Sitting in front of a crackling fire in the White House at the end of February, President Joe Biden explained to historian Heather Cox Richardson how he sees himself as a transitional leader, carrying forward the founding ideals of U.S. democracy in the face of authoritarianism’s rise around the globe. As the interview took place, Russia was launching its invasion of Ukraine, giving more weight to Biden’s words.
Biden has turned out to be a bulwark against the worst elements in our politics.
Democratically run countries have been in steady decline for the last couple of decades, observed Biden, who described a conversation he had with Chinese President Xi Jinping, in which Xi expressed his belief that democracies can’t compete with autocracies in a rapidly changing world because “democracies require consensus and it’s too hard to get consensus.”
That is precisely the challenge Biden faces both at home and abroad. Authoritarianism is on the rise not just in Eastern Europe, but right here in the United States, where Republicans have pledged allegiance to Donald Trump’s Big Lie, officially sanctioned the violent mob that broke into the U.S. Capitol in the misguided belief that the 2020 election was “stolen,” fanned the flames of white nationalism, and are now busily passing state-level anti-voting laws to tilt elections in their favor by disqualifying the votes of low-income people and people of color.
Standing in the breach is Biden, articulating a pragmatic idealism and a long view of history that seems to be exactly what we need right now.
Let me stipulate that I was no Biden fan during the Democratic primaries in 2020 when he appeared to be the least progressive candidate in the field. I thought he lacked vision and energy, and I didn’t like his cozy relationship with the banking industry, his biggest contributor, for whom he helped defeat consumer bankruptcy protections.
But as President, Biden has turned out to be a bulwark against the worst elements in our politics. He has pushed through an ambitious series of domestic spending bills on a scale not seen since the New Deal. He has rapidly built consensus among European nations to condemn Russia and impose stiff sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine, including cutting off Russian oil imports to the United States, while stopping short of triggering a nuclear war.
Biden made good on his promise to nominate a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing in Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson not just a powerful legal mind, but someone who would also be the first Justice to have worked as a federal public defender, with a deep understanding of the shortcomings of the criminal justice system for defendants.
He is trying to force the country to pivot away from the deepening climate crisis with investments in green infrastructure. In his State of the Union address, he took a swing at greedy, non-tax-paying corporations and the growing gap between rich and poor using language straight from a Bernie Sanders stump speech. He has put together the most diverse administration in history. He used his bully pulpit to denounce state plans to deny medical care to trans kids, telling LGBTQ+ youth, “I’ll always have your back.”
Biden’s warm, inclusive, and reassuring tone is worlds away from the gleeful mean-spiritedness Trump unleashed. That alone is a tremendous relief.
In his State of the Union address, Biden told the nation, “You, the American people, are strong,” adding, “you’ll be OK.” He acknowledged the devastation of the pandemic, economic uncertainty, and historic levels of disaffection and political division—and, of course, the destabilizing and frightening specter of the biggest crisis in Europe since World War II.
Like FDR, whose portrait now hangs in the Oval Office, Biden is battling fear itself. He is promoting the public interest over private greed and pursuing ambitious redistributive policies to feed the hungry, keep people in their homes, extend relief to the unemployed, support unions, and save the middle class. As a result, also like FDR, he has attracted the scorn and fury of the right.
Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan is, as The New York Times put it, “one of the largest injections of federal aid since the Great Depression.” It included a child tax credit that cut child poverty by 40 percent.
A recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the federal pandemic relief programs for workers, households, and businesses that Biden doled out “helped make the COVID-19 recession the shortest on record”—lasting just six months. Government aid reduced the number of people living below the federal poverty guideline by eight million, the report states; without that aid, the number would have increased by nine million.
On Biden’s watch, the federal government made direct cash payments to people; extended unemployment benefits; kept health coverage stable for millions who lost their jobs; temporarily halted evictions; and put significant funds into child care.
Right after the State of the Union, Biden traveled to Superior, Wisconsin, to tout the infrastructure investment in the Blatnik Bridge that connects Superior to Duluth, Minnesota, across the St. Louis Bay of Lake Superior. More than 33,000 vehicles cross the sixty-one-year-old bridge daily. For decades, this crucial piece of infrastructure has been deteriorating to the point where load restrictions have set a maximum vehicle weight of forty tons. But now, thanks to the $27 billion that Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill allocated to spend on bridges, Wisconsin and Minnesota are finally able to make much-needed repairs.
The Republican National Committee immediately sent out a press release deriding Biden’s visit, and his investment in the bridge, as a pledge “to waste trillions more in taxpayer dollars.” Yet in late January, hours before Biden was scheduled to visit Pittsburgh to discuss needed infrastructure investment, a busy commuter bridge collapsed just before morning rush hour, injuring ten people.
Republicans at the state and national level have similarly resisted Biden’s efforts to help people weather the worst of the pandemic, claiming that extending unemployment benefits and providing affordable child care and health insurance would only make people less willing to work. And they continue their eternal war on unions.
Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, is running for re-election while endorsing cutting off unemployment, letting manufacturers in his home state take good paying jobs elsewhere to avoid paying union wages, repealing the Affordable Care Act, and raising taxes on the poorest Americans. Contrast that with Biden, who is pushing legislation to protect the right to organize and has used executive orders to mandate union labor on federal contracts.
Sara Nelson, the dynamic president of the national flight attendants union and a rising star in the labor movement, told me Biden “gets it” about the importance of unions to protect a livable life for Americans in a way few Presidents ever have.
Biden knows he needs to hit the road to drum up support for his initiatives and spread the message that the government can, and does, help people. He knows that, during the Obama Administration, he and the President he then served missed the chance to fully take credit for the Affordable Care Act and federal stimulus money that saved the economy from falling into a massive depression.
The stakes are even higher now. As Biden told Cox Richardson, the world is at an “inflection point.” He is trying to keep alive people’s sense of possibility, of decency, and of pulling together despite our many differences instead of splintering into warring factions. “I think that we really have an enormous opportunity in this moment of change to reassert the basic premise of why we are a country in the first place and to bring people together,” he said.
While he touts the United States as a place that “can do anything,” Biden acknowledges that the nation has “never fully lived up to” its ideal of being a beacon for justice, “but we’ve never walked away from it. We’ve never abandoned that idea,” he said.
He’s doing his best to stay true to that optimistic creed in exceedingly difficult, complex times. The pledge for unity he ran on took on more resonance as Russia began crushing Ukraine.
“We see the unity among leaders of nations and a more unified Europe, a more unified West,” Biden declared hopefully in his State of the Union. He offered moral support to Ukraine and moved rapidly to build a united front with European countries for sanctions on Russia and safe harbor for Ukrainian refugees, while avoiding triggering a nuclear war by sending in troops. That’s about as much as he can do at this moment.
And while the war in Ukraine crystallizes his democracy-versus-autocracy theme, Biden has also made dramatic progress on the domestic front, showing that government can be a force for good.
Knowing he’s there, under the portrait of FDR in the Oval Office, working against fear, against poverty, against greed and divisiveness and authoritarianism, all while telling Americans that things will be OK, is genuinely reassuring.
Considering the alternatives, Biden looks pretty good right now.