Joe Biden projects a calm, moderate demeanor. He is aided by a lifetime spent in Washington, an acquiescent media, and the marked contrast with Donald Trump’s volatility.
While Trump’s outsize personality attracted constant media attention and caused his critics and admirers to overestimate the significance of his policies, Biden’s aides have adopted an intentionally understated approach designed to induce complacency. Bill Clinton negotiated with congressional Republicans to enact many of his most important domestic bills, triangulating between the two parties to find a third way. Barack Obama resorted to executive actions and largely failed to pass major legislation after he lost control of Congress.
Biden’s apparent takeaway from his predecessors is that Democrats were not aggressive enough at the beginning of their terms when they had the majority and the political capital to enact their agenda. He is determined not to repeat that mistake, and the result is aggressive liberalism playing offense. A more confident conservatism, building on its domestic economic and foreign policy successes in the 1980s, continued to exert its influence even when Democrats occupied the White House. Bill Clinton famously declared, “The era of big government is over,” recalling Reagan’s declaration, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Clinton negotiated and signed the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which included reductions in Medicare’s growth rate and amended Medicaid to allow lower provider rates.
Even Obama felt the need to include reductions in Medicare rates to partially offset spending in the Affordable Care Act, and negotiated the Budget Control Act, and its caps on spending and automatic sequestration cuts, after he lost his congressional majorities. Whereas the BBA, along with the dot-com bubble, helped produce temporary federal budget surpluses, today’s Democrats recently enacted a $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill and routinely ignore pay-as-you-go rules.
Many progressives advocate for a continued vacation from fiscal restraint and even more deficit spending for Biden’s infrastructure bill, citing historically low borrowing costs and claiming the new spending will generate future offsetting revenues. The most extreme Democrats have adopted modern monetary theory and reject the importance of confronting the federal government’s accumulated debt or annual deficits. Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it” and eventually negotiated with congressional Republicans to pass welfare reform in 1996. The resulting legislation imposed lifetime limits on certain cash benefits, ending welfare as an entitlement, required recipients to work or attend school, and gave states more flexibility in designing and administering their programs.
Democrats today incorporated a nearly universal refundable child tax credit in their COVID relief bill, as well as additional Obamacare subsidies, allowing people earning more than the previous four times the federal poverty level limit to receive assistance. Both subsidies reverse welfare reform’s principles of targeted, temporary assistance tied to education or work requirements. Progressives hope these supposedly temporary benefits prove popular, and thus durable, like many previous federal subsidies. Clinton enacted the last broad-based tax increases in 1993, when he increased individual and corporate income tax rates and raised fuel taxes. Democrats today are considering increasing individual and corporate income tax rates, as well as capital gains rates, and expanding estate taxes, as part of their infrastructure bill. In addition to offsetting a portion of their new spending, Democrats seem as motivated by the desire to attack increasing wealth inequality.
Whereas Democrats once feared being labeled “tax and spend liberals” or the “party of class warfare,” they now openly mock Republicans for favoring “trickle-down economics” and embrace populist attacks on the wealthy. Biden authored the 1994 crime bill, which provided funding for 100,000 police officers and prisons, expanded the federal death penalty, encouraged mandatory sentencing, and otherwise proved Democrats were not “soft on crime.” Mainstream Democrats once joined Republicans in citing the reduction in poverty rates and teenage pregnancy rates as evidence of welfare reform’s success and the reduction in crime rates as evidence of the law-and-order approach’s success. Progressives now march to defund the police and have pushed for new policies to end cash bail, eliminate the death penalty, decriminalize many offenses, and reduce sentences.
Clinton promised to “mend, not end” affirmative action, and racial preferences were often portrayed as temporary remedies required by specific past acts of discrimination and designed to result in a colorblind society. Many liberals justified affirmative action policies on economic, rather than racial, considerations. Today, liberals have replaced class identity with race and gender identity as the most relevant political prism and no longer deem a colorblind society possible or ideal. Democrats have mandated explicit diversity quotas for corporate boards, integrated critical race theory into school curricula, and otherwise point to signs of systemic racism throughout society.
On social policies, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, precluding same-sex marriages, proclaimed abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare,” and signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act authored by then Rep. Chuck Schumer. During his first presidential campaign, Obama also opposed same-sex marriage. Today’s Democrats have become increasingly secular, intolerant of pro-life candidates or conscience clauses, and stridently opposed to even the most modest restrictions on late term and other abortions.
The media laments the demise of bipartisanship, especially when that involves Republicans compromising their principles to vote for Democrat proposals. It was indeed easier for partisans to work across party lines when there was more overlap between their policies and constituents. While Republicans continue to fight to cut taxes, spending, and regulations, Democrats have moved the goalposts far to the left.
The top line: Republicans are counting on the backlash to these extreme positions to power them to midterm victories, but they should be proactively making the case for policies that both parties once thought important.
Bobby Jindal is a former two-term governor of Louisiana.
