The Travails of Bidenomics

The recent media flurry over “Bidenomics” is the latest attempt to distill a complex but far from complete rupture with neoliberalism. Premised in part on lifting the wages and employment rate of historically low-income groups, Bidenomics is really about two things: strengthening the relationship between climate policy and national security, and prodding capital to commit to more useful, more productive investment in the domestic economy. Industrial policy is its core feature—the main means of inducing, steering, and even compelling capital to serve societal and national goals short of explicit economic planning. Like a heresy without a new church, industrial policy has been the watchword of the last two years despite having no organized base in the American electorate. As for Bidenomics in general, according to an Associated Press poll released in June, just 34 percent of the public approves of Biden’s overall handling of the economy.

More ambitious than anything attempted by a Democratic administration since the mid-1960s, Bidenomics nevertheless marks another uncertain chapter for the party in the twenty-first century. While some analysts, pointing to bipartisan agreement over the imperative to strategically decouple from China, have been quick to declare a new economic consensus in Washington, debates over industrial policy and Bidenomics more generally are stimulating new divisions within the liberal-left.

For those who hail it as the start of a “new progressive era,” Bidenomics is both the apotheosis and transmutation of the legislative potential glimpsed in Barack Obama’s electoral coalition. It demonstrates that today’s Democrats have finally embraced activist government to achieve inclusive growth, enhance the welfare state, pursue social justice, and meet ambitious climate targets.

Economic progressives of a more populist, New Deal bent are likewise sympathetic, if more cautious. Developmental states, they argue, require time to build up their capacities; altering the composition of a country’s industrial mix does not occur overnight. This is no less true of the West’s ultra-polarized hegemon, pockmarked as it is by staggering social and regional inequalities.

By contrast, a motley crew of global governance Keynesians, Marxists, de-growthers, and neoliberals have despaired over this particular strategy to decarbonize the U.S. economy and revive growth, branding it sheer mercantilism. For leftist detractors, Bidenomics is a PR exercise for a revival of state capitalism that will concede little to labor, let alone change the fundamental polarization of society or prevent ecological breakdown. These debates show that the broad American Left is still grappling with the errors of political economy committed under the Clinton and Obama administrations, when free trade was axiomatic and public-private partnerships served to reinforce the power of U.S. multinationals and the financial sector.

At first glance, the fractious response is unsurprising, particularly in light of the influence of Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia on the Inflation Reduction Act and the administration’s hawkish tenor on China. Still, given the limitations of the two-party system and the historical weakness of the labor movement, Bidenomics contains several features that more or less align with the goals of an electoral Left that is committed to reestablishing a popular basis for social democracy primarily through the Democratic Party. At least since the heyday of Bill Clinton, realist progressives have pressed for industrial reinvestment, infrastructure, and innovation to build climate resilience as well as regulations to constrain monopoly power. Executed properly, it was thought, these goals would mesh part of the old New Deal coalition with the new social movements that took root in the 1970s and 1980s, and thus capture a decisive political majority.

The apparent indifference of the broader public, however, reveals that there is an underlying disjuncture between the policy mechanisms and the moment in history in which they would have maximum political impact. Bidenomics’ primary weakness stems from the fact it is a very belated treatment for a host of social and economic problems. Despite the administration’s lofty ambitions, current trends do not suggest that the combination of green subsidies, trade controls, and neo-Keynesian demand management will engender a political transformation. Industrial policy at this late hour can only repair so much damage, whether the issue is climate change or the fortunes of the Democratic Party in the Rust and Farm Belts.

The enduring power of the neo-sectionalist axis in U.S. politics forms, perhaps, the starkest challenge. Changes in the national economy and the party system since the 1990s have solidified into distinctly regional partisan blocs that neither party is keen to disturb; electoral competition in most red states and blue states has declined to such a degree that certain subsectors of the economy are now freighted with barely concealed ideological assumptions. As an overture to workers and economic concerns in conservative-leaning regions, Bidenomics reflects an older, more Fordist understanding of political economy that, despite scattered efforts to placate Democratic interest groups, appears out of sync with the impulses of neo-progressivism. The limited potential of Bidenomics to surmount the country’s sectional dynamics is undercut not only by the GOP’s general intransigence on issues like climate policy, but by the Democrats’ conflicted understanding of what is necessary to propel political and economic development forward.

Indeed, even the most generous interpretation does not allow for much confidence about the constituency Bidenomics might build. Whatever its policy merits, no amount of boosterism can hide the geographic, structural, class-based, and ideological problems facing national Democrats. The crux of the issue is that while Bidenomics has renewed an older tradition of American developmentalism, it lacks a politics that can (1) demonstrably overcome sectional stress and (2) prevent further working-class defections that undermine Democratic strength and lead to disequilibrium in the party system. For all its claims to diversity, the Democratic Party is still too much of a regionally and socioculturally constricted coalition to exploit discontent with a still deleterious and polarizing economic order—one in which the party’s role has proved no less duplicitous than that of the Republicans. Aside from the drift of certain minorities, industrial workers, and middle-class suburban women, who together may flip a midwestern or Sunbelt state to either party, it would seem the basic coalitions that emerged in the 2000 election are largely fixed. An epochal realignment like the New Deal or Reagan Revolution eludes both the Left and the Right.

And yet, Bidenomics—and, by extension, the shotgun marriage of progressive neoliberalism and neomercantilism—faces no credible substitute. Even under a Republican administration in 2025, geopolitical concerns and the force of path dependency, among other considerations, will limit the chance of a total policy reversal. It is thus worth asking: what can Bidenomics achieve politically given the state of polarization? More fundamentally, how did we get here?

The Return of Sectionalism

The last time a major political realignment beckoned was when Barack Obama won an impressive 365 Electoral College votes in 2008. On top of the northeastern and Pacific states, the key blocs of past presidential nominees Al Gore and John Kerry, Obama scored several upset victories, including in Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa—states that Democrats have since ceded to Republicans. Amid massive bank bailouts and an emergency stimulus that failed to hasten recovery from the Great Recession, many journalists, academicians, and think tanks eagerly announced a new progressive era. They intermittently stoked this narrative even after Obama pivoted to austerity following the Tea Party wave in the 2010 midterms. But aside from the Affordable Care Act and a handful of modest regulations and executive orders, all of which failed to stimulate fixed investment, the prospect of a new progressive era was deferred.

Not all disappointments from the Obama era can be blamed on obstructionist Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Tea Party zealots. Nor can blame be simply deflected toward Clintonian Democrats such as Lawrence Summers, then director of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Some analysts, such as historian John B. Judis, warned early on that Obama’s view of American capitalism was more akin to Herbert Hoover’s than FDR’s. His caution was ingrained, not merely tactical.

In hindsight, Obama misunderstood the well-tested interventionist traditions of American political economy—the mix of developmental and redistributive mechanisms that can be harmonized to advance social democracy. Instead, he favored the global cities paradigm that primarily benefited the top 10 percent, to the serious detriment of his party and millions of debt-laden, underemployed Americans. If, in the twilight of the Reaganite era, the broader electorate was ambivalent about more government, working people still intuited that economic growth ought to be broadly shared. The Democratic National Committee and its surrogates, however, were increasingly in the business of lowering expectations, particularly for those outside the hubs of the knowledge and advanced services economy.¹ The choice was perplexing given that the Third Way—at heart, no less boosterish than Reaganism—had been sold on the basis of trade- and tech-driven growth.

Until Biden took office, however, the party line was that Obama was a committed reformer foiled by a racist backlash and other events beyond his control. When Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016, his volleys against the Democratic establishment targeted Clintonism while avoiding direct criticism of Obama; Sanders, of course, was courting disaffected Obama supporters who were nevertheless reluctant to confront the failures of his presidency. This was yet another awkward dance between the populist Left and the liberal elite, in which intellectual honesty had to be subordinated to more pressing strategic and partisan considerations. Even as Sanders extended his hand to forgotten workers in regions hit hard by liberalized trade and foreclosure, his movement could not entirely resist the Manichaean logic of red and blue America ascendant in the liberal establishment. The stakes of these competing visions for the country, admonished palace historians, were too high.

