Joe Biden's to do List

Joe Biden is now almost two months into his tenure as President of the United States and it’s safe to say he has wasted no time in steering America’s ship of state into less choppy waters. Biden’s flurry of executive orders has so far taken the US back into the Paris Climate agreement and World Health Organisation, cancelled the Keystone Pipeline, and allowed transgender citizens back into military service. The direction of travel in these opening days couldn’t have been more obvious, Biden is unpicking as many of Trump’s most confrontational measures as possible.

There is a bit of a problem here though if you happen to be a fan of progressive politics. Cleaning up the mess created by your predecessor with executive orders is all well and good, but simply stepping back from the turmoil of the Trump era leaves you right where you left off in 2017, with a continuity Obama administration, and that simply won’t do the trick for America this time out.

Whatever your opinion may be of Obama as a President, there is no denying that Trump’s victory in the 2016 election does pose some fairly difficult questions about how the Democratic Party fared under his tenure. There was no doubt some considerable successes. But for far too many working-class Americans in the Rust Belt states and elsewhere, the party of Obama was no longer the party of Roosevelt and Johnson, it no longer seemed to speak to them, or care about their priorities.

If Biden and the people around him want this budding repudiation of Trumpism to continue beyond the next four years, then there are three things the new administration needs to get right.

Forget Bi- partisanship, just get sh*t done.

It used to be the case that although political capital was in finite supply in Washington, a newly elected President usually had enough of it to engage in some meaningful, emotionally fulfilling bipartisanship. Presidents of the mid-20th Century such as Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson were experts at navigating the corridor politics of Congress to get things done. Eisenhower pulled Republican and Democrat senate members together to create the National Highway System and a swathe of new government programmes and Johnson’s Big Society and civil rights legislation would have gotten nowhere without cross-party support. The system worked because the President always had willing partners.

The Republican Party in its current form are the opposite of willing partners. The House caucus is currently ridden with people who openly support the most absurd conspiracy theories, GOP Senators have shamelessly dodged their responsibilities as jurors, and the leadership under Mitch McConnell has proven time and again that it is far more interested in acting as a roadblock to legislation than meaningfully engaging with it. You need only see how partisan the vote on this week's stimulus bill was if you need any further evidence of that.

What the Republicans did following the 2010 midterm elections was to turn congressional politics into a zero-sum game. They will oppose everything substantial Biden tries to do just as they did with Obama in the 2010’s, only now he is dealing with an even more virulent and unreachable opposition. In a gridlocked system such as that, wily old political operators need to understand that law making is no longer a game of chess, it’s bare knuckle boxing where the only right is might and the numerical ability to force laws through.

Biden’s talk of wanting to bridge the divides that blight America is admirable, but when push comes to shove, his time will be best served forcing his own legislative agenda through Congress as best he can whilst he still has the majorities to do so. All else is a waste of energy and time.

Be Progressive

This is something that Obama routinely got wrong and that Biden will have to get right.

Whenever the big wigs of the Democratic Party were accused of no longer representing the values of their base in congress, they often responded with something along the lines of ‘we’d love to, but those mean old Republicans just won’t let us’.

Now however, the Democrats have control of the executive branch and both houses of Congress. They need to show America’s liberal majority that they can make progressive laws when they have the wiggle room. A lot of noise has been made recently about Biden being willing to back a $15 minimum wage, as well as the federal legalisation of recreational marijuana. But it isn’t enough just to talk about these things, the Democrats must actually do them while they still can. Progressive policies with heavy popular support represent easy wins for Biden, and easy wins shouldn’t be sniffed at in such an unforgiving political environment.

Biden shouldn’t see this as a secondary priority. The turnout of the Democratic base may well be the most decisive factor in federal elections for years to come. The Democrats have won the popular vote in every Presidential election bar one for the last 30 years, they lose not when they can’t convince republicans to switch, but when they can’t convince liberals to show up. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain by throwing the base a bone or two.

Know who your friends are

Between 1989 and 2017, America’s strategic position as the self-elected ‘Leader of the Free World’ was relatively well understood. America wasn’t just a member of institutions like the UN, NATO, and the WHO, it’s money and manpower was the central pin holding the whole liberal international order together. But whereas Bush and Obama went to international summits with the clear intention of getting multilateral deals on trade and climate change, Trump revived an earlier form of American foreign policy that leaned heavily on isolationism, unilateral action and ‘strongman’ leadership. Trump’s approach to diplomacy was essentially an attempt to do The Art of the Deal negotiations with men he considered to be powerful and authoritative. Trump consequently neglected the USA’s traditional allies in Europe and Japan in favour of grandstanding alongside Putin and Xi, it was a form of macho, faux-Charlton Heston American leadership that bypassed established international norms. Trump did not understand them and didn’t want to.

Trump’s conception of geopolitics was obviously wrong and inherently destructive, but it did reveal a blind spot in the pre-existing US foreign policy that Obama failed to deal with, and Biden needs to address.

There is no use pretending that the World is the same place that it was in 1945, 1990, or even 2001. The American appetite for the role of global policeman has diminished considerably since the Iraq War and China and Russia are far more bullish than they have been in recent history. But the real change has been the gradual erosion of American moral leadership. That erosion reached a crescendo earlier this year when the world woke up to the fact that a country which only narrowly survived an attempted insurrection is probably not best placed to lecture anyone about stable democracy and the rule of law. Biden cannot hope, as Bush and Obama perhaps believed they could, to be either the lone moral crusader or the overbearing leader of the NATO states, so will have to accept a more modest role.

Instead of pursuing a continuity Obama policy, Biden might consider embracing multi-polarity. The new administration will know full well that there is little appetite in America for footing the NATO bill in perpetuity, so why not support the EU’s efforts to stand on their own 27 feet by backing proposals to expand the Common Defence and Security Policy. As for America’s other NATO allies, such as Britain and Turkey, there is no need for Biden to try and find establish any new security relationship until those countries know exactly where they want to stand. There is more than enough goodwill on all sides for meaningful progress to be made on climate change, combating international crime and terrorism without any side needing to feel railroaded into accepting American directives.

Biden must accept that the 21st Century will not be a repeat of Pax Americana. If he does so, he won’t find friends too hard to find.