Bidenomics: Farewell to an Idea? 

As the Democratic Party reckons with another loss to Donald Trump, no issue looms larger than its continued hemorrhaging of working-class voters. It’s not hard to find proximate causes for this crisis. Inflation—which rose from 1.4 percent when Biden took office and peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022—certainly eroded the party’s razor-thin 2020 margins in crucial states. The cost of housing and childcare, meanwhile, rose at an even faster rate. As many commentators pointed out, the Democrats allowed the Covid-era social safety net expansions to lapse just as inflation was peaking. 

But the picture grows more complicated when we consider what Biden accomplished from a policy perspective. His Department of Labor and National Labor Relations Board genuinely advocated for workers’ rights. He was the first occupant of the White House to walk a picket line. Above all there was “Bidenomics.” The term, as Osita Nwanevu explained in these pages, describes “a three-pronged approach to reviving an active role for the federal government in setting the direction of the economy: substantially increasing public investment, involving the federal government more directly in the development of the workforce, and bolstering economic competition.”

Bidenomics is associated with three major pieces of legislation: the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the Infrastructure Bill. Together they amount to as transparently assertive an industrial policy as the US has pursued since the mobilization for World War II. The total package could reach $1.6 trillion, much of it directed toward green energy and advanced technology. Biden claimed that the IRA would “create tens of thousands of good-paying jobs and clean energy manufacturing jobs, solar factories in the Midwest and the South, wind farms across the plains and off our shores, clean hydrogen projects and more.” The CHIPS Act, he said, could stimulate “more than 1 million construction jobs alone over the next six years building semiconductor factories.” These initiatives have indeed drawn a remarkable level of private investment: over $1 trillion by this November, per the administration. Not for nothing did Bernie Sanders concede that “Joe Biden has been the most pro-worker president since FDR.”

What, then, explains the disjuncture? If Biden did so much to boost the economy and labor markets, why didn’t voters feel the effects? One way to answer this question is by analyzing the underlying structure of Bidenomics. Biden often pitched his industrial policy as a way to grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up. But in reality these initiatives primarily subsidize corporations; the trickle-down benefits for workers and regular people are supposed to come later. The vast majority of government funds are routed through business incentives—tax credits, subsidies, public-private partnerships, and so forth—and through grants to be disbursed by middlemen at universities, banks, nonprofits, and other parastate organizations. The result is a massive program built upon business and nonprofit welfarism. 

Such an approach necessarily takes time to become visible to voters—not something that Biden had on his side. Weeks before he bowed out of the 2024 race, only about a quarter of Americans reported positive benefits from the bills. Roughly the same share of respondents (37 percent) believed that Donald Trump had been as successful at boosting infrastructure and creating jobs as Biden (40 percent). The millions of Americans locked into low-wage, irregular, or service work did not rest easy at night because corporations were planning new investments. 

Bidenomics encapsulates something fundamental about the Democratic Party. Since the New Deal, one cornerstone of its approach to governance has been to subsidize and insure corporations and firms engaged in providing housing, health care, high-tech manufacturing, and other activities that might contribute to the common good. Rather than call this industrial policy—with its connotations of smokestacks and state planning—this bundle of strategies is better understood as market-making. In a country as conservative as the United States, it has some political sense. It allows Democrats to shape economic and social outcomes in ways that deflect right-wing accusations of governmental overarch; it tries to align progressive social goals with the interests of capital, which might otherwise lash out or simply flee the country. Perhaps most importantly, from the 1930s to the 1960s it was subsumed within a larger and more robust welfarist agenda that did offer direct benefits like public works employment while also significantly expanding the public social safety net: Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare were all established in this period. 

In subsequent decades, however, as unions declined and public-sector austerity took hold, the political expedience of market-making gradually colonized the entirety of the Democratic imagination. A paradigmatic example of this shift is Obamacare. Rather than deliver a genuinely public option, the Obama administration created a highly complicated system of incentives and subsidies to expand access to private insurance markets—which drove up costs, led to massive windfalls for insurance companies, and ceded ever more control over our lives to health care corporations. Even as it takes root through public policies, Democratic market-making has in fact thinned the relationship between citizens and the state, which has come to depend on the interests and whims of capital to actually deliver social progress. 