As the menace of Trumpism metastasized, Obama’s very rejection of this pernicious red-versus-blue lens in his famous 2004 convention speech was all but erased from memory. Throughout the Trump years, liberal magazines such as the New Republic published sectional apologia (e.g., “Bluexit”) while Democratic politicians, liberal economists like Paul Krugman, and activist media all maligned red “moocher” states that receive more in fiscal transfers than they contribute to federal revenue. Hillary Clinton, for her part, reminded audiences that she had won the places that were “dynamic” and “moving forward.” Each thread served to mystify why the recovery from the Great Recession was so protracted and uneven, diverting attention from the Democrats’ failure to improve their prospects in multiple regions. At times, the willingness to pathologize working-class whites who voted for Trump was just a few degrees less explicit than that of Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review, who offered in 2016 this prescription:

[T]ake an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization . . . the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die [emphasis added].

One wonders what the consequences of this narrative might have been had the pandemic not intervened and made the mission of ending Trump’s chaotic presidency much more urgent for a broad swath of the electorate. Instead of building on the strategies of Sanders or the 2008 Obama campaign, renascent progressivism focused overwhelmingly on taking on “corporate Democrats” and their coastal urban machines. Democratic socialists, who initially understood the salience of overcoming regional divides, fell under the gravitational pull of hypervigilant anti-Trumpism. Promoting “place-based economics,” whether in a populist vernacular or in the language of the Brookings Institution, was of marginal interest.

Suppressing Class Antagonisms

A partial metamorphosis of the country’s political coalitions subsequently accelerated. While the GOP still projected the exclusivity of country clubs and proffered the discredited recommendations of free market think tanks, it continued to absorb what may be called neo-Jacksonian Democrats—whites hostile to nation-building abroad and partial to government policies that aid working- and middle-class wealth creation. While socially conservative in key respects, these voters are not synonymous with the Gingrichites, Moral Majority evangelicals, and Citizens’ Councils who had defined right sectarianism in previous decades, especially given that many of them descend from the “white ethnics” that underpinned the New Deal coalition.

At the same time, the Democrats continued to win over more and more people who would have fit within the Republicans’ long-buried liberal wing: upscale educated professionals who countenance the basic welfare state but favor technocracy, a large role for philanthropy, globalization, and generally limited intervention in markets. The Eastern Establishment—alongside its West Coast counterpart—became more Democratic and more avowedly liberal on cultural and social issues while discounting the populist gestures that had kept Democrats afloat in flyover states, exacerbating the challenge facing Bidenomics. According to the office of Marcy Kaptur, a Democratic representative from Ohio, Democrats in the 118th Congress represent nine of the ten congressional districts with the highest median income in 2021, while Republicans represent a majority of those in the bottom half.

Each party’s base is in a state of flux and re-composition, perhaps more so than any time since Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy in 1992. The pivotal constituencies are by now evident: downwardly mobile white industrial workers are critical to the GOP, whereas struggling degree-holders, white and nonwhite, comprise the Democrats’ base. Fluidity in the electorate, then, is arising from discontent among those less affluent voters whose Democratic leanings are taken for granted. While many people socialized in neo-affinity groups and professional networks believe their economic advance is inextricably linked with the Democrats, their less connected and less credentialed counterparts, from minorities inclined toward religion and traditional family structures to those simply at a remove from progressive causes, appear willing to disregard MAGA extremism as they weigh which party offers the least complicated path toward greater opportunity and economic independence.

Both parties have therefore evolved to contain much more pronounced class antagonisms. Although political and cultural elites have deftly prevented the combustion of such intraparty contradictions (right-wing media is especially adept at innovating new cultural grievances), most analysis has scrutinized the GOP’s faux-populism while either overlooking or minimizing the Democrats’ own class divide. There are obvious reasons for this. “White solidarity” in the ancient Democratic tradition undeniably became an overt feature of the Republican coalition, pushing the party further right in symbolism and rhetoric as well as specific policies, such as country-based immigration controls. In a macro-historical sense, however, the party base has simultaneously retreated from an all-encompassing traditional conservatism. A case can be made that more Republican voters than in the recent past are keen on preserving major welfare programs; are tolerant of racial pluralism, as evidenced by the increasing diversity of Republican candidate slates; and, at least on some issues, such as gay marriage and partial abortion rights, are basically at peace with a dialed down social liberalism. (The base, after all, includes men and women who partook in the cycles of cultural and sexual liberation that have been going on since the 1960s.)

