Read Jacobin’s retrospective on Joe Biden’s foreign policy here.
The trouble with evaluating Joe Biden’s presidency on the domestic front is that it both was so much better than anyone had a right to expect and fell far, far short of both what the moment demanded and what the president’s most ardent boosters kept telling us it was.
A Joe Biden presidency was always going to be something of a paradox. As one of the leaders of the Democratic Party’s lurch to the right, Biden had been, without exaggeration, a key figure in virtually every ailment that led to Donald Trump: mass incarceration, the shredding of the New Deal, deindustrialization, endless wars, the zeal to slash budgets at all costs, a society chained to debt — the list goes on and on.
The man who helped create these problems over four decades was suddenly tasked with solving them in the Oval Office; the politician who had proudly declared his distaste for radicals, class warfare, and populism was now trusted to steer the country through a radical, populist era of class war — all while exorcizing Trumpism from the American psyche and forging a new New Deal on the back of the most expensive, oligarch-financed campaign at that point in American history. It’s no wonder he failed.
Everyone has their own idea of when exactly Biden’s presidency fell apart: the August 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal debacle and his media savaging over it; the February 2023 departure of left-curious chief of staff Ron Klain and his replacement by a private equity…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
