Biden Is Planning an FDR-Size Presidency

Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux.

Driving from work this evening I heard part of an interview with  the director of a manufacturing association who discussed the harsh assessment of manufacturing CEO's who saw little demand - and therefore, hiring increases - through the end of 2020.  The other possible dead weight on the economy is that many pre-pandemic jobs may not come back or, if they do, will come back very slowly.  One of the things these CEO's thought would boost demand and employment was a major infrastructure initiative by the federal government, something Trump has bloviated about but which the Congressional Republicans have done nothing.  Now, with America's economy upended and the political game plan for November, 2020, similarly turned upside down, presumptive Democrat nominee, Joe Biden, has radically altered what he believes his presidency must do if he defeats Der Trumpenführer,  Rather than status quo ante, back to normal, restore the soul of the nation, administration, Biden - correctly, in my view - believes that a FDR style presidency and policies and programs are needed to put America back on a solid economic footing. A very long piece in New York Magazine looks at Biden's evolution on what will need to be done.  Here are highlights:

[S]ometimes looking at the small lake abutting his backyard that bulges out from Little Mill Creek, {Joe Biden} the self-conscious man in the Democratic middle — mocked by the activist left throughout the primary campaign as hopelessly retrograde — considers the present calamity and plots a presidency that, by awful necessity, he believes must be more ambitious than FDR’s.
 The former vice-president carried the Democratic primary by relying on perceptions that he was an older, whiter, less world-historical (and less inspiring) Barack Obama — a steady hand who seemed more electable against a monstrous president than any of his competitors did. The heart of his pitch, when he delivered it clearly, was status quo ante, back to normal, restore the soul of the nation.
 But in the space of just a few months, COVID-19 and the disastrous White House response appeared to have dramatically widened Biden’s pathway to the presidency, making the matter of moderation and electability seem, at least for the time being, almost moot. They also changed his perception of what the country would need from a president in January 2021 — after not just four years of Trump but almost a full year of death and suffering. The pandemic is breaking the country much more deeply than the Great Recession did, Biden believes, and will require a much bigger response. No miraculous rebound is coming in the next six months.  Long before the pandemic, he described a range of actions he’d take on day one, from rejoining the Paris climate agreement to signing executive orders on ethics, and he cited other matters, like passing the Equality Act for LGBTQ protections, as top priorities. Already his recovery ambitions have grown to include plans that would flex the muscles of big government harder than any program in recent history. To date, the federal government has spent more than $2 trillion on the coronavirus stimulus — nearly three times what it approved in 2009. Biden wants more spending. “A hell of a lot bigger,” he’s said, “whatever it takes.” He has argued that, even if you’re inclined to worry about the deficit, massive public investment is the only thing capable of growing the economy enough “so the deficit doesn’t eat you alive.” He has talked about funding immense green enterprises and larger backstop proposals from cities and states and sending more relief checks to families. He has urged immediate increases in virus and serology testing, proposing the implementation of a Pandemic Testing Board in the style of FDR’s War Production Board and has called for investments in an “Apollo-like moonshot” for a vaccine and treatment. This is all only what he believes should be done now before he even ascends to the presidency; by then, he thinks, the country could be in a much darker hole than it is today, presumably requiring even more federal investment and intervention. David Kessler, who led the Food and Drug Administration under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and has been speaking with Biden regularly about the crisis, recently told me the former vice-president “understands that until we have a vaccine or a therapeutic entity that can be used as a preventative, the virus is still going to be with us and that we’re going to constantly be putting out mini-epidemics.” [W]hile 2009 shows that spending unprecedented amounts of money alone doesn’t necessarily make a presidency transformational, the pandemic and the economic collapse it has produced have expanded Biden’s sense of not just how much relief will be required but what will be possible to accomplish as part of that recovery. Trump accomplished one big-ticket priority: tax cuts. Obama managed two: the stimulus, with a filibusterproof 60-vote Senate majority, and, barely, Obama-care. While it’s impossible to tell where the country is headed, Biden’s camp is in the disorienting position of scaling up its laundry list of proposals to match the ambition, and the political appetite, he thinks the American people — desperate for relief — will have in January. Biden’s long platform has grown in recent months as the crisis has deepened. . . . Once he began talking about a coronavirus recovery, he also started signaling more immediate ambitions on climate, including in his multiple conversations with Washington governor Jay Inslee. “He’s totally understood the centrality of a clean-energy plan,” said Inslee. [O]ne morning in late April. . . . he said into the phone, it was time they expanded their thinking. Sure, massive gobs of federal financial help have already been approved — unlike in 2008, he pointed out — but that still won’t be enough. Not while the magnitude of this crisis dwarfs the last one. His advisers agreed: If they were going to talk about lessons from history, their future calls might as well dive into the Great Depression and World War II. Biden is also a lifelong Democrat who likes the view from the center of the party, enough to move rapidly to accommodate when it shifts, as it is doing now very quickly. He may look like a milquetoast moderate to the activist left and maybe even to you, but the party — and world — has changed so fast that even his primary platform puts him well to the left of Obama in 2008 and, in many ways, left of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Those close to him say he sees in the crisis an obvious window for action. “There is no denying that the challenges a President Biden would face in 2021 are different than anyone could have imagined six months ago given the economic and health consequences of the coronavirus,” Feldman, who has worked with Biden for nearly a decade, told me. “What I’ve heard the vice-president say over and over again is this crisis is shining a bright, bright light on so many systemic problems in our country, and so many inequities. It is exacerbating and shining a light on environmental-justice issues, racial inequalities, so many other problems.” Publicly, Biden has made no secret of his displeasure with Trump’s handling of the disaster, from his personal conduct — Biden has said the delay in distributing relief checks in order to print Trump’s name on them “bothered me the most” — to the administration’s failure to ensure small businesses access to relief funds while state unemployment systems were overwhelmed. The crisis, Biden believes, has expanded “the state of what is possible, now that the American people have seen both the role of government and the role of frontline workers,” said Sullivan. “He believes he has a more compelling case to make that this is the agenda that needs to get passed.” Outwardly, at least, Biden appears sensitive to the concerns of progressives. “He has said this is the second time in 12 years that the American taxpayers have bailed out American business,” Sullivan told me. The implication is that Biden has run out of patience. “That’s fine, we should do it and protect our economy — but he believes we have to ask our private sector to take on greater responsibility and accountability.”