Still, right-leaning cultural mores, encapsulated by the party’s cross-class desire to preserve the dominance of the heterosexual, property-owning nuclear family, drive Republican politics. Right-leaning voters, accordingly, are served up warmed-over lessons in personal responsibility instead of a program for shared prosperity. As magnified by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that ended a federal right to abortion, the right-wing elite are uninterested in policies that actually reflect the attitudinal complexity and nondoctrinaire (i.e., complicated and “immoral”) personal lives of many blue-collar Republicans.

With the Democrats, the picture is more complicated. The party is at perpetual risk of overextending itself through its commitments to a wide range of interest groups, even if many of those commitments are primarily symbolic. As most social and labor rights have slowed in their advance since the 1970s, and even regressed significantly in some cases,² the party has amplified group-rights discourse, leading to sometimes novel or quixotic demands by activist constituents under the umbrella of social and historical justice. It is highly questionable whether this dynamic represents a viable path for the future of positive rights. What is often overlooked is that it is impossible to divorce a continually expanding politics of recognition from highly group-specific material concerns, the consideration of which can never be perfectly equal. Inevitably, this leads the party to prioritize identitarian claims over common goals. Intentionally or not, advocacy for measures like universal health care, which advance equality through nondiscriminatory forms of social citizenship, has waned in recent years.

In an attempt to stave off coalitional strain, the Democrats combine the emancipatory cultural stances of the New Left with a creeping paternalism. The nature of this conciliatory arrangement with the party’s lower-income supporters is arguably more deceptive than many on the left are willing to admit. As a few analysts have remarked of the party’s “upstairs-downstairs” coalition, the multiracial base of downwardly mobile professionals and heavily exploited food service, delivery, warehouse, and care workers has become habituated to rich elected officials enacting piecemeal reforms while promising a robust defense of “liberal values.”³ Frequently, reforms at the state and city level have entailed subsidized, targeted services, particularly in health care, that might marginally strengthen the purchasing power of certain demographics, alongside other hodgepodge attempts to promote equity, from education to criminal justice to small business.

Such gestures to progressive governance leave larger developmental questions off the table. States and municipalities do have some capacity to pursue their own industrial policies, which can spur housing construction, infrastructural upgrades, and other fiscal multipliers. Welfarist reforms centered on services of one kind or another, however, have substituted for large public projects. High wages and other avenues that foster economic independence, such as truly affordable housing (Sanders, in fact, advocated for more home ownership) or European-style paid vacations and family leave, remain a low priority. Oftentimes, it seems that the more Democratic progressivism promises “self-actualization,” the more economic self-determination becomes a mirage.

Thus, despite collectively producing a majority share of GDP, blue counties contain significant subpopulations above the poverty threshold who are competing over relatively scarce opportunities to achieve a decent standard of living. While Bidenomics is an attempt to address the breakdown of economic opportunity during the last two decades, which has depressed family formation, disintegrated associational bonds, and fueled a life expectancy crisis now spreading to young people, in the near term it seems more likely to stoke investment in regions less beholden to the forces that have captured and in some ways fettered development in blue counties.

In most respects, however, cultural and identarian issues—exacerbated by regional polarization and vice versa—continue to suppress the class antagonisms in both parties. In fact, both parties have managed to yoke the material interests of lower-income workers to those of vanguard activists and other prominent constituencies. In addition to the rarefied spheres of finance, real estate, and tech, economic opportunity in blue enclaves has been increasingly routed through the NGO-nonprofit sector (the revenue of which derives significantly from a donor network encompassing Democratic power brokers) and, more recently, the burgeoning arena of ESG consultancies. To a great extent in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, progressive neoliberalism has been encoded in the salaried employment of the professional-managerial class, whose purchasing power has helped allocate a surplus of disadvantaged urban workers to the food service, hospitality, and personal care sectors. In opaque ways, the economies of the deepest blue areas are arguably shaped by those who wield disproportionate influence over the priorities and discourse of progressive politics. The repercussions for the composition of the labor market are nevertheless discernible: services that cater to a privileged strata of knowledge workers have mushroomed to an unsustainable degree, absorbing degree-bearing castaways from media, academia, and entertainment while exacerbating shortages of skilled tradespeople and engineers as well as teachers and nurses. Although these problems are national in scope, the pre-pandemic economic weight of blue regions had molded the career expectations of the last two generations at the expense of other socially necessary fields.

