If Biden Wants to be FDR.
By: Lauren Elizabeth
Tags: Politics, Joe Biden, Democrats, Elections, Government

If Biden Wants to be FDR.

The President-Elect pays lip service to the idea of drastic action, but will he actually do it?

Carolyn Castor/AP

More than once, President-Elect Joe Biden has likened his position in America’s current moment to that of FDR, when he was tasked with bringing the United States out of the Great Depression.

In a piece detailing the “similarities” between the two, Charlotte Alter with TIME writes:

“In several recent interviews, he has cited the Roosevelt presidency as an inspiration for what he hopes to achieve and how he wants to do it. “There’s no such thing as guaranteed democracy,” he told Brene Brown on her podcast, explaining how writer Walter Lippmann had encouraged FDR to impose a dictatorship in order to pull America out of the Depression, and FDR had resisted the call. “There’s nothing automatic about this,” Biden said. “We have to earn it every single generation.” Both men are more practical than ideological. When asked about the philosophy behind the Tennessee Valley Authority, Roosevelt said, “It’s neither fish nor fowl, but whatever it is, it will taste awfully good to the people of the Tennessee Valley.” Biden, too, has embraced an elastic style of politics. “I’m kind of in a position that FDR was,” Biden told The New Yorker in an interview in July. “What in fact FDR did was not ideological, it was completely practical.”’

While I found Alter’s piece to be far too generous to Joe Biden to say the least, there is some semblance of truth to the idea that Biden does want to believe he could be capable of accomplishing everything that Roosevelt did. On some level, there is a piece of him that at least cares about his legacy, and I do think he would enjoy leaving the nation with the impression that he left an impact similar to that of FDR. Unfortunately, if he was serious about being an FDR-style President, that would mean Joe Biden would have to readily adopt every single policy proposal from the left that he spent the entire campaign running from.

FDR didn’t leave a lasting impression on the country that long outlived him because he called for “unity over division, science over fiction”, and said that we were in a “battle for the soul of the nation”. He isn’t engrained in the nation’s history because he was quietly promising austerity measures before he even got elected like Joe Biden, and telling the wealthy not to worry, that “nothing will fundamentally change”. On the contrary, in his famous 1936 speech in Madison Square garden FDR took aim at the elite forces, identifying them as “the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering."

Roosevelt went on to say: “I welcome their hatred”.

If Joe Biden wanted to be the next FDR, student loan debt would be cancelled by executive order on day one. His staffers would be roaming the halls of congress, telling every single Democrat and vulnerable Republican that if they don’t vote for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, or support tuition free public college, that he would find, endorse, and actively campaign for any primary challenger from the left. Biden would be making the case to the American people to defund the police, and reallocate a significant portion of their budgets to education, social work, mental healthcare, and job programs. He would fight aggressively to pack the courts, a minimum wage that kept up with productivity, a federal jobs guarantee, and expand social security.

There was an undeniable note of truth to Biden’s assertion that what Roosevelt did wasn’t ideological, it was practical. Everything that FDR did was necessary in order to save the nation from economic collapse, and considering how many communities it still left out of the equation, he didn’t go far enough. There are no words to describe how incredibly demoralizing and disheartening it has been to watch the calls for the fundamentally necessary action required to take care of this country’s people at a time of crisis being labelled as “radical” by Republicans and Democrats alike. Considering how the Democrat running in my district ran an entire ad campaign about how she would stand up to “radical” Democrats who want to de-fund the police, I haven’t been at all hopeful that — outside of a few powerful, refreshing voices like Bernie Sanders and the “squad” — the Democrats aren’t interested in looking beyond the preservation of their own power.

My hope does not lie with Joe Biden or the Democratic party. It lies with the left. A left who is getting more vocal and organized with each passing election, and has tools available to them to pressure Democrats that weren’t there before. Tools like Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, and the Sunshine Movement. Joe Biden’s not going to be the new FDR, but maybe the next one will be found among the various grassroots organizations all across the country, who have decided enough’s enough.