Biden has talked openly, and seriously, about the notion of rolling out certain Cabinet picks before he is elected as a way of giving voters a sense of what to expect and to hit the ground running when he takes office. And he has already begun early-stage thoughts about not just top appointments but sub-Cabinet posts and the broader shape of his government. [H]e’s spent plenty of his time out of the spotlight weighing his vice-presidential options, conscious that he may effectively be picking his replacement and therefore sending an important signal about his wishes for Democrats’ future. His list of top contenders has long been thought to include Harris, Klobuchar, Whitmer, and Warren, as well as Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. As the lockdown has dragged on, Biden has insisted his pick be ideologically “simpatico” (once thought to be a point against Warren, though less so amid this crisis), and he has hardened his belief that she must be prepared to take over from their first day in office. That point — which Obama has echoed in their conversations — is read by some in Biden’s circles as a potential knock against Abrams, who has never held statewide elected office, and some members of Congress who’ve been floated.

With the pandemic likely lingering through the end of the year, the prospect of four more years of Trump's mismanagement and the GOP effort to restore the Gilded Age ought to terrify most Americans - or at least those not totally blinded by racism and religious extremism. 

How the Myth of American Exceptionalism Threatens Democracy

A variant of the Star and Stripes used by a neo-Nazi party headquartered in Westland, Michigan, 13 August 2015.