A comparable if less intricate dynamic can be observed in Republican-dominated regions. While it is typically assumed that the GOP sans Trump does not play to the material interests of its own working-class base, it does offer a mish-mash of vague promises to safeguard the jobs of extractive and heavy industry workers, spur better growth, and keep the cost of living down (usually under the banner of “energy independence”). At the state level, Republican governors’ appeals to growthism are quite forceful,⁴ which undoubtedly attracts moderates who don’t see specific social and cultural positions as affecting them. As indicated by the post-pandemic surge in migration to the South, the Right’s culture war has not been a deterrent for middle- and working-class Americans seeking new opportunities, including more affordable housing. Resignation or indifference to the cycle of Right and Left moral panics may also be a factor. Aware of liberalism’s cultural hegemony, working-class Republicans who do not personally align with the old Christian right of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and who do not weigh how a conservative judiciary or state legislature might affect their own lives, have with some reason determined the public influence of hardline cultural and religious conservatism is in terminal decline.

Yet even when accounting for recent demographic shifts, the sectional pull of party politics over other alternatives is likely to continue. As in previous eras of sectional stress and competition, the material stakes are often expressed through the opposition of newer and traditional industries rather than in terms of class conflict and social inequality. In several Republican-dominated counties, industrial workers wary of disinvestment have effectively aligned with their employers against the perceived dangers of climate regulation and import competition. Meanwhile, in a number of subsectors important to solid blue counties, but especially nonprofit and “mission-based” advocacy work, professionals are likewise allied with their employers, often intrinsically so on the basis of “shared values.” There are two main effects that result from these alignments. First, while workers’ welfare is always tied up with the success of the firm or organization that employs them, loyalties forged in the face of perceived political threats or structural obstacles in the national economy inhibit workers from exerting pressure on the wage bargain, particularly if they are at the lower boundary of the pay scale or their employer is chasing revenue. Second, ideological tensions between the sectional poles of the party system are intensified due to the growing divergence between their respective regional economies, different interpretations of the country’s economic direction, and, in some cases, incompatible ideas about what yields sustainable growth and national wealth. In short, cultural and political attitudes cannot in all instances be divorced from economic considerations; when the latter have a strong sectional character, the possibility of cross-regional alliances between workers declines.⁵

None of this is to suggest that the parties have moved in equally extreme directions when it comes to elected office. On several counts, the Republican Party has welcomed the American Far Right with open arms. The Pew Research Center has coded congressional Democrats as becoming somewhat more liberal since the 1970s, whereas their Republican counterparts, especially southerners, have more dramatically swung toward the right-wing fringe. Not unlike the Southern-led Democratic Party of the Progressive Era, however, the GOP simultaneously attracts voters in search of an alternative to the dominant party who are manifestly not neo-Confederates, crypto-fascists, or anything similar. Correspondingly, at every juncture in which the modern Democratic coalition has had the potential to become more like a traditional labor or social democratic party, it loses voters that would validate said classification. The consequence is that a class-first populism in U.S. party politics stays muzzled.

Silos and Schisms

The primary hazard of these suppressed class antagonisms and class-based defections, in the view of left-populists, is that the central fight over economic power and inequality that Bidenomics theoretically represents could lose force. Despite the lifeline thrown to many unemployed workers and families through the cares Act and the American Rescue Plan, the pandemic amplified the trend of economic inequality. Not only has the top 10 percent’s share of wealth continued to widen, it has become more regionally concentrated. There are also growing concerns that green jobs won’t match or exceed the wages and benefits of traditional manufacturing employment. Even if long-term wage growth outpaces inflation and green investment unleashes Keynesian multipliers in less developed regional economies, it is doubtful that today’s hot labor market will spark a serious income compression that recalls the upward mobility of the postwar era. For the time being, however, fatigue and defeatism have quelled the discontent that sparked last decade’s populist explosion. Once trenchant warnings about the rise of oligarchy, incessantly repeated by left-leaning political scientists and public figures like Robert Reich, have lost impact.

