On Cebul and Geismer On Bidenism
Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have written two of the books that have most influenced my thinking about politics and governance in the last couple of years. And there is no doubt that, however much my domestic-policy colleagues and I in the Biden Administration felt like we achieved in our policy efforts, the 2024 election results show that we failed in the ultimate political test. So when I saw that Cebul and Geismer had published an early analysis of “Why Bidenism Failed,” I eagerly read it.
Here are some thoughts. In short, I agree with Cebul and Geismer on the fundamental political limitation of the Biden Administration’s domestic agenda: The benefits of the Administration’s efforts to rebuild American infrastructure and manufacturing did not come quickly enough to be felt before the election, and the failure to include more “immediately tangible social benefits” in the legislation that became the Inflation Reduction Act ensured that voters would not give Biden credit for his domestic efforts.
But I disagree with Cebul and Geismer’s suggestion that this limitation flowed from the sociology of the “professional-class liberals” who staffed the Administration (and Democratic congressional offices). Rather, I believe the problem is one of political economy—that the power of labor has been so diminished over so many decades that there was no near-term political coalition to adopt the kind of tangible social benefits that would have helped the Democratic Party win the 2024 election. Although the Biden Administration undertook historic efforts to rebuild labor power, those efforts, too, could not bear fruit in just a few years. And losing the election ensured that those pro-labor efforts will be reversed. I thus find myself in an even more pessimistic place than are Cebul and Geismer.
Cebul and Geismer’s Argument
The essence of Cebul and Geismer’s argument is straightforward: Even if the Biden Administration’s initiatives helped move us significantly toward good outcomes in the world, the policy tools the Administration employed to implement those initiatives ensured that the benefits would accrue too slowly for Biden to receive credit from the public for them. Crucially, they argue, those tools also obscured the role of the state, and therefore the Biden Administration, in achieving those benefits.
In particular, they argue that “[t]hough Biden spoke boldly about his economic, environmental, and socially transformative goals, his three signature legislative accomplishments—the IIJA, the IRA, and the CHIPS Act—proved to be political duds precisely because of their reliance on the same old hard-to-grasp and even harder to enjoy managerial, technocratic, and market-based approaches.” What they mean by “the same old … managerial, technocratic, and market-based approaches” is that these key laws were largely structured as efforts to regulate, subsidize, or promote actions by private businesses to achieve the Administration’s preferred outcomes, rather than as providing services or benefits from the state to the people directly.
Cebul and Geismer note that the Biden legislative agenda had some very significant successes, both in terms of getting key laws passed and in terms of the impact of those laws in the world (quotes are bolded):
The 2021 IIJA included some $550 billion for infrastructure improvements. The 2022 IRA contained around $750 billion for climate-related innovations as well as funding to reduce home energy costs. And the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act is spending nearly $300 billion to foster the domestic production of semiconductor chips, foundational components for everything from solar panels to cell phones. These incentives aim to make renewable energy so cost-effective that, experts believe, US electricity-related emissions may drop by 75 percent by 2035 and transportation-related emissions could drop by one-third.
As a result of Biden’s investments, manufacturing’s share of the country’s GDP is the highest it has been since 1981, and green investments in manufacturing facilities doubled between 2021 and 2023. If these trends hold, some $300 billion in public subsidies are forecast to stimulate more than $500 billion in private investments over the coming years across a range of green sectors: solar and wind energy production and storage, electric vehicles and batteries, and decarbonization of traditional manufacturing, including decarbonizing concrete and steel production. This spring, the Department of Energy announced it was processing 203 applications for $262.2 billion in loans across 245 locations in the United States. And these applications—from companies working on carbon reuse and reduction, advanced nuclear technologies, electric vehicles and batteries, energy transmission, and more—are coming from businesses in both red and blue states, their new jobs and businesses championed by Republican and Democratic governors alike.
And yet, they say, “vanishingly few Americans have perceived benefits from these initiatives.” That conclusion was sort of obvious from the election results, but it’s still bracing to see the evidence Cebul and Geismer adduce to support it:
One poll found that a majority of Americans “haven’t seen, read or heard anything or much at all” about the IIJA or the CHIPS Act, while 48 percent said the same about the IRA. Of those who had heard of the bills, just one-quarter reported positive sentiments. Roughly the same share of voters believe that Donald Trump—whose administration’s repeated failure to invest in infrastructure only brought us the “Infrastructure Week” meme—did as much as Biden to create jobs and deliver infrastructural investments.
As one of many people who worked hard on President Biden’s infrastructure bill, I can’t help but have the following reaction:
I mean, Trump did nothing to advance infrastructure, despite talking about it endlessly! But the Biden Administration made massive, massive investments in infrastructure. Yet the voters clearly didn’t see it, giving Trump just as much credit for infrastructure investment as Biden.
Why didn’t the Biden-Harris Administration get credit from the voters for its significant achievements in rebuilding America’s infrastructure and manufacturing? Cebul and Geismer make a powerful argument that it’s the fault of “liberals’ professional-managerial approach to governance, the substantive heart of [the Biden Administration’s] political style.” They say that the governing wing of the Democratic Party, dominated by members of the Professional-Managerial Class, made two crucial errors in advancing the Biden Administration’s key initiatives. First, rather than rely on overt public provision to achieve its goals, the Administration took the more indirect approach of subsidizing, encouraging, and regulating market actors. That approach was consistent with the proclivities of “professional-class liberals,” who favor “highly complex and technical approaches to governance” and believe “that centering expertly managed markets and technocratic governance [will] solve social problems in ways that might preclude more thoroughgoing redistribution or structural change.”
But these “managerial, technocratic, and market-based approaches” to governance have a fundamental political flaw: Because their benefits come directly from private market actors, the role of government action in achieving those benefits is (in the word used by Suzanne Mettler in her own great book) “submerged.” People thus give credit to the private actors rather than the government.
And this leads us to the second problem Cebul and Geismer identify. Because it is hard for voters to see the benefits of the sorts of “market-mediated” policies that formed the centerpiece of the Biden legislative agenda, it was incumbent on the Administration to work especially hard to “sell” its policies to them. “But,” they say, “there is little evidence that Biden and Vice President Harris were even interested in trying.” Rather, they argue, “the Biden administration and its surrogates often took a condescending approach, blaming the media and voters themselves for not knowing what was going on”—condescencion that Cebul and Geismer suggest stems from the arrogance or isolation of the professional-managerial class.
Where I Agree with Cebul and Geismer
There’s a lot I agree with in Cebul and Geismer’s argument. For one thing, I agree that we should be pursuing direct state provision far more often than Democrats have in recent decades. We currently have the worst of both worlds: a submerged state in many ways, but also submerged privatization within nominally state-run programs.
Consider health care. According to the latest census data, 92 percent of Americans have health insurance. Of those, the vast majority receive their health insurance directly from a private insurer. This includes those individuals who have employer-based coverage, those who purchase private insurance in the marketplace (likely through the exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act), those who participate in Medicare Advantage (about half of those who are eligible for Medicare), and a large majority of the nearly three-quarters of Medicaid beneficiaries who are enrolled by their states in managed care plans. Yet government action supports every one of these pathways to coverage. Employer-based coverage is supported by a massive tax subsidy ($190 billion or so in Fiscal Year 2022). The individual market is supported by the Affordable Care Act exchanges and premium tax credits. Medicare Advantage is supported by money from the federal Medicare Trust Fund ($462 billion in 2023), and Medicaid managed care organizations are paid by a combination of federal and state revenues. All of these forms of insurance, moreover, must comply with numerous federal regulations, including the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to provide preventive services at no out-of-pocket cost to beneficiaries.
At the same time, much of the infrastructure of nominally state-provided insurance has been outsourced to private actors. When people seek to enroll in Medicare, Medicaid, or Affordable Care Act exchange plans, or they encounter problems with those services, they may reach out to what they believe to be a government-operated phone line—but they will likely reach a call center that is in fact operated by a private contractor. Private contractors run much of the back-end infrastructure of government programs to provide health care and other social services. (See Anne Kim’s recent book Poverty for Profit for much more on this point.) When these contractors mess up, beneficiaries often blame the government.
