Is Joe Biden the Future of Liberalism? Let’s Hope So

“Will the Democrats prove captive to cultural grievance, identity politics, anti-racism, and the like? Or will they throw their lot in with Biden-style moderates…”

The New York Times reported earlier this week that “President Biden’s economic advisers are preparing to recommend spending as much as $3 trillion on a sweeping set of efforts aimed at boosting the economy, reducing carbon emissions and narrowing economic inequality, beginning with a giant infrastructure plan that may be financed in part through tax increases on corporations and the rich.” Coming on the heels of the $1.9 trillion Coronavirus (COVID-19) stimulus bill, that $3 trillion price tag—yes, trillion, with a T—is somewhat jaw-dropping. Infrastructure investments are much needed and long overdue, but one does not have to be a penny-pinching fiscal conservative to start to wonder whether we are going too far on the spending front.

Debt and deficit concerns aside, President Joe Biden’s oncoming infrastructure push would stay true to form. As I argued in the lead-up to the 2020 election here in the pages of Merion West, a Biden administration would offer us a more substantive, policy-driven politics. He certainly has delivered thus far. President Biden is not particularly interested in the culture wars (in large part because the Left has a much less popular stance on many such issues, and President Biden is politically adept), and he has issued a flurry of executive orders and passed a monumental piece of legislation in the form of the American Rescue Plan, all while overseeing an increasingly successful national vaccination effort. President Biden is opting for tangible policy—and policy that is geared towards dollars and cents and points of fairly broad-based consensus—instead of more divisive, symbolic stances. It is not surprising that his administration is doing so poorly with immigration policy thus far. Immigration is more divisive, more culturally fraught than sending people bundles of cash or rebuilding our infrastructure, while the Republicans dawdle and read Dr. Seuss books.

President Biden’s policy-heavy, identity politics-light presidency has some astute political observers like David Brooks thinking that he is more than the placeholder president we all thought he would be. He just might be “transformational.”