Liberals need to start playing power politics

If it's not too late

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Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the lost opportunity represented by the Biden years.

In 2020, Joe Biden won the election mostly because he was all of the things that Trump was not. He came across as sane, moderate, sensible, mainstream, and predictable. These qualities appealed to a Democratic primary electorate which prioritized beating Donald Trump at any cost, and they appealed to a general election electorate which was sick of the chaos and divisiveness of the Trump years.

But there was a cost associated with electing a figure like that. On the one hand, Biden surprised a lot of people by tacking greatly to the left on domestic policy. His instinct has always been to find where the center of the party is and occupy that position. The Democratic Party of 2020 had progressive preferences on a lot of issues, and Biden’s infrastructure, climate and general spending policy reflected that.

But there was one big way in which Biden failed to meet the moment, and that was in not recognizing the fundamental threat to the constitution and the rule of law posed by the MAGA movement. He might have tacked left on climate, but he retained his immense bias towards the status quo and his fundamental conservatism on the basic norms, rules and laws which govern American democracy. He believed that the system could contain and destroy Donald Trump if only all of Trump’s opponents would follow the rules and do things the way they had always been done.

That was a profoundly incorrect assumption, and we are all now playing the price.

In a sense, getting a president with this attitude was a natural consequence of voting for someone mainly on the basis that they were the un-Trump. Biden promised a return to normalcy, but normalcy was no longer capable of beating back the radical right.

What happened next was that the U.S. got hit by a wave of historic price inflation of the sort that many Americans had never experienced at all and no-one had experienced for about 30 years.

This put a fatal hole in the heart of Biden’s presidency, which was predicated on the idea that a return to constitutional and political normalcy would allow people to get on with happy, prosperous lives. Instead, the liberalism that Biden represented became associated with economic failure.

But there is a deeper problem here, one that allowed this situation to arise in the first place.

That problem is that liberals have increasingly come to see liberalism as consisting mainly of a set of procedures and norms through which politics is conducted, rather than a primordial belief system that meets people’s basic needs for material comfort and psychological self-esteem. “Let’s ensure Congress and the courts follow normal procedures” is not much of a rallying cry compared to “bread and racial grievance for all”.

When I look back, the Biden presidency made two fatal mistakes which flowed from this – and they are mistakes that Democrats urgently need to avoid in the future.

The first was not to use the power of the state, while they held it, to hold Trump and other MAGA figures accountable for their crimes. Donald Trump and many figures around him engineered an attempt to steal an election which culminated in an insurrection. His enemies then held all of the power of the state for the next four years, but managed to make him face absolutely zero consequences. They then calmly handed him back the power of that state four years later. To future historians, this sequence of events will appear incomprehensible.

And it cannot be allowed to happen again. If there is a free and fair election in 2028 and Democrats win it, then they need to turn their attention to a program of constitutional and institutional reform which will make it much harder for a figure like Trump to run an undemocratic regime again. This might mean weakening the power of the presidency, un-Trumpifying the courts, and overhauling the structure of emergency powers to make them much less prone to abuse.

The second failure of the Biden years was to chart the course of a new liberalism, one that is able to offer a better counterpoint to MAGA than “we’ll give you a good economy if global conditions permit and an extension of the welfare state if Republicans in Congress will let us”.

People often want to debate what particular policies the Democrats should offer – should they be relatively more or less progressive, should they be more or less focued on economic redistribution, and things of this nature. That’s an important conversation, but to me it’s secondary to the fact that the party – and the liberalism that it represents – have been completely checkmated at the game of power politics. They’ve lost their vitality and lost their popular appeal.

The right policy proposals can help to get those things back, but they’re not sufficient on their own. More important is appearing as a force which is willing to blow through obstacles and get things done, to recognize that the enemies of liberalism long ago stopped playing by those rules and that to continue to pretend those rules still exist will just lead to defeat.

The stakes of defeat are now much higher. The Trump regime is not just threatening four years of relatively uncongenial policies – it is threatening, fairly regularly and explicitly, the end of the democratic system itself. Restoring “the norms” is not a sufficient answer to that. We’re playing for keeps, and that means different tactics.

What exactly that looks like is for aspiring leaders of the left – and the Democratic Party – to spell out. But my intuition that the successful argument will be one that points out that democracy, the rule of law and other nice things are not just some optional extra in a wealthy, thriving society. You cannot have the prosperity and the freedom of a modern capitalist democracy without the democracy part. People’s prosperity and quality of life is tied to their freedom, and the more Trump attacks the latter, the more harm he will ultimately do to the former.

The Democrats’ failure to make that link – and to then explain how they would use the power of the state to better people’s lives – is the biggest political failure of the last ten years. I hope there will be an opportunity for it not to be their last.

Thanks for reading America Explained! Paid subscriptions are what keeps this newsletter a going concern, so please upgrade if you’re able to spare a few dollars or euros or whatever (I’m not picky!) a month to support independent journalism and to access all of our posts. And as always, students and educators can get a full subscription for free - just drop me a line.