Joe Biden is governing in a rare moment in which policy imperatives transcend ideology and moral authority carries disproportionate value. He couldn’t have done it without Donald Trump.

AP

By Lisa Van Dusen

March 16, 2021

Among the most prominent leadership totems displayed in Joe Biden’s Oval Office — including busts of heroic labour leader César Chávez and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — is a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The FDR portrait occupies the centre of an arrangement overlooking the cluster of couches and chairs where so much of the work gets done. The 32^nd president is flanked on his right by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, on his left by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

If the presidential profile Venn overlap between Biden and FDR had escaped anyone despite its regular flagging by columnists including this one, it was vividly delineated on March 11, when the current president of the United States signed the American Rescue Plan one year to the day after the COVID-19 epidemic graduated to a pandemic.

“President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package is being hailed by Democrats and progressive policy advocates as a generational expansion of the social safety net, providing food and housing assistance, greater access to health care and direct aid to families in what amounts to a broad-based attack on the cycle of poverty,” per the AP report.

The comparisons between this moment as a leadership challenge and the socioeconomic morass FDR faced in 1933, four years into the Great Depression, are obvious. Both men — of vastly different backgrounds but with characters chiseled by loss — were compelled to carry into office disproportionate burdens of courage and moral certitude, two qualities that usually only occupy the top drawer of an incoming president’s persuasion arsenal in wartime.

That application of social values more noble than mere monetary profit informs Biden’s favourite fiscal policy quote, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.” In that sense, the rescue plan passed by Democrats is, as was the New Deal, a moral statement.

With both men, those qualities were deployed in the face of an existential threat. For FDR, per his first inaugural address, the economic catastrophe unleashed in 1929 had revealed a level of rot in the system that had, not surprisingly, proved immune to remedy by the same men who’d produced it. “The rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated,” he said on March 4, 1933 in a remarkable screed against the same financial aristocracy that spawned him. “They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

That application of social values more noble than mere monetary profit informs Biden’s favourite fiscal policy quote, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.” In that sense, the rescue plan passed by Democrats is, as was the New Deal, a moral statement. But at a moment when a confluence of unprecedented factors including technological change, politically leveraged corruption and covert geopolitical competition have blurred the strategic boundary between economics and politics, it’s also a recovery blueprint based on a vision of society in which human beings are valued — a policy and political principle newly imperilled in democracies under siege. Joe Biden has been empowered to govern from a position of moral authority by both the existential stakes of the moment and by the contrast with a predecessor whose moral bankruptcy cost America so much.

This is the first time since FDR delivered the admonition, in that same inaugural address, about fear itself being the only threat, that urgent economic necessity has effectively closed the gap between liberalism and pragmatism. When people are going hungry, debates about income supplementation are decidedly less abstract and therefore less ideological. In the current context, the policy blunders of the previous administration have created a crisis that demands not just remedial action but corrective redress, which makes solutions long labelled “liberal” and “socialist” in the US political din suddenly both practical and necessary.

This shift in context isn’t as relevant to the Trudeau government’s upcoming budget as it is to Biden’s pandemic stimulus, partly because our politics are less polarized and our social safety net isn’t quite as vulnerable to the whims of special interests, the massive amounts of money wielded by those interests, and the hyperpartisanship it produces in the US. The political argument in Canada has focused largely on the perpetually delayed budget date and the fiscal caution of what a rise in interest rates could do to unprecedented deficit spending. But the usual ideological arguments have been largely dulled by the context of crisis, and that’s with a national election looming, rather than just behind us.

In America, Donald Trump’s presidency and the stock-market gaming, crony capitalism-serving, bespoke tax-cutting, trade triangulating, economic — “policies” seems too legit a word — shenanigans for which it provided cover were the product of years of incremental corruption capture of American democracy that has shifted power away from the people and into the hands of unelected interests (The animating spirit of that phenomenon best illustrated publicly in the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision that ruled corporations are people, unleashing a flood of dark money into politics that acted as a force multiplier for corruption, intractability, mistrust, systemic racism and economic inequality).

As has been obvious in the persistence of the absurdity he rationalized for four years and that has continued since his departure like a daily bout of phantom propaganda wankery, Trump was a symptom, not the core problem.

The convergence of health and economic crises that’s defined our reality for the past year has produced incalculable pain and suffering. Its intersection with the desperate final months of Trump’s tenure has also served to expose the extent to which that trend in corruption capture has compromised the moral infrastructure of democracy, from the systematic attacks on truth, to the shameless efforts to disenfranchise Black voters, to the leveraging of social media as a tactical weapon, to the relentlessly anti-humanist presidency itself, which provided hourly evidence of the extent of the problem across a range of content battlegrounds, foreign and domestic.

One of those battlegrounds is the Republican Party, which has effectively surrendered itself as an anti-democracy operational asset — from its embrace of a president who incited a deadly attack on Congress as a parting stunt to its adoption of voter suppression as a national mission, to its Fox-assisted promulgation of viral bollocks as a lunatic branding strategy — on the apparent thinking that enabling and fuelling treachery is more profitable these days than furthering the goals of peace, order and good government that serve democracy’s true clients.

Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempts to remain in office weren’t just about his own ego. As has been obvious in the persistence of the absurdity he rationalized for four years and that has continued since his departure like a daily bout of phantom propaganda wankery, Trump was a symptom, not the core problem.

Biden and the Democrats have established a governing garrison beyond that sophomoric gamery at a time when stark necessity has dismissed trickle-down economics, politically selective deficit hawkery and the coded calculations of fiscal racism as cynical relics of less soul-trying times.

There will likely be pushback — economic, political, geopolitical — against the new American president’s pendulum swing. Meanwhile, Joe Biden doesn’t need Winston Churchill looking over his shoulder as a reminder of moral certitude. César Chávez will do just fine.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor and deputy publisher of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.