What if Biden had governed from the center left, rather than the hard left?

Would our politics be healthier and Trump's influence less?

As this dismal election season plods towards an undoubtedly dispiriting conclusion, punctuated in Arizona by Donald Trump’s upcoming rally on behalf of what he calls his team of GOP candidates, let’s consider a counterfactual.

Joe Biden’s presidential bid consisted of two contradictory elements.

The overall thematic pitch was that Biden would be an antidote to Trump’s turbulent and corrosive politics. Biden would return American politics to their normal contours. He would provide stability and reduce the heat in our politics and governance.

However, Biden also worked out a platform and agenda with Bernie Sanders that was aggressively progressive. It amounted to a blueprint to transform America's political economy into a European-style social democracy. Pursuing it was always going to increase the heat and division in American politics and governance by greatly increasing the stakes. 

As president, Biden has pursued the Biden-Sanders blueprint to remake the United States into a European-style social democracy. He has failed because of opposition within his own party. Principally from Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, but more silently from at least a handful of others.

Biden hasn’t been as reckless or irresponsible as Trump in either his actions or his rhetoric. But the attempt to pass the blueprint, largely incorporated in the Build Back Better proposal, on a straight party-line vote through the misuse of the budget resolution process turned the heat in American politics up another notch, rather than turning it down as Biden’s general thematic pitch promised.

Pursuing a divisive progressive agenda has characterized most of Biden’s presidency. The student debt forgiveness initiative is a recent example. Biden is stretching his executive authority beyond the breaking point and attempting to institute by fiat a policy that would never fly in Congress. And in the process alienating those who didn’t go to college, worked their way through it, or paid off their loans. The initiative pours salt into some of the sensitive cultural divisions in the country.

Biden wasn’t elected to enact the Biden-Sanders blueprint to transform the United States into a European-style social democracy. He was elected to be the Trump antidote.

What if, instead of attempting to ramrod a progressive agenda, Biden from the beginning had governed according to the general thematic pitch that got him elected. Governed from the center left, not the hard left. Accepted the constraints of a closely divided Congress rather than seeking to circumvent them. Try to turn down the heat in American politics rather than turning it up even higher.

In terms of policy, the outcome wouldn’t be considerably different. Biden has succeeded in pounding through Congress on largely party-line votes only two major initiatives: his bloated Covid relief bill, broadly thought to have contributed to inflation spinning out of control; and the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, the shrunken version of Build Back Better.

Most of what has been accomplished in Biden’s presidency has been through bipartisan congressional efforts to which he has been peripheral. Sinema’s infrastructure bill is a prime example.

There are 2O or so GOP senators willing to work on bipartisan governance. The infrastructure bill was supported by 19 Republican senators. Twenty-two of them recently voted for the continuing resolution to keep the federal government open past the end of the fiscal year.

Contrary to the caricature of him by the left as Mr. Obstruction, Mitch McConnell, minority leader and master parliamentarian, is one of them. He voted for both the infrastructure bill and the continuing resolution.

If Biden had attempted to govern from the get-go from the center left, there might have been several other bipartisan accomplishments.

Would this have lowered the political temperature in the country and loosened Trump’s grip on the Republican Party?

I don’t know. And certainly Biden isn’t to blame for Trump and his continuing corrosive influence. That blame rests solely with Trump and his supporters and enablers. Biden did at least beat the guy in 2020 and removed him from office.

Still, there is a sense of a missed opportunity. Biden was elected to be the Trump antidote, to lower the temperature and restore the normal contours in American politics. 

Instead of sticking to that, Biden pursued a transformative progressive agenda voters hadn’t endorsed and which couldn’t pass a closely divided Congress, increasing the political stakes and turning up the heat in our politics even more.

These are conditions conducive to Trump’s continuing influence. If the political stakes are high, you want a fighter leading your side. And Trump has no match as a political brawler.

The results of a counterfactual can never be known, only speculated. And the speculation in this case is highly tenuous.

But the feeling lingers: that the country, and our politics and governance, would be in a better place if Biden had resolved his contradiction in the other direction.

Reach Robb at robtrobb@gmail.com.