The Democratic Party and progressive politics in the post-Biden era
Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have an helpful analysis in the new (Winter 2025) print issue of Jacobin on "Why Bidenism Failed."1 It focuses on the Democrats' frustrating habit of passing substantive legislation that benefits large numbers of voters, but set them up so that the most obvious benefits are backloaded so that they may first become obvious to much of the public during a subsequent Republican Administration. And they also often do a weak job of identifying those programs and their benefits to their voters.
Biden’s return to pro-labor, Keynesian economics
Biden really did practice a kind of pro-labor, anti-monopoly, Keynesian, industrial-policy type approach that we have seen, really, since Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency. And Cebul/Geisner give a good description of this side of Biden’s Administration:
While he never embraced the full suite of “Green New Deal” initiatives urged by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and the Left, his three major pieces of legislation - the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2021, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 [the cut-down version of Biden’s original Build Back Better proposal], and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 - all aimed to use public power to spur private investment and manufacturing that would not only support the green energy transition but also stimulate good jobs for working people.
Biden even managed some actual Democratic partisan symbolism: “His fall 2023 trip to Michigan to walk the picket line with striking autoworkers was meant to symbolize his differences from Trump.”
This is the right way for the Democratic Party to move and has needed to move for a long time. But while the Republican Party and their allied media supporters do a disciplined job of pushing a particular message and repeating it over and over and over again across a wide variety of platforms, the Democratic Party, well, doesn’t. As Cebul and Geisner observe, “But given their sweeping scale, ambitions, and real policy successes [of those economic programs], it is especially telling that people rarely talk about them.”
And a lot of that is really a case of the Democratic Party just falling down on basic messaging. Or their self-branding, if one prefers. And they rightly note, “there is little evidence that Biden and Vice President Harris were even interested in trying [to tout those actually beneficial and substantial accomplishments].”
They received vanishingly little notice in Biden’s final State of the Union address. And in their lone presidential debate, when Trump challenged Harris on Biden’s (actually strong) record on stimulating industrial investment and manufacturing jobs, she failed to mention the IRA or the CHIPS Act.
Everyone knew in the campaign that Trump and the Republicans hated immigrants, and Black people, and uppity wimmin, and that they were all against “wokeism” and trans people and women’s right to abortion. But going into the election, voters were mainly hearing that Kamala Harris was getting glitzy celebrity endorsements and was really, really proud of having Dick and Liz Cheney supporting her.
The Democrats just have to be more willing to fight for their own side. They just do.
Cebul and Geisner also call out the Democrats for not executing their own popular initiatives properly:
[H]ealth care reform has not yielded the political dividends Democrats long hoped it would. The architects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) routinely promised that taking a market-based approach would make the delivery of care more efficient. The implementation of the ACA has nevertheless proven that structuring a market in health care delivery enables price inflation, not to mention grift by private companies. Biden’s successful negotiation with drug companies did lower the costs of certain prescription drugs like insulin, but these efforts ultimately treat the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem. And despite repeated updates to the ACA’s open enrollment website, it remains profoundly difficult to navigate the many plans to choose from and the complex rules of eligibility in the limited time provided to make plan selections. It is equally difficult to get a representative from HealthCare.gov on the phone.
This stuff matters. And, yes, good management is always a challenge. But it’s something that’s achievable, that pays real political dividends, and is something that politicians can remind voters during campaigns that they have been making it work right. This is not an exotic or theoretical leftie notion. It’s just basic politics and public administration.
It wasn’t so long ago inn the mists of time that Democrats would commonly quip that “Republicans campaign complaining that government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” They could still do that and benefit from it. They just need to try.
And that’s still true. People want to be able to access government services like health care. They want to be able to find basic information about paying their taxes without having to first get a college degree in accounting. They want to government to negotiate reasonable prices on drug purchases. The Democrats should be out there every day saying what Bernie Sanders does, that the US is the only country in the world that doesn’t negotiate the purchase price of drugs and instead just lets Big Pharma dictate the price (with a very few exceptions now that the Biden Administration won but fumbled marketing even that as a political achievement).
