Foreign Exchanges Election Roundtable

A panel of contributors offers thoughts on the recent US presidential election and what it portends for the future.

Hi folks, Derek here. In the wake of the US presidential election earlier this month I’m very pleased to be able to bring you a little collection of analysis from several excellent contributors. Some may be familiar to Foreign Exchanges readers but we’ve got a couple of new faces in here that I’m really excited to bring on board. The pieces below are by no means meant to comprise a comprehensive look at the election but they do cover a wide range of topics, some looking back at the Biden administration/Harris campaign and others looking ahead to the Trump administration. We’ve got Michael Brenes on Joe Biden’s economic record, Assal Rad on the role Gaza played in the election, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins on the failure of the Harris campaign’s message, Annelle Sheline on the Biden administration’s abandonment of human rights, Djene Bajalan on the future of US-Turkey relations, and Alexander Aviña on the future of US policy toward Latin America.

Donald Trump’s victory party on election night in Florida (Brendan Gutenschwager/Anadolu via Getty Images)

This is the kind of undertaking that cannot be completed without the support of paid FX subscribers. With that in mind, I’ve decided to release Mike’s piece to the public but the rest will be behind the paywall for our subscribers. If you’re already one of those, thank you for your support and please share the newsletter with anyone you think might appreciate it. If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, please consider becoming one today to get access to this piece and so much more, while supporting the newsletter:

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It’s the (Political) Economy (of US Foreign Policy), Stupid

by Michael Brenes

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Bernie Sanders wrote these words two days after the 2024 election, earning him an interview on The Daily podcast and some plaudits among Democrats in Washington, D.C. for (correctly) diagnosing why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump.

Others saw Bernie’s words as disingenuous, even apocryphal. Biden was “the most pro-labor president in 60 years,” said one commentator. (Sanders has also called Biden “the most progressive president on domestic issues since FDR.”) 

Both are true. Biden rejected neoliberalism and embraced pro-labor policies. He strengthened the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), supported strikes by the United Auto Workers (UAW), and pushed back against anti-union policies—all things that benefit working Americans. As the journalist and biographer of John Maynard Keynes, Zachary Carter, pointed out in July, Biden created a near full employment economy that saw significant gains in Black and Latino employment and ameliorated income inequality. 

But in an election that hinged predominantly on economic, “kitchen table” issues, the question remains why Biden’s economic platform—“Bidenomics”—did not resonate with voters. Harris touted the administration’s pro-labor record and the impact the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) had—or would have—on the economy, but to no end. Did economic conditions come down to subjective experiences? Vibes? Inflation made people feel the economy was not working; the policies did not matter. 

The answer, I believe, is not “vibes” or inflation alone. Bidenomics failed as a long-term vision of economic recovery for working Americans—to fortify the working- and middle-class in the United States after decades of neoliberalism. First framed as a comprehensive post-neoliberal order, Bidenomics became an industrial strategy to out-compete China on climate and technology. If Bidenomics was subterfuge for “great-power competition” with China—which Van Jackson and I think it was, among others—it could never be a program for the working-class and would fail to remake the Democratic coalition, let alone win the presidency for Kamala Harris.

Biden came to office wanting his presidency to be compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s. But unlike FDR’s New Deal, Biden’s “Build Back Better” lacked a vision that could be sold to the American people—even the name had less punch than “a New Deal.” Biden’s “Build Back Better Framework” initially had elements of an expansive social welfare project: universal childcare, maternity leave, good jobs for Americans without a college education. But then that framework ran into Congress. FDR had supermajorities in Congress; Biden had senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to deal with, along with a sizable Republican minority. 

To get aspects of Build Back Better (BBB) passed through the Senate, Biden discarded its welfarist elements and argued that federal spending on infrastructure and climate were investments in national security. The CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) emerged from this shift. “This is not designed to be stimulus,” said head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Cecilia Rouse, after the passage of the IRA. “It’s designed to be the most strategic, effective investments so that we can continue to compete against China and other countries that are making bigger investments in their infrastructure.” The result was a package of tax credits, corporate incentives—and, to be fair, some labor protections—that did not benefit the working-class directly or affect them in the short term, but were constraints to China’s global influence. Then Biden’s enthusiasm for BBB waned after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and in the face of opposition within his own party, and he rolled out climate and labor policies in piecemeal fashion rather than as a unitary, ambitious response to economic insecurity and inequality. High consumer prices overtook the news cycle and outweighed the proposed benefits of what Biden/Harris had to offer, even in a “full employment” economy.

Americans were told in the last weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign that to vote for Trump would mean voting for a fascist. But Harris’s economic strategy was not a bulwark against fascism. As historian Eric Rauchway has argued, FDR’s New Deal offered an attack on a corrupt, oligarchical order, but also a conspicuous vision of social democracy that “gave Americans permission to believe in a common purpose that was not war.” Joe Biden failed to give Americans that chance. And Harris did not have “a thing that comes to mind” that she would have done differently.

But if you want to fight fascism, the lesson of the New Deal is clear: only an affirmative, bold vision of social democracy, one framed in terms of domestic security—not war—and dependent on populist rhetoric, can stave off fascism. A repackaged form of Cold War liberalism—welfare spending through the national security state—is not enough to thwart the neo- or quasi-fascists, the autocrats, or whatever you want to call Donald Trump. This is a lesson the Democratic Party must learn.

Michael Brenes teaches history at Yale University. His new book, The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (co-written with Van Jackson), will be published in January.