP refuses to consider any infrastructure beyond "roads, bridges, ports and airports", dismissing the rest of the plan as "a bunch of costly progressive demands". The Republicans will certainly turn the debate into another culture war to justify their anticipated obstruction.

Nonetheless Biden has a sizable advantage, the best advantage a President can have with Congress: the support of the American people. His popularity is at 61% and has held steady for the last three months. It is on a rising curve concerning the economy, with his approval rate up from 55% to 60% in the last poll; regarding his management of the pandemic, 73% of Americans support him, including 50% of Republicans (a notable fact). During his four years in office, Donald Trump never passed the 50% bar of approval. 

In any event, the announcement of the plan is only the beginning of a months-long congressional marathon, which will involve negotiations in both chambers, especially between Democrats, and especially in the Senate. There will also be negotiation between the two chambers to arrive at a common version of a bill, which will more or less resemble the current proposed plan. 

What does this plan tell us about Biden’s goals, and his methods?

The vast scope of the plan can be explained first and foremost by the institutional and political limits of the American system, and the narrowness of the Democrats’ majorities in Congress. The next congressional elections will take place in 18 months, and, in some districts or states, the battle for the primaries has already begun. This means that Biden’s window for action is already closing. In addition, the specific constraint of the Senate filibuster, which effectively means that a party needs 60 votes to wield a majority, can only be circumvented in 2 circumstances: for nominations, and through the so-called budget "reconciliation" process, a method that can be used only twice more this year, and with some limitation.

This lays the context of this plan, which in an earlier period of American political life would have been the subject of multiple different bills. The recently-passed rescue act similarly included, in addition to economic stimulus measures (such as individual checks for $1,400), education and family policy components: in the absence of European-style "social safety net" in the United States, Democrats are also motivated to "seize the moment" of the pandemic crisis, and push through measures that have long been policy priorities for some members of the party.

Biden has also referred repeatedly to the crisis of democracy, both in the United States and more generally worldwide, to the "existential challenge" of climate change, and to the priority for the US of focusing on competition with China. At the beginning of March, he gathered historians for a discussion at the White House centered on transformative ambition, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, and the need to "think big and go fast". These ambitions were present in Biden’s 2020 campaign, in his desire to create a new "democratic coalition" which "transformed his candidacy" in the spring of 2020, when the pandemic and Bernie Sanders’ withdrawal led to joint working groups between the two campaigns, and the two wings of the contemporary Democratic party. The joint work has continued, and Biden’s closest advisors are still in touch with the party’s progressive base, its organizations and elected officials. This willingness was further confirmed in his first political nominations. Biden appointed multiple personalities known to be close to Elizabeth Warren, notably in the areas of the economy, trade, and climate, leading some Washington insiders to refer to his administration as the "Warren administration". None of this is surprising coming from a politician who has always evolved along with his party’s center of gravity - and with the American people. It also seems to be indicative of Biden’s method for achieving this new democratic synthesis, one that can only come through its confrontation with what is possible politically in the contemporary Congress.

This strategy would definitively turn the page not only on the Reagan era of American politics, but also on the era of Bill Clinton’s "New Democrats", instead hearkening back to a role for government within the American economy that was more prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. As Biden explained when he presented his plan in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday March 31, the objective is to "reform capitalism", and "prove that democracy works better than authoritarianism".

In part, this last argument has a foreign policy tint that aligns with the plan’s ambitions concerning China, but is also a message for the domestic audience. Biden wants to defeat Trumpism, by showing that the new trumpist GOP represents a false populism, a "pluto-populism" that in fact only legislated for the benefit of the wealthy (as particularly exemplified by the 2017 tax reform), while the Democratic Party wants to act for the benefit of America’s middle and working classes - whether that working class is white or not. As such, it is no coincidence that Biden went back to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to present his new plan - Pennsylvania, the decisive swing state in the last two elections, a state he already visited to explain and pitch the covid rescue plan, where he launched and closed his presidential campaign, and where he made more trips than any other candidate in 2020.

Copyright: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP