A Democratic president wants everyone to know he’s transforming the country by taxing and spending, and everyone’s like, OK.
On March 12, President Joe Biden held a press conference with Vice President Kamala Harris, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to celebrate the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act—ARP, for short. With his party’s other leading figures around him in the Rose Garden, discussing the first major product of their “unified” control over the executive branch and Congress, it was as close to an official mission statement as the new president has taken the opportunity to make. After emphasizing the parts of the huge, deficit-financed spending bill that provide direct payments to low-income and middle-class Americans, Biden took a metaphorical step back to describe what he believes it accomplishes philosophically. “The bill does one more thing, which I think is really important,” he said. “It changes the paradigm.” Specifically, he said, “for the first time in a long time, this bill puts working people in this nation first.” About three weeks later, Biden went to Pittsburgh to introduce an even larger spending proposal—ostensibly related to infrastructure, but really just a plan for trying to fix everything —and said he wants it financed by tax increases on wealthy individuals and corporations. Changing the paradigm by redistributing money from the rich to the poor and the middle class is a plan Bernie Sanders could (and does) support, described in a way that’s only a thesaurus away from Elizabeth Warren’s call for big, structural change. It’s an embrace of the kind of populism that was described for years—by people like Joe Biden—as being too divisive and disruptive to appeal to the American public as a whole. And according to the polls, the American public as a whole loves it! They’re eating it up, like a bunch of hogs! How is he getting away with it? The answer probably involves some structural factors—the ever-widening maw of inequality and segregation that threatens to pull the American dream once and for all into its vast darkness, and such—and some good timing, courtesy of accelerating vaccine distribution and the comparative effect of having taken over from one of the worst presidents ever. But another thing that differentiates Biden from the Democrats who were considered unelectable radicals for proposing the things he’s doing is the way he talks. Consider this thesis statement from the speech Sanders gave when he announced his 2020 campaign. Sanders went on to name the enemy, or, rather, list the many enemies: “the private health insurance companies,” “the pharmaceutical industry,” “Walmart, the fast food industry, and other low-wage employers,” “corporate America,” “the fossil fuel industry,” “the prison-industrial complex,” “the top 1 percent and the large profitable corporations,” “large, multinational corporations,” and “Wall Street, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, the fossil fuel industry and a corrupt campaign finance system that enables billionaires to buy elections.
