The Failed Presidency of Joe Biden, Part One

While many, including some progressives, contend that Biden's term was a success in domestic policy, the results say something different.

Jan 04, 2025

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As 2025 dawns and the specter of Donald Trump’s second term looms, I come to bury Joe Biden, not to praise him. Biden’s disastrous single term is responsible not only for the resurgence of Trump, but for setting back the hope for human decency in the United States by decades.

Those who would peddle a positive legacy for Biden are being either deliberately dishonest or willfully blind. Even the few positive things Biden did were attained only in order to ward off far more impactful gains or were in the form of recouping what could be reaped after massive setbacks.

Biden tried to present himself as “the decent man,” and thus the alternative to the authoritarian, fascist-wannabe Donald Trump.

But he was never that, from his earliest days and opposition to integration while cozying up to the greatest racists in Congress; to his long-standing opposition to a woman’s right to control her own body with his support of the Hyde Amendment (which he only abandoned in 2019 when his staff, after weeks of haranguing, was finally able to convince him that he would lose the nomination over it); from his pivotal role in degrading Anita Hill and paving the way for Clarence Thomas to sit on the Supreme Court; to his support as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee for the invasion of Iraq, Biden is many things, but he is nearly as far from “decent” as Trump.

Biden’s foreign policy failures are going to go down in history as legendary and will have massive impact for the foreseeable future. But the mythologizing around his domestic agenda will continue to wreak major damage within the United States as well.

In this two-part essay, I will be looking at Joe Biden’s sordid service and failed presidency. In Part 1, I am focusing on his domestic agenda, and will take on his foreign policy in Part 2, following soon after.

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The myth of Joe Biden’s domestic and economic policies

Biden came into office with a great deal of progressive support. There were several reasons for this, the most prominent being the belief that he had the best chance to defeat Donald Trump in 2020. After Trump oversaw the calamitous American response to the Covid-19 pandemic, that was certainly urgent.

But this was the beginning of the Biden mythology. I made the case in 2019 that Biden was a very risky choice, and he was. It didn’t matter because the unique nature of Trump’s first term, particularly with Covid exposing both Trump’s inability to lead and the festering sores in American society, meant that any Democrat was very likely to win.

But Democrats convinced liberals that Biden’s moderate voice and traditional support of the oligarchy was the surest way to defeat Trump, and liberals fell for it. They did it again in 2024, making them believe that Kamala Harris’ embrace of Liz Cheney and the most right wing parts of the Democratic party would win. Without the unusual conditions of 2020, the same kinds of mistakes that sunk Hillary Clinton tipped the scales against Harris as well.

Biden did one big thing right in 2020, and that was to realize that he needed progressive support to ensure his victory over Trump. Unlike Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, he reached out to Bernie Sanders, and committed to a few progressive conditions in exchange for Bernie’s unqualified support. It was a good deal for both sides.

Sanders got plum spots in the Senate, first chairing the Senate Budget Committee and then the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, both spots where Sanders could steer a course for some gains for American workers. More importantly, Biden appointed several Sanders favorites to the National Labor Relations Board. These had some real effects, especially against union-busting activity by large corporations during Biden’s term.

Yet the gains for organized labor beyond what Sanders could secure are not what Biden likes to claim. While unions asserted themselves more powerfully after the pandemic, 2023 still saw union membership continue its long-term decline, and that year marked a new low in union membership.

Biden leaves office with an unemployment rate just over 4%, which is a pretty low figure, historically. But those numbers are also deceptive.

For one thing, employment rates under Biden have been no better than they were under Trump before the pandemic hit. But more importantly, none of these official figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tell anything close to the real story.

The Real Unemployment Rate, which “tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes,” is a far better gauge, especially if we want to understand the mood of voters, who get to vote whether or not they are counted by BLS.

That rate is currently 23.9% of the workforce. In fairness to Biden, that is lower than the previous lowest rate (that is, the lowest rate before Biden’s presidency) of 24.7% in 2019. But it demonstrates a massive problem that went completely unaddressed by Biden, just as it has by every president before him.

When we consider that we’re talking about nearly a quarter of the American workforce, we can see that the variance of one or two percentage points reflects not policy changes but the vagaries of a large economy. Indeed, the top 0.1% of Americans held a greater share of the nation’s wealth at the end of Biden’s term than they did at the beginning.

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The neoliberal model

In early 2023, Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan took the unusual step of unveiling Biden’s new approach to global trade. Having Sullivan deliver it highlighted a troubling bipartisan trend to express economics in national security terms, but this is neither new nor the most worrisome aspect of Sullivan’s presentation.

Sullivan put forth what he purported to be Biden’s break with neoliberalism. Actually, it was little more than a modified version of the same old program, albeit with significant tweaks that were meant to respond to the supply chain weakness exposed by the pandemic.

