UAW's Victory And Joe Biden's Curse

The president catches hell easily; his successes often go ignored

With all that’s happening in the world, you may have missed the news that the autoworkers’ union prevailed in labor contract negotiations with General Motors, the last of the Big Three car makers, after a six-week strike.  

The deal, if ratified as expected, would deliver workers significant wage gains (25 percent) over four-and-a-half years. President Biden hailed the development from the White House as a “historic agreement,” and called it “good economic news, showing something I’ve always believed: Worker power…is critical to building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up.” 

This is mostly a story about victorious workers and the power of collective bargaining, but by the transferative property, which I just invented, it should also be a victory for Biden, who sided with the workers, walked a picket line with them, and can rightfully note that their success is evidence of a strong economy, with tight labor markets. By the inverse property it is also another mark against Donald Trump, who tried to bamboozle the workers into thinking he supported their efforts, then held a campaign event at a non-union shop and tried to subvert the very solidarity that just prevailed.

I don’t actually think there’s any other reasonable way to sum it all up, but apart from rare entries like this one by Greg Sargent, it’s not how the political side of the UAW strike story played out in the public sphere.

Trump initially succeeded at confusing the issue, because he was able to convince many people of his lies while Biden was still deciding how tightly he wanted to link himself to the work stoppage. Getting journalists to correct the record once Trump’s deceit became clear was harder than it should’ve been. There was a whole subgenre of punditry dedicated to the question of whether the strike would backfire. And then, when it was all over and ended well, many of those same pundits had lost interest in the story. Reporters had moved on to other pressing news. Add it all up and you might have a wash vis-a-vis public perception of the candidates’ support for unions, against a backdrop of continued mass confusion about the state of the economy, where most people report good financial circumstances in their personal lives but believe the wider economy is depressed.

It was, in other words, a microcosm of the Biden presidency, through which he has governed well without reaping benefit from those telling the story of his administration. 

Fortunately for Biden, it isn’t too tough to imagine this substantive success caroming its way into the minds of voters. 

For as long as I’ve covered politics, Democrats have been able to count on the support of most unions, even as their memberships drifted rightward. That increasingly awkward dynamic has been driven by larger political and social realignments, but to the extent that union leaders hoped to slow the trend, they had their work cut out for them. Democratic policies—encompassing health-care protections, minimum-wage initiatives, corporate taxation, and downward redistribution—are clearly better in aggregate for working-class people than Republican policies. But Democrats haven’t made a high priority of unionization itself. Republicans have made the contrast a bit clearer with their doctrinaire opposition to organized labor and aggressive assaults on union power in states they control, but the picture wasn’t always as clear as it could have been: Democrats support your union and the other guys don’t. 

Biden has changed all that. And what might make his substantive success finally pay off politically is the union itself—the thousands of midwest autoworkers who can be reminded repeatedly that Biden had their back when Trump didn’t.

Unfortunately, almost nothing else in modern politics works that way.

Voters continue to believe (or at least tell pollsters) that the economy is terrible. Whatever real information drives them to say their personal circumstances are solid (greater purchasing power, larger savings) they are bombarded with much more bad or decontextualized  information about the bigger picture, and there is no superstructure in place (like a union) to lay out for them why that information is wrong. Mainstream news has a big incentive to hide from allegations of bias by covering positive economic news skeptically; Republicans and their propaganda outlets have much more obvious incentives to just insist everything is ruined, or to at least place a bunch of emphasis on the trees (high staple-goods prices) while ignoring the forest (wages have risen faster). Left-wing media and left-wing influencers do much the same thing. They are loath to accept economic indicators at face value because they’d then have to acknowledge that the U.S. has achieved full employment, real wage growth, and falling inequality all without either a radical policy revolution or a president who identifies as a democratic socialist. Their reach is more limited, they have no Fox News, but they hector any liberals or Democrats who have the temerity to observe that conditions are better now than they were under Trump—the last time Americans were satisfied with the economy—and it works as a force multiplier. How many Democrats do you see running victory laps the way Republicans did under Trump?

