Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden

By Branko Marcetic

Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden exposes the forgotten history of Joe Biden, one of the United States' longest-serving politicians, and one of its least scrutinized.

Over nearly fifty years in politics, the man called "Middle-Class Joe" served as a key architect of the Democratic Party's rightward turn, ushering in the end of the liberal New Deal order and enabling the political takeover of the radical right.

Far from being a liberal stalwart, Biden often outdid even Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush, assisting the right-wing war against the working class, and ultimately paving the way for Trump.

The most comprehensive political biography of someone who has tried for decades to be president, Yesterday's Man is an essential read for anyone interested in knowing the real Joe Biden and what he might do in office.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso US
• Release date: Feb 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839760297

Branko Marcetic

Branko Marcetic is a staff writer for Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting Fellow at In These Times.

Book preview

Yesterday’s Man

Yesterday’s Man

The Case Against Joe Biden

Branko Marcetic

First published by Verso and Jacobin Foundation Ltd. 2020

© Branko Marcetic 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

Jacobin Foundation Ltd.

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www.jacobinmag.com

ISBN-13: 9781839760280

eISBN-13: 9781839760303

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Printed in the United States by Maple Press

Contents

Introduction

1. The Making of a Neoliberal

2. Victory in Defeat

3. Racing in the Street

4. It’s the Middle Class, Stupid

5. No Daylight

6. The Great Compromiser

Epilogue

Notes

Introduction

Ask any liberal-minded person, and they can probably tell you where they were and what they were doing when they learned Donald Trump won the White House. Three years and five stages of grief later, they’ll probably tell you they’re now wondering which of the many, many candidates gunning for the Democratic presidential nomination will just end the nightmare and bring things back to normal. As of the time of writing, that may well be former vice president Joe Biden, who has continued to lead the polls since entering the race in April 2019.

But simply removing Donald Trump from power won’t do what many liberals hope it will. Trump and Far-Right populists like him are just one by-product of the same normal that the many now pine for, a normalcy that, I hope this book makes clear, often felt like anything but for a growing number of people.

To return the United States to any version of normality that won’t just lead the country straight back to another Trump, the eventual Democratic nominee will have to do two things: they’ll have to beat Donald Trump at the ballot box, thus removing him from the White House; and they’ll need to midwife a fundamental break from the political status quo, removing or mending the conditions that led to his rise in the first place. This book makes the case that Joe Biden, beloved elder statesman and current frontrunner, will not do the second and may well fail at the first.

Joe Biden is not a bad or evil man. But he is someone who, by virtue of the political, social, and historical forces that shaped his life, made choices and drew political lessons that not only make him ill-suited to combat Trumpism but led him to help engineer the very conditions that handed Trump victory in the first place. In this, Biden is not much worse than many other prominent Democrats; indeed, part of the problem is that the Democratic Party, right now the only viable electoral vehicle against Trump and the Republicans, is loaded with politicians who share these same inadequacies.

Biden’s career has straddled the United States’ uneasy transition from the politics of the New Deal to its takeover by the radical Right. Starting in the 1930s, after decades marked by class conflict, stark inequality, and alarming concentrations of wealth and power, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four terms helped transform the United States from a country whose business was business, as one Republican predecessor had famously put it, to one focused on securing hard-fought social, economic, and political rights for its working people, however imperfectly and even unjustly it carried out that task.

In the process, Roosevelt forged an unstable but powerful voter coalition that helped turn all politics into New Deal politics for the next several decades. Even when Republicans took power, they largely went along with the political order Roosevelt had laid down, recognizing that to do otherwise would be political suicide. And though the United States never got as far as, say, some of its European counterparts in securing economic and political rights for its people, for a good few decades, it secured a viable, if flawed, welfare state.

The first major cracks in this unspoken consensus came in the 1960s, when the Vietnam War and the victories of the civil rights movement began to unravel the New Deal order in different ways: Vietnam by fomenting mass unrest and disillusionment with both the Democratic Party and the US government more generally, and the civil rights movement by prompting a mass exodus of racists from the Democrats and into the arms of the GOP. These fissures widened in the 1970s, with the continuation of Vietnam and its accompanying unrest, rolling economic crises, and the rise of a more conservative, suburban-dwelling, white middle class that rebelled against the same New Deal order that created it. Meanwhile, the radical Right, which had, with generous corporate backing, been building a grassroots movement against the New Deal for decades, fell in line behind the GOP, which in turn recognized the power of leveraging racist resentment to win power, winning victories on the back of suburban support across the country.

