Despite lofty ambitions, four years of professional-managerial approaches to governing moved the Democrats even further away from their New Deal roots.
The Democratic establishment’s swift consolidation behind Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy in March 2020 — and against Bernie Sanders’s insurgency — was an impressive show of strength. But the decision to back the seventy-seven-year-old DC insider also reflected fears about the inability of other leading Democrats to reach working-class voters.
Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren: all were creatures of modern liberalism’s professional-managerial class (PMC) — consultants, attorneys, professors. They were precisely the kinds of elites Donald Trump could easily paint as aloof and out of touch. For all his time in Washington, DC, and despite his training as a lawyer, Scranton Joe had never been fully scrubbed of his folksy, working-class shtick. Faced with the potential for an extinction-level loss of white working-class support, party leaders hoped Biden could put a hard hat atop the Democrats’ thoroughly PMC style.
And so he did. In 2020, Biden embraced the rallying cry that “this election is Scranton versus Park Avenue,” spotlighting his blue-collar bona fides and dismissing Trump’s populism as a charade. In office, Biden frequently claimed to be the most union-friendly president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His fall 2023 trip to Michigan to walk the picket line with striking autoworkers was meant to symbolize his differences from Trump. And in some corners, there was hope that Biden was beginning to remake the Democratic Party’s tarnished image in the eyes of workers. Since at least the Bill Clinton era, the party had grown increasingly distant from (and sometimes hostile to) unions, manufacturing jobs, and their associated strands of working-class voters.
Certainly this was part of the impetus for Biden’s pursuit of green industrial policy. While he never embraced the full suite of “Green New Deal” initiatives urged by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and the Left, his three major pieces of legislation — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2021, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 — all aimed to use public power to spur private investment and manufacturing that would not only support the green energy transition but also stimulate good jobs for working people.
Despite this embrace of industrial policy, the devil, particularly when it came to winning working-class support, was in the policy details. Rather than include public initiatives that could quickly put people to work or provide other immediate social benefits, the administration maintained the Democratic Party’s half-century commitment to highly technocratic, market-dependent approaches to governing. The result has been a series of important but narrow and complex policies whose immediate effects are removed from the lives of working-class people.
A deeper history stretching back to the late 1960s and 1970s helps explain the more familiar and recent story about partisan class dealignment — voters sorting by educational attainment rather than income or wealth — that accelerated in the disastrous 2024 election cycle. It’s true that some sources of working-class opposition to liberalism lie in “woke” rhetoric and other signs of cultural disconnect. But these complaints more often speak to deeper discontents with liberal approaches to the economy and government, which have often been sold by Democratic politicians as a stand-in for a sweeping moral vision. Professional-class liberals’ doubling down on technocratic solutions and institutional norms as both policy approach and moral philosophy has proven alienating for working people.
If anything, the Biden years have brought into sharp relief the facts that policy design matters and that liberals’ professional-managerial approach to governance, the substantive heart of its political style, is at the root of working-class voters’ disillusionment with the Democratic Party.
A New Agent of History Is Born
In 1977, Barbara and John Ehrenreich published a now classic article tracing the emergence of the “professional-managerial class.” They identified a class of bureaucrats, lawyers, and managers that operate between working people and the highest echelons of capitalism. Hillary Clinton’s defeat of Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 brought renewed attention to how this proliferating PMC had substantially remade liberalism and the party. Beginning in the 1970s, lawyers, policy experts, bureaucrats, and consultants exerted growing influence over the Democratic Party’s electoral priorities and its perception of its voting base.
The liberal professional class has also shaped the party’s style of governance and policy priorities when in power. Modern liberals ostensibly share the social commitments of the New Deal — broadly available access to affordable health care, an economy that delivers widespread opportunity, access to safe, affordable shelter, and more. But the methods they use to pursue these goals are nearly always dependent on the private or voluntary sectors. This has meant that the experience of citizenship increasingly requires regular people to navigate confusing thickets of businesses, partnerships, and nonstate service providers. Today’s liberal state has become encrusted with nonprofit and profit-seeking private administrators.
