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Too much at once
Take, for example. Policies that are popular on their own can be unpopular in combination. Checks in the mail from the federal government are welcome. Checks plus infrastructure, action against corporate “price gouging,” a crackdown on Big Tech, and other paternalistic gestures start to smell like enthusiasm. Voters hear chords, not notes. Otherwise, politics is ridiculously simple: just stack crowd-pleasing ideas on top of each other.
Second, it matters who proposes what. Republicans can get away with big government because voters trust the right-wing party not to overreach through doctrinal fanaticism or class hatred. There’s such a thing as “license.” Democrats don’t. (Unlike on crime, Harris can and should take strong positions without upsetting swing voters.)
Taken together, these factors mean that Bidennomics will run into electoral trouble in any era unless voters crave an interventionist state. And therein lies the key. Are we living through such an era? Did the public consensus shift leftward in 2020, whereas it moved in the opposite direction in 1979-1980? Did the pandemic reveal an existing dissatisfaction with “neoliberalism”? If so, Harris should commit to continuing her boss’s statist project.
But I doubt it. This dialectical turn has always felt like something critics were trying to force.
On the eve of the pandemic, American economic confidence was at its highest level in a millennium. The global political trend is against incumbents, not against this or that program. Few eras have clear ideological identities. (In the rich world, neoliberalism did not prevent national social spending from being higher as a share of GDP in 2005 than in 1980.)
If there is one center-left leader who understands the ambivalence, it is Keir Starmer, who has enough parliamentary seats to upend Britain but knows he won them only if he dared not to do so.
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