TOO MANY AT A TIME
Here is one. Policies that are popular on their own terms can be unpopular in combination. A cheque in the mail from the federal government is a delight. A cheque plus an infrastructure splurge, a crusade against corporate “price-gouging”, a takedown of Big Tech and some other paternalist gestures starts to smell of zeal. Voters hear the chord, not the notes. Otherwise, politics would be absurdly easy: Just stack crowd-pleasing ideas on top of each other.
Second, it matters who proposes what. The Republicans can get away with big government because voters trust a party of the right not to over-reach through doctrinal fervour or class animus against the rich. There is such a thing as “permission”. Democrats don’t have it. (Unlike on crime, where Harris can and should harden her line without unnerving swing voters.)
Put these factors together, and Bidenomics would have run into electoral trouble in any era, except one in which voters craved an interventionist state. And here is the crux. Are we living through such a time? Was 2020 a leftward turn in the public consensus, as 1979 to 1980 was in the opposite direction? Did the pandemic uncover a pre-existing frustration with “neoliberalism”? If so, Harris should pledge to continue her boss’s statist project.
But I doubt it. This dialectical turning point has always felt like something commentators have tried to will into being.
On the eve of the pandemic, US economic confidence was at its highest since the millennium. The worldwide trend in politics has been against incumbents, not against this or that programme. And few eras have a clean ideological identity. (Across the rich world, neoliberalism didn’t stop the state’s social spending being higher as a share of GDP in 2005 than in 1980.)
If a centre-left leader understands the ambiguous mood out there, it is Keir Starmer, who has the parliamentary numbers to turn Britain upside down, but knows he won them on the premise that he wouldn’t dare.