Professional-class liberals developed this distinctive approach to governance through their education and, over time, their class interests. Beginning in the 1960s, the ranks of graduate-level trained Americans grew markedly and accelerated in the decades that followed. Between 1963 and 1979, the number of first-year law students doubled to more than forty thousand. Other professional schools and master’s programs saw similarly explosive growth, and formal training in public policy grew substantially. The democratization of graduate training was particularly striking among women and people of color, and soon professional-class diversity became a hallmark of modern liberalism. Professional-class influence cuts across partisan lines, but its hold on the top of the Democratic Party has been especially pronounced: Tim Walz was the first person without legal training on a Democratic presidential ticket since Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Many young baby boomers sought ways to apply the social values of the 1960s through their work commitments. And so, from within the broader ranks of these managers, lawyers, and expert bureaucrats of the ’60s and ’70s, there emerged a rising and increasingly diverse generation of political liberals. They were often uncynically idealistic political and policy professionals — many passed up more lucrative opportunities in the private sector to work in or alongside government.
By the 1980s and ’90s, professional-class liberals’ training, instincts, and social worlds had become inextricably embedded in the globalized capitalist system they imagined themselves reforming. As union contributions to liberal political campaigns faded relative to contributions from corporate and financial interests, some liberals even took board seats and other consulting positions in the private sector. Throughout, liberals celebrated new technologies and the leveling promise of global capitalism, found faith in rational, data-based evidence as a means of political persuasion, and, above all, made the reform, management, and promotion of markets both means and ends of public policy.
Faced with growing backlash to large bureaucracies in the private and public sectors, they aimed to use the state not to build public capacities but to bend them to shape markets in ways that might deliver social benefits. Rather than construct public housing, they offered subsidized vouchers to provide poor people with access to private housing markets. Rather than create a public option in health care, Obamacare created a Rube Goldberg–like system of technical subsidies, incentives, and regulations to expand access, manage private markets, and cajole states to participate. For many contemporary liberals, in fact, the creation of a market for social goods was a means of ensuring their survival — should conservatives target Medicare, for instance, the health care providers and insurers that feast at the trough of Medicare Advantage will rally to its salvation.
It is therefore not surprising that a revolving door emerged between top consulting firms like McKinsey and Democratic presidential administrations. Over time, such a managerial and market-oriented ethos has become the defining characteristic of the Democratic Party, once the party of labor. Of course, professional-class liberals were not the sole cause of labor’s decline — deindustrialization, automation, and increased global competition were structural realities for decades. But beginning in the 1970s, new generations of liberals increasingly saw unions and the industries they were traditionally embedded in as less important than more dynamic sectors like tech and finance.
These highly complex and technical approaches to governance reached their zenith in the Clinton and Obama administrations. In the face of mounting inequality and social discontent, President Barack Obama celebrated “smart governance” as the solution. During his two terms, Obama promoted his market-managing policies using the word “smart” more than nine hundred times. Obama and his team of professional-class liberals genuinely believed that centering expertly managed markets and technocratic governance would solve social problems in ways that might preclude more thoroughgoing redistribution or structural change. During Biden’s eight years in the Obama White House as vice president, not to mention his more than three decades in the Senate, he clearly assimilated this management-focused approach as well. Scranton Joe brought just such an orientation to his presidency, along with many alums from the Clinton and Obama administrations.
Despite its class composition, the Biden White House took deliberate steps to bolster its appeal to working-class Americans. These efforts, however, were all but smothered by its market-managerial approach to policy design. Though Biden spoke boldly about his economic, environmental, and socially transformative goals, his three signature legislative accomplishments — the IIJA, the IRA, and the CHIPS Act — proved to be political duds precisely because of their reliance on the same old hard-to-grasp and even harder to enjoy managerial, technocratic, and market-based approaches.
These bills comprised the main thrust of Biden’s green industrial policy. But given their sweeping scale, ambitions, and real policy successes, it is especially telling that people rarely talk about them. The 2021 IIJA included some $550 billion for infrastructure improvements. The 2022 IRA contained around $750 billion for climate-related innovations as well as funding to reduce home energy costs. And the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act is spending nearly $300 billion to foster the domestic production of semiconductor chips, foundational components for everything from solar panels to cell phones. These incentives aim to make renewable energy so cost-effective that, experts believe, US electricity-related emissions may drop by 75 percent by 2035 and transportation-related emissions could drop by one-third.
As a result of Biden’s investments, manufacturing’s share of the country’s GDP is the highest it has been since 1981, and green investments in manufacturing facilities doubled between 2021 and 2023. If these trends hold, some $300 billion in public subsidies are forecast to stimulate more than $500 billion in private investments over the coming years across a range of green sectors: solar and wind energy production and storage, electric vehicles and batteries, and decarbonization of traditional manufacturing, including decarbonizing concrete and steel production. This spring, the Department of Energy announced it was processing 203 applications for $262.2 billion in loans across 245 locations in the United States. And these applications — from companies working on carbon reuse and reduction, advanced nuclear technologies, electric vehicles and batteries, energy transmission, and more — are coming from businesses in both red and blue states, their new jobs and businesses championed by Republican and Democratic governors alike.
Biden has repeatedly pledged that Bidenomics would grow the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up,” but vanishingly few Americans have perceived benefits from these initiatives. One poll found that a majority of Americans “haven’t seen, read or heard anything or much at all” about the IIJA or the CHIPS Act, while 48 percent said the same about the IRA. Of those who had heard of the bills, just one-quarter reported positive sentiments. Roughly the same share of voters believe that Donald Trump — whose administration’s repeated failure to invest in infrastructure only brought us the “Infrastructure Week” meme — did as much as Biden to create jobs and deliver infrastructural investments.
These kinds of market-mediated and, as the political scientist Suzanne Mettler has called them, “submerged” policies are clearly hard to sell to voters. But there is little evidence that Biden and Vice President Harris were even interested in trying. They received vanishingly little notice in Biden’s final State of the Union address. And in their lone presidential debate, when Trump challenged Harris on Biden’s (actually strong) record on stimulating industrial investment and manufacturing jobs, she failed to mention the IRA or the CHIPS Act.
Instead of embracing their roles as messengers, the Biden administration and its surrogates often took a condescending approach, blaming the media and voters themselves for not knowing what was going on. As John Podesta, Biden’s top clean energy adviser, put it, “I don’t think people are paying attention to the names of bills or even that legislation’s passed.” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm agreed: “It’s just huge how much is happening out there,” she said, but “people don’t realize what is actually happening.”
This version of liberalism may have begun building the green transition, but it is not a recipe for building political power. The problem clearly lay less with the American public than with the priorities of policymakers and politicians. Rather than embedding its slower-moving business-oriented green economic policies within a wider set of immediately tangible social benefits, Democrats offered vague forecasts about the trickle-down employment effects of its subsidies for green capital. As the economic historian Adam Tooze has written, “it is a top-down agenda” that lacks a “transformative ambition” when it comes to the fundamental nature of American class and social politics.
These dynamics also demonstrate why health care reform has not yielded the political dividends Democrats long hoped it would. The architects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) routinely promised that taking a market-based approach would make the delivery of care more efficient. The implementation of the ACA has nevertheless proven that structuring a market in health care delivery enables price inflation, not to mention grift by private companies. Biden’s successful negotiation with drug companies did lower the costs of certain prescription drugs like insulin, but these efforts ultimately treat the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem. And despite repeated updates to the ACA’s open enrollment website, it remains profoundly difficult to navigate the many plans to choose from and the complex rules of eligibility in the limited time provided to make plan selections. It is equally difficult to get a representative from HealthCare.gov on the phone. These experiences have made many Americans even more frustrated by and alienated from government and, by extension, the Democratic Party, the party of “smart” governance.
Learning the Right Lessons
It doesn’t have to be this way. In a society as socially, politically, and regionally fragmented as the modern United States, robust public policy could offer a means of forging cohesion and connection. As in the New Deal, good public policy would also validate and help facilitate wider movements for the green transition, improved wages and benefits, and union organizing. Effective, legible governance could provide the foundation for restoring faith in democracy itself. As originally conceived, “Bidenism” contained social welfare proposals that could have materially improved people’s lives and, perhaps, Democrats’ electoral prospects up and down the ticket.
