Yesterday’s Man
Yesterday’s Man
The Case Against Joe Biden
Branko Marcetic
First published by Verso and Jacobin Foundation Ltd. 2020
© Branko Marcetic 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
Jacobin Foundation Ltd.
388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11217
ISBN-13: 9781839760280
eISBN-13: 9781839760303
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Printed in the United States by Maple Press
Contents
1. The Making of a Neoliberal
2. Victory in Defeat
3. Racing in the Street
4. It’s the Middle Class, Stupid
5. No Daylight
6. The Great Compromiser
Epilogue
Notes
Introduction
Ask any liberal-minded person, and they can probably tell you where they were and what they were doing when they learned Donald Trump won the White House. Three years and five stages of grief later, they’ll probably tell you they’re now wondering which of the many, many candidates gunning for the Democratic presidential nomination will just end the nightmare and bring things back to normal. As of the time of writing, that may well be former vice president Joe Biden, who has continued to lead the polls since entering the race in April 2019.
But simply removing Donald Trump from power won’t do what many liberals hope it will. Trump and Far-Right populists like him are just one by-product of the same “normal” that the many now pine for, a normalcy that, I hope this book makes clear, often felt like anything but for a growing number of people.
To return the United States to any version of normality that won’t just lead the country straight back to another Trump, the eventual Democratic nominee will have to do two things: they’ll have to beat Donald Trump at the ballot box, thus removing him from the White House; and they’ll need to midwife a fundamental break from the political status quo, removing or mending the conditions that led to his rise in the first place. This book makes the case that Joe Biden, beloved elder statesman and current frontrunner, will not do the second and may well fail at the first.
Joe Biden is not a bad or evil man. But he is someone who, by virtue of the political, social, and historical forces that shaped his life, made choices and drew political lessons that not only make him ill-suited to combat Trumpism but led him to help engineer the very conditions that handed Trump victory in the first place. In this, Biden is not much worse than many other prominent Democrats; indeed, part of the problem is that the Democratic Party, right now the only viable electoral vehicle against Trump and the Republicans, is loaded with politicians who share these same inadequacies.
Biden’s career has straddled the United States’ uneasy transition from the politics of the New Deal to its takeover by the radical Right. Starting in the 1930s, after decades marked by class conflict, stark inequality, and alarming concentrations of wealth and power, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four terms helped transform the United States from a country whose business was business, as one Republican predecessor had famously put it, to one focused on securing hard-fought social, economic, and political rights for its working people, however imperfectly and even unjustly it carried out that task.
In the process, Roosevelt forged an unstable but powerful voter coalition that helped turn all politics into New Deal politics for the next several decades. Even when Republicans took power, they largely went along with the political order Roosevelt had laid down, recognizing that to do otherwise would be political suicide. And though the United States never got as far as, say, some of its European counterparts in securing economic and political rights for its people, for a good few decades, it secured a viable, if flawed, welfare state.
The first major cracks in this unspoken consensus came in the 1960s, when the Vietnam War and the victories of the civil rights movement began to unravel the New Deal order in different ways: Vietnam by fomenting mass unrest and disillusionment with both the Democratic Party and the US government more generally, and the civil rights movement by prompting a mass exodus of racists from the Democrats and into the arms of the GOP. These fissures widened in the 1970s, with the continuation of Vietnam and its accompanying unrest, rolling economic crises, and the rise of a more conservative, suburban-dwelling, white middle class that rebelled against the same New Deal order that created it. Meanwhile, the radical Right, which had, with generous corporate backing, been building a grassroots movement against the New Deal for decades, fell in line behind the GOP, which in turn recognized the power of leveraging racist resentment to win power, winning victories on the back of suburban support across the country.
It was at this point that the supposed “liberal consensus” set up in the 1930s was gradually replaced. Just as Roosevelt’s election had heralded a sharp break from what came before, Ronald Reagan’s in 1980 did the same, only in the opposite direction. While Roosevelt’s New Deal order had used state power to improve people’s lives, Reagan’s presidency helped usher in a neoliberal order that claimed to pursue the same goal with the opposite platform: lower taxes, less government “interference” in the market and people’s lives, and overall pro-business policies that, the claim went, would create prosperity that filtered down to everyone else.
Though Reagan and those who followed him didn’t always live up to their slogans—mostly due to the need to maintain a powerful military to police a US-dominated global order that kept markets open for these same business interests—these beliefs broadly came to undergird virtually the entire mainstream political spectrum, helped along by the influence of money that seeped more and more into every facet of the US political system. Just as even anti–New Dealers had gone along with the prevailing Rooseveltian mood for the sake of political survival, liberal politicians found it easier to swim with the tide Reagan had set in motion, adjusting their politics and narrowing their imaginations to suit this new consensus.
But this could only last for so long. By giving businesses and the super-rich more and more power over people’s lives and dismantling or weakening the government programs that helped guarantee prosperity, or simply survival, for working people, neoliberalism made the overwhelming majority of Americans’ lives worse. The pool of political leaders willing to fundamentally challenge this order and the powers that be behind it shrank and became marginalized.
The result was the dramatic collapse