In some ways Bidenomics was poised to break from this status quo. But despite the scale of the resources expended, it ultimately built on the old market-making structures. The history of Democratic policymaking helps explain how we got here: to the point where even momentous federal policy initiatives fail to win over voters.   

Industrial policy has fueled American economic dynamism since the earliest days of the Republic. In his Report on Manufactures (1791) Alexander Hamilton implored the state to impose protectionist tariffs, pass mercantilist trade policies, and provide “bounties”—that is, tariff-derived cash—to support growth. His developmentalist ideas were adapted across the nineteenth century, when the government borrowed money and spent it on canals and railroads, stole land from Native Americans and transferred it to settlers, and established public “A&T” universities that, to this day, conduct research for agriculture and industry.

The modern pattern of market-making, though, emerged during the New Deal—a period when conservatives were quick to charge Democrats with socialist tendences. To deflect or plausibly deny that the state was shaping industry, New Dealers embraced three primary forms of indirect intervention: insurance or loan guarantees for businesses and corporations (which wonks today call “de-risking”); contracts with, direct subsidies for, or investments in businesses; and targeted tax credits.

I have described this approach as “supply-side liberalism.”¹ Where the familiar conservative version of “supply-side economics” is based on cutting taxes and regulations, Democrats use investment, financing, insurance, and targeted tax credits to stimulate growth in particular sectors. Rather than vacate the state and invite businesses alone to shape the economy, in other words, they subsidize businesses to shape the economy in more or less targeted if not directly planned ways.

The promise—and pitfalls—of granting the private sector wide autonomy over the use of public subsidies are illustrated by the operations of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). By design, the FHA’s mortgage lending insurance created a lot of new business for home builders, for the primary and secondary manufacturing sectors whose products went into homes, and, of course, for the financial institutions that brokered home loans. It mostly did this indirectly—not by paying construction firms or transferring money to lenders, but by insuring the home loans that banks made to applicants. If a homebuyer defaulted on their mortgage, FHA insurance bailed out the lending bank but not the homeowner. When making FHA-backed loans, banks were effectively lending house money. Their risks—and profits—were utterly socialized. 

Here was where redlining came in. If banks granted home loans to applicants or in areas deemed risky—in practice, this meant Black Americans as well communities home to large groups of certain ethnic or minority groups—they were generally denied FHA insurance. The state’s responsibility for housing discrimination is now widely recognized. But real estate and banking interests began honing such lending practices in the late nineteenth century.² New Dealers even hired bankers and real estate professionals into the FHA and HOLC to ensure that the “best market practices” were followed. The private sector taught the state how to create the markets that produced the modern, lily-white suburb.

By the 1940s, New Dealers’ market-making initiatives proliferated precisely because they offered politically and fiscally lighter alternatives to the more direct social benefits created by European social democracies.³ The state deployed loan guarantees and subsidies in sectors far beyond mortgage markets. Following the New Deal, government’s invisible hand wore the glove of many private sector intermediaries—banks, Silicon Valley startups, universities, corporations, and contractors. These government subsidized organizations fostered not only rental housing, private pension plans, and postindustrial urban redevelopment, but also specific products like nanotechnology, LCD displays, and lithium batteries.

Consider the Internet, which was first created in the late 1960s to facilitate internal communication between researchers working for the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPAnet, as it was called, was expanded in the 1980s through the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), to connect university-based computer scientists through the Computer Science Network. In 1993 NSF-funded students at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign also created Mosaic, the first freely available web browser, with web pages that included both text and graphics. By the 1990s, as the fantastic commercial possibilities began to attract investment, the NSF awarded contracts to private corporations to develop and maintain the internet’s infrastructure. In 1998 it entirely ceded control—and future profits—to the private sector.

Where government’s hand was most visible, and devastatingly so, was in the military-industrial state. As the historian Tim Barker has pointed out, in the 1950s and 1960s the aerospace industry was the largest manufacturing employer in the US—and it did 80 percent of its business through contracts with the Department of Defense. Even today the Pentagon functions as a global financier and broker for domestic arms manufacturers. But then Republicans have never taken umbrage at state support for warfare.

