Progressives should defend Biden's legacy to protect their future - E.J.Dionne WaPo

Besides the president and his staff, who should care about how Joe Biden’s policy legacy is judged? Everyone who believes that government should invest in the future and defend the interests of workers and those stuck at the bottom of the income heap — that’s who.

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Legacies are not just about bragging rights or a politician’s self-esteem. How a president is judged can affect the direction of policy for decades. Public anger over Herbert Hoover’s mismanagement of the Great Depression opened the way for the dominance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism for a half-century — even when Republicans held power. Frustration over inflation under Jimmy Carter led to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 counterrevolution in favor of lower and less progressive taxes, regulatory restraint, and a celebration of the social role played by wealthy entrepreneurs.

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None of this, however, should distract from what Biden accomplished with the power voters gave him. He changed the paradigm of economic policy from a view that prosperity stems from rewarding “job creators” at the top to what he called a “middle-out” and “bottom-up” strategy. It wasn’t just a slogan. In recent years, wage growth among low- and middle-income workers has outpaced that of higher-income groups.

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His largest contributions will be to the future: the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Chips and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. Biden has grounds for claiming that these initiatives “mark the most significant investment in America since the New Deal,” and he’s certainly right that the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act is “the most significant investment in climate and energy ever.”

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Nonetheless, the truth about the Biden economy should not be lost in the mire of political defeat and messaging failure. It’s a reality that will make it much easier to defend his domestic policy legacy than it was to stand up for Hoover’s or Carter’s: The economy Biden leaves behind really is in good shape. Unemployment and, now, inflation are both low. The initial effects of Biden’s investment programs have been positive, and their impact will grow over time.

Defending this legacy is vital to battling against a sharp rightward turn in economic policy. Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University professor who authored a recent history of the Democratic Party, told me that Democrats, who will inevitably return to “advocating similar programs to empower working people,” can’t afford to allow Biden’s record to be trashed.

How Biden’s term is remembered is not just about him. It’s about the future.

https://wapo.st/49G3cJD

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