But the class analysis that Cebul and Geismer make is more dubious. They identify the “professional-managerial class” as dominant in the Democratic Party, having replaced working-class voters as a driving force:
Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren: all were creatures of modern liberalism’s professional-managerial class (PMC) consultants, attorneys, professors. They were precisely the kinds of elites Donald Trump could easily paint as aloof and out of touch.
This is a bit murky, to put it generously. Even the most flaming leftwing, hardcore pro-labor campaigns would also use “consultants, attorneys, professors.” To use an old leftie concept, class allegiance is more important in politics than class background. The problem is much more a dependence on well-heeled donors than it is that Democratic campaigns use consultants and attorneys.
The opposition in the Trump II era
The direction the Democratic Party needs to go to become a more democratic and genuinely working-class party is pretty straightforward to describe. Getting there is a much heavier lift.
Biden’s return to stimulate Keynesian economic policy and something like a national “industrial policy” (as it was called in the 1980s) is the right way to go. Democrats need to encourage in word and deed the formation of much larger, serious labor unions. They also need to develop real state-level party organizations again that reach into smaller cities and towns. That will look different in a lot of ways than similar organizational efforts looked into the past. After all, we have Zoom calls and What’s App and the like today.
There are networks of progressive organizations, think tanks, and activists out there. They have had big effects in the past and still can and will. Hopefully, the next time a movement like, say, Black Lives Matter develops, the Democrats can come up with a better reaction than “We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police is to fund the police. … Fund them. Fund them. Fund them …”2
Democrats need to get better at fighting for their own side – their voters’ side, not wealthy donors’ side. Democratic officials like Minnesota’s attorney general Keith Ellison have found ways to fight against police abuse while supporting responsible law enforcement. “Fund them, fund them, fund them” is mainly a reflex appeal to police unions. But when we look at events like the mass murder at the elementary school shooting in Uvalde TX in May 2022 it’s painfully clear that we have to demand responsible policing.
That means in extreme emergencies like Uvalde, the cops’ job is not to stand out in the hall listening to the murderer shoot and kill 19 children and two teachers. Their job is stop the killer. It’s because the sometimes do have to take extreme risks that can even put their lives in danger that ordinary police officers are honored like no other ordinary public employees. And are generally paid very well in comparison to others.
Nobody that’s not basically a hardcore racist or sociopath wants to see cops do what those four officers in Minneapolis did to George Floyd in 2020 in the incident that became one of the key drivers of the BLM movement, i.e., holding him down and deliberately strangling him to death on a public street while being filmed in the act of murder.
Running away from common decency, whether it’s in defending cops who murder innocent people or in funding a genocide in Gaza, is not what the Democratic Party needs to stand for.
The Republicans pretty much have the militia-movement and fans-of-sadistic-cops vote locked up. The Democrats aren’t going to be able to compete with them on things like that.
It shouldn’t be a hard lesson. Democrats don’t need to be campaigning with Republicans named Cheney. They need to be campaigning for things that will make the lives of ordinary people more prosperous and secure. (And, yes, the latter includes supporting responsible policing and condemning any other kind.)
And on issues like xenophobia that rightwing parties across the world embrace and which fits well with an authoritarian, anti-democracy political orientation, the Democrats have to push back against demagoguery. Yes, by all means campaign for responsible immigration policies that recognize the actual, critical role that even “undocumented” immigrants play in the US. Kamala Harris’ and Joe Biden’s position of we-hate-the-immigrants-more-than-the-Republicans do will continue to fall as flat as it did in 2024.
We can leave the copaganda and bitching about the existence of homeless people and lurid, exaggerated stories about foreign criminals to the Republicans and to neo-MAGA converts like Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of TYT.
Aside from the patient work of building progressive activist networks inside the Democratic Party and outside, the promotion of left media is critically important. The establishment Democrats’ and Joe Biden’s favorite “resistance liberal” network MSNBC is crashing and burning. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of Morning Joe were quick to make their pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago after the election to kiss Trump’s ring after years of calling him a fascist threat to democracy. (The latter was and is true, BTW.)
