American liberalism is exhausted, but it cannot regenerate or reimagine itself, because doing so would require taking risks and breaking with pro-corporate shibboleths. When a political project has based its entire appeal on restoring equilibrium and stewarding normalcy, both are obviously impossible. The result, as the circumstances surrounding Biden’s reelection bid illustrate, is a constellation of institutions too enervated to transform themselves and too fixed in their patterns to be forced into a meaningful realignment.
Such a realignment would not actually be impossible. An incarnation of the Democratic Party willing to substitute a populist strategy for the current big donor and Wall Street–friendly approach could find fertile ground within the electorate on which to put down roots. Americans know the economy is
rigged in favor of the rich. When it was first introduced, majorities of voters in both parties supported the idea of a
Green New Deal. Ordinary Americans want
higher taxes on the wealthy and a majority would
prefer a universal, Medicare for All system that puts human need over private profit.
Pursuit of such an agenda, however, would require the kind of confrontation with corporate America that today’s Democratic mainstream
gestures at when it’s convenient but
dispenses with in practice. It would also require mass mobilization, the ousting of countless operatives from their sinecures, and a party culture open and dynamic enough to accommodate the challenging of incumbents.
Having defeated that vision in 2016 and 2020, Democratic grandees are evidently content to rest on their laurels, make broad appeals for tolerance, and pitch themselves as the only alternative to an increasingly menacing Republican right. Revealingly, Biden’s reelection announcement cast the president as the person best qualified to defeat the Trumpian right and win the battle for the soul of America. It’s a decidedly non-programmatic message, and one that, as the
New Republic observed, notably did not include the words “abortion,” “climate,” “environment,” “gun,” “immigrant,” “justice,” “labor,” “union,” and “worker.”
In a short-term, purely electoral sense, it may be enough for Biden to defeat Trump a second time. What it does not signify, however, is a political project that aspires for a better future than the present.