It was at this point that the supposed liberal consensus set up in the 1930s was gradually replaced. Just as Roosevelt’s election had heralded a sharp break from what came before, Ronald Reagan’s in 1980 did the same, only in the opposite direction. While Roosevelt’s New Deal order had used state power to improve people’s lives, Reagan’s presidency helped usher in a neoliberal order that claimed to pursue the same goal with the opposite platform: lower taxes, less government interference in the market and people’s lives, and overall pro-business policies that, the claim went, would create prosperity that filtered down to everyone else.

Though Reagan and those who followed him didn’t always live up to their slogans—mostly due to the need to maintain a powerful military to police a US-dominated global order that kept markets open for these same business interests—these beliefs broadly came to undergird virtually the entire mainstream political spectrum, helped along by the influence of money that seeped more and more into every facet of the US political system. Just as even anti–New Dealers had gone along with the prevailing Rooseveltian mood for the sake of political survival, liberal politicians found it easier to swim with the tide Reagan had set in motion, adjusting their politics and narrowing their imaginations to suit this new consensus.

But this could only last for so long. By giving businesses and the super-rich more and more power over people’s lives and dismantling or weakening the government programs that helped guarantee prosperity, or simply survival, for working people, neoliberalism made the overwhelming majority of Americans’ lives worse. The pool of political leaders willing to fundamentally challenge this order and the powers that be behind it shrank and became marginalized.

The result was the dramatic collapse of the neoliberal center embodied by 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Weaned on decades of elections where her party’s traditional base of multiracial working-class voters had no option but to vote for the Democrat, Clinton explicitly pitched her campaign at the more affluent, suburban voters who for decades had formed the Republican base. At the same time, she found herself hampered by a set of flaws she shared with most of the political elite: an approach that prioritized business interests over those of workers, a racial justice record that victimized nonwhite Americans, an aggressive foreign policy that sunk lives and money into wars, a lack of consistent political principles, and a history of corruption that mingled her political work with her family’s enrichment.

Clinton’s approach could only work, as it had for her husband and his Democratic successor, as long as the party’s voters stayed motivated enough to turn out on Election Day and as long as her opponent was firmly to her right. But Donald Trump made for a very different Republican candidate than those who came before: he criticized the political corruption endemic to the system, rejected foreign wars, attacked the free trade deals that put corporate interests over those of workers, acknowledged working-class suffering, and pledged to take aggressive action as president to alleviate it. The fact that he was disingenuous about all this and would largely betray these promises once in office made little difference. Trump held onto the affluent Republican base and peeled away just enough working-class voters from Clinton, while many traditional Democratic voters, seeing nothing for themselves in either option, didn’t bother voting at all.

Joe Biden, who is cast by much of the media, as Clinton was, as the safest, most logical choice to defeat Trump, has all of these weaknesses and more. While Clinton was hammered for her husband’s criminal justice policies that overwhelmingly hurt black communities, Biden was one of the chief architects of a racist system of mass incarceration and showed a career-long willingness to sacrifice African American communities for political survival. While Clinton’s neoliberal politics alienated many voters, Biden was one of the earliest adopters of neoliberalism, successfully pushing the party to become more like him. The hawkishness that turned a war-weary public off Clinton has been a cornerstone of Biden’s foreign policy views for decades. Trying to be all things to all people, Biden has stuck to a Clinton-like strategy of telling different audiences whatever they want to hear. And while not matching the scale of corruption Clinton and Trump have engaged in, Biden has tended to follow the instructions of his wealthy and corporate backers while letting his family profit off his political connections.

Even if Biden manages to beat Trump, there is every chance that his presidency will produce the rise of someone much worse. Rather than appealing to the material, class-based interests that unite voters across racial, gender, religious, or other lines, Biden has instead sought to find a nonexistent middle ground between working-class Americans and the rich and powerful, often leaning toward the latter. Rather than offering a bold alternative, Biden has spent his career reflexively adopting his right-wing opponents’ positions as his own. Genuinely believing in consensus and bipartisanship for their own sake, he has repeatedly worked with Republicans to advance the lion’s share of their political goals, dismantling the legacy of the New Deal in the process. At the same time, whether it has been crime, drugs, terrorism, or something else, Biden has tended to get swept up in every right-wing panic of the last few decades, often going even further than Republicans in his response. All of this has supposedly been on behalf of the middle class, a group Biden defines as white, suburban, and largely conservative voters, whose interests alone he sees as essential to political success.