Other developments illustrate the separateness of Bidenomics from the matrix of progressive institutions. The professionalization of social justice work and its extension into the influencer industry have supplanted the groundswell eruptions of the last dozen years. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the resistance to the Trump administration, grassroots climate activism: these flashpoints neither matched the power of labor in the 1930s or the civil rights activists of the 1960s, nor did they offer a programmatic vision that could coalesce multiple constituencies in search of a new political settlement. Of course, these moments were formative experiences for many people who have since devoted themselves to trade unionism and other fora to organize new activists. Still, the outcome reflects a retreat into various silos, as well as a desire to opt out of the reality of national governance. The same can be said of the economic Left and its predictable split over industrial policy. Bidenomics has been repeatedly branded a concession to the Left, but no one is claiming victory.

In view of these silos, one can imagine the relief of the Democrats’ donor class and the party leadership. As long as a nexus of elected officials and celebrity cadres can mollify the activists who may be counted as reliable Democrats first and self-styled radicals second, and therefore redirect their energies into the world of NGOs and electioneering, the fragmentation of recent social movements will cool expectations for change without leading to serious defections at the voting booth. In the short term, this makes Biden’s job a little easier but also more illusory. He can focus on long-term economic resilience, targeting the vast middle of swing voters from his youth that no longer exists, and leave the business of social justice and the welfare state—its future universality, or its evolution into a plethora of means-tested and equity-determined services and subsidies—to his successors.

The disconnect between the administration’s “paradigm shift” on political economy and the Left’s understanding of governance and development was not inevitable. Bidenomics, it hardly needs to be said, is not New Dealism, but its architects do grasp that mitigating polarization is downstream from political economy; touted investments in several red and purple states, for instance, are a key component of the administration’s promise to deliver inclusive growth. Historically-minded progressives would presumably recall that the New Deal became the U.S. developmental project par excellence because it was deepened under pressure from organized labor, radical and populist politicians on the make, and reformist currents in civil society that stretched back decades. Why, then, is the Left ambivalent on Bidenomics and its potential to forge the cross-regional constituencies which Democrats need to prevail in federal elections?

As the Left is relegated once again to becoming the Democratic Party’s “conscience,” it is increasingly evident that there is an ineluctable weakness to neo-progressivism, which is hindering Bidenomics and vice versa. In particular, the Left’s failure to serve either as a shrewd coalition partner or a credible, independent political force has limited activity to wrest the most from Bidenomics. Ultimately, the Left seems unwilling to accept the fact that the path to social democracy was always going to entail compromises in domestic politics that tested globalization and did not reward, in every instance, the most vocal Democratic interest groups. The Left’s crisis over its role in the Democratic Party points to its declining relevance. Efforts to realign the party and court working-class voters beyond conventional liberal strongholds have hit a wall at the same time that the left-wing tilt of millennials and Gen Z appears to be weakening. The recent spate of liberal legislation under Democratic trifectas in Minnesota and Michigan, alongside calibrated appeals to economic nationalism, such as those that aided John Fetterman’s victory in Pennsylvania’s Senate race last year, point to how Democrats might rebuild their regional power. But these developments are not the fruits of left-wing insurgency. If anything, the victories stem from a concerted center-left drive to repel fringe MAGA candidates; leftist neo-progressivism, by and large, remains a frustrated coastal phenomenon.

New Deal Ghosts

The contortions on the left have made way for some mainstream commentators to argue that Bidenomics needs to focus more on a “liberalism that builds.” Many of these voices are former Obama acolytes who dismissed Sanders’s economic critique but now concede that markets left to their own devices have led to a profound scarcity of essential social and infrastructural goods. As the American Prospect’s David Dayen has observed, these voices are unenthusiastic about the populist ingredients—that is, the actual politics—that would make Bidenomics politically successful. One cannot help but conclude that intermittent declarations of a new progressive era stem from a deep intellectual hunger but little actual desire to chart a post-neoliberal path. Moored to partisan feeling, neo-progressivism in both its Left and establishmentarian versions is not the same thing as an appetite for competing visions of reform and renewal that disrupt and even overhaul the party system.