The Build Back Better package, the original legislation from which the IRA was salvaged, was the first feasible major piece of legislation in generations on the scale of the New Deal’s social and economic policy, with the potential to shore up the social safety net and reinvigorate American class and electoral politics. It included universal social policies: funding universal preschool, extending the COVID-era child tax credits, establishing federal support for paid family leave and medical caregiving, and much more. Of course, Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema ground down the legislation, cutting many of the direct social benefits and refashioning the bill as the compromised Inflation Reduction Act.
That so many other liberals in the House and Senate were willing to make these compromises in the name of party comity and respect for procedural norms suggests just how allergic the liberal professional class has become to overt struggles over political power or moral vision. Voters are asked to trust the process, enter their vote, and wait. For working-class voters who saw the child tax credit withdrawn under Biden, this was especially galling, as they watched childcare costs soar alongside ballooning grocery bills and rents.
As former AFL-CIO director Steve Rosenthal recently told the New Yorker, the working-class voters he’s polled crave politicians who will lead with economic issues, including better jobs and health care. Rosenthal heads the pro-labor organization In Union, which cosponsored a report that found many working-class voters “believe Democrats care about everyone else but them.” That’s the messaging side, of course. But, as Rosenthal continued, these voters needed to see “clearly that our candidates and our party are working to improve their lives economically.”
If professional-class liberals resented Donald Trump’s vulgar and in-your-face presidential style — signing stimulus checks personally, for instance — there is no denying its populist appeal. It’s impossible to imagine John Q. Public writing a letter to Biden describing how the IRA’s green energy provisions immediately improved his family’s life.
The Biden administration somewhat stubbornly refused to accept that, no matter how many times the president donned a hard hat or dropped a “malarkey” into a speech, it could not combat how alienated working-class voters of all races and ideological orientations have become with the approach and image of the Democratic Party. The last four years have proven that the Democrats’ fifty-year indifference toward — and contribution to — union membership decline could not be changed overnight.
Harris, much more than Biden, exudes a professional-class liberal ethos. Her hyper-managed campaign’s microtargeted approach clearly prioritized the quantitative analysis of experts more than it tried to genuinely connect with the needs of working people. Harris’s selection of Tim Walz as her running mate initially generated excitement among a diverse swath of the electorate. Yet the campaign’s team of professional-class political consultants managed Walz so carefully that he came to represent just another disingenuous hard hat awkwardly sat atop a profession
Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren: all were creatures of modern liberalism’s professional-managerial class (PMC) — consultants, attorneys, professors. They were precisely the kinds of elites Donald Trump could easily paint as aloof and out of touch. For all his time in Washington, DC, and despite his training as a lawyer, Scranton Joe had never been fully scrubbed of his folksy, working-class shtick. Faced with the potential for an extinction-level loss of white working-class support, party leaders hoped Biden could put a hard hat atop the Democrats’ thoroughly PMC style.
And so he did. In 2020, Biden embraced the rallying cry that “this election is Scranton versus Park Avenue,” spotlighting his blue-collar bona fides and dismissing Trump’s populism as a charade. In office, Biden frequently claimed to be the most union-friendly president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His fall 2023 trip to Michigan to walk the picket line with striking autoworkers was meant to symbolize his differences from Trump. And in some corners, there was hope that Biden was beginning to remake the Democratic Party’s tarnished image in the eyes of workers. Since at least the Bill Clinton era, the party had grown increasingly distant from (and sometimes hostile to) unions, manufacturing jobs, and their associated strands of working-class voters.
Certainly this was part of the impetus for Biden’s pursuit of green industrial policy. While he never embraced the full suite of “Green New Deal” initiatives urged by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and the Left, his three major pieces of legislation — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2021, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 — all aimed to use public power to spur private investment and manufacturing that would not only support the green energy transition but also stimulate good jobs for working people.
Despite this embrace of industrial policy, the devil, particularly when it came to winning working-class support, was in the policy details. Rather than include public initiatives that could quickly put people to work or provide other immediate social benefits, the administration maintained the Democratic Party’s half-century commitment to highly technocratic, market-dependent approaches to governing. The result has been a series of important but narrow and complex policies whose immediate effects are removed from the lives of working-class people.