In the Reagan years federal subsidies flowed toward military projects, including the Strategic Defense Initiative, his unrealized missile defense shield (which the incoming Trump administration has pledged to revive as an American version of Israel’s Iron Dome). At the same time, he slashed income and corporate tax rates, exploding the federal deficit. As the government borrowed foreign capital to paper over its deficits, Wall Street financiers expressed concerns that it was “crowding out” opportunities for private investment. Managing the deficit, they stressed, was essential for maintaining businesses confidence—which is to say, for domestic investment.

Bill Clinton and the generation of “New Democrats” took those warnings to heart. They balanced budgets by sacrificing traditional liberal commitments, most significantly by ending welfare as an entitlement. In search of policy models, they even held up the FHA’s mortgage insurance provisions as an ideal. In their influential book Reinventing Government, the consultants David Osborne and Ted Gaebler claimed that the FHA showed that the way to solve “a problem generated by the market”—in that case bankruptcies, a foreclosure crisis, and a sharp downturn in construction jobs—was to “restructure that market.”⁴

A related article of faith among the New Democrats was that the state could maximize resources by inviting nongovernmental partners—nonprofits or private contractors—to administer public programs. When Clinton signed legislation ending the federal welfare entitlement, he offered just such a public-private partnership as a replacement. The “Welfare to Work Partnership” delivered some $3 billion in subsidies to businesses, nonprofits, and local governments to create jobs for former welfare recipients. (Businesses also enjoyed generous tax advantages.) This effectively inverted the logic of the New Deal era: rather than offer bounties to business to develop crucial economic sectors in the context of a welfare state, it invited business to erode and even replace the social safety net.

By the turn of the century Democratic market-making had narrowed into highly technical fiscal and monetary policies: targeted tax breaks, interest-rate adjustments, and the odd loan guarantee. This withered scope for public action defined the 2000 Democratic Party platform, which conveyed Al Gore’s hopes to secure growth while addressing climate change. Americans, it proclaimed, had been “led to believe they had to make a choice between the economy and the environment.” This “false choice” missed how the “right incentives”—tax credits and budget neutral spending—could spur consumers and businesses to invest in “new environmentally-friendly technologies” such as fuel-efficient cars. The chastened Democrats promised “no new bureaucracies, no new agencies, no new organizations. But there will be action and there will be progress.” 

The technical expertise, legal and regulatory knowledge, and sheer fiscal and financial wonkery required to run these circuitous programs was prodigious. As they proliferated, the ranks of middlemen swelled: nonprofit staffers, lawyers, economists, think tank researchers. By the twenty-first century, these professionals—along with their private sector partners in finance, health care, and Silicon Valley—increasingly defined the Democratic agenda.⁵ 

As Barack Obama took office, the Democrats flirted with a return to bold government solutions, in response to the interconnected crises set off by the Wall Street crash. But ultimately he offered generous and direct aid only to big banks imperiled by mass foreclosures. To expand private health insurance, Obamacare embraced the full suite of market-making tools: budget-neutral incentives, regulations, credits, fees, and targeted taxes. To stimulate green technologies, Obama pursued a limited version of the old federal de-risking, loan-guarantee model. Despite promising that his election would mark “the moment when our planet began to heal,” he never passed significant climate legislation. 

This was partly due to Republican obstruction. But the Democrats utterly failed to forge their own consensus on the green transition. Obama’s top economic advisor, Larry Summers, was staunchly opposed to creating a “Green Bank” to finance climate-friendly startups. Others argued that he should simply shelve climate legislation: the post-2008 recession would slow carbon emissions in any event.⁶

Today Obama’s green policy is remembered, if at all, for a $500 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, a California-based solar cell manufacturer, which declared bankruptcy on the eve of his reelection campaign. That Mitt Romney could stoke public outrage about this comparatively trivial failure says much about voters’ amnesia about decades of actual existing industrial policy. Meanwhile, the Obama administration made successful loans to Ford ($5.9 billion) and Tesla ($465 million) to develop electric vehicle technology—but these are largely forgotten. 