As a history major and one who has traveled overseas much more than many in Donald Trump's base of support, one of the things that I have always found maddening is the myth of American exceptionalism that has become an article of faith in America's civil religion, if you will. This myth entails the belief that America is different from any other country on earth, that it doesn't need to learn from  the experience of others, and that problems and fates that have befallen other nations simply cannot happen here because this is America.  Not only is the hubris of this myth  - which sadly even those who should know better, like Barack Obama - off the charts, but this mindset ignores aspects of America's history which many would prefer to forget or pretend never happened. As a piece in Newsweek by a historian points out, there is nothing in America's history that proves it is immune to sliding into authoritarianism or even autocracy.  And, if one knows history, examples abound where autocrats have maintained the trappings of a democracy - the Roman emperor Augustus created the template in 27 BC  when he became the first Roman emperor yet kept the Senate and trappings of the Roman Republic - while democracy has died.  With an occupant of the White House who views himself as an autocrat and a Congress controlled by Republicans only too happy to aid in the subversion of the United States Constitution, we have a great deal to fear.  Here are article excerpts:

For too long, progressive intellectuals have mocked conservatives as “know-nothings” for their insistence that the U.S. is immune to history and can’t be compared to other countries because it is simply superior.

I suspect, however, that historians, even radical ones, suffer just as much from American exceptionalism.

Our version of this mindset is evoked by the title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here. No military coups, no dictatorships, no violent revolutions, no breaks in the constitutional order—what do we really have to worry about?

The United States will persevere somehow, and if you need reassurance, recall Watergate’s bipartisan removal of a president via constitutional processes.

And then along came Trump.

It’s pretty obvious that the certainty “it could never happen here” was foolish in hindsight. More than just admitting error, we need to face up to what history tells us is possible. . . . . . There is no fundamental reason to insist the U.S. is immune from authoritarian government, whether outright fascism or a regime maintaining the technical forms of democracy (a legislature; formal elections; courts that issue sentences) while actively subverting democracy’s real content. 

Turkey and much of central and eastern Europe, including Czechia, Hungary, and Poland, are trending towards authoritarian democracy, an oxymoron if there ever was one, and Putin’s Russia shows them how to do it.

We have to stop treating the deep anti-democratic currents in modern U.S. history as exceptions—mistakes that will never happen again. We should know better.

In the past century, there are any number of existing legislative and judicial precedents for large-scale repression and direct attacks on democratic rights, none formerly overturned by Supreme Court action or constitutional amendment.

The Espionage Act of 1918 criminalized peaceful dissent in wartime. Approximately two thousand people were jailed for speaking or writing against U.S. entry into World War One, often for long sentences.

World War II was worse. In February 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Army to deport anyone it saw fit from the West Coast.

This order targeted Japanese immigrants (Issei) and native-born citizens of Japanese descent (Nisei), 120,000 of whom were deported to desert concentration camps for the rest of the war, unless released to do manual labor or serve in the armed forces. It was validated by the Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision, which has never been overturned.

Moving past 1945, the “McCarthyite” Red Scare is remembered, but in ways that soften its impact and mask the responsibility of liberals and the larger civil society. Large-scale purges of employment and blacklists began well before Senator Joseph McCarthy became a household figure in 1950 and lasted long after the Senate censured him in 1954.

In 1947, President Truman ordered a Loyalty Security Program to assess the political sympathies of federal employees. The criteria for “loyalty” were entirely ideological. Thousands of government workers were fired and many more quit, a process repeated in every state and by all employers with government contracts.

Constitutional protections of due process were abrogated; the FBI interviewed neighbors and associates and presented evidence in cameraas to what books people read or opinions they had voiced.

 

It is naïve to think these precedents are not on the minds of the President [Trump] and the people around him. Trump justified his attempted ban on Muslims entering the U.S. by evoking FDR’s executive order authorizing internment; he has pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who used his shield to cover explicitly racial violence against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.

Most frightening, of course, is the presidential tolerance extended to neo-Nazi “alt-right” groups, equating them with civil rights protesters.

In sum, it has, repeatedly, happened here. And it may again, with lasting consequences.