The difference with the transpartisan Progressivism of the early twentieth century is crucial. Then, key reformers from civil society operated without an explicit partisan lens or affiliation; not a few of their political allies, moreover, were willing to buck their respective party machines and run as independents of one variety or another. Socialists, meanwhile, were competitive in what are now some of the reddest states. Both radical and reformist currents converged on the importance of disrupting the centers of power in each section of the country. Rooseveltian Progressivism, Wilsonian Progressivism, La Folletean Progressivism, Debsian Socialism, and municipal socialism, along with their respective hybrids and certain vestiges of late nineteenth-century Populism: all these tendencies challenged the ossification of unthinking partisan loyalties and sectionally determined agendas. Such risk-taking and political entrepreneurship is virtually impossible to conceive of now, especially as the DSA becomes the de facto left wing of the Democratic Party.

Contra Bidenomics’ developmentalist thrust, Democratic power brokers and their sycophants essentially crave a pseudo-populism that cements the activist Left’s peace with the Brahmin Left and gentry liberals. This model invariably creates a buffer against class-first populism as promulgated by Jacobin as well as the soft economic nationalism typical of midwestern Democrats; as with the activist Left, the faintest dissent from social libertarianism is scorned. By the same token, state-level third-party politics for economic progressives and other practical reformers in red regions is all but proscribed, preempting its mere feasibility.

The paucity of political imagination is lost on the very organs championing change. In most cases, it is considered misguided or foolish to think that either one or both parties could crack up in the next decade, prompting a substantial realignment, or to venture that Democrats should aggressively court voters in red states (many of which have substantial numbers of African-Americans and other minorities that form the party’s alleged “backbone”). Whatever the grassroots ferment, the overarching approach to modern progressivism makes it even more elite-mediated than its early twentieth-century antecedent. This explains the nearly automatic resignation of most progressive reformers to the holding pattern of blue states and red states; if certain places are simply incorrigible, then elite progressives and their benefactors can absolve themselves of failure in perpetuity.

Still, after years of endless prelude in which the Democratic Party has only grown closer to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, progressive cadres insist upon the viability of their project to restore the Democratic Party’s ostensible roots. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in 2019, the goal of new, young progressives is to bring the Democratic Party “home.” That, however, would demand winning in places that few in the national party have any serious intention of courting after Biden’s tenure. Such remoteness from vast sections of the country only saps the vitality—and yes, diversity—of the party leadership. Regardless of scattered state and city reforms and the ascent of a handful of left-wing politicians, the Democrats’ overall weak bench looms. The task of infusing Bidenomics with heterodox ideas has mainly been the purview of think tanks and related advocacy groups populated by experts drawn from elite universities, not aspiring masters of congressional power. Accordingly, a neo-Brandeisian ethic has animated parts of the administrative state. But while the National Labor Relations Board and Federal Trade Commission have issued some important rules and memoranda in favor of basic economic democracy, the instantiation of “hipster antitrust” signals technocratic ingenuity at a remove from the actual zeitgeist—another gambit to make regulatory moves reverberate from political institutions into a democratic politics emptied of traditional mass-member organizations. Like green developmentalism as the antidote to offshoring and hyper-financialization, modern antitrust cannot suddenly undo the consequences of deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s. After three decades of benumbing corporate domination facilitated by the lure of everyday bargains, most Americans lack a frame of reference for how regional economies were once able to keep more wealth local and more equitably circulated between smaller firms, workers, farmers, and consumers. Vows to diversify supply chains, reduce costs, and simultaneously raise wages have yet to assuage the anxieties of Americans on fixed incomes and those at the periphery of the tight labor market.

At every turn, then, Biden’s improbable knack for experimentation struggles to find a natural constituency. Despite refurbishing many older, credible ideas about how to construct a well-regulated democratic capitalism, his approach to political economy is no longer the primary basis of Democratic identity. Meanwhile, the adoption of Trumpian ideas, however sotto voce, may simply generate cognitive dissonance for team blue and its consultant class. Targeted attempts to rein in corporate power have been accompanied by the maintenance of Trump-era tariffs and buy-America procurement rules, hardly rallying points for Democratic interest groups disinclined to cheer on economic patriotism. These protectionist commitments demonstrate an extraordinarily belated recognition of the concerns first sounded by Rust Belt Democrats and their trade union allies a half century ago.

