Biden Is Getting Ready to Bury Neoliberalism [View all]

[StrictlyRockers]

A President Biden U.S. domestic policy would shift well to the left of where it would have been under a President Hillary Clinton in 2016.

This spring, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden agreed with his former primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders to form joint task forces on health care, criminal justice, climate change, the economy, education, and immigration. It is clear from the reports of those bodies, issued earlier this summer, that under a President Biden U.S. domestic policy would shift well to the left of where it would have been under a President Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But none of those committees covered foreign policy as traditionally defined. The ideological flames fanned by Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and then brought to a white heat by the Black Lives Matter movement, have barely touched foreign affairs, which is often isolated from domestic politics. A Biden promise to return to the status quo ante would be a brain-dead response to a transformed world, but it would not be politically costly.

Yet the assumption that under a President Biden domestic policy would move left, but foreign policy would not, presupposes a distinction between the two that is itself an artifact of an earlier era. Some elements of a Biden foreign policy would almost certainly move left as a dependent variable of domestic policy. Biden uses the expression “a foreign policy for the middle class” to express the idea that trade and international economic policy must be guided by the benefits they will bring to average Americans—rather than to American multinationals. For those of you keeping an ideological scorecard at home, that policy may be taken as the death knell of neoliberalism.

That term “neoliberalism,” which began as a neutral descriptor before turning pejorative in recent years, describes the faith that a lightly regulated global marketplace in which goods, services, capital, and firms moved across borders with minimal friction would unleash growth that would increase jobs and spread prosperity, especially in the United States, the engine room of globalization. That was the guiding doctrine of the administration of President Bill Clinton. Its high apostles, including Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, served as President Barack Obama’s senior economic advisors.

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