This is How Trumpism Happens All Over Again
If Biden Gets it Wrong, Trumpism Could Come Back Even Stronger in 2024
Check out the picture above. Have a good laugh. Right about now, Donald Trump is deservedly the object of ridicule, scorn, and contempt. Deservedly, because, well, he’s been america’s worst president by a long way. But while Trump may be finally on his way out, Trumpism — the authoritarianism that’s come to prevail among the GOP — surely isn’t. So while Trump is being universally mocked today, what if…?
Here’s how Trumpism recurs, only stronger.
The Biden Presidency isn’t a failure — but it’s not exactly a success, either. It’s a return to the status quo ante, the way things were before. And so the same old trends that marked American decline pick up steam, and continue accelerating.
Biden, being who he is, an old school neoliberal, settles for the same old policies and institutions. Economic policy is about markets as the solution to everything in society. The point of society is to accumulate profit, not provide people the basics. Social policy, such as it is, is nonexistent.
As a result, America fails to join the modern world, as it has for decades now. Americans still go without all the following things — decent healthcare, education, retirement, childcare, all the public goods people in every other rich society, from Europe to Canada, enjoy as basic human rights. Biden’s team, composed of the same old Democratic Beltway insiders, revert to form. Retirement? Get a 401K! Translation: Wall St will handle it. Healthcare? Buy some “insurance” on the “marketplace!” Childcare? Sorry, that’s your problem — meaning it’s a woman’s problem, mostly. And so forth.
So America makes no real institutional reforms. As in, having an American Healthcare System, or a National Retirement Fund, or a network of community childcare centres (like Liz Warren proposed.) The same old policies prevail because the same old ideas do. Neoliberals believe in the ideas of “individual responsibility” and “fiscal discipline” and “market forces” and “freedom of choice” and so on. The problem is that these are all failed ideas. Catastrophically failed ideas.
