You Can Thank The Left For Biden's Policies

Article

Apr 30

Last night, Joe Biden gave his first speech to a joint session of Congress and it revealed a great deal — not so much about the president, but about the rising influence of the left. He talked a big game about social spending, more ambitious than anything proposed by the previous two Democratic presidents — on care work, green jobs, education and infrastructure. And all this from a famously centrist politician.

Some have made the case that Biden’s nearly $2 trillion plan is simply a response to the dire times we’re living in. On the popular New York Times podcast The Daily, correspondent Jim Tankersley argued that Biden’s plan was a meeting of “what Democrats think is a renewed interest in big government with the heightened struggles of a 21st-century economy.”

Whence the renewed interest in big government? It shouldn’t be forgotten that Biden ran in a crowded primary in which much of the field was well to his left. The president’s interpretation of that primary — that the party’s base is shifting leftward — can be seen in today’s domestic policy proposals. For example, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) framed action on climate change as a driver of working-class job growth and challenged other candidates to get on board. Democratic socialists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Naomi Klein and Kate Aronoff have spent years explaining how a Green New Deal could produce not just prosperity but greater equality.

It is the left flank of the party that has generated new and promising ideas. If we are to compare the scale of Biden’s spending plan to the New Deal, we should acknowledge another echo: It is pressure from the much criticized left that may save the party, and American capitalism, from itself. (Said one socialist lawyer in FDR’s administration: “We socialists are trying to save capitalism, and the damned capitalists won’t let us.”)

Many on the left have pointed out that Biden’s plan, despite its considerable size, is insufficient. But if we’ve learned one lesson over the last decade, it’s that the left’s power to effect change is still growing.