I have taken to arguing in recent years that though good ideas, good governing, and good policy implementation are all important—indeed, they are the “why” of liberal politics—they are also mere table stakes. In these times, a president and his party should expect a low ceiling of public support, and will struggle to maintain power through long periods of misgovernance. But the converse is not true. Governing well is not a golden ticket to political success. Democrats can rack up legislative victories, implement a popular regulatory regime, preside over a strong economy, and still lose the horserace, because politics is not quite as mechanistic as many liberals have convinced themselves it is. We have not lived through a Great Depression; to the extent events have challenged us, we have had a few admirable leaders sprinkled among the bad, but none quite as gifted as FDR; we no longer have a consolidated media that will tell a simple story like “FDR ended the depression,” and even the idea that Americans rewarded Democrats for the New Deal with a generation of partisan loyalty oversimplifies the history. 

Whether or not unions can stave off the worst consequences of Biden’s unpopularity, they can’t solve every perception problem he suffers from. They can engage in targeted persuasion of workers in the midwest, but they can’t make him more popular with young people. They can’t prevent staggering misinterpretations of his record from becoming viral knowledge. They can’t stop the broader public from making the dumb inference (or believing the malicious lie) that strikes are a sign of economic weakness—a widespread sentiment that’s the labor-market equivalent of the old Tea Party line “government hands off my Medicare.” They can’t stop the reckless faction of the post-Bernie Sanders left that wants to destroy liberalism so Americans have to choose between reactionary Republicans and socialists. 

Democrats have to address those challenges directly.

One way to go about this would be to become a bit more savvy about drawing media attention to issues of economic fairness, and getting caught on the side of the little guys. It pains me to say, but I believe it’s true, that Biden nailed the substance of the UAW strike, but fumbled the politics of it. I imagine most Americans who paid less-than-complete attention don’t know that he was on the side of the workers and Trump was on the side the CEOs.

Another would be to instead rally the broad center left around the anti-authoritarian politics that brought Democrats back to power in the first place. 

The New York Times published an alarming article this week about Donald Trump’s plans for his second presidency. One of his goals is to fill the administration with Stephen Miller-approved lawyers who will abuse their powers and violate the law aggressively, secure in the belief that they can insulate themselves from future tribunals. Of all the lawyers who brought disgrace on themselves in Trump’s first term, few faced any sanction, and most of those who did worked outside the federal government. The horrors of a second Trump term are, thus, easy to  conjure—they’re the same horrors we just lived through, only worse. Fewer voices of restraint; significantly more incompetence; deeper lust for revenge; no mitigating pressure of having to face voters in four years. Pardons galore. Unbridled grievance, hatred, and corruption.

It’s a helpful splitscreen for voters who’ve soured on Biden, and ultimately I just think this stuff matters more (subjectively and objectively) than policy specifics or the precise degree of progress Democrats manage to make on issues, because it changes the question at the heart of elections. When it seemed like Mitt Romney might beat Barack Obama, liberals had to contemplate the heartbreaking possibility that Obama’s health-coverage guarantee would never take effect, and Democrats would have to start from scratch once again. All that time and effort wasted, and the country’s first black president relegated to a single term. It was an awful thing to brace for, but it was also galvanizing, and we understood it as a particularly weighty instance of the normal ebb and flow of politics. Winning is best, but living to fight another day is tolerable—it eventually happens to everybody. 

When it seems like Donald Trump might beat Joe Biden, on the other hand, we have to contemplate whether liberals will ever have the opportunity to make real progress on any issue ever again. Not “will we face a setback?” but “will we be stripped of our political rights?” It’s why instead of counseling policy moderation or gunning for a revolution that would actually just empower fascists, I’ve stressed the importance of democracy protection, and arming Democrats for the fight they’re actually in. Trump accountability and court reform would do more to help working Americans and protect them from wannabe dictators than any policy platform or any self-professed socialist ever could. Biden’s left-wing critics will reject that simple truth out of hand, but his allies can’t seem to accept it either.