How President Biden Saves the Economy

Only President Biden has the experience and the heart we need.

We have a great story to tell voters about a man who used his experience and his heart to steer our economy through two major storms, with the help of his trusted friends, the Democrats. There is still a lot of storm damage to repair, but President Biden is fighting hard for economic fairness and against corporate greed. Republicans will stop at nothing to prevent him from succeeding, but he won’t back down. He’s the best friend working people have had in the White House since Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt and he will keep fighting until there’s room enough for everyone in the middle class.

My Photoshop version of “Joe Biden: A Little Golden Book Biography” by Shana Corey (Author), Lauren Gallegos (Illustrator)

Meaning Making

I was talking to a young friend the other day, and she said to me, “You’re the first person I have ever heard say anything nice about Joe Biden.” I was pretty shocked, especially as this particular young person is not only among the brightest of her generation, but a political science major at a top university. There is a lot to unpack about that, but in the moment, I realized that I needed, not a list of statistics or policies, but a story to tell about Joe Biden, not just as a man, but as a President.

We on the Left still imagine that if we give people enough facts, people will be able to see immediately what the facts mean, just as we do. We have learned to offer personal stories that evoke empathy as they illustrate the impact of those facts. But personal stories are not the only kind of narratives we need.

We need what cultural historians call “meaning-making narratives.” If we want voters to see the world the way that we do and judge our actions as being morally right, we have to tell people the kind of stories that help them make sense of the world around them.

Republicans have a bunch of these stories and they push them for years, if not decades. “Replacement theory” is one. “Trickle down economics” is another. They use them to spin facts into alternate versions of reality where black is white and up is down. The only way to counter these truth-distorting narratives is by providing truth-reinforcing narratives, and by pushing our narratives twice as hard as they push theirs.

In this case, there is a giant hole in our public debate, a critical absence of a story that explains the relationship between President Biden (and Democrats) and the economy as people currently perceive it. The following is just one attempt to spin that kind of narrative. I am sure that with work and collaboration, we can make it far better.

In our narrative, we are in the middle of a multi-years-long saga of crisis and recovery, of struggle and of reinvention.

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How President Biden Saves the Economy

Part 1: President Biden masterfully steered the economy through two major economic storms with the help of the Democrats in Congress, but there is still much work to do.

With back-to-back crises, an economic shutdown and inflation, it could have been a total disaster. Thank God we had a president with so much experience.

Here’s what happened:

When the pandemic hit America, Trump had to shut down the economy to keep people safe at home. Then, Biden won the election and revived the economy by investing in American workers. He kept up the consumer demand that drives economic growth by making sure people had money in their pockets and by investing in infrastructure and clean energy.

People had saved up and needed to buy things, but businesses didn’t have enough supply to meet the demand, so prices went up. Plus, greedy companies took advantage of the situation to raise prices even higher.

Then Biden did the impossible. Everyone said that we’d have to throw people out of work to bring inflation down. But President Biden had a better idea: he brought inflation down by increasing supply to meet the demand. He cracked down on price gougers, cleared supply chain bottlenecks, brought manufacturers home and invested in new manufacturing. Now inflation is almost back to normal.

We survived the storms, but there is still a lot of damage to repair, and we’re all a little traumatized from the experience. We can work together to build our country back up, but we should take this opportunity to build back better than before, but not only in terms of our physical infrastructure.

President Biden and the Democrats are taking this opportunity to change some things that have been wrong for a long time, to usher in a new era of economic fairness.

Part 2: President Biden is fighting for economic fairness.

President Biden is taking a principled stand against economic unfairness. He is mobilizing the power of his administration and working with Democrats in Congress to take on massive corporate power in unprecedented ways.

Here’s what’s going on:

While we have largely (and miraculously) recovered from back-to-back economic crises, the pandemic disrupted our lives, causing us to question many of the ways things were before.

People are realizing just how much our economic system has become fundamentally unfair. There has been an epidemic of greed and concentration of wealth, and workers are getting screwed. People are working harder than ever, yet too many still can’t afford core needs like housing and retirement or live one emergency away from a financial crisis.

