Maybe I was wrong about Joe Biden – is he actually the progressive president I was waiting for?
OK, fine, I was wrong. But, in this case, I’m very happy to be wrong: it seems that Joe Biden may be shaping up to be a progressive president after all. I supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, but I can now see that Biden was the better choice.
When Biden announced he was running for president, I was dismayed. I thought he was Hillary Clinton 2.0 and we were going to see a repeat of 2016. (And I maintain that, had it not been for the pandemic, which changed everything, then it probably would have been.) Then, when Trump lost, I was relieved but not exactly thrilled by the prospect of a Biden presidency. He largely campaigned on a platform of returning the US to “business as usual” – but business as usual just wasn’t working for most people.
Instead of simply turning back the clock four years, however, Biden has been pushing forward undeniably progressive policies. The $1.9tn pandemic relief bill that just passed is expected to reduce US poverty in 2021 by more than a third. And many of its provisions won’t be temporary: the Biden administration has indicated that it will aim to make permanent the increase in child credits contained in the bill, which could cut child poverty in half.
How is all this going to be paid for? Partly by – get this – taxing the rich. Biden’s next big move may be the first major federal tax hike since 1993. The White House is expected to propose raising the corporate tax rate, increasing capital gains tax for people earning more than $1m annually, and raising income tax for those earning more than $400,000. Whether all this will get passed by the Senate is yet to be seen, of course, but it’s a big shift in the right direction.
I don’t want to go overboard here. Biden is far from perfect. It only took him a month, for example, to start doing what American presidents love doing best: bombing the Middle East. And a number of things he is being effusively praised for also don’t really stand up to scrutiny. Biden’s executive order pausing new oil and gas drilling on federal land, for example, is riddled with loopholes; one industry analyst told the Financial Times it presented a “bestcase scenario for the oil industry under a Biden administration”. Indeed, Biden issued at least 31 new drilling permits in his first few days of office.
Nevertheless, he is advancing a far more progressive agenda than I expected. And, while I was rooting for Sanders to be president, I think Sanders would have got a lot more pushback than Biden from Republicans on the same policies. Sanders is a brilliant agitator: he has helped to bring into the mainstream a lot of progressive thinking in the US. In the end, though, I think he is probably more effective at putting
pressure on Biden to move to the left than he would have been as the president.
In a recent New York Times column,
David Brooks called Biden a “transformational” president. That is a ridiculously premature assessment: we are only a couple of months into his presidency. Plus, Biden is not going to change anything if Republicans block his most ambitious policies. For Biden to really be effective, he needs to end the filibuster – a tactic that has significantly increased in recent years, in which you debate a bill endlessly in order to block or delay it. Biden doesn’t seem to want to do this – which is frustrating because he does have the potential to be transformational. Time and time again, it seems establishment Democrats like talking about change a lot more than they actually like making it happen. Still, I’ve been proved wrong about Biden once. I hope he proves me wrong again.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist