Why is Biden Struggling? Because America is Broken
My latest in the New York Times
I have a lengthy essay in this morning’s New York Times in which I try to do some deeper thinking about why President Joe Biden is struggling so badly in the polls against former President Donald Trump. No, it’s not just the president’s age. It’s that three in four Americans are dissatisfied about the way things are going in the United States. Why?
The examples are almost too numerous to list: a disastrous war in Iraq; a ruinous financial crisis followed by a decade of anemic growth when most of the new wealth went to those who were already well off; a shambolic response to the deadliest pandemic in a century; a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan; rising prices and interest rates; skyrocketing levels of public and private debt; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities; undocumented migrants streaming over the southern border; spiking rates of gun violence, mental illness, depression, addiction, suicide, chronic illness and obesity, coupled with a decline in life expectancy.
That’s an awful lot of failure over the past 20-odd years. Yet for the most part, the people who run our institutions have done very little to acknowledge or take responsibility for any of it, let alone undertake reforms that aim to fix what’s broken. That’s no doubt why angry anti-establishment populism has become so prominent in our politics over the past decade — with Mr. Trump, a political outsider, taking over the Republican Party in 2016 by running against the elites of both parties, and Senator Bernie Sanders giving the establishment favorite Hillary Clinton a run for her money that same year by taking on the banking and finance sectors of the economy, along with their Democratic and Republican enablers.
Mr. Biden has never been that kind of politician. Most of the time he speaks and acts as if he thinks American institutions are doing perfectly fine — at least so long as Mr. Trump doesn’t get his hands on them. Part of that is undoubtedly because Mr. Biden is an incumbent, and incumbents always find themselves having to defend what they’ve done in office, which isn’t compatible with acting like an insurgent going to war against the system.
Then there’s the fact that Mr. Biden has worked within our elected institutions since the Nixon administration, making him deeply invested in them (and implicated in their failures). Finally, as a Democrat who came of age during the heyday of mid-20th-century liberalism, Mr. Biden is wedded to the idea of using a functional, competent and capable federal government to improve people’s lives — whether or not more recent history validates that faith.
This places him badly out of step with the national mood, speaking a language very far removed from the talk of a broken country that suffuses Mr. Trump’s meandering and often unhinged remarks on the subject. The more earnest statements of third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein also speak to aspects of our brokenness, taking ample and often nostalgic note of what’s gone wrong and promising bold, if vague, action to begin an effort of repair.
That leaves Mr. Biden as the lone institutionalist defender of the status quo surrounded by a small army of brokenists looking for support from an electorate primed to respond to their more downcast message.
I hope you’ll take advantage of following this gift link that will allow you to read the whole piece for free. That will get you more of the analysis, as well as several paragraphs in which I propose a number of ways Biden could shift his message in order to do a better job of meeting the voters where they are.
Is America "broken", or have those in charge mismanaged the country's affairs? In other words, are those things that are causing pain for voters intrinsic to the American system and therefore nearly impossible to change, or are they transient symptoms of a curable disease based on political choices?
It's an important question, because before we can "fix" anything or take responsibility for it, we need to be clear about what we're talking about, we need to identify the causes of any "breakage," and we need to be careful about what we're accepting responsibility for if we want to be the one to bring about improvement. Simply prostrating oneself before an angry, irrational crowd and saying "sorry, I'll do better" isn't going to work; they'll trample you or string you up.
I don't think America's broken (by the way, I'm a Scottish immigrant to Canada); I think it's been mismanaged, and the mismanagement has had serious long-term, cumulative consequences for how Americans feel about themselves and their country.
The GW Bush administration's disastrous knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 was the successful outcome of bin Laden's strategy to "break" America. Its even more disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq was a major bonus (to him) and an accelerant of US decline.
The Bush administration allowing banks to lend more than they could cover upset the fine balance between greed and prudent regulation, and precipitated a global financial crisis.
Even earlier, the Reagan administration's economic policies hollowed out US manufacturing and massively boosted the enrichment of owners and investors at the expense of entire swaths of America's industrial heartland.
The Trump administration's massive tax cut for the rich made the gap between the rich and everyone else grotesque where before it was merely ugly. Trump breaking a solemn nuclear treaty with Iran and rendering the Palestinian cause finally hopeless fatally destabilized the Middle East. And he launched economic warfare against China out of sheer ignorance, trashing a delicate diplomatic balance that had kept critical channels open and largely moderated China's extremes.
These were all Republican managers, and they imposed Republican policies that were uniformly characterized by a total disregard for the needs and happiness of the ordinary working voter. Since so few of the latter see enough of the big picture to realize who has been causing these successive waves of demoralizing and impoverishing malaise, I think it would be a mistake for Joe Biden to bow his head and take responsibility for it; it would be much better if he just keeps making progress in the good, and let the bad fade like the unpleasant dream it always was.
As I wrote in the NY Times Opinion Comments: a message of "we/I broke it, we/I have not yet fixed it, but give us/me a second chance and maybe we/I will" is not going to help Joe Biden win re-election. Instead, making this a choice election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump (instead of a referendum election) is what will help. Biden should point out: I have a plan that's popular to fix the deficit by raising taxes on the wealthy; Donald Trump's plan will make it worse. I have a plan to lower inflation (I already have done a lot), Donald Trump's tariffs will make them worse. I have a plan to keep America safe by supporting our allies abroad and giving them the tools to fight wars so we don't have to. Donald Trump will abandon our allies and force us to eventually step in and clean up the mess we ignored from the beginning. I have a plan to ensure safe access to abortion rights. Donald Trump nominated the judges who overturned Roe v. Wade including one judge who, typically, would not have been nominated under normal political times.
That's a potentially winning argument. Telling people that, yes, Donald Trump is right that our institutions and establishment sucks (and I am part of that) is handing them a reason to vote for Trump.