Dr Tom Chodor1
1Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Tom Chodor is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the School of Social Sciences, Monash University. His research focuses on the global governance of the global political economy, specifically the role of private actors in contributing to and contesting global policy agendas, and the transformation and global institutions in an era of geopolitical competition. He has published articles in Review of International Political Economy, Journal of Common Market Studies, Globalizations and Global Governance, and is his latest book, with Shahar Hameiri, is The Locked-Up Country: Learning the Lessons from Australia’s Covid-19 Response (University of Queensland Press, 2023).
Abstract:
What was Bidenomics and why did it fail? The economic policies of the Biden Administration, based on the return of industrial policy aimed at re-industrialisation, decarbonisation and sustaining American supremacy in cutting edge technology sparked a wide-ranging debate. Opinion differed on whether Bidenomics represented a break with neoliberalism, its continuation in new bottles, or something in between. These debates have become even more pertinent in the wake of the failure of Bidenomics in the 2024 US Presidential election, with saw the return of Donald Trump to the White House on the back of a campaign explicitly focusing on the economic policy. This paper examines Bidenomics, and its failures, through the Gramscian lens of ‘passive revolution’: the strategy of dominant social forces responding to organic crises, which seeks to reform hegemonic projects from above to re-secure consent. It locates Bidenomics in the context of the post-2008 organic crisis of neoliberal hegemony and examines the coalition of social forces that sought to resolve this crisis by proposing a new model of accumulation, new form of state, and new ideological project to secure consent for it. It then considers the failures of this passive revolution, focusing on the limited capacity of the US state, the narrowness of the coalition of social forces behind it, and its national security focus, all of which undermined the ability of Bidenomics to revive the US economy and generate consent. The paper concludes by considering the legacy of Bidenomics in in the era of Trump.