By BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/3aoKyFN
Lawrence Mishel, a
well-known labor economist, has been a critic of centrist Democrats for
decades. “My adult lifetime has covered the Carter, Clinton and Obama years,
and labor policy has never been a priority,” Mishel, the former president of the
Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, told me. In the
2016 primary, he voted for Bernie Sanders. This year he supported Elizabeth Warren.
(So did I.)
But when Mishel saw Joe Biden’s labor policy, he was thrilled. “I
think that if you had asked me in 2016 whether we would ever see an agenda like
this, this is beyond my hopes,” he said.
Biden’s proposals go far
beyond his call for a $15 federal minimum wage — a demand some saw as radical
when Sanders pushed it four years ago. While it’s illegal for companies to fire
employees for trying to organize a union, the penalties are toothless. Biden
proposes to make those penalties bite and to hold executives personally liable.
He would follow California in cracking down on companies like Uber that
misclassify full-time workers as independent contractors who aren’t entitled to
benefits. He’d extend federal labor protections to farmworkers and domestic
workers.
Mishel said that no Democratic nominee in his lifetime has
presented “as robust and fleshed out a policy suite on labor standards and
unions.”
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The anticlimactic end of the Democratic primary has left many
progressives depressed, if not despairing. Instead of a fresh face or a
revolutionary, the party has chosen a man who seems to embody the status quo,
at least as it existed before Donald Trump. Yet should Biden become president,
progressives have the opportunity to make generational gains.
Biden has always
positioned himself at the center of the Democratic Party, and the Democratic
Party has moved left. To try to unite the party around him, he’s making serious
progressive commitments.
And contrary to
conventional wisdom, most politicians attempt to keep their campaign
promises. Writing in The Washington
Monthly in 2012, the political scientist Jonathan Bernstein
surveyed the research on campaign pledges. Presidents, he wrote, “usually try
to enact the policies they advocate during the campaign. So if you want to know
what Mitt Romney or the rest of the Republican crowd would do in 2013 if
elected, the best way to find out is to listen to what they are saying right
now.”
Trump, in some ways, is the ultimate example of this. In 2016,
many social conservatives were understandably skeptical that a thrice-married
sybarite and longtime supporter of abortion rights really shared their
priorities. But personal impiety aside, Trump understood the political
necessity of keeping his base happy, so his administration has given free rein
to theocrats.
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Biden wouldn’t need to
pivot so dramatically to be a transformative progressive president. There are
plenty of bleak moments in his record, including his treatment of Anita Hill
and his Iraq war vote, but it’s not quite as reactionary as leftists sometimes
imagine. Among other things, he’s long been better-than-average on unions; as
Jared Bernstein, Biden’s former chief economist, told me, “One of the main
things that differentiates Biden from a traditional mainstream Democrat is his
understanding of the importance of worker power.”
Still, it’s clear that
he’s moving leftward. Biden recently came out for tuition-free college for
students whose families earn less than $125,000. He endorsed Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy
plan, something that would have been unimaginable in 2005, when
Warren, then a Harvard law professor, charged onto the public stage to fight a
regressive bankruptcy bill that Biden supported.
After long supporting the
Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for most abortions, Biden gave in to pro-choice pressure to
come out against it. His climate plan already went beyond any of
Barack Obama’s initiatives, and he’s pledged to make it even more robust.
Biden’s health care proposal falls far short of single-payer, but it is, as
Paul Waldman wrote in The Washington Post, “surprisingly liberal.”
It will be in Biden’s
political interests to try to make good on these commitments. “I’ve worked with
him for a while now,” said Jared Bernstein. “He really believes you achieve
political success by either doing what you’ve promised to do or getting caught
trying like hell.”
In the 20th century, the
two presidents with the most substantive records of progressive accomplishment
were Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Liberals nearly revolted on the
Democratic convention floor when John F. Kennedy, looking to placate Southern
voters, chose Johnson, but he ended up doing far more for liberalism than
Kennedy did.
Roosevelt’s future
greatness wasn’t obvious to all when he first ran for president. Sounding some
of the same notes as Biden’s critics today, the famous political columnist
Walter Lippmann wrote: “He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of
entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important
qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president.”
It may be too much to hope that Biden could equal the
achievements of Roosevelt or Johnson. But should he become president, he will,
like both of them, inherit a country deep in crisis, where once inconceivable
political interventions suddenly appear possible. We can’t know whether he will
rise to the opportunity — only that presidencies are shaped by far more than
the ideology of the person who achieves the office.
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