Kamala Harris’s elevation to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket has transformed the race. Party leaders have rallied to her side and voters are at once relieved and energized. But as her “honeymoon” period comes to an end, key swing states are still in the balance, and there remains lingering skepticism about her ability to beat Trump. Fairly or not, critics still point to her aborted 2020 presidential campaign, her alleged fickleness on the issues, and her lack of a strong policy role in the Biden administration. It remains to be seen whether she can craft a convincing policy message to counter Trump’s faux populism, which was buoyed by his pick of J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential candidate and appeals to the labor movement during the Republican convention.
For the moment, it seems likely Harris’s campaign may focus on a “safe” strategy centered on abortion rights, Trump’s unfitness for office, and the GOP’s most regressive tax plans. Harris has also signaled she would pursue major investments in child and elder care and renew the expansion of the child tax credit. No doubt this is, at least in part, an attempt to assuage progressives worried about whether she will advance Biden’s domestic record and salvage parts of the failed Build Back Better bill.
But Harris’s ties to big tech and courtship of major business players suggest she may dial down Biden’s more populist initiatives. Many in the new antitrust movement are concerned she would curb the Federal Trade Commission’s muscular attacks on monopoly power under chairwoman Lina Khan. So far, Harris’s close association with California’s liberal, tech-friendly establishment suggests she may not be poised to battle corporate greed.
Perhaps Harris’s sudden momentum at the start of the campaign will drown out these concerns. But the larger debates they point to cannot be tabled indefinitely. Both Biden’s age and the challenge posed by Trump have overshadowed a philosophical split in modern progressivism between New Deal–style social democrats and global-city technocrats. This debate is likely to intensify if Democrats don’t greatly improve their standing in “left behind” America. Indeed, Biden’s exit reignites the central questions that have haunted Democrats since the 2016 election: How does the party plan to lead the country, and why has it struggled so painfully to vanquish Trump?
As president, Biden simultaneously tried to promote domestic production and rein in corporate power in response to the economic grievances that helped fuel Trump’s rise. Disproving skeptics on the Left and Right, he mustered several initiatives to answer Trump’s empty challenge to “Make America Great Again.”
Biden’s domestic agenda highlights one of the great ironies of our era. Despite the outsider populist energy behind him, Trump and his team never honed a coherent, much less comprehensive, plan to strengthen the economy and turn the page from neoliberalism. Meanwhile, Biden, the consummate insider, embarked on a course to reinvigorate democratic capitalism on the basis of pro-labor principles.
The range of instruments Biden used to guide and grow the economy was unprecedented in modern times. No president since FDR has combined support for fiscally stimulated full employment (Keynes), industrial policy (Hamilton), and antitrust action (Brandeis) in order to comprehensively shape incentives and redistribute power within the market. This unexpected “tripod” of different governing traditions ought to have provided a surefire blueprint for the next generation of Democratic leaders to build a post-neoliberal future.
But despite his accomplishments, Biden failed as a messenger. An aging party figurehead, he struggled to reinvent himself as an economic populist. Pundits who marveled at Biden’s legislative blitz missed that it was undermined by a “themeless politics,” as philosopher Michael Sandel recently wrote. Meanwhile, Democrats close to the White House were slow to address the electorate’s strain under inflation and rising interest rates and unable to find down-to-earth surrogates who could tell a compelling story about the country’s past and future. As a result, none of Biden’s strongest measures have resonated in working-class communities the way the president’s allies and advisors had hoped.
Bidenism also struggled politically because it lacks a flagship program that immediately improved the material security of most Americans. The tripod of Bidenism leans on its Hamiltonian pillar, which used billions of dollars to create tens of thousands of jobs for the energy transition. While the knock-on effects could be a boon for regional economic development, the administration’s actions aren’t visible in everyday life.
Finally, intractable polarization along regional and cultural lines prevented Biden’s slate of interventionist policies from meeting with popular acclaim. Antipathy toward Democrats now runs so deep in some rural and Rust Belt counties that it is hard to fathom Barack Obama’s victories there in 2008. Despite the economy’s rebound from the pandemic, pessimism is widespread. The number of Americans with a positive view of the country’s direction hasn’t cracked 50 percent in twenty years. In this environment, an agenda whose full impact will take years to materialize couldn’t immediately change how disadvantaged Americans see their futures.
Still, voters’ skepticism toward—and, in some cases, ignorance of—Biden’s achievements should not be taken as a rejection of his industrial strategy, push for productive competition, and support for tight labor markets. Rather, these problems illustrate that pockets of despair and anomie remain widespread—and that largescale policies must be accompanied by other efforts to rebuild the Democratic Party where it is weak.
Biden’s mixed record leaves the party at a crossroads, and it’s unclear how much the party elite has embraced his approach. His agenda always coexisted uneasily with the interests of the Democratic Party base, which increasingly consists of educated professionals who benefitted from globalization and are generally unbothered by the firms and sectors that regulators like Khan aim to police. These voters, along with the officials they elect, tend to support social policies that compensate for some of capitalism’s unequal outcomes rather than mechanisms that shape market behavior itself. Pro-business moderates in liberal-leaning professional networks still condition how many Democrats speak and think about inequality, market power, and other economic issues.
Meanwhile, Harris’s minimal vice-presidential record does not make her an obvious heir to Biden, nor does she necessarily want to lay claim to his legacy. Already a hard sell to a public weary from inflation and the pandemic, that legacy became a potential albatross during his defiant attempt to stay in the race. Harris may prefer to see herself as a forward-looking avatar of progressive capitalism rather than a conduit of countervailing power in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt.
In fact, the same goes for nearly all of the younger Democrats who will compete to head the party in 2028 if Harris loses. With the possible exception of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, the party’s vaunted “deep bench” of future presidential candidates notably lacks a progressive populist. Despite the ill repute of the Reagan and Clinton eras, Democratic officials who grew up at the time still tend to view global commerce and social progress as intertwined. Even as the party’s congressional wing has purportedly moved left overall since 2016, a number of party leaders seem hesitant to expand labor rights and corporate oversight beyond what Biden has attempted.
The party’s lack of conviction on fundamental questions of political economy is reflected in its inability to make significant inroads in red counties and states. Reluctance to embrace economic populism was particularly evident in the 2022 midterms. Strategists and liberal pundits cheered by the lack of a “red wave,” for example, largely ignored the feckless support given to former Representative Tim Ryan in his failed campaign against Vance in Ohio’s Senate race. Beating Vance then would have surely damaged the GOP’s efforts to rebrand itself as a pro-worker party. Ryan’s loss reflected the fact that Democrats lack a coherent plan for building a durable coalition on the scale of the New Deal.
In the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society—the successor to the New Deal—many future New Democrats came to the reductive conclusion that it was a failed, misguided experiment. This eased their participation in the Right’s demolition of the economy’s guardrails under the banner of ending “big government.” There is a risk that younger Democratic leaders and voters, once inspired by progressive insurgents like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, will come to view Biden’s term the same way. Reverting once again to a more hands-off approach to development and regulation—which much of the donor class would undoubtedly prefer—would repudiate the central insights of Bidenism: namely, that the costs of neoliberal globalization were grossly understated by mainstream economics, the media, and the D.C. consultant class, and that Democratic policies not only failed to stop the country’s slide toward oligarchy but also helped hollow out former blue strongholds and turn them red.
Rather than focusing on the material conditions that led to this critical moment, many Democrats, especially those locked into social media echo chambers, remain preoccupied with Trump’s and Trumpism’s most lurid, vicious, and bizarre aspects. They discount the visceral and enduring appeal of his message to those Americans most buffeted by globalization, and they conflate the symptom with the disease. The power of this echo chamber could spell trouble for Harris, despite the more attractive contrast that her candidacy now presents with Trump.
On its own, that contrast—in age, normalcy, and decency—should help recover the support Biden lost and put Trump on defense in states where he had gained a clear advantage. But vacillating on Bidenism’s more populist components would needlessly cede ground to Trump on issues of economic prosperity. Despite its own mixed signals on key policy questions, the Trump-Vance ticket is a bet that right-wing populism will win over a majority of workers. The choice before Harris and her advisors, then, is whether to develop a competing message on economics or simply emphasize Trump’s threat to democracy and the rule of law. Given Trump’s singular resilience, Harris’s team must weigh the limits of an appeal to voters centered on Trump’s character and crimes.
The strategies the Harris campaign deploys in the weeks ahead will demonstrate whether Democrats are, in fact, prepared to fight the real long-term threats to democracy: plutocracy and the evisceration of social rights at the hands of reactionary justices and bureaucrats. These are threats that existed before Trump, and they will not simply disappear if he is defeated in November. The nihilism, blight, and loss of civic life which gave rise to Trumpism will also last beyond his time. Biden, despite his flaws, came to understand this. Let’s hope Harris has grasped it too.