This would all be concerning no matter what. But in a time of rising white supremacy and with a Republican Party more ruthless and ideologically extreme than any major center-right party in the Western world, a Biden presidency could well end up taking the United States further down a Far-Right path than even Trump, whether by attempting to appease his opposition by pursuing some of their political goals—a hallmark of both his politics and of the administration he served in for eight years—or by creating the kind of economic conditions tailor-made for a Far-Right populist, which, in a sense, Biden has done his entire career.

Many interpreted Clinton’s 2016 defeat as the neoliberal center’s death knell. But Biden’s ongoing popularity—based mostly in his overwhelming support among older voters who long ago internalized the myth, disproven in election after election, that unambitious corporate centrism is the only answer to an increasingly radical right wing—suggests its obituary has been written too soon. Whether Democratic voters ultimately decide to go with Biden or not, pre-Trump normalcy has collapsed and isn’t coming back, particularly with an intensifying ecological emergency that much of the media and political establishment are trying their hardest to block out.

With a temporarily ascendant Far Right and a growing popular rejection of forty years of neoliberalism feeding the sudden return of the kinds of ideas that led Roosevelt’s Democratic Party to dominate politics for decades, the world and the United States in 2020 are standing on the precipice of something. The question is: will Democratic voters rise to the occasion?

Chapter 1

The Making of a Neoliberal

There are some things worth losing over. Don’t be involved with this for the politics of it. Be involved only if you believe in something.

—Joe Biden to Delaware Democrats, March 1996¹

It is no small irony that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born in the cradle of the New Deal order he would later help dismantle. Neither Biden nor the United States is unique in this respect. Look at just about any developed country’s generous postwar welfare state, and among its rich and powerful foes, you’ll find many who benefited most from its generosity, only to turn against the system that created them, convinced they had done it all on their own.

The Irish heritage Biden would stress throughout his public life was only part of his family history. His parents met in high school: Joe Sr. was born to the daughter of a French family with roots in colonial times and a Baltimorian who may or may not have hailed from England; his mother, Jean, to the Scranton son of Irish immigrants and the daughter of a Pennsylvania state senator. Your father’s not a bad man, Biden later recalled his Irish aunt telling him. He’s just English. Though recounted in jest, Biden’s later approach to various foreign conflicts would suggest he had in fact internalized something from this family lore about the immutability of ancient sectarian grudges.²

The hyper-focus on the middle class that would define Biden’s politics may well have been shaped by his own father’s struggles. Joe Sr. had started out with meteoric success, brought into a burgeoning business by his wealthy uncle who held the patent for a sealant for coffins. Once the Second World War took off, so did the business, which by that point had moved beyond sealant to supplying armor plate, mostly for merchant marine vessels making the dangerous journey across the Atlantic. When Congress passed a law mandating their armor on every US ship trading in the North Atlantic, the business boomed, with Joe Sr., his uncle, and his cousin running the operation across three different locations: Boston, New York, and Norfolk, Virginia, respectively.³

But once the war was over, so was the government largesse, and as Joe Sr. searched for his next venture, he suffered a string of bad luck. Planning to buy a building in downtown Boston and turn it into a furniture store, his business partner absconded with their money. Purchasing an airport and a couple of planes for a crop-dusting business, Joe Sr. struggled to secure contracts, while his cousin, his partner in the venture, squandered what was left of his wartime fortune. His uncle (and financier) pulled his capital. After years of expensive and generous living as a federal defense contractor—hunting pheasant on the weekend and buying dazzling toys for his infant son—Joe Sr. and the family, now mired in debt, moved in with Jean’s parents in Scranton only three years after the end of the war.⁴

Though the young Biden and his three siblings spent their earliest years in that crowded but loving house in Scranton, their father’s employment prospects would force the family to relocate several times. They first moved when Biden was ten to the outskirts of Wilmington, where Joe Sr. had been commuting every day—a nearly three-hundred-mile round trip. In 1955, they moved to Mayfield, a suburb of Wilmington populated by employees of DuPont, the family and company that had shaped and controlled Delaware’s politics and economy for more than a century.⁵