By the time Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, the prospect of inclusive growth had all but disappeared. He was strikingly clear about this development. In a debate with Donald Trump, he dwelled on the concept of the “K-shaped economy.” This was, he said, “a fancy phrase for everything that’s wrong with Trump’s presidency…what ‘K’ means is those at the top are seeing things go up, and those at the middle and below are seeing things go down and get worse.” If this structural crisis—a dual economy that served the elite while exploiting the rest—was the main reason for Biden’s embrace of industrial policy, there were three other contingent factors: growing urgency around the climate crisis, particularly among younger policy advocates and experts; momentary acceptance of government spending during the Covid-19 pandemic among traditional opponents; and Democratic hopes that a Green New Deal could help forge a coalition of the working class, minority groups, and well-educated suburbanites.

The Build Back Better (BBB) package, the doomed bill from which the IRA was carved, contained the seeds of this alternative future. It was the first Democratic proposal in generations that not only went big on green market-making, but that also shored up and expanded the social safety net, proposing free universal preschool for three- and four-year-olds, making the Covid-era child tax credits permanent, and offering significant subsidies for paid family leave, childcare, and eldercare. The neoliberal fever seemed about to break. 

Business struck back. As the economic historian Andrew Yamakawa Elrod has shown, an array of actors banded together to lobby against the bill. Industry groups that depended on low-wage service work for their outsized profits—distribution, retail, leisure, and hospitality—knew that its child support and family leave allowances would threaten their low labor costs. Multinational firms and Wall Street interests were alarmed at the prospect of increased corporate taxes. And Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema opposed expanding social benefits. By the late fall and early winter of 2021, BBB and its New Deal-style direct social benefits were dead. 

Still, the market-making bills that did pass were momentous. To give credit where due: Biden’s green industrial policy was a technocratic tour de force. Learning from Obama’s fiscal timidity, his staffers understood that lightly nudging markets would not suffice to meet the climate crisis. This is because of what economists call a market failure. Developing foundational technologies is often initially prohibitively expensive, because of low immediate consumer demand or lack of economies of scale. Private investment is unlikely to take the risk—and needs a helping shove (and often some security) from the state. 

Bidenomics was that shove. The clean energy strategists Lachlan Carey and Jun Ukita Shepard have described the relationship between its three bills in anatomical terms. The CHIPS Act is the “‘brains’ of the operation,” underwriting billions to foundational research in energy biofuels, advanced battery technology, and quantum computing. The Infrastructure Act is the backbone, supporting not only traditional roads, ports, and water infrastructure but also clean hydrogen, low and zero-emission transit buses, and EPA Superfund projects to clean up contaminated sites. The IRA is the financial heart of the machine, subsidizing both the production and consumption of green technology. The lions’ share of federal spending has been directed at foundational research and development and the initial scaling up of markets—the stage, as Carey and Shepard put it, “where private markets are less likely to invest in research, development, demonstration, and early commercialization.” 

Bidenomics also aims to onshore entire supply chains. For instance, the Section 45X Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit supports the domestic production of components for wind and solar energy, battery development, and electric vehicles. Take solar panels: the credit offers $3 per kilogram for manufacturing polysilicon, which transforms sunlight into electricity. Companies turning that element into components for solar cells receive $12 per square meter. The next links up the chain receive credits—ranging from $40 to $70 per kilowatt—based on how much electricity their cells and panels produce. Along with a range of other subsidies for aluminum and other core components, these credits are projected to reduce the costs to producers of domestic solar by more than 40 percent, according to Advanced Energy United, a consortium of green energy businesses. They have been effective: the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that wind turbine service technicians and solar photovoltaic installers will be the fastest-growing occupations through 2033.

As far as energy and component production goes, the IRA was responsible for some 646 energy projects (either announced or underway) that have produced 334,565 jobs as of August 2024. The Swiss firm Meyer Burger used 45X to complete building facilities in Goodyear, Arizona. The US manufacturer First Solar made a $450 million investment in a new R&D center in Perrysburg, Ohio, which they commissioned in 2024; hiring is underway for an estimated three hundred new positions to be filled this year. Perhaps most impressive, the South Korean corporation Qcells invested more than $2.5 billion on a solar-cell and module production facility in Dalton, Georgia—which anchors a region devastated by the decline of the textile industry. That campus employs two thousand full-time workers who produce 5.1 gigawatts worth of solar panels each year, the most of any site in the country. 

