After a months-long wind-up, Joe Biden officially entered the 2020 presidential race on April 25. Buoyed by Obama-era nostalgia and name recognition, the former vice president has already achieved frontrunner status among the 20 declared Democratic candidates.
Yet, if there is any ideology at all in Biden’s campaign, it’s old-school moderate centrism that plays much like that of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. And in a race that features many younger and more overtly progressive candidates, that centrism feels outdated.
Biden’s campaign website says nothing of the extremely popular Medicare for All proposal, instead offering this treacly rhetoric: “We should defend and build upon the Affordable Care Act to ensure every American has access to quality, affordable health care.”
Likewise, in place of where other candidates might advocate College for All or the cancellation of student debt, Biden says, “Education is at the heart of the American Dream, and essential for the United States to compete globally in the decades to come. Every American should have the opportunity throughout their lives to obtain the skills and education to realize their full potential.”
This kind of milquetoast sentimentality charading as policy is ripped straight out of the centrist Democrats’ playbook. It reads as though it were written by a room full of pollsters and manages to say almost nothing at all. One could read every line of Joe Biden’s campaign website and leave unable to imagine what a Biden presidency would actually mean.
One could read every line of Joe Biden’s campaign website and leave unable to imagine what a Biden presidency would actually mean.
The irony is that this vague middle-roading is exactly what Biden supporters like about him. The word most associated with Biden’s potential nomination is the fabled “electability.” A strong contingent of Democrats have been so utterly shell-shocked by Trump’s success in the 2016 race that they see veering to the middle as their best way forward.
In what would truly be the most profound of Trumpian victories, Biden supporters would rather retreat to outmoded centrism and capitulation, than risk scaring away working-class whites in Michigan and Pennsylvania with talk about guaranteed healthcare and dramatic action on climate change, ideas that represent the real future of the Democratic party.
But perhaps most mind-boggling is that Biden and his supporters continue to insist on returning to the center even after the landmark victories and popularity of left candidates including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar in 2018. Forming the most progressive and diverse freshman Democratic House in U.S. history, these fresh faces (read: the future of the party) have decidedly different views on centrism.
As Ocasio-Cortez has stated, “When we think about the greatest things we have ever accomplished as a society have been ambitious acts of vision, and the ‘meh’ is just worshipped now, for what?”
Ocasio-Cortez’s own victory and enduring popularity is precisely due to her dismissal of establishment centrism, which allowed her to unseat 10-term moderate Democrat Joe Crowley. The future of the Democratic Party is clear, and Biden is in the way.
At its core, Biden’s brand of centrism only serves to amplify the ideology of the currently powerful and helps enforce the status quo. In an age where the status quo involves migrant children locked in cages at the border, indebted college students, sick people unable to afford life-saving medication, and the ever-present threat of catastrophic climate change, moderation politics is effectively immoderate.
If America is ever to fully recover from the Trump administration, combat climate change, and curb skyrocketing wealth inequality, it will be because of bold progressive leadership.
There is nothing sensible about Biden’s brand of common sense. In Trump’s America, the center is still an irredeemable locale that will serve only to manage America’s decline, not reverse it.
This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by the Tribune News Service.