In September 1981, 10 months after Ronald Reagan’s sweeping 44-state victory over Jimmy Carter, 100 leading elected Democratic officials privately convened to formulate a response to Reaganism. Alan Cranston of California, the Senate minority whip, began the meeting with a fundamental question: “If our party is a coalition, unlike the Republicans, who tend to represent a single group, what are the common denominators, transcending regional differences and local interests, which make us a national party?”
In the four decades since the fracturing of the New Deal order, an answer to this question has largely eluded the Democratic party. Of the United States’ 20 highest-median-income states, Kamala Harris won 18; of the 20 lowest, Harris won just three. Democrats reliably win the counties that produce the majority of American economic output; Harris’s losing base consisted of counties collectively representing 60% of the GDP. Yet the Democrats continue to depend upon some portion – smaller and smaller each election – of the less-affluent denizens of metropolitan America. The result is a deeply bifurcated coalition with little by way of a unifying “common denominator”.
Seen in this light, the Harris campaign’s noncommittal nature – some talk of a ceasefire in Gaza alongside an enthusiastic embrace of the Cheneys’ endorsement, some remarkably progressive economic messaging alongside reassurances to corporate America – reflected not just a strategic misstep by the Harris campaign, but a basic political dilemma for the party: unifying two poles of a wildly disparate coalition. Even stalwart Democratic loyalists have bemoaned the party’s failure to offer a meaningful positive program; less theorized by these loyalists, perhaps deliberately so, are the forces preventing the Democrats from doing so.
The irony is that the project of “Bidenomics”, which resembled the party’s first serious effort to develop a national governing vision since the Great Society, so thoroughly failed to offer Harris a serviceable vision for her presidential campaign. At its core, the essential project of Bidenism was the formation of a cross-class coalition for reindustrialization, investment in infrastructure and energy transition – a compromise leaving little room for the kinds of direct confrontation with capital that a proper response to “sellers’ inflation” might have demanded.
Whereas Trump’s trade policy sought rapid and often devastating confrontation with trade-dependent sectors, the Bidenites promised a gradual – and inoffensive – transition to a green industrial economy. As the economist Daniela Gabor explains, the main way that Biden’s industrial policy achieves this is by “de-risking” investment for the private sector; aside from a handful of strategic tariffs, Biden largely refrained from using punitive measures to discipline investors. As such, there are few reasons for any corporate interests – including the dirty energy sector – to oppose this kind of agenda; indeed, the Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute have already vowed to defend the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) from a Republican majority.
It was an agenda, in short, whose viability depended upon a careful aversion to offending moneyed donors and the upper strata of the bifurcated Democratic coalition. For a brief moment, it worked as intended: even Wall Street seemed to back the Biden administration’s fiscal stimulus. This shared interest in revitalizing dilapidated American infrastructure, de-risking the domestic climate transition, and mildly expanding social programs appeared to be a serviceable Democratic common denominator. But when Bidenomics needed to speak to voters’ immediate economic concerns – rising food, healthcare, childcare and energy costs driven by corporate greed chiefly among them – Democratic consultants, policymakers and commentators had little beyond denial and outright scorn for those who dared even question the economy’s strength.
Jason Furman, a Harvard professor and Barack Obama’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, denied that voters could truly be dissatisfied with the state of the economy at all: “There’s nothing in the spending data that looks like anyone’s upset about anything.” Ben Harris, a Brookings Institution economist and a former treasury official under Biden, concurred: “If you really want to understand how people feel about the economy, look what they’re doing – not what they’re saying.” The administration itself took the view that, given enough time, Americans would simply come to their senses: it was, in one Biden adviser’s words, taking “consumers a while to kind of see data consistently”.
Insofar as the highest echelons of Democratic advisers had a strategy to manage immediate economic concerns, it was to simply wait things out. The trouble was that Americans never came to see the data the way the Biden administration insisted they would. One exit poll had nearly half of voters claiming to be worse off economically since 2020 – the highest rate since 2008.