Domestically, Biden’s so-called “supply-side liberalism” doesn’t fundamentally address problems. Rather, it moves issues from one place to another. On the one hand, there is no doubt that Biden’s CHIPS Act, as well as the few parts of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that weren’t temporary offered incentives for domestic industrialized production. But these were all in the form of still more giveaways to corporations (i.e., corporate welfare), with virtually nothing in the way of regulation. All carrot and no stick, as Andrej Markovčič and Nick French put it.

In the end, Biden’s proposals did not move away from neoliberalism, but this should be no surprise. Biden abandoning neoliberalism would be akin to the Pope abandoning Catholicism.

It is a mark of the gullibility of Americans that Biden, who build his entire political career as the bagman in the Senate for the country’s most predatory banks—earning him the moniker of the “Senator from MBNA”— was able to sell himself as an ally to working people. But he did, and with a sad amount of success.

Biden’s real goal was no secret. It was revealed in 2019 when he promised a room full of major donors that “nothing would fundamentally change.” Indeed, nothing did. He reiterated his vow not to legislate against corporate greed in 2020, and he kept his word again.

There is an unspoken political strategy in Biden’s words. The 2020 presidential campaign was not the usual, every four year regurgitation of political platitudes and insincere campaign promises. That race happened in a very different context, one that Biden’s wealthy supporters scrambled to address.

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Biden vs Progressivism

Donald Trump had tapped into the populist right in a way mainstream Republicans had been reluctant to do, and with reason. Those old-style, blatant aristocrats that ran the GOP suddenly found themselves facing a new wave of far-right sentiment that capitalized on popular disaffection that Trump channeled.

But that populism wasn’t confined to the MAGA crowd. It manifested as well among the left and was suddenly expressed as dissatisfaction with an aging, elitist, and corporate Democratic leadership. It found electoral expression in the 2016 and 2020 campaigns of Bernie Sanders, as well as the election of younger and more progressive members of Congress.

The pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the general polarization in the country had strengthened the national mood for change. The stratification of wealth had reached unprecedented heights, and, while it was lost on liberal media and many of the more well to do liberal voters, many Americans had never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis (and still haven’t).

Like Teddy Roosevelt more than a century earlier, Biden recognized that the mood of the country was starting to seethe. Unlike Roosevelt, who understood that some things, whether he liked it or not, did have to fundamentally change, Biden offered cosmetic and temporary changes that relieved the pressure of those social movements momentarily.

What ended up dooming Biden is that the temporary measures he instituted expired too soon, giving up the game that the point of those actions was never to help people, but to relieve the pressure on the unsustainable status quo.

Roosevelt, by contrast, made significant, permanent changes that went a long way toward staving off revolutionary politics in the decades that followed. A militant labor movement was able to capitalize on this strategy for decades, from the days of one Roosevelt to another, FDR, to win more and highly significant victories. Ultimately, for the elites, it was all about giving a little to save the system as a whole.

Biden, for a variety of reasons, didn’t do this. It’s true that political opposition—both from Republicans and from within his own party—played a significant role in that failure, but Biden never intended to make anything approaching the kinds of changes the two Roosevelts did. He could have made the provisions of the IRA permanent, or at least for a long enough term that they would have become the new normal. He could have done as he promised and refused to sign the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill unless it was one unit with the Build Back better Bill rather than completely gut the latter. The excuse that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema thwarted his plans is a joke—imagine if Lyndon Johnson had been willing to use the excuse of internal dissent around the Civil Rights Act.

The list of Biden’s domestic failures is long indeed, but all of it is obscured by the credulity of too much of the mainstream media and an American public whose political education—never a strength—has been intentionally dumbed down for decades. Biden claims to stand for women’s right to control their own bodies; for the equal rights of LGBTQIA folks, especially trans people; for racial equality; for working people; and against the rightward shift of the Supreme Court.

But while he talked about those issues, he never even tried to use his bully pulpit to legislate around them. He had an especially golden opportunity to push for legislation around reproductive rights, especially after midterm elections showed that this was a winning issue even in some deep red states. But there was nothing. Outside of symbolic or performative acts, there was nothing on any of the other issues either.

Biden was a dismal failure on domestic policy, and, while that is not the prevailing opinion among the commentariat or the DC bubble, I am willing to bet a great deal that in ten years, Biden’s term will be looked at very differently than it is now, and not with favor.

And that’s just speaking of domestic policy. In Part 2 of this essay, I will look at Biden’s real disaster, foreign policy. It’s a lot worse.

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The Failed Presidency of Joe Biden, Part One

While many, including some progressives, contend that Biden's term was a success in domestic policy, the results say something different.

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