It’s the Fear, Stupid: Why Biden’s FDR-Size Aspirations Fell Short

When Joe Biden entered office four years ago, FDR comparisons were everywhere. We at the Roosevelt Institute even briefly asked our followers to guess whether a quote belonged to FDR or Biden. As we close out Biden’s one-term presidency, we thought it would be a good moment for a more sober reflection on the comparison. 

At the start of his term, the analogy between Biden and FDR was almost overused. Both men came into office at times of historic economic crisis and when democracy appeared to be faltering around the world. As such, they both faced the dual tasks of 1) quickly stabilizing and changing the direction of the economy, and 2) effectively responding to ideological ferment that challenged established ways of thinking about the role of government and public policy. At the end of four years, it’s safe to say that while FDR was able to meet both of these challenges, Biden, tragically, only met one. 

When Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, almost 25 percent of the labor force was unemployed, productivity had fallen to one-third of what it had been prior to the start of the Great Depression in 1929, and the banking system had failed. Eighty-eight years later, Joe Biden took office in the worst economy the country had experienced since 1933, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging. The official unemployment rate had reached 6.3 percent, but a full 15 percent of the workforce were either unemployed, “temporarily unemployed” due to the pandemic, or had seen their pay and hours cut. Snarled supply chains had also left consumers scrambling repeatedly (remember the baby formula crisis?). 

Both men were inaugurated at a time of fear and political instability: FDR took office four years after the Great Depression began, at a time when fascism was on the rise and rapid technological changes had transformed not only the economy but the relationship between everyday people and the government. Much the same could be said of Biden, who took office not only amid a pandemic and associated economic crisis, but at a moment when—for better and for worse—the global institutions and norms of the neoliberal, democratic order were crumbling in the face of another bout of rapid technological change. 

Both men moved quickly to address the crises they faced. FDR’s first 100 days saw a flurry of legislative activity and executive action that became the measuring stick for presidential terms going forward. Biden made no secret of his own desire to have a comparable first 100 days, but he faced a very different Congress—almost completely divided and polarized. Still measured against that reality, Biden had a very promising start. In addition to successfully rolling out a national vaccine program to address the pandemic, Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan (ARP) in March 2021. Learning the lessons of the Great Recession and the decade of economic stagnation that followed, the Biden economic recovery plan rested on big upfront investment. The $1.9 trillion ARP delivered the fastest recovery in generations, as government funding for workers and businesses enabled the economic certainty essential for job growth. 

By many measures, the Biden economy has been remarkable. Despite a difficult Congress, after the ARP, Biden managed to pass three more pieces of significant investment legislation (the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act) that have driven a manufacturing boom, keeping jobs numbers humming. Over the last four years, record levels of consistently low unemployment have built worker power as the Biden administration intended, spurring a resurgence of labor activism and substantial contract wins for many union members. At the same time, US GDP has grown significantly faster than that of our peer countries and is now higher than it was forecast to be before the pandemic. Meanwhile the real and persistent problem of post-pandemic inflation has been lower than that experienced in other countries, and wages have continued to outpace prices, especially for those at the bottom of the income distribution. 

And yet, Americans hate the economy. This puzzle has been at the center of much post-election coverage. Theories include (but are not limited to) the unique political salience of inflation, Biden’s failings as a communicator, and the experience of having the pandemic safety net ripped away. In making sense of these explanations, the FDR comparison can move past hagiography (nostalgic or hopeful) to provide some useful insights into how these explanations fit together. 

Historians often divide the New Deal programs into three buckets: relief, recovery, and reform. Relief included jobs and aid programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps; recovery was legislation designed to stabilize and stimulate the economy, for example the National Recovery Administration; and reform programs looked to change how the economy functioned over the long term through the creation of programs/agencies like Social Security, the Rural Electrification Administration, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Roosevelt himself was clear that these programs had to move in concert to be a long-term success, because his definition of success was always more than pure economic recovery. 

From the beginning, Roosevelt defined his project as defeating fear by deploying the government to create long-term stability. He did this in stages. By the time he was reelected in 1936, unemployment was down to 16 percent—still shockingly high, but significantly improved and on the right track. The Social Security Act had just passed, promising new financial security in old age; the Federal Housing Authority and Rural Electrification Administration had also begun their work driving the construction of needed infrastructure. Things seemed to be consistently improving in ways built to last. 

Stability is what the Biden administration ultimately could not deliver. The rapid economic recovery was not experienced as newfound economic stability for Americans. As Roosevelt Fellow JW Mason recently wrote, “Real per-capita income was 6% lower in 2022 than in 2021. This is more than twice as large as the next biggest decline since the data begins in the 1950s. In 2024, there were a million more Americans without health insurance than there were in 2022.” Likewise, there has been much coverage of the ARP’s expanded Child Tax Credit cutting child poverty by almost half only to see all progress erased when it lapsed a year later. These stories are both a testament to the success of temporary pandemic relief programs that dramatically improved Americans’ financial health, and explain Americans’ anger. When those successful programs all ended, Americans did not learn that the government could create stability, but rather that their economic conditions were as tenuous as ever. 

That kind of continued instability is not the material from which a new ideological order is forged, regardless of the communicator at the helm. And, to be clear, FDR was a better and more frequent communicator than Joe Biden. His famous Fireside Chats regularly brought explanations of New Deal programs—the obstacles they faced and the ways they proposed to address them—directly into people’s homes. Doing so helped solidify a new ideological order that favored a strong government in the name of economic stability that was understood as essential to democracy. Biden, on the other hand, did less communicating than most presidents—holding fewer press conferences, granting fewer interviews. Still, on some level, no amount of communication strategy can counter the actual experience of increased instability. Indeed the 1937 recession produced an electoral defeat for Roosevelt in the 1938 midterms. 

So where does that leave us? FDR got four terms to solidify his legacy and create a new political order. Joe Biden got four years. We no longer face the economic and health crises we did when Biden took office, but we are still deep in a moment of ideological turmoil. Some of the blame for this can go to Joe Biden’s failure to match FDR’s rhetorical skills; some to congressional dysfunction. Depending on your perspective, plenty of blame can be directed at how Biden responded to international events, at our corrupted court system, and/or at post-pandemic inflation. There isn’t a single answer, but what FDR’s legacy should teach us is that the first order of business for establishing a new governing order out of chaos is making things less scary. Despite the end of the pandemic, for most people the world has not gotten sufficiently less scary in the last four years. 

And, so, truly, this is still a moment of ideological turmoil. Donald Trump has eagerly exploited people’s fears, but he has not solidified a new ideological order any more than Joe Biden has. Even though he will have defined our politics for 12 years by the end of his next term, Trump is not commanding the kind of support from which a new ideological order is set. Consider FDR’s elections: In 1932 he won 42 states, and in 1936 he won 46. In 1936 he won 60.8 percent of the popular vote, while his Republican opponent won a mere 36.5 percent of the vote. The 1940 and 1944 elections were closer, but still saw almost 10 percentage point gaps. In contrast, as we know, Donald Trump just won by less than 2 percent of the popular vote—a smaller margin than Joe Biden won by in 2020. Biden won 25 states four years ago; Trump just won 31. Trump should be understood as a representation of our moment of instability and disorder, not the resolution. A new ideological order will come from someone who can create stability for Americans, not capitalize on their fear.