A deeper history stretching back to the late 1960s and 1970s helps explain the more familiar and recent story about partisan class dealignment — voters sorting by educational attainment rather than income or wealth — that accelerated in the disastrous 2024 election cycle. It’s true that some sources of working-class opposition to liberalism lie in “woke” rhetoric and other signs of cultural disconnect. But these complaints more often speak to deeper discontents with liberal approaches to the economy and government, which have often been sold by Democratic politicians as a stand-in for a sweeping moral vision. Professional-class liberals’ doubling down on technocratic solutions and institutional norms as both policy approach and moral philosophy has proven alienating for working people.
If anything, the Biden years have brought into sharp relief the facts that policy design matters and that liberals’ professional-managerial approach to governance, the substantive heart of its political style, is at the root of working-class voters’ disillusionment with the Democratic Party.
A New Agent of History Is Born
In 1977, Barbara and John Ehrenreich published a now classic article tracing the emergence of the “professional-managerial class.” They identified a class of bureaucrats, lawyers, and managers that operate between working people and the highest echelons of capitalism. Hillary Clinton’s defeat of Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 brought renewed attention to how this proliferating PMC had substantially remade liberalism and the party. Beginning in the 1970s, lawyers, policy experts, bureaucrats, and consultants exerted growing influence over the Democratic Party’s electoral priorities and its perception of its voting base.
The liberal professional class has also shaped the party’s style of governance and policy priorities when in power. Modern liberals ostensibly share the social commitments of the New Deal — broadly available access to affordable health care, an economy that delivers widespread opportunity, access to safe, affordable shelter, and more. But the methods they use to pursue these goals are nearly always dependent on the private or voluntary sectors. This has meant that the experience of citizenship increasingly requires regular people to navigate confusing thickets of businesses, partnerships, and nonstate service providers. Today’s liberal state has become encrusted with nonprofit and profit-seeking private administrators.
Professional-class liberals developed this distinctive approach to governance through their education and, over time, their class interests. Beginning in the 1960s, the ranks of graduate-level trained Americans grew markedly and accelerated in the decades that followed. Between 1963 and 1979, the number of first-year law students doubled to more than forty thousand. Other professional schools and master’s programs saw similarly explosive growth, and formal training in public policy grew substantially. The democratization of graduate training was particularly striking among women and people of color, and soon professional-class diversity became a hallmark of modern liberalism. Professional-class influence cuts across partisan lines, but its hold on the top of the Democratic Party has been especially pronounced: Tim Walz was the first person without legal training on a Democratic presidential ticket since Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Many young baby boomers sought ways to apply the social values of the 1960s through their work commitments. And so, from within the broader ranks of these managers, lawyers, and expert bureaucrats of the ’60s and ’70s, there emerged a rising and increasingly diverse generation of political liberals. They were often uncynically idealistic political and policy professionals — many passed up more lucrative opportunities in the private sector to work in or alongside government.
By the 1980s and ’90s, professional-class liberals’ training, instincts, and social worlds had become inextricably embedded in the globalized capitalist system they imagined themselves reforming. As union contributions to liberal political campaigns faded relative to contributions from corporate and financial interests, some liberals even took board seats and other consulting positions in the private sector. Throughout, liberals celebrated new technologies and the leveling promise of global capitalism, found faith in rational, data-based evidence as a means of political persuasion, and, above all, made the reform, management, and promotion of markets both means and ends of public policy.
Faced with growing backlash to large bureaucracies in the private and public sectors, they aimed to use the state not to build public capacities but to bend them to shape markets in ways that might deliver social benefits. Rather than construct public housing, they offered subsidized vouchers to provide poor people with access to private housing markets. Rather than create a public option in health care, Obamacare created a Rube Goldberg–like system of technical subsidies, incentives, and regulations to expand access, manage private markets, and cajole states to participate. For many contemporary liberals, in fact, the creation of a market for social goods was a means of ensuring their survival — should conservatives target Medicare, for instance, the health care providers and insurers that feast at the trough of Medicare Advantage will rally to its salvation.
It is therefore not surprising that a revolving door emerged between top consulting firms like McKinsey and Democratic presidential administrations. Over time, such a managerial and market-oriented ethos has become the defining characteristic of the Democratic Party, once the party of labor. Of course, professional-class liberals were not the sole cause of labor’s decline — deindustrialization, automation, and increased global competition were structural realities for decades. But beginning in the 1970s, new generations of liberals increasingly saw unions and the industries they were traditionally embedded in as less important than more dynamic sectors like tech and finance.
