As Democrats puzzle over how President Biden can be so unpopular, it’s worth looking at the global context — because he’s actually doing better than most Western leaders.
In the Morning Consult approval ratings for global leaders, Biden polls better than leaders in Canada, Britain, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands, Norway, France and Japan.
Here in America, we often attribute Biden’s unpopularity to his age, and that’s certainly part of it. But youthful leaders abroad are even less popular: In Britain, people fault the 43-year-old prime minister, Rishi Sunak, for being “too inexperienced for these grim times,” as The New Statesman put it.
The United States is doing better economically than most other countries, but Biden’s challenge is still that he represents the establishment at a time when there is deep suspicion around the globe of elites and globalization — yet there are also lessons from abroad that could help Biden beat Donald Trump. So while there’s a far-right tide that may also swamp the United States, it’s not hopeless for Biden.
Fareed Zakaria notes in his brilliant new book, “Age of Revolutions,” that a backlash to globalization after the 2008-09 financial crisis fed political uprisings in many Western countries, parallel to the rise of the Tea Party and the ethnonationalist takeover of the Republican Party that was happening in the United States.
“These anti-globalization parties have successfully tapped into the social and economic anxiety of millions,” Zakaria writes. These narratives may be untrue or simplistic, but they are reshaping the West.
For anyone who can’t imagine Trump’s winning again, consider what has happened in countries we think of as socially liberal. The Sweden Democrats, a party with neo-Nazi roots, has surged to become the country’s second-largest party.
In Germany, the extreme nationalist Alternative for Germany party is leading in eastern parts of the country. Italy is governed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose far-right party has links to neo-fascists.
Then there’s the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders — who once sought to ban the Quran and called Moroccan immigrants “scum” — won national elections in November.
What are the lessons for Biden from this global trend?
First, far-right parties “all feed on anti-immigration sentiment,” notes Sylvie Kauffmann of Le Monde in France. One strategy to defuse this, pursued with some success by Denmark’s liberal prime minister, is to signal that the left can also curb immigration.
I’m uncomfortable with this strategy. I flinch at Denmark’s crackdown on immigrants and I’m wary of Biden’s push to show how firm he can be on immigration. I exist only because of the compassion that the United States showed to refugees in 1952, when it admitted my dad. Yet I’m even more horrified by the prospect of a return to the White House of a man who demonizes immigrants and separated children from their parents at the border.
So on balance, reluctantly and nervously, I’m OK with Biden’s increasingly harsh stance on immigration — and politically he has an advantage because he is proposing a crackdown as Republicans wring their hands and block it. Biden hasn’t seized that advantage, but the international scene suggests he would benefit if he did: He could shout from the rooftops that in practice it is he, not Trump, who is the tough guy on immigration.
The other lesson from across the industrialized world is the importance of educated liberals showing greater sensitivity to the working class, which has drifted rightward in country after country. In Britain, the Labour Party is trying to win back working-class voters with more moderation in both policies and tone, and this may be working: It is leading in the polls.
In the United States, Biden is in a better position than some other Democrats to recover working-class voters, just as they helped him win both the primaries and the general election in 2020. Biden may be the most religiously observant president in decades and is strongly pro-union. Instead of condescending, he speaks from the heart about working-class fragility. He tells a poignant story that I hope he shares more often:
His dad, while working at a car dealership, attended his office Christmas party but was disgusted when the owner threw out silver dollars on the floor for employees to scramble after. The elder Biden walked out and away from the job — and made sure his son knew that a job isn’t just about pay but also about dignity.
With stories like that, Biden can compete for working-class voters. (If he gets out and campaigns more!) It helps that his opponent is a billionaire whose scores of felony charges complicate any effort to run as an anti-corruption populist. Biden’s policies also have a legitimate populist tinge, from the call for higher taxes on the rich to his record delivering on a price cap for insulin — a crucial issue for the eight million Americans who need it.
In short: On immigration and on economic policy, in his background and in his faith, Biden has a chance to out-populist the populist.
Biden may also be helped by a recognition that some of his antagonists don’t have core values so much as a box of tricks. That brings me to Senator Katie Britt, who in her response to the State of the Union address was caught in deceptions about human trafficking to try to hurt Democrats.
As someone who has been writing about human trafficking for three decades, I was appalled to see Britt diminish a critical human rights issue by misleading the public about a survivor’s story and treating her as a political prop. If Britt actually cared about trafficking, there are policies she could back (like fixing foster care, now a common pipeline to traffickers). Some Republicans did excellent work on the issue under President George W. Bush.
Instead, Britt displayed the worst kind of political cynicism, taking something as horrific as modern slavery and using it to manipulate voters. She exploited for her own purposes women who already have suffered brutally.
Even in times of a global populist headwind, that hollowness of his opposition gives Biden an opening.
