Conservatives are right. Joe Biden is a progressive trojan horse.
Photo by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Ever since Joe Biden won the Democratic Primary in the spring, there has been an indirect debate between America’s far left and far right about what exactly is wrong with Joe Biden. Many progressives insist that Biden is a racist tool of America’s oligarchy who sponsored the 1994 crime bill and sought to do away with Social Security earlier in his career as a senator. Trump and his supporters, however, see Biden as a radical liberal hellbent on socializing America’s industries, masquerading behind a veil of centrism. While both of those perspectives are extreme, Biden’s appeal to conservatives like John Kasich and John McCain and his vocal renouncement of policies like the “Green New Deal” and “defunding the police” give more credence to those who believe he would rather compromise with Republicans. By advocating for bipartisanship, Biden’s strategy is to appear as a reasonable centrist, someone willing to work with others and who will not pursue radical policies. This political strategy is a facade.
While progressives are correct that we must look to Biden’s record as a Senator to understand his current policy positions, their conclusions about his record are far less nuanced than the reality and ignore the context of his entire career. Throughout his career, Biden has positioned himself directly in the center of the Democratic party. Data from Voteview demonstrates that Biden remained incredibly close to the ideological median of the Democratic Party throughout his 36 years in the Senate. Over the past several years, Democratic opinion has shifted dramatically on issues from tax policy and climate change to police accountability according to the Pew Research Center. Consider the issue of gay marriage: Biden voted to block federal recognition of same-sex marriages in 1996. By 2012, when a comfortable majority of Democratic voters had shifted their support in favor of gay marriage, Biden became the highest profile politician to endorse it at the time. The Democratic constituency is now significantly more progressive than it used to be due to the success of people like Bernie Sanders. As the party has changed, so has Biden.
Although Biden remains at the center of an increasingly progressive Democratic party, he has explicitly rejected many of his party members’ most progressive proposals. However, the distinction between Biden’s policies and those of his progressive peers is not so clear. For example, “The Green New Deal” is a rallying cry for politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a punching bag for conservatives warning of socialism. Proponents call for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, environmental and economic equity for America’s marginalized communities, and major investments in infrastructure to create jobs and develop clean energy. Although Biden claims to disavow this plan, his climate change policy is virtually indistinguishable from it. It, too, advocates net-zero emissions by 2050, environmental equity, and infrastructure investment. Biden even calls his plan a “revolution,” echoing Sanders’ language.
Biden’s plan for criminal justice reform also reflects leftist calls to “defund the police” without endorsing the label. Defunding the police, as defined by the ACLU, is the idea that “[w]e must cut the astronomical amount of money that our governments spend on law enforcement and give that money to more helpful services like job training, counseling, and violence-prevention programs.” Biden’s plan is to “shift our country’s focus from incarceration to prevention” and support individuals with social services instead of putting them in prison. The language is different but the intent is nearly the same: emphasize and invest in community services rather than law enforcement.
Why, then, if Biden’s policies are so closely aligned with those of the “left wing,” does he refuse to endorse them? Although these policies are widely popular, their labels are not. According to a poll conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2019, while policies such as increased federal spending on clean infrastructure and net-zero emissions had close to 70% support among U.S. adults, the “Green New Deal” had only 20% support. Close to 60% of adults had not heard enough about the “Green New Deal” to judge it, but the Post reported that “Republicans were about twice as likely as Democrats to have heard a good amount about the plan” from high-profile GOP attacks. “Defunding the police” also remains incredibly unpopular compared to the actual policies behind the phrase, even among Democrats. Republicans have successfully tarnished the label of “Green New Deal” and other progressive policies among their base and influenced the national conversation more generally without engaging with the policies themselves. Thus, as Biden denounces the labels while embracing the ideas, he successfully advocates popular policies that he believes in while dodging Republican attacks on popular progressive rhetoric.
Biden successfully backs progressive policies without the damaging partisan baggage. He accomplishes exactly what Bernie Sanders and his allies strive for but haven’t been able to achieve: to convince the country that progressive policies are neither “radical” nor “extreme.” Despite his increasingly progressive stances, Biden is still viewed by the plurality of voters as a “moderate.” Biden’s advertisement of himself as a centrist compromiser successfully circumvents conservative efforts to paint him and his ideas as “socialist” and “radical.” By incorporating progressive policies into his platform while maintaining his centrist facade, Biden is the trojan horse of the left, sneaking progressive ideas past a wall of Republican rhetorical dominance.