Exploring the Sources of Biden’s Struggles
We need to understand why the president’s approval rating is so persistently low
Left-leaning pundits were pretty close to unanimous last week after President Joe Biden’s State of the Union. It was a masterful performance, they said. He’d put to rest concerns about his age, showing endurance, feistiness, and even a capacity to ad lib cogently in responding to jeers from Republican officeholders in the audience. He spoke powerfully and movingly about American democracy, the threat Donald Trump poses to it, and the strength of the country’s economy. It was a rousing start to the general election campaign, everyone felt certain. Game on.
A week later, those reactions seem misplaced. A strongly positive response from the electorate should have produced a bounce in Biden’s approval rating. He was sitting at 38.1 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregate, and 1.8 points behind Trump in the aggregation of head-to-head polls at Real Clear Politics, on the day of the speech. Seven days and various polls later, there’s little sign of positive movement in Biden’s position. Trump is now up to a 2.1-point lead at RCP, while the president’s approval is effectively unchanged (up just three tenths of a point, to 38.4 percent) at FiveThirtyEight.
I don’t want to place too much emphasis on these specific numbers. All the usual caveats apply: It’s only March; a lot can change between now and November; most voters aren’t paying close attention to the race yet; Trump faces a lot of legal jeopardy that could adversely affect his standing; and so on and so forth.
Yet certain facts remain: Biden has been underwater in the polls since the late summer of 2021; the long-term trajectory of his approval has been down; since Harry Truman’s surprise win 75 years ago, no president faring as badly in the polls has managed to win re-election; in fact, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were polling significantly better in mid-March of the fourth years of their presidencies than Biden is; this fact points to the possibility that instead of rebounding over the coming months, Biden could sink still lower.
Every day I see left-leaning analysts waving away these concerns in favor of delivering pep talks. I wrote in my previous post about why I don’t do the same in my own writing. Today I’m going to treat Biden’s unpopularity as a given and engage in some speculation about why he seems so enduringly disliked by so many Americans.
The Political-Cultural Power of Social-Justice Progressivism
As I noted near the conclusion of my last post, the populist right is making electoral gains in countries across the democratic world; in most cases, those gains are inversely related to a collapse in support for parties of the center-left. Because of those continuities across countries, I’m going to downplay most of the factors I listed in my mid-January post that posed the question, “Why Is Biden Likely to Lose?”
That’s because most of those factors are rooted in the specifically American context: Biden is viewed as too old for the job; persistent anger about price increases that have outstripped wage increases during the past three years; the hapless withdrawal from Afghanistan; the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris; etc.
I think all of those factors (and more) are contributing to Biden’s struggles—as is the intensification of partisan polarization and negative partisanship over the past decade, which may have delivered us into an era when presidents of both parties, after a brief honeymoon period, will be dragged down by low approval, leading to less incumbent advantage in re-election campaigns.
But in this post, I want to highlight an additional factor. It’s one that a small subset of my right-leaning readers keep highlighting in dissenting comments on my posts. That’s the “wokeness” factor. I won’t use the w-word again in this post, because I’m sick of the term, I don’t like its polemical deployment by the right, and I think the term social-justice progressivism captures more precisely what I mean when I talk about the phenomenon. Allow me to explain:
Our polity is deeply divided over politics, with Democrats and Republicans often residing in morally and epistemologically distinct worlds, and each side viewing the country’s history, current condition, and possible futures very differently. But there’s also a common public culture all Americans share and take part in. It is governed by certain implicit norms and expectations that apply to everyone.
But who determines those norms and expectations? The answer is that these days it is often progressive activists. How do they accomplish this exercise of political-cultural power? I will admit that I’m not entirely sure. Something like the following process appears to happen: A group of left-leaning activists declares that certain words, claims, or arguments should be considered anathema, tainted as they supposedly are with prejudice, bigotry, racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, or transphobia; then people in authoritative positions within public and private institutions (government, administrative and regulatory agencies, universities, corporations, media platforms, etc.) defer to the activists, adjusting the language they use to conform to new norms; and then, once the norms and expectations have been adjusted, a new round of changes gets mandated by the activists and the whole process repeats again, and again, and again.
I suspect that to many millions of Americans (and to lots of people living in democracies across the world where something similar is going on) the process feels a bit like a rolling moral revolution without end that makes them deeply uncomfortable. That response is no doubt a function of right-leaning views among some voters. But I’d be willing to bet that for many others, the negative reaction follows from the sheer bossiness of it, with schools, government bureaucrats, HR departments at work, movie stars, and others constantly declaring: You can’t talk that way anymore; you must speak this other way now; those words are bad; these words are the correct ones. A lot of people are ok with this. But many others respond with: Who the f-ck are you to tell me how I’m allowed to talk? Who elected or appointed you as my moral overseer and judge?
Note that, although this process sometimes touches on questions of policy (Should same-sex marriage be considered a constitutional right? Should minors be permitted to initiate gender transitions using pharmaceuticals and/or surgery?), it often doesn’t. The language one uses about race, gender, immigration, and other matters tells us nothing about where that person comes down on tax rates or entitlements or abortion or aid to Ukraine. That points to the distinction I made above between partisan polarization on the one hand and controlling our nation’s common culture—the civic water in which all of us swim—on the other.
Who Makes the Rules of our Public Life?
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