Joe Biden's Platform for 2020: Anti-Populism
By criticizing the views of both Berniecrats and Trumpites, Biden is positioning himself as the antidote to populism in all its forms and flavors.
By BILL SCHER September 23, 2017
On Monday, former Vice President Joe Biden wrote a blog post that proves two things: Blogging isn’t dead and neither is Biden’s political career. In fact, in Biden’s essay, and in other little-noticed public pronouncements, you can see him sculpting a role for the 2020 presidential campaign that perhaps only he could get away with playing: the voice of anti-populism.
Though Biden’s essay was largely ignored amid the constant hum of Trump-related stories, it made a bit of news in wonk circles because Biden used it to announce his opposition to a “universal basic income,” that newly vogue policy proposal in which every American would receive a periodic check from the government regardless of their work status. But there’s more in the post to decipher. Biden criticized the “Silicon Valley executives” who have championed universal basic income for “selling American workers short” and undermining the “dignity” of work. He recoiled at rhetoric, often wielded by Senator Bernie Sanders and his acolytes, that demonizes corporations (“Some want to single out big corporations for all the blame. … But consumers, workers, and leaders have the power to hold every corporation to a higher standard, not simply cast business as the enemy.”) And he cut against the prevailing sentiment among Trump-friendly working-class whites that not everyone should go to college: “Cognitive capacity—as opposed to brawn—continues to become a surer path to climb that ladder into the middle class.”
A few days earlier, the former vice president published a New York Times op-ed deriding President Donald Trump’s nationalistic foreign policy. “[T]his White House casts global affairs as a zero-sum competition,” he wrote, calling this line of thinking “disturbing.” Moreover, America’s global standing had eroded due to Trump’s “shameful defense of the white nationalists and neo-Nazis.” “Not since the Jim Crow era has an American president so misunderstood and misrepresented our values,” wrote Biden.
By criticizing the views of both Berniecrats and Bannonites—and by making a full-throated, clear-eyed declaration of what the alternative should be—Biden is positioning himself as the antidote to populism in all its forms and flavors.
Is he even running for president? We can’t know for sure. But consider the following. He has opened two policy institutes, one at Penn focused on foreign policy, and the other at the University of Delaware with a domestic focus. He has a book coming out in November, and will accompany it with 19-city “American Promise” book tour. He has an “American Possibilities” political action committee. And to borrow the teasing headline from a July profile in the Washington Post, “Joe Biden Still Wants to be President.” If you want the presidency—and if you could enter the field as a front-runner for your party’s presidential nomination—you usually run for it.
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/23/joe-biden-president-2020-anti-populism-215638
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