These highly complex and technical approaches to governance reached their zenith in the Clinton and Obama administrations. In the face of mounting inequality and social discontent, President Barack Obama celebrated “smart governance” as the solution. During his two terms, Obama promoted his market-managing policies using the word “smart” more than nine hundred times. Obama and his team of professional-class liberals genuinely believed that centering expertly managed markets and technocratic governance would solve social problems in ways that might preclude more thoroughgoing redistribution or structural change. During Biden’s eight years in the Obama White House as vice president, not to mention his more than three decades in the Senate, he clearly assimilated this management-focused approach as well. Scranton Joe brought just such an orientation to his presidency, along with many alums from the Clinton and Obama administrations.
Biden’s Submerged White House
Despite its class composition, the Biden White House took deliberate steps to bolster its appeal to working-class Americans. These efforts, however, were all but smothered by its market-managerial approach to policy design. Though Biden spoke boldly about his economic, environmental, and socially transformative goals, his three signature legislative accomplishments — the IIJA, the IRA, and the CHIPS Act — proved to be political duds precisely because of their reliance on the same old hard-to-grasp and even harder to enjoy managerial, technocratic, and market-based approaches.
These bills comprised the main thrust of Biden’s green industrial policy. But given their sweeping scale, ambitions, and real policy successes, it is especially telling that people rarely talk about them. The 2021 IIJA included some $550 billion for infrastructure improvements. The 2022 IRA contained around $750 billion for climate-related innovations as well as funding to reduce home energy costs. And the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act is spending nearly $300 billion to foster the domestic production of semiconductor chips, foundational components for everything from solar panels to cell phones. These incentives aim to make renewable energy so cost-effective that, experts believe, US electricity-related emissions may drop by 75 percent by 2035 and transportation-related emissions could drop by one-third.
As a result of Biden’s investments, manufacturing’s share of the country’s GDP is the highest it has been since 1981, and green investments in manufacturing facilities doubled between 2021 and 2023. If these trends hold, some $300 billion in public subsidies are forecast to stimulate more than $500 billion in private investments over the coming years across a range of green sectors: solar and wind energy production and storage, electric vehicles and batteries, and decarbonization of traditional manufacturing, including decarbonizing concrete and steel production. This spring, the Department of Energy announced it was processing 203 applications for $262.2 billion in loans across 245 locations in the United States. And these applications — from companies working on carbon reuse and reduction, advanced nuclear technologies, electric vehicles and batteries, energy transmission, and more — are coming from businesses in both red and blue states, their new jobs and businesses championed by Republican and Democratic governors alike.
Biden has repeatedly pledged that Bidenomics would grow the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up,” but vanishingly few Americans have perceived benefits from these initiatives. One poll found that a majority of Americans “haven’t seen, read or heard anything or much at all” about the IIJA or the CHIPS Act, while 48 percent said the same about the IRA. Of those who had heard of the bills, just one-quarter reported positive sentiments. Roughly the same share of voters believe that Donald Trump — whose administration’s repeated failure to invest in infrastructure only brought us the “Infrastructure Week” meme — did as much as Biden to create jobs and deliver infrastructural investments.
These kinds of market-mediated and, as the political scientist Suzanne Mettler has called them, “submerged” policies are clearly hard to sell to voters. But there is little evidence that Biden and Vice President Harris were even interested in trying. They received vanishingly little notice in Biden’s final State of the Union address. And in their lone presidential debate, when Trump challenged Harris on Biden’s (actually strong) record on stimulating industrial investment and manufacturing jobs, she failed to mention the IRA or the CHIPS Act.
Instead of embracing their roles as messengers, the Biden administration and its surrogates often took a condescending approach, blaming the media and voters themselves for not knowing what was going on. As John Podesta, Biden’s top clean energy adviser, put it, “I don’t think people are paying attention to the names of bills or even that legislation’s passed.” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm agreed: “It’s just huge how much is happening out there,” she said, but “people don’t realize what is actually happening.”
