Why Joe Biden is like Harry Truman
The November/December 2023 print edition of the Washington Monthly is hot off the presses and up on washingtonmonthly.com.
The issue kicks off with the traditional editor’s note from Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris, summarizing our cover package, “Bidenomics Really Is a BFD.”
And anchoring the issue is The Great Reordering, in which Rana Foroohar of the Financial Times explains how Biden is engineering a “true economic paradigm shift.” (She discussed the article on CNN yesterday—click here for the video.)
Glastris argues that in leading such a transformation, Biden is not so much the next Franklin D. Roosevelt as he is the next Harry S. Truman.
The list of similarities between the two is long, but “the most striking parallel” is “the two men’s work to build a global order”:
Truman is most remembered today for the doctrine that bears his name: committing U.S. power to contain communism and support democracies. This involved military actions, as in Korea, and new military alliances like NATO, but also vast economic interventions and investments that integrated the world’s democracies into a common trading system that could withstand the threat of totalitarianism while building a broad middle class.
…Biden is attempting something similar: He is pursuing economic agreements with U.S. allies to boost average wages in their home countries and ours. The goal is to undercut support for political illiberalism and challenge the economic predations of Russia and China.
Click here for the full story.
The new issue of the magazine is loaded with even more deep insights on a wide range of issues. Some highlights:
- The Lost Mystique of Betty Friedan: Sara Bhatia reviews the new biography Betty Friedan: The Magnificent Disrupter by Rachel Shteir, and explores Friedan’s “fairly magnificent legacy.” Click here for the full story.
- My Parkinson’s Crisis—And Ours: E. Fuller Torrey and Wendy Simmons argue the federal government is underfunding research into the mysterious disease. Click here for the full story.
- How the Founders Overcame Partisan Dysfunction: Jean Parvin Bordewich reviews the latest from historian H. W. Brands, Founding Partisans. Click here for the full story.
- The Prosecutor Who Blew the Whistle on Barr and Durham: Margaret Carlson and Bill Curry profile Nora Dannehy, who quit Trump’s Justice Department in protest and became a Connecticut Supreme Court judge. Click here for the full story.