Clean energy manufacturing requires semiconductors, which are the building blocks of solar cells as well as the digital components of wind turbines, electric vehicles, and advanced energy storage. Every electric vehicle contains between two to three thousand chips. As the pandemic shortage made clear, US industries relied overwhelmingly on foreign production. This is where the CHIPS Act came in. The legislation granted $50 billion to the Department of Commerce: $11 billion for semiconductor research and development and $39 billion for chip manufacturing and workforce training. The resulting surge of private investment has been impressive. According to the Financial Times, by April 2024 some thirty-one projects worth at least $1 billion had been founded since the act was passed, compared to just four in 2019. By that point the government had spent just over half of the act’s incentives.

Since the election the Biden administration has been working to get the rest of the subsidies to businesses. Leading recipients include Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), Samsung, and Micron. In December the commerce department announced that Texas Instruments could receive as much as $1.61 billion in direct CHIPS funding for projects in Texas and Utah. The department now predicts that by 2030 domestic markets could produce a fifth of the world’s chips; until very recently, the US produced none. 

Bidenomics, in short, has certainly bolstered domestic supply chains and manufacturing—and made jobs in the process. Unless the Trump administration completely shuts down the initiatives, more are likely to follow. But it should be clear by now that these tax credits and subsidies first benefit corporations and professional middlemen rather than working people. This is true even of programs for underserved communities. Take the IRA’s Environmental Justice grants, which, among a range of initiatives, are intended to fund environmental cleanup efforts, workforce development, air quality monitoring, and asthma remediation programs. In 2023 and early 2024 the EPA announced two rounds of funding totaling more than $1 billion.

Such projects could have made Bidenomics more visible to voters, if only at the margins, but the money was not handed out directly. Instead it was routed through what the administration called “Regional Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmakers.” These include Fordham University ($50 million), the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina ($100 million), and Texas Southern University ($50 million). Those organizations had until summer 2024 to begin opening subgrant competitions. A spokesperson for the Research Triangle Institute conceded that it hadn’t planned to make any awards until this past fall. Following the election, however, local environmental justice groups now worry that Republicans will claw back or redirect funds. 

While some bloat is to be expected with any massive government undertaking, such public-private initiatives also serve to hollow out the state. Government is underwriting its future incapacity. And middlemen breed middlemen. The application process for smaller, community-based grants poses greater legal and technical barriers than do the subsidies for businesses. The EPA’s solution to that problem was to hire more intermediaries: independent contractors who assist both applicants and subgrant-making organizations. An EPA press release explained that the Technical Assistance Services for Communities (TASC) program “has the expertise and skills needed to guide communities in the direction of their choice.” Given such administrative complexities, the recent flurry of CHIPS Act subsidies is unlikely to be replicated for environmental justice groups. 

Similarly, the EPA’s $27 billion IRA-funded “national green bank” was designed to make direct grants to community groups, individual firms, and smaller organizations. But in April 2023 the EPA quietly announced an alternative approach: it would disburse money to between four and ten nonprofit organizations that would, in turn, act as funding agents. Last spring and summer President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made a big show about rolling out the initial awards. But rather than describe anyone doing anything substantive, they merely said that $20 billion was awarded to eight community development banks and nonprofits—which would then set up their own subgrant process. 

Even when grants have been made, businesses and professional middlemen have often benefited first. Last October Climate United, which oversees $7 billion in federal green bank funds, made the first of its grants (a revolving loan, in fact, meaning that Climate United will continue to offer green financing well into the future). It delivered $31 million in financing to Scenic Hill Solar, a solar energy developer based in Little Rock, Arkansas, which will use the money to lower the carbon footprint and utility bills of the University of Arkansas system. Lowering carbon footprints and energy costs is important. But it’s also byzantine, top-down, and slow-moving structures like this that led Adam Tooze to conclude that Bidenomics was “not a policy ‘by’ or ‘of’ the middle class but ‘for’ them”—to say nothing of the working class.

The public-private grants system is inefficient in other ways, too. In December Vox described the thicket of state and local regulations, administrative authorities, and zoning requirements that slows the funding and development process. Take the IRA’s Home Energy Rebates program, which offers households up to $14,000 to install more efficient heating and cooling systems. Those credits generally take the form of reimbursements from a utility company or a state agency. States and utilities have struggled to set up reimbursement systems, the feds were slow to approve them, and higher interest rates blunted consumer enthusiasm. In addition to up-front cash, then, beneficiaries need patience.