This version of liberalism may have begun building the green transition, but it is not a recipe for building political power. The problem clearly lay less with the American public than with the priorities of policymakers and politicians. Rather than embedding its slower-moving business-oriented green economic policies within a wider set of immediately tangible social benefits, Democrats offered vague forecasts about the trickle-down employment effects of its subsidies for green capital. As the economic historian Adam Tooze has written, “it is a top-down agenda” that lacks a “transformative ambition” when it comes to the fundamental nature of American class and social politics.
These dynamics also demonstrate why health care reform has not yielded the political dividends Democrats long hoped it would. The architects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) routinely promised that taking a market-based approach would make the delivery of care more efficient. The implementation of the ACA has nevertheless proven that structuring a market in health care delivery enables price inflation, not to mention grift by private companies. Biden’s successful negotiation with drug companies did lower the costs of certain prescription drugs like insulin, but these efforts ultimately treat the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem. And despite repeated updates to the ACA’s open enrollment website, it remains profoundly difficult to navigate the many plans to choose from and the complex rules of eligibility in the limited time provided to make plan selections. It is equally difficult to get a representative from HealthCare.gov on the phone. These experiences have made many Americans even more frustrated by and alienated from government and, by extension, the Democratic Party, the party of “smart” governance.
Learning the Right Lessons
It doesn’t have to be this way. In a society as socially, politically, and regionally fragmented as the modern United States, robust public policy could offer a means of forging cohesion and connection. As in the New Deal, good public policy would also validate and help facilitate wider movements for the green transition, improved wages and benefits, and union organizing. Effective, legible governance could provide the foundation for restoring faith in democracy itself. As originally conceived, “Bidenism” contained social welfare proposals that could have materially improved people’s lives and, perhaps, Democrats’ electoral prospects up and down the ticket.
The Build Back Better package, the original legislation from which the IRA was salvaged, was the first feasible major piece of legislation in generations on the scale of the New Deal’s social and economic policy, with the potential to shore up the social safety net and reinvigorate American class and electoral politics. It included universal social policies: funding universal preschool, extending the COVID-era child tax credits, establishing federal support for paid family leave and medical caregiving, and much more. Of course, Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema ground down the legislation, cutting many of the direct social benefits and refashioning the bill as the compromised Inflation Reduction Act.
That so many other liberals in the House and Senate were willing to make these compromises in the name of party comity and respect for procedural norms suggests just how allergic the liberal professional class has become to overt struggles over political power or moral vision. Voters are asked to trust the process, enter their vote, and wait. For working-class voters who saw the child tax credit withdrawn under Biden, this was especially galling, as they watched childcare costs soar alongside ballooning grocery bills and rents.
As former AFL-CIO director Steve Rosenthal recently told the New Yorker, the working-class voters he’s polled crave politicians who will lead with economic issues, including better jobs and health care. Rosenthal heads the pro-labor organization In Union, which cosponsored a report that found many working-class voters “believe Democrats care about everyone else but them.” That’s the messaging side, of course. But, as Rosenthal continued, these voters needed to see “clearly that our candidates and our party are working to improve their lives economically.”
If professional-class liberals resented Donald Trump’s vulgar and in-your-face presidential style — signing stimulus checks personally, for instance — there is no denying its populist appeal. It’s impossible to imagine John Q. Public writing a letter to Biden describing how the IRA’s green energy provisions immediately improved his family’s life.
The Biden administration somewhat stubbornly refused to accept that, no matter how many times the president donned a hard hat or dropped a “malarkey” into a speech, it could not combat how alienated working-class voters of all races and ideological orientations have become with the approach and image of the Democratic Party. The last four years have proven that the Democrats’ fifty-year indifference toward — and contribution to — union membership decline could not be changed overnight.
Harris, much more than Biden, exudes a professional-class liberal ethos. Her hyper-managed campaign’s microtargeted approach clearly prioritized the quantitative analysis of experts more than it tried to genuinely connect with the needs of working people. Harris’s selection of Tim Walz as her running mate initially generated excitement among a diverse swath of the electorate. Yet the campaign’s team of professional-class political consultants managed Walz so carefully that he came to represent just another disingenuous hard hat awkwardly sat atop a profession