In the case of such overtures, Biden may ultimately be chasing New Deal ghosts rather than real constituents. While his industrial strategy may coax infrastructure-hungry industrial capital and green-tech startups to support the Democratic column in congressional and presidential elections—perhaps helpfully diluting the influence of Wall Street over the party’s funds and platform—the Democrats are over-relying on their upper-middle-class supporters to kickstart the energy transition. Tax credits for goods like electric vehicles and heat pumps are a preliminary inducement, but as a class this group is keen to preserve its standard of living as much as its Trumpian counterpart: namely, the perks of a consumption model predicated on low-wage, on-demand services and Amazon parcels of cheap goods manufactured in China. As asset-holding winners of the knowledge economy, they benefited in a variety of ways from offshoring. At best, “Made in America” is a forced fit.

Paradoxically, strides toward greater fixed investment and development have also been undercut politically by decisions that constrained the Democratic Party’s more natural welfarist impulses. Pandemic-based experiments with an expanded safety net have proved to be just that: experiments. Between the expiration of the enhanced Child Tax Credit and emergency Medicaid coverage, the party has once again taken its working-class supporters for granted. It seems you can either get market-friendly welfarism (e.g., Obamacare) or industrial policy from a modern Democratic administration, but you can’t reasonably expect both. Eventually, though, Democrats will have to decide what kind of welfare state they want, given the pace of climate change and the future of tech. With concerns gradually mounting that the current jobs boom could implode with the advance of AI, it may become more palatable to promise a basic income in lieu of a “just transition” for all workers. The conditions which force that hand, however, are unlikely to produce the political winner for the Democrats that has so far eluded Bidenomics.

Toward Disequilibrium?

In our post-pandemic malaise, it is tempting to conclude that Bidenomics is a false dawn rather than the road to redemption. Attempts to popularize it cannot escape the fact that party strategy is now the opposite of Obama’s in 2008; there is little talk of expanding the Democrats’ electoral map in 2024 or later. Yet the formidable obstacles that lie beyond the coasts mask a deeper truth: most progressive elites do not actually want to govern the red states, regardless of their diversity, just as most Republicans have no desire to vie for power in the blue ones. The purportedly egalitarian ends of the national Democratic Party are belied by a fundamentally conservative instinct. Progressives blame the backwardness of the deepest red regions for the state of the country (much as Reaganite conservatives once blamed the supposed pathologies of the urban core), but the reality is that epochal turning points in the United States hinge on geographically and ideologically diverse developmental coalitions. That many progressives question the value of state-steered investment in red states, with only perfunctory reference to their right-to-work laws, suggests the Left may fatally misunderstand what it will take to build and invigorate a post-neoliberal order. Bidenomics may end up a top-down reconfiguration of capitalism, not by design, but because nearly all factions of the Left are unequipped to mobilize where it counts.

In light of these contradictions, is an exit from our zero-sum mode of politics at all possible? Severe restrictions on abortion and gender-affirming care in GOP-dominated states are seen by most on the left as a harbinger of the draconian things to come under future Republican presidents. At the same time, a countermovement against progressive orthodoxy appears to be gathering pace; Republican strength is not in every instance a product of gerrymandered districts and anti-majoritarian forces. There are voters and communities completely separate from a right-sectarian, nativist milieu who are convinced that aspects of neo-progressivism undermine the terms of their own social reproduction, and the long-presumed economic trade-off—i.e., to vote Democratic is to vote their material interests—is not, in fact, true for every sector or community in which working-class people are predominant.⁶

Here, then, is the enduring puzzle of the modern Democratic Party and its left flank. With so much on the line, it struggles to embrace the tripartite task of any developmental coalition oriented to the economic welfare of the majority: to pump investment into stagnant and under-developed regions; purposefully induce skilled migration to new centers of growth, which may relieve unproductive competition in and upward redistribution toward high-rent locales; and simultaneously renegotiate the terms of opportunity in places where capital is concentrated but failing to serve acute social needs. These are vexing challenges replete with ideological and sociological tensions, heightened all the more because they entail mobilizing a critical mass of irregular voters, the “de-aligned,” and a small, yet persuadable, portion of “Trump Democrats.” But unless these challenges are met, an older progressive spirit—guided by the belief that the plane on which the parties compete must itself be transformed to salvage and strengthen the development of the country—will be lost to history.

This article is an American Affairs online exclusive, published August 20, 2023.

Notes