Biden is picking up where Obama left off

19 June 2023

Donald Trump has affected (or infected) our minds such that we forget something important. He advanced Barack Obama’s populist perspective.

In the beginning, Obama was not a populist, of course – not an economic populist. He was not conspicuous in his belief that the very obscenely rich should be forced to pay a higher share of their wealth in taxes. He would not be fully forthright about this until after the 2007-2008 financial panic but, more importantly, not until after a movement called Occupy Wall Street.

That was the only thing that Occupy Wall Street accomplished. It established an awareness, greater than any before, of the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, the former getting to eat the cream of the economy while the latter being left to survive on the dregs. On that, Obama built his 2012 reelection campaign. He characterized his opponent as the kind of a “vulture capitalist” who’d defrauded millions and triggered the long Great Recession.

Donald Trump has made an art out of taking something a Black president has said and making it appealing to the white-power base of the Republican Party. The more Obama said he spoke for the 99 percent, the deeper the impression in GOP circles that he was a communist. But when Trump seemed open to taxing the rich, he wasn’t seen as a communist. He was seen as a populist.

Trump was a populist, of course, and still is – a “cultural populist,” according to the scholarly nomenclature. He did and still does champion laws and policies that privilege “the master race.” If he has been good for nothing else, Trump has been good for revealing a core truth. Americans who say they hate the government don’t, as long as it’s a government of, by and for the Herrenvolk.

In fact, the criminal former president has been good for one other thing. I’d guess that, for most Americans, the line between “cultural populism” and “economic populism” is so blurry as to be invisible. One has to do with (anti-Black) racism. (Obama’s populism stood against anti-Black racism.) The other has to do with a popular resentment of the very obscenely rich. Each claims to speak for an ordinary majority against an extraordinary minority.

That bothers some liberals. In my mind, these are respectable white people who believe that political neutrality is not only possible but desirable, and that political institutions are, or should be, insulated from the effects of democratic politics. These liberals are now worried about the possible erosion of public trust after the current president’s administration indicted a former president.

But populism’s problem isn’t that it’s populist, wrote scholars Octavia Bryant and Benjamin Moffitt. The problem, usually, is that it’s rightwing politics in disguise. In 2019, they said it “has often been conflated with authoritarianism and anti-immigration ideas. But these features are more to do with the ideology of the radical right than they are to do with populism itself.”

That’s just one reason white liberals don’t like it. The other is, or should be, more concerning to them. Respectable white people don’t trust populism – economic or cultural – because populism challenges a political status quo that currently, whether or not they admit it, gives privilege to “the master race.”

“Populists are disruptive,” Bryant and Moffitt wrote. “They position themselves as outsiders who are radically different and separate from the existing order. So they frequently advocate for a change to the status quo and may champion the need for urgent structural change, whether that is economic or cultural.”

That’s the other thing that the criminal former president has been good for. The very obscenely rich used to have inviolate control over the white-power base of the Republican Party. That’s no longer the case. Trump opened that black box. Now, they want governments to harass firms that are “too woke.” They are even open to “socialism,” as long as it’s “socialism” for Herrenvolk.

Populists often promote “a sense of crisis (whether true or not), and presenting themselves as having the solution to the crisis,” Bryant and Moffitt wrote in 2019. They don’t have to, though. Nor must they come from outside the existing order. They can be at the height of power while claiming to speak for all Americans. Populists, in other words, can be normal small-d democrats.

That’s Joe Biden. The Associated Press reported over the weekend that the president “delivered an unapologetically economic populist message Saturday during the first rally of his reelection campaign, telling an exuberant crowd of union members that his policies had created jobs and lifted the middle class. Now, he said, is the time for the wealthy to ‘pay their fair share’ in taxes.”

The Associated Press reported that “Biden spotlighted the sweeping climate, tax and health care package signed into law last year that cut the cost of prescription drugs and lowered insurance premiums — pocketbook issues that advisers say will be the centerpiece of his argument for a second term.”

He’s picking up where Barack Obama left off. Unlike Obama, though, he’s running on a record of accomplishment – of truly popular accomplishment.

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