Great Power Politics: Adam Tooze on Bidenomics (Adam Tooze, 11/07/24, London Review of Books)
We are left asking how this four-year period fits into recent American history and what legacy it leaves. The National Defence Industrial Strategy (NDIS) offers to do some of the work for us. Like other, better-known documents of the Biden era – Jake Sullivan’s speech on ‘Renewing American Economic Leadership’ at the Brookings Institution in April 2023, for instance – the NDIS is historically self-conscious. The basic Biden narrative was of America’s fall from greatness, starting in the 1990s, when the industrial fabric of the nation began to fray and China’s manufacturing capacity surged. Now China and other competitors are rising fast. The home front is undermined by polarisation and social dysfunction. But, with measures such as the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act (which increased spending on semiconductor research), the bipartisan infrastructure law and the NDIS, the Biden administration was attempting a national rebuilding centred on industrial production and a revalorisation of manual work.
One of the sleights of hand this narrative performed was to claim the current moment, and Biden’s response to it, as unprecedented. In his Brookings speech, Sullivan announced that the administration was calling time on neoliberalism. In his farewell letter, Biden described the IRA as the biggest climate measure in history. The NDIS is supposed to be the first document of its type ever issued by the Pentagon. In fact, neoliberalism lives on precisely because it continuously reinvents itself. The IRA may be a first in the US, but Europe puts more money into climate solutions and China’s subsidies for its microchips industry are four times those of the US. The facts were less important, however, than the claim of novelty. Bidenism wanted to respond to America’s many crises not with orthodoxy but by making a historically significant break.
In October 2023, Sullivan wrote in Foreign Affairs, the house journal of the US foreign policy establishment, that the world had entered the third era of American power since the Second World War. The article seemed to be modelled on one of George Kennan’s famous memos staking out the terrain of the Cold War. As a source of inspiration, the Kennedy moonshot moment has some appeal. But within the Biden administration, it was the 1930s and 1940s that captured the imagination. Jigar Shah, who runs a $400 billion loan programme at the Department of Energy, liked to evoke the Second World War in his attempts to inspire America to do ‘big things in a very short period of time’.
The irony, of course, is that this narrative is anything but new. In all but name, this is MAGA, and credit for it belongs to the Trump team in the 2016 campaign. If we were to date it precisely, as good a moment as any would be Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Thursday, 21 July 2016, in which he portrayed the nation as besieged by violence and terrorism. That moment was telling because President Obama responded in the following days that he saw a very different country. Americans weren’t living in a gothic world of doom. They were taking their kids to school and to sports camp. They were getting on with finding real solutions to real problems. Trump wasn’t all that Republican or even conservative, he implied; Trump was just weird.