Despite the populist overtones of her campaign launch – Harris praised unions and attacked “price-gouging” back in August – she has since reassured business leaders she is “pragmatic”, the word she used in a major economic speech delivered at the end of September in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. Optimistic progressives nevertheless believe Harris can rally voters by distilling Bidenism down to what one of its architects calls its core principles: “build” and “balance”. The first addresses major structural shortages, from re-establishing regional supply chains to accelerating housing construction, while the second is about ensuring government promotes fairness, justice, and basic security within a market economy. Together, they are meant to shape market behaviour and ultimately make the American social contract more egalitarian – and even, as ambitious economic progressives would have it, more social-democratic.
Still, the Harris-Walz ticket will have to do more than convince wary voters it holds firm to these principles. In fact, if the Democratic leadership as a whole is serious about solidifying a post-neoliberal order and owning the political era that follows, it is incumbent upon them to deal with the simultaneous over-complexity and fragmentary ambition Bidenism has displayed thus far. This is a fundamental matter of vision that goes beyond Biden’s poor salesmanship: above all, Bidenism itself lacks equilibrium between its major priorities, in replication of a political antagonism that has its roots in the ideological fault lines of the American Revolution.
The source of the problem is that the main philosophical traditions behind “build” and “balance” have historically been in tension with one another. One entails using public subsidies and trade barriers to build up specific industries to spur innovation and economic development. The other polices how firms and markets operate, whether in terms of their competitive practices or how they treat workers, consumers, and the environment. Or, to label this in the context of American intellectual history, Bidenism is an uncommon fusion of neo-Hamiltonian industrial policy and the Madisonian–Brandeisian view of dispersed and state-modulated economic power. The former approach dates to the first U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who advocated numerous measures, including tariffs, to stimulate manufacturing; the latter descends from his rival James Madison, another Founding Father, who believed competition buttressed self-government, as well as from the anti-monopoly work of the early 20th-century Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis.