President Biden is leading a quiet political revolution
“Our economic package is a closely knit, carefully constructed plan to restore America’s economic strength and put our nation back on the road to prosperity,” the president declared in a speech from the Oval Office. “Each part of this package is vital.”
While President Joe Biden could have said that about the $1.9 trillion economic rescue package the House sent to his desk on Wednesday, the words were President Ronald Reagan’s in support of his 25% across-the-board tax cut in July 1981.
Forty years ago, the victory of Reagan’s tax cut plan inaugurated a new ideological era, its core conviction summarized by a line in Reagan’s inaugural address that conservatives of a certain age can recite in their sleep: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”
Passage of the Biden plan reflects the triumph of the opposite view: that only active and competent government can get us out of the mess we’re in now. The willingness of Democrats to speed through a program of this size reflects the final shrugging off of Reagan-era constraints that made even liberal politicians gun shy about government activism.
The shift away from top-down supply-side economics could not be more dramatic. The Reagan theory, reduced to its essence, was: Help the rich and their investments will produce jobs and prosperity for everyone else. The Biden theory is bottom-up: Help middle-class and low-income Americans, and their purchasing power will drive an unprecedented era of growth.
The Tax Policy Center’s comparison of President Donald Trump’s corporate tax cuts and Biden’s rescue bill tells the tale of two theories. The benefits of Trump’s tax cut went overwhelmingly to the top 20%. Assistance from the Biden rescue reaches well into the middle class, but its biggest benefits go to the bottom 40% of the income structure.
This poses a danger to Republicans still clinging to the Reagan faith because the GOP’s less affluent supporters understand what’s going on.
A Pew Research Center survey this week found that Biden’s plan was supported by only 25% of upper-income Republicans and 37% of those with middle incomes. But among lower-income Republicans (those earning less than roughly $40,000 annually, who account for a quarter of all who identify with the GOP), fully 63% backed the plan. A resurgence of class politics could split the Republican Party in ways well beyond the capacity of Mr. Potato Head and the culture war controversies around him to contain.
Politics is a “by their fruits shall ye know them” business. Reaganism solidified its hold because of the economic boom that began late in 1982. Conservatives were unrelenting in ascribing the good times to Reagan’s policies.
Biden’s team and Democratic strategists know they must sell the rescue plan hard and make sure voters know all that the administration is doing to end the pandemic and get the economy moving.
The administration knows that the president must tout the impact of his achievement. Presidential travel in the coming weeks will be geared toward this objective.
The disparate health and economic impacts of COVID-19 turned inequality from an abstract question into a life-or-death proposition.
Just as the stagflation crisis at the end of the 1970s gave birth to Reaganism, the current crisis might lead to a new disposition through which pragmatic forms of government activism add up to a quiet political revolution. Maybe we’ll call it Bidenism.
E.J. Dionne Jr. writes for The Washington Post.