Biden is waging class warfare without the war

Biden has adopted the descriptive language of the left in many ways, making frequent reference to the portion of the Trump tax cuts that benefited the top 1 percent of earners (83 percent, he says), citing the idea of “rewarding work, not wealth” as a mantra, and projecting concern for the people and groups who have been “left behind” by those “at the top.” But he hasn’t co-opted its sense of confrontation. Words he hasn’t used (in the context of American politics) since becoming president include cheat, corrupt, donor, greed, lobbyist, rigged, or structural. Twelve of the 14 times he’s said Wall Street, it’s been to suggest that its analysts support his economic vision. He has mentioned fighting for U.S. companies (“to ensure that American businesses are positioned to compete and win on the global stage”) but not against them. At his most hostile, Biden will lament the disproportionate benefits accrued by “corporations” or the misguided ideas of “my Republican friends.” (The exception to this rule is Donald Trump, whose tenure and policy objectives he mentions with a casual contempt.)... Biden had a front-row seat to a presidency whose agenda was held back by accusations of divisive class-warring. Those charges were largely unfair: Barack Obama was as loyal a friend as (regulated) American capitalism will ever have, and there was barely a socially liberal banker or corporate lawyer from New York City, Chicago, or D.C. whom he didn’t try to hire to work in his administration. The notion that he was unusually hostile to business depended in large part on the fact that he was Black, which made him susceptible to accusations of being radical, socialist, Muslim, secretly African, or whatever—it didn’t have to be accurate to convince some people that he wasn’t part of the American tradition as they understood it.