The success of market-making efforts always and ultimately depends on wider market conditions. Arizona is an instructive case in how these conditions can slow progress to a crawl. The state successfully courted the semiconductor industry, but a shortage of skilled labor curbed development. (This is a national problem: one industry association estimates that the US will face a shortfall of nearly 70,000 workers by 2030.) So Maricopa County created the Quick Start program, a CHIPS-funded ten-day crash course in chipmaking. Graduates of the program receive a “pre-apprentice credential,” intended to help them land entry-level, $30-per-hour jobs with promises of future training and advancement. The Maricopa County Community College District offered thirty-one special degree and certificate programs, some developed in partnership with Intel. 

But in January 2024 Business Insider reported that the jobs simply weren’t there yet: 58 percent of Quick Start graduates were looking for work and 11 percent had stopped trying. Last May Intel and TSMC announced delays or entire holds on Arizona projects, citing labor and material costs. Other firms entered holding patterns while awaiting federal grant decisions. Still others pressed pause until the outcome of the election was known.

Volatile economic dynamics and the whims of business interests limited another promising initiative: Pennsylvania’s Whole Home Repairs program for residential decarbonatization. It supports up to $50,000 in home repairs to improve energy and water efficiency and, as an incentive, allows homeowners of modest means to pursue a wider range of other essential repairs. Decarbonizing housing and commercial buildings is an underappreciated piece of the green transition: together those structures account for roughly three quarters of national energy use. State senator Nikil Saval spearheaded the innovative program using $125 million in pandemic relief funds; aspects were included in the commonwealth’s $4.6 billion application for IRA funds. (Senator John Fetterman has introduced legislation that would take the program national.) As of last summer 1,151 residences were repaired or modified. But local administrators had received 25,700 applications. Many counties froze the process in the face of overwhelming demand. Others capped their awards at just under $25,000, a figure that would trigger compliance with prevailing wage laws.

Small contractors found such wage regulations burdensome. Larger contractors were simply not interested in small scale repair projects. (The construction industry was booming.) In a state as divided as Pennsylvania, the legislature declined to allocate additional funds to beef up the programs. Maryann Velez runs a nonprofit in Luzerne County that helped thirty-five homeowners apply for the Whole Home Repair program. None were funded. “You could just hear the defeat in their voices,” she lamented. “It’s very disheartening.”

When they advocate for market-making as their political vision, today’s Democrats sound like nothing so much as used car salesmen: they promise discounts, rebates, credits, low ARPs. When he signed the IRA, Biden announced the plan would benefit “working families” by “providing them rebates to buy new and efficient appliances, weatherize their homes, get tax credits for purchasing heat pumps and rooftop solar, electric stoves, ovens, dryers.” At his final state of the union, salesman Joe promised to move more inventory. “When you refinance your home, you can save $1,000 or more . . .” Cutting usurious credit card fees, forgiving student loan debt, and promoting electric vehicles are obviously good things to do. But when the main thrust of your appeal to voters is the stuff of daytime television ads—low APR! no credit down! get out of debt!—you are a party adrift. 

The Trump administration could theoretically shut down many of Biden’s green initiatives. But the electoral benefits to Republicans would be unclear: most of the IRA’s recent projects are based in congressional districts with Republican representatives. It’s more likely that they will redirect subsidies to their districts and preferred businesses—including in the extractive sector—and brag about job growth. They are already at it. In 2023, when Kamala Harris appeared at the Qcells plant in Dalton, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene accused her of “trying to take credit for jobs that President Trump and Governor Kemp created in Georgia back in 2019.” 

That Harris did not even make the case for a renewed Build Back Better agenda speaks volumes about the Democratic Party’s continued aversion to state intervention. Yet if Obama’s bank bailout and the rapid expansion of the social safety net during the pandemic have taught Americans anything, it’s that the state can undertake big, expensive, and effective policies. The Democratic Party must learn this lesson, too, and yoke their technocratic know-how to public initiatives that squarely address economic insecurity, social inequality, and the green transition. This will be the surest—and probably the only—way to win back working-class voters. Far more than the party’s future is at stake.