Biden and the Democrats are fighting to make our economy more fair for working people and do many other things the majority of American voters want, but Republicans are fighting them every step of the way.

The super-rich use their wealth to buy political power. If you look at everything Republicans do, they are clearly using their control of the U.S. House to fight Biden on behalf of these global financial elites.

President Biden is the best friend working people have had in the White House since the Roosevelts. He is standing up to these modern-day robber barons. He’s cracking down on price gouging and wage theft. He’s breaking up monopolies and bringing back competition. He is restoring workers’ rights: fighting for people’s right to organize, to be able to sit across the table from management and negotiate as an equal.

President Biden and the Democrats understand that the economy exists to serve the needs of people, not the other way around, and that working people deserve to take home a greater share of the wealth that they create.

They also understand that this is an uphill battle against powerful and entrenched financial interests, with powerful friends in the courts and in the media. They know that they won’t win every fight, but they’re not going to back down.

We have a long way to go, to make our economy more fair, to make life more affordable and less precarious, but President Biden and the Democrats in Congress are seizing this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make some real change, and they will not stop fighting until there is room enough for everyone in the middle class.

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Themes:

Build Back Better

“Build Back Better” is a brilliant theme, but the phrase doesn’t work all by itself. This narrative is about fleshing out the analogy. We have to remind people about the storm damage we have incurred (economically and psychically) and how the crisis creates an opportunity to build our country back up better than it was before, in every sense.

Experience

Never, ever talk about Biden’s age, his cognitive abilities, or his physical fitness. All of that just keeps his age front and center. We need to make the debate about experience. Only someone with Biden’s depth of experience in the Senate and as Vice President could have handled these back-to-back crises with such skill and achieved so much legislatively in such a short time.

Worker-driven Economics

It’s not just that President Biden can relate to working people. He actually looks at every situation from the perspective of working people and makes decisions based on how they will be impacted. President Biden achieved two economic miracles because he did what was right for working people in defiance of conventional economic wisdom, and that turned out to be what was best for the economy as a whole. That’s a big f-ing deal: a radical departure from fifty years of trickle-down orthodoxy.

Economic Fairness

In economic discussions, I’d like to hear more about demand-side economics and consumer-driven economic growth. But in political discussions, we need to connect with what people are feeling, and what people are feeling is that the “deal” is fundamentally broken. What people want is plain old “economic fairness.”

“Economic fairness” is the thing we believe to be morally right, the principle for which we are willing to fight. The thing we are trying to create is “a middle class big enough (or with room enough) for everyone.”

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The Bottom Line

There’s nothing wrong with talking about things like drug prices and junk fees. But there’s so much more power in talking about grand battles of principles and fairness, of right versus wrong. That’s what motivates and persuades voters.

There are a hundred examples, about bridges and water pipes, about Amazon and Google, meat packers and chicken farmers, cryptocurrency and private equity firms. We have to weave all these examples together into a bigger picture about who is on the side of working people and who is fighting against them.

We can inspire voters with larger and more dramatic narratives about historic upheavals, near misses and epic power struggles. We shouldn’t just tell them about the villains. We should talk about the heroes too.

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Thanks, as always, for reading and subscribing! I hope you are able to use this in your work and your activism!

In solidarity,

Antonia

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NOTES

Democrats Are The Party of Economic Fairness

To many, our economic system feels increasingly unstable and unfair. People just want our private sector to live up to its side of the deal: We work hard. You pay us enough to live on, with a little breathing room. Maybe voters just want political leaders to stand up to big business on their behalf.

What Democrats Believe: Economies are for People

We have to expose and challenge conservative myths and replace them with our own set of beliefs: our understanding of the true relationships between our economic system, our society and our government.

Debate Strategy: The Budget Battle

How to engage Republicans on our terms when we battle over the budget, by making the positive case for the federal government and its programs as good, necessary and worth funding.