Opinion: Biden’s revival of this Democratic tradition needs a 21st century update

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Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 25 books, including the New York Times best-seller, “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past” (Basic Books). Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN  — 

There was good reason for Democrats to cheer President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. The president embraced the kind of economic populism that Democrats have traditionally championed and provided a welcome antidote to the cultural red meat that the GOP likes to throw at working and middle class America as a way to soft-pedal the fact that their supply-side economic agenda actually tends to disproportionately benefit higher income Americans.

On Tuesday, Biden empathized with workers struggling to make ends meet, spoke about restoring “pride in what we do,” and touted his vision of building “an economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down.”

Democrats have a long tradition of deploying this agenda effectively. President Franklin Roosevelt remade American politics and built a durable New Deal coalition around economic programs and agencies, which included unemployment insurance, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which brought jobs and electricity to rural areas in the South, and public works spending that bolstered a vibrant middle-class even after he was gone.

His Democratic successors continued this tradition, with great political success. President Harry Truman built on Roosevelt’s programs as part of his Fair Deal and ended up defying the polls in his dramatic reelection campaign in 1948 against New York Governor Thomas Dewey.

President Lyndon Johnson offered a full menu of economic support to working Americans, including Medicare and federal spending on education, as part of his Great Society. His landslide victory against the Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona in 1964 revolved around eviscerating his opponent’s opposition to core programs like Social Security that working families counted on. In his superb history of the Democratic Party, Georgetown historian Michael Kazin documented how the attempt to achieve a kind of “moral capitalism” has been at the heart of the party’s appeal.

But times have changed and Biden has a tough road ahead. While the president offered a robust vision of how federal investment has and could create jobs in key sectors such as the semi-conductor industry and infrastructure, the kinds of manufacturing jobs that were at the heart of federal investment between the 1930s and 1960s have vastly diminished and are not likely to return.

Biden needs to acknowledge how his economic populism will address the industries of the 2020s rather than those of the 1950s and 1960s. Today, the high-tech sector favors employees with greater educational credentials than many Americans can afford, while service sector jobs tend to be nonunionized, with meager benefits and very little long-term security.

As Biden touts the promise of manufacturing jobs tied to a greener infrastructure, for instance, it’s unclear how many of these will be created and sustained within the current high-tech and financial services centered economy. He will also need to offer ways to expand access to those positions and provide greater security in the service sector.

Biden faces another challenge: public trust in government remains low, a trend that can be traced back to the 60s. If Americans don’t believe that the government can be effective and do what politicians say their policies will do, then it will be extraordinarily difficult for Biden to win support for an agenda of economic populism that revolves around federal investment in the economy.

Biden needs to devote as much energy to combating this distrust as he does to the promise of more robust government intervention. The good news for the president is that voters often express very positive views of specific public policies when the conversation shifts away from more abstract conversations of trust in the government.

The more that he can talk about concrete programs—as he is doing by raising the possibility of Republicans cutting Social Security and Medicare spending and repeatedly mentioning legislation that funds new local building projects or subsidizes clean vehicles —the more he can combat distrustful sentiment. Biden seems to be doing just that by traveling to the sunshine state to drive home his support for Social Security and Medicare, establishing a contrast to Sen. Rick Scott of Florida. Scott, who denied charges of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare, appeared on CNN Thursday to double down on his proposal to sunset federal programs every five years in order to force Congress to reauthorize them.

Finally, in an age of polarization, Biden will have to confront the fact that many Americans vote based on their cultural and political leanings rather than the pocketbook issues they may or may not accurately attribute to the executive branch. As Nick Hanauer wrote in the Prospect, “Democrats often shake their heads in amazement that, even though the American economy has performed much better under Democratic presidents than Republicans since World War II … polling almost always shows that more people see Republicans as being better for the economy.”

This is a relatively intractable challenge, although we have seen in recent presidential elections that it still might be possible to win over swing voters, especially those who might be turned off by the GOP’s culture war agenda and the chaos many contemporary Republican politicians have sowed. The recent midterms also showed that it is possible for voters to break with expected patterns.

None of this is to say that economic populism is not a winning issue and an important policy agenda. It just won’t be an easy sell and the Biden administration needs to consider just how it will adjust this important Democratic tradition to modern economic times in a way that resonates with voters. If President Biden can figure out how to achieve that goal, he might help his party win back voters who have drifted away from their coalition in recent decades.