The result of all of this reliance on market actors is devastating for those of us who care about vigorous government action: State capacity is eroded as private actors drive up the costs of public programs to pad their bottom lines—all while the state fails to get the credit for the benefits of its programs while remaining on the hook for their failures.
The submerged state/submerged privatization approach also creates a pernicious political economy. As the government increasingly relies on profit-making private parties to deliver important entitlements, benefits, and services to the public, those profit-making entities acquire more and more power to block efforts at reform. That is in part because they have more money to spend on political advocacy. And it is also because they can in many cases mobilize the people to whom they currently deliver those entitlements, benefits, and services—by telling employees that a proposal for single-payer health care will take away their existing employer-based coverage, for example, or by characterizing increased regulation of Medicare Advantage as a cut to their health insurance.
If I were king of the world, we would return state functions to the state. That would mean a single-payer health care system, or at least real Medicare rather than Medicare Advantage. It would mean deprivatizing the ongoing operations of government that have been outsourced. And it would mean the state taking on responsibility for carrying out—and not just prodding or subsidizing—responsibilities that the private sector cannot handle well. Manufacturing of certain generic drugs—on which private entities often cannot realize their desirable profit while meeting quality standards and providing sufficient quantity to serve patients’ needs—might be an example here.
Rebuilding and resurfacing the state in this way would have substantial policy advantages. It would directly serve the people without empowering private parties to siphon off profits from these public functions. It could achieve positive outcomes that the market cannot. And perhaps it could create a new political economy that stops entrenching rent-seeking and starts expanding the power of ordinary people. A return to the state might thus ultimately have political advantages for progressives and the working class.
So I’m very much on board with the substantive agenda that motivates Cebul and Geismer. And they have identified a real tendency among Democratic policymakers to prefer subsidizing and managing the market—in ways that may submerge the role of government—over direct public provision. Their books show the roots of this policy approach, and how it developed and became entrenched in the Democratic Party over time. During my own time in the Biden Administration, I observed that market management, rather than public provision, was typically the default policy response.
Not Sociology, But Political Economy
But I’m not convinced that the power within the Democratic Party of the Professional-Managerial Class—with its inclination to market-managerial policy tools—is the sole, or even the dominant, explanation for the political failure of the Biden approach.
For one thing, the default to market-managerial policy tools can’t be explained simply as the product of the sociology or “political style” of “professional-class liberals,” as Cebul and Geismer at points suggest. Rather, a big part of the explanation is political economy: Absent a much stronger labor movement, Democrats necessarily need the support of some elements of the business sector if they are to obtain enactment of significant economic policies. And that typically means using tools that subsidize and channel market actors, thereby giving those actors a stake in the policies at issue.
In an interview published just before the election, Gabriel Winant described the dynamics at play here:
On the left, we often think what we would like to do would be to take more direct control over supply, like in the public education example—and directly politicize the conditions of supply. In the absence of the political power to accomplish that, the kind of partial measure that winds up coming on the table is a subsidy—a subsidization of demand for a service supplied by some market or quasi-market institution. That’s a very politically convenient mechanism because it brings some suppliers, service providers, and clients onto the same side.
For example, home health agencies love the Harris proposal of a Medicare benefit for in-home health care. The private equity firms that have entered into the home health care space also are very happy about that idea, because Medicare reimburses at a higher rate than Medicaid. This solves the political problem in the near term by expanding the patient market, raising the reimbursement rate, and thereby presumably flushing more money into home health care—which will in fact enable more people to get the care they need and presumably raise the quality because it will raise wages, and thus draw labor into the sector where there is a systematic shortage, all while further enriching a set of for-profit actors. This is that logic of the structurally divided Democratic Party coalition that I was alluding to earlier. It’s true across lots of these industries. This is how the Democrats work—they try to strike deals to subsidize demand and thereby bridge the two class parts of their coalition.