America seemed to be remaking itself for our postwar generation, Biden later recalled. There were new houses, new schools, new car models, new gadgets, new televisions, and new television shows with people who looked just like us.⁶

The Bidens benefited from this beyond just their father’s wartime business success. The suburban dream they were entering was the direct outcome of the postwar New Deal order, as the federal government subsidized a construction boom concentrated in the suburbs. And just as the US military would in essence become the largest government jobs program in the decades ahead, indirectly subsidizing the conservative activists in places like Orange County who leveraged this comfort to get the government off their backs, the government’s fingerprints were wiped just clean enough from all this to convince postwar suburban America it had been a happy accident.⁷

But that dream was not all hunky-dory. Although Delaware, a former slave state that waited until 1901 to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, had a long history of racism, Biden would later explain that he had just assumed everyone treated everyone fairly until he worked as a lifeguard on the predominantly black east side of town during his first year of college. While no doubt an exaggeration—he also later told a biographer that he was always the kid in high school to get into arguments about civil rights—Biden’s naïveté was entirely plausible given that the government-subsidized postwar housing boom in Delaware and elsewhere was explicitly geared toward ensuring racial segregation, sending affluent whites scurrying for suburban communities that African Americans were excluded from. By 1977, Wilmington’s public schools were 85 percent black, while suburban schools were around 90 percent white.⁸

The young Biden probably wasn’t aware of just how deep this went. He wouldn’t have known that Delaware’s public schools were explicitly and legally created to be segregated and unequally funded, or that the University of Delaware had only admitted its first black student around the time his family moved to the state. He may well have been oblivious to the way that the state, particularly Wilmington, promoted suburban, mostly middle-class white interests at the expense of inner-city, mostly poorer black ones; that the city’s public housing authority engaged in urban renewal and federally subsidized slum clearance that tore down black neighborhoods without replacing them, displacing countless families of color; or how the fiercely contested construction of the I-95 highway through the city in the 1960s did likewise, so that car-owning suburbanites could leapfrog a desolate downtown.⁹

Biden may not have consciously internalized all this. But the city’s tendency to prioritize predominantly suburban, middle-class interests at the expense of its minority populations would come to embody Biden’s political approach.

From the Middle

Very few politicians come within a heartbeat of the US presidency without a lifetime of plotting out their rise, and Joe Biden was no different. After overcoming a debilitating stutter in childhood—the first in a lifetime of personal setbacks Biden would struggle to overcome—he set his sights on politics, startling those around him with his presidential ambitions.

It was soon after we met him, before they were even married, before he even got into politics,’ his first father-in-law, Robert Hunter, later recalled. By God, he came up one day and said he was going to be governor first, and then president of the United States. When his future mother-in-law asked the college junior the same question, the response was identical: President.¹⁰

Biden would deny this again and again over the years, always insisting that he started out with no grand ambitions, that he was simply taking things as they came. During one speech in Wilmington, he repeated this claim only for a nun in the audience to produce a sixth-grade essay he’d written about wanting to grow up to be president. And he wasn’t the only one who believed the White House was his destiny. From the first day I went to work for him, people said [to Biden], ‘You’re going to be president,’ his longtime aide Ted Kaufman later recalled.¹¹

By his own admission, Biden had entered law school because it was the best route to a political career. After graduating, he put politics aside for a while, teaching in the Delaware public school system, serving as an assistant public defender, and working for several Wilmington firms, including his own: Walsh, Monzack and Owens. The Owens was John T. Owens, a college classmate who had earlier been deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania and would soon marry Biden’s sister. But the political world was never far away: several of the lawyers Biden was associated with at this time, including Owens, were also prominent local Democrats.¹²

As a public defender, Biden represented clients in various states of desperation seeing firsthand the frayed line between underclass and criminal. He pled with a judge to go easy on one defendant, a down-on-his-luck fisherman with four kids who had stolen and sold a cow.¹³ Another, he explained, had been crazy drunk and already brain damaged when he killed his roommate.¹⁴ The Washington Post would claim in 1975 that Biden had a largely black, even black-militant clientele as a lawyer, though it’s unclear how accurate this was, given Biden’s habit of embellishing his civil rights activism and the fact that the article came out at a time when he was especially eager to play up his relationship with the local black community.