We need to pay attention to and support where we can progressive media, both print and broadcast, that present good quality journalism in the context of pro-democracy analysis.
I recently posted the following on Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta platform Facebook, and the algorithms apparently buried it. I usually get some kind of reaction to most anything I post there. But not this time. One of the signs of the evolving media environment:
GETTING TO KNOW OUR TECH-BRO OVERLORDS
Who knows how the billionaire-run social media algorithms work these days? I sure don't. But I'm guessing that this Kyle Kulinski video3 is not likely to appear on most of my Facebook friends' feed.
Anyway, this is still a wonderful takedown of Peter Thiel, the TechBro overlord who is part of the so-called "Paypal Mafia" and the sweaty guy on the right in the image below. Also known as a key patron and booster of incoming Vice President J.D. Vance and also of Sebastian "Basti" Kurz, the former Prime Minister of Austria who is mainly known for his, uh, tolerance for corruption and his general suspicion of this whole "democracy" thing.
It has some not-appropriate-for-the-office language. (Although these days, who plays stuff like this out loud in the office anyway?) Kyle is married to Krystal Ball, who is one of the two principals in the "Breaking Points" YouTube channel. With the spectacular crashing-and-burning in process at MSNBC, channels like this are actually where the media environment is these days for the US. At least this side of the FOX News world, which I understand pulls way more viewers these days than CNN.
The "Walter Cronkite era" is long, long gone. I'm "old enough to remember" when Cronkite actually interviewed Daniel Ellsburg on camera when Ellsberg was underground as a fugitive from the federal government for leaking the Pentagon Papers. It's literally almost impossible to imagine a senior reporter at today's corporate media doing such a thing.
Cebul, Brent & Geismer, Lily (2024): Why Bidenism Failed. Jacobin Winter 2025, 72-79.
WATCH: ‘Fund the police,’ Biden says at State of the Union. Associated Press 05/01/2022. <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-fund-the-police-biden-says-at-state-of-the-union> (Accessed: 2024-20-12).
Gooey Billionaire MELTS When Asked BASIC Question. Secular Talk YouTube channel 12/16/2024. (Accessed: 2024-20-12).
It’s very strange how they operate. Even rhetorically. I remember Democrats who were very insistent it was Lieberman and the GOP who messed up the ACA. But instead of saying ‘you could have something great but we got you what we could…’ they would say ‘this ACA is the greatest miracle ever, a wondrous perfect achievement.’ And people would see their premiums rise or the website not work, and think ‘really?’
Whenever they are kneecapped they move forward and say ‘look at this fabulous thing!’ Then if you say ‘why didn’t they do such-and-so’ (e.g., extend the child tax credit) they say ‘oh, they want to but …Joe Manchin…’ They act like nothing happened and say ‘it was great! Everything is super duper!’ They don’t ever say ‘I got you these jobs and would have fixed these problems if I hadn’t been thwarted.’
Besides the means testing and the strange habit of letting benefits come later, and all the other incredible complexity of their proposals—this is another one that is puzzling. Are they lying when they say ‘we tried to get this better thing but were thwarted?’ Many people believe that! All they have to do to dispel that idea—and also point out what people are being deprived of—is to say so. But they NEVER WILL. So another possibility is that they think whatever they do will be unpopular —with someone. They don’t want anyone to see. Or they don’t want the rich to see? Or they don’t want expectations to rise? What is the purpose of the spin they put on things? Or maybe they’re just BAD at politics, and don’t understand how giving people hope of something better while also pointing out that others are the roadblock is very effective. This is what Trump does constantly.
Could they learn this? I have my doubts. The one thing the most vocal Democrats wanted everyone to know about was THE BORDER BILL that gave Republicans everything they wanted but which was knocked out by Republicans so that people could stay angry about the border. Everyone needed to know about that…about anything else it’s like —let’s hide it or make it impossible to notice.
Such peculiar behavior. And they seem unable to notice the resentment they engender with it. I guess Joe Biden hasn’t been in a position to notice things, if reports are true. But how do they not know about the effect their approach tends to have? They seem wildly out of touch.