One can very fairly criticize Democrats for failing, over several decades, to defend and bolster the power of labor. Worse, Democratic presidents have aggressively promoted policies that have undermined labor power, notably including accession to NAFTA and the WTO. (Most congressional Democrats, including those from my home state of Michigan, opposed these trade policies, but Democratic presidents did champion them.) And I think it’s clear that, in general, Democrats have been insufficiently attentive to the need to build and maintain forces that can exercise countervailing power against business interests. While Republicans were undertaking aggressive “defund the left” efforts against labor unions, plaintiffs’ lawyers, and others who might hold powerful economic interests to account, Democrats have too often failed to mount equally aggressive efforts on behalf of these key allies.
But here’s the thing: Joe Biden really has been the most pro-union president since FDR. President Biden’s support of unions was not just, as Cebul and Geismer say, “symboli[sm]”—though one should not undersell the symbolic importance of a president walking a picket line. Biden’s NLRB issued a string of pro-worker, pro-union rulings unmatched by any Board in my lifetime, his Department of Labor aggressively promoted workers’ rights, and his Administration’s policies across the various Executive Branch departments incorporated significant provisions to bolster unions. The Biden Administration sought to advance labor especially in its implementation of the three major pieces of legislation Cebul and Geismer discuss: the IIJA, the CHIPS Act, and the IRA.
Perhaps if the Democrats had won another presidential term, these actions would have resulted in a reversal of the decline of private-sector unions in the United States. But up against decades of policies that undermined or ignored labor, there was simply no way they could have meaningfully expanded labor power in time for the 2024 election—much less in time to shape the very laws that President Biden signed in 2021 and 2022.
So there was really no alternative, as a practical and political matter, to framing the IIJA, CHIPS Act, and IRA in a market-managerial manner. To the extent that people did not see the benefits of these laws right away—and they clearly did not—that has a lot to do with the long-term erosion of state capacity that made it difficult for the Biden Administration to get money out the door and shovels in the ground quickly. But the same problem would have bedeviled any effort to rely on more direct public provision, rather than a subsidize-the-market approach, to implement these initiatives. (Some on the center-left and center-right would even argue that it was the Biden Administration’s efforts to bolster labor that slowed implementation; I side with those who reject that argument, but the very dispute highlights the point that the problem here is not that the Administration was too “business-oriented,” to use Cebul and Geismer’s term.)
In the end, Cebul and Geismer seem to recognize that investments in rebuilding infrastructure and manufacturing could not have achieved significant results in time for the 2024 election. The Biden Administration’s political misstep, they say, was in failing to “embed[] its slower-moving business-oriented green economic policies within a wider set of immediately tangible social benefits.” But although those social benefits might have been good politics once they were enacted—and became “immediately tangible”—there was not a political coalition to enact them. Indeed, Cebul and Geismer seem to acknowledge the point:
The Build Back Better package, the original legislation from which the IRA was salvaged, was the first feasible major piece of legislation in generations on the scale of the New Deal’s social and economic policy, with the potential to shore up the social safety net and reinvigorate American class and electoral politics. It included universal social policies: funding universal preschool, extending the COVID-era child tax credits, establishing federal support for paid family leave and medical caregiving, and much more. Of course, Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema ground down the legislation, cutting many of the direct social benefits and refashioning the bill as the compromised Inflation Reduction Act.
Cebul and Geismer suggest that “the liberal professional class” showed its true colors by compromising with Manchin and Synema rather than continuing to fight for the broader Build Back Better bill. But liberal legislators and key Biden Administration officials very publicly fought with Manchin and Synema over the legislation for months. If anything, the fights only seemed to entrench the battle lines. Cebul and Geismer offer no reason to believe that continuing the fight would have moved Manchin and Synema or resulted in anything better than the Biden Administration ultimately achieved.
In the end, the problem wasn’t that the Biden Administration embodied the proclivities of professional-class liberals. The problem was that labor, and progressives in general, lack power. That lack of power is in part the result of many decisions made by many professional-class liberals over many decades. But the lack of power will remain a brute political fact even if Democrats staff their presidential administrations with people who are less taken by market-managerial policy tools. And that means the problem is much harder to fix than Cebul and Geismer’s piece might lead one to presume.