A combative economic agenda, coupled with a compelling rupture from the deeply unpopular incumbent, might have saved Harris’s – or another Democrat’s – chances. At the peak of her campaign’s popularity, Harris praised unions and promised a ban upon “price-gouging”, though this disturbed the high-income segments of the Democratic base: she quickly retreated to a “pragmatic” message. No serious answer to existential questions of economic anxiety, Harris found, would have satisfied each bloc in the party.
Bidenomics depended, in effect, upon these episodes of acute, zero-sum class conflict being perpetually delayable. This vision for the Democratic party proved completely incapable of challenging the forces driving inflation in 2022 and onward. Bidenomics might deliver a decarbonized “designer economy” in a decade’s time, but its viability today depends upon raising and de-risking corporate profit margins. To openly confront capital, as a populist message against “greedflation” might have, would have contradicted the project’s entire nature.
Even so, it should have been clear that even the elite constituency for de-risking has grown vanishingly small. BlackRock – which, in 2021, told investors that the American state’s increased indebtedness would “likely have more benign market implications than in the past” – became more hawkish on inflation than the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, himself, insisting that the Biden administration’s spending had overheated the American economy and that inflation was not simply transitory. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who worked with the Biden administration to craft the 2021 stimulus bill, has now reverted to demanding that the Biden administration slash the American budget deficit. And no matter how “de-risked” its investments, JPMorgan itself has largely lost interest in climate transition, warning its clients of the need for a “reality check” on phasing out fossil fuels earlier this year.
Even the Biden administration’s most tangible investments hardly resemble the “good jobs” of the post-war era. Whatever their long-term effects, many of the new investments made under Bidenomics have flowed to the anti-union south. The Bidenites’ hope was that this might generate a renewed landscape for labor organizing and class conflict in America, out of which labor might eventually come out on top – though evidence for this effect has been, at best, mixed. Workers at the IRA’s banner investments suffer from the same precarity and abuse that characterize the entirety of the American political economy; in one acutely ironic case, a battery plant funded by a $9.2bn low-cost IRA loan took three months to address a mold outbreak, leaving workers severely ill. As one worker hospitalized for mold exposure at the IRA-funded plant put it: “This is corporate America walking all over us.”
This, as political economist Max Kiefel notes, is the fundamental impasse of American industrial policy. Workers are to be helped by a highly professionalized party, whose knowledge production flows from consulting firms and thinktanks; they are never directly empowered themselves. In 1999, the political scientist Theda Skocpol described this mode of political association as a kind of “advocacy without members”: the supposed benefactors of party advocacy ceased to be agents in the advocacy supposedly on their behalf. Austerity and inequality are now seen in a critical light within liberal politics, but the structure of political association within the party remains as alienated and self-contained as ever.
A party functioning in this manner might occasionally win elections, though it cannot do so with any reliability. It will always be at the mercy of consumer sentiment, oscillations in macroeconomic indicators, and exogenous political shocks. As in 2008 and 2020, these factors can occasionally carry the party to victory. Biden’s margin of victory was considerable by modern standards; the broad, cross-class coalition united by Trump’s incompetence in the face of the pandemic fulfilled, briefly so, the Democratic promise of a “big tent”. But by the Bidenites’ own admission, Biden’s victory was the product of an exceptional historical moment: as the Democratic political consultant Anita Dunn admitted: “Covid is the best thing that ever happened to him.”
This is dark logic: a party requiring world-historic catastrophe to breathe life into its political fortunes can hardly be considered a serious contender for power. Anti-incumbent sentiment, though it can yield uniquely expansive coalitions, cuts both ways; it is not a reliable basis for a political project. But as long as the Democrats remain reliant upon tailing the fragments of American society and capital alienated from Trumpism, they will find themselves returning to the questions the party asked itself in 1981 – searching, still, for the common denominator that can make them a national party.
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