A registered independent since the age of 21, Biden was first courted by local Republicans to make a run for office before officially becoming a Democrat in 1969. At only 27, the party tapped him to run for the New Castle County Council the following year, a campaign for which he kept his party affiliation out of promotional material. The district where he was running was overwhelmingly Republican, and the county as a whole was shaped by the politics of suburban white flight: while its population increased fourfold between 1940 and 1980, Wilmington, the county seat, saw its numbers drop by 38 percent. Biden was perhaps the perfect fit. As a former state Democratic Party chairman who observed Biden’s career from the start later recalled, He had lots of energy and idealism and was always assertive. But to my knowledge, he had no substantive ideology.¹⁵

Biden would later claim that civil rights and Vietnam had prompted his political career. In 1973, however, he told a local paper that a citizens’ campaign against highways had drawn him into politics. He won the council seat partly by railing against unchecked growth and industrial development swallowing up the county’s green spaces and partly by tapping into themes that would prove electorally fruitful in subsequent decades; he complained about the rapidly deteriorating crime situation in the county and the spread of drugs. Most crucially, he had been backed up by what one paper termed his Children’s Crusade: an adoring volunteer army of more than one hundred high school kids, college students, and young professionals one squeak above the equal of a Beatle maniac. Biden later admitted that as early as this county council campaign, he had his eyes on the presidency.¹⁶

Although later described as a public housing advocate during this time, his was a less-than-full-throated advocacy. Everybody’s opposed to public housing—no one wants it in their backyard, but damnit, if you have a moral obligation, provide it, he told the press, while cautioning that he was not a Crusader Rabbit championing the rights of the people. The stance nevertheless earned him some enmity during the campaign, including the label of nigger lover.¹⁷

Biden became the only county council Democrat elected from a suburban district. Despite winning by the slimmest margin of all the council members, his 2,000-vote victory in November 1970 made Biden the golden boy of Delaware politics—maybe even the state Democratic Party’s great hope for 1972, as a newspaper profile of the councilman-elect offered. Young, handsome, and charming, with a beautiful wife and young family, the Kennedy comparisons came thick and fast (he could be Delaware’s JFK, noted the profile).¹⁸

Biden stressed that integrity was his most important quality. The one thing I want to be known for in politics, in my law practice, in my personal relationships is that I am totally honest—a man of my word, he said. The profile also gave a glimpse of what would arguably loom far larger in Biden’s political identity: the socially conservative streak he would wear as a badge of honor for much of his political career. Samuel Clemens said ‘all generalizations are untrue, including this one’ and keeping that in mind, I am a liberal Democrat, he joked.¹⁹

A teetotaler in his personal life—Biden once even threatened to end a date if the girl didn’t throw away her cigarette—he rubbished the idea of legalizing marijuana. Acknowledging his wife was the brains of the operation, he nonetheless opted for her to stay home and mold my children. I’m not a ‘keep ’em barefoot and pregnant’ man, he said. But I am all for keeping them pregnant until I have a little girl.²⁰

Biden’s short time in the New Castle County Council revealed a sharp, ambitious liberal politician genuinely concerned about poverty and environmental degradation and willing to stand up to corporate interests. He fought to block construction of oil refineries and protect vital wetlands,²¹ called for a halt to the dredging of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal,²² denounced the destruction of tidal marshes, and tried to de-escalate the construction of a controversial superhighway that he called a 10-lane monstrosity.²³

Biden also criticized a report on public housing for not paying enough attention to the very poor and spoke out against the bulldozing of the dilapidated homes of the county’s poor black residents. Seeing a balance between the county’s growth and the preservation of its natural resources, he worked to restrict development, or at least slow it. He called for more funding for mass transit and denounced the senseless highways being built in its place.²⁴

A county council seat was always going to be too small a pond for someone who had been eyeing the presidency since he was barely out of his teens, and Biden soon locked eyes on higher office. His hand was forced to an extent, with county Republicans scheming to redistrict him out of his seat. Consequently, it took less than a year after his victory for Biden to start mulling a run for the US Senate, a course he’d evidently decided on by the one-year anniversary, when he accidentally called himself a candidate in a speech. Biden’s ambition for higher office soon took priority above the issues that had supposedly animated his career in the first place. When the New Castle County Housing Authority made plans to buy an apartment complex in Biden’s district and convert it into public housing for the nonelderly, it did so with no involvement from the councilman himself, who was too busy campaigning to discuss the plan.²⁵

The daunting task of unseating Republican J. Caleb Cale Boggs fell to Biden thanks to a combination of reluctance and