These qualities enabled Biden-the candidate who seemed, to media and political elites, the most outdated and irrelevant of them all-to win the presidency. (Twitter is alien to Biden.) He doesn’t highlight the battle lines when doing so would alienate half the country. He doesn’t linger to engage in the presidential equivalent of a Twitter food fight. When it comes to the culture wars over issues like race and gender, crime and policing, and immigration, Biden comes down on the side of common decency and common sense, then he moves on. His out-of-touchness has allowed him to avoid most of the traps that lie in wait for Democratic politicians. Though he came of age in the turmoil of the 1960s, he has the instincts and convictions of a politician from his childhood years, the Roosevelt and Truman era, practicing the politics of the fair shake. It’s one of Biden’s unexpected strengths that he doesn’t belong to any of the four dominant narratives. It could happen, if the party first extricated itself from the grip of bigotry and corporate capture-but then it would no longer be the Republican Party.
Some Republicans, like Senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio, imagine transforming their party into the electoral vehicle of Americans without college degrees.
Peasants for plutocracy free#
Instead, Free America answers the ambitions of the business class and corporations Smart America describes the utopia of educated professionals Real America voices the resentments of the white Christian heartland Just America believes in a metaphysics of group identity that divides the working class. None of the four narratives I described speaks to or for these Americans. They suffer not just economic difficulty but also social inferiority and cultural invisibility. Today, workers in the service sector, caregiving jobs, and remnants of the blue-collar trades have a kind of second-class status. During these past five decades, the transracial working class, which once made up the backbone of the Democratic Party, with a narrative of the “fair shake,” has seen its power battered. By definition, a list of dominant narratives leaves out other narratives and the people they represent. My taxonomy does not describe the whole country-it’s not a group portrait of 330 million people. In “ The Four Americas,” an article adapted from my book Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, I described the four dominant narratives in this country over the past half century: Free America, Smart America, Real America, and Just America. If Biden won’t give his a name, I’ll try.
But successful presidents from Lincoln to Roosevelt to Reagan understood that the people need a vision. He provides reassurance, not inspiration. He speaks in sayings, anecdotes, and exhortations. His mind goes to the particular, not the general.
Regardless of whether this agenda goes far enough, or whether Congress allows it to go anywhere at all, the administration is pointing the country in a fundamentally new direction.īiden hasn’t given this new direction a name. The sum of these and other policies is more ambitious, and more ideologically pointed, than the Biden campaign slogan “Build Back Better.” President Biden is using the resources of the federal government to reverse nearly half a century of growing monopoly, plutocracy, and inequality. In the past few weeks, the Biden administration’s domestic agenda has come into sharp focus: a bipartisan Senate bill for physical and environmental infrastructure projects nearing passage new statistics showing that COVID-19 relief has dramatically reduced poverty across demographic groups an executive order aimed at concentrated market power, promoting competition and worker power a $3.5 trillion budget proposal with large outlays in social spending, paid for by taxes on the rich and corporations presidential speeches on behalf of better jobs for Americans at the bottom and middle of the economy.
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