What Biden on the UAW picket line tells us about power and the presidency
There’s been a lot of discussion about whether Biden walking the picket line in Detroit this week was truly unprecedented. Certainly, as presidential scholar David Ryan Miller points out, presidents have taken sides in labor disputes – perhaps most famously, Ronald Reagan’s order to striking air traffic controllers to get back to work, and Theodore Roosevelt’s involvement in the coal strike of 1902. The latter was considered precedent-breaking. The federal government’s role in the economy was rapidly evolving and Roosevelt’s intervention, on the side of labor, was an important turning point.
But Biden’s decision to join UAW workers on the picket line in Detroit comes at the intersection of two weaknesses, one of Biden specifically and one of the presidency in general. Let’s start with Biden specifically. Biden is an unusual president in the post-1980 age. Compared with Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump he’s a lot less symbolic of his party coalition – he’s an old, church-going straight white guy (have you heard about his age recently? Biden is old, in case you hadn’t heard) in a party that depends on votes from women, people of color, younger voters and LGBTQ voters. Maybe even more importantly, he’s not a candidate who made his reputation by being great at TV or rallies. He’s more of a throwback to the mid-20th century, having built a political career forging legislative relationships and doing committee work and other, well, long-term Senate stuff – plus, being vice president meant he didn’t have to work those other venues to get nationally known when he announced his presidential bid in 2019. And throughout his presidency, both sides of this equation has shown: Biden has more legislative experience than his post-1980 predecessors combined, but he’s not terribly skilled in the public-facing part of the office.
It's a matter of great debate among experts exact how and how much this matters, but one lesson of the Biden presidency is that it probably does. He hasn’t been able to sell any of his legislative successes all that well, and a recent poll shows especially low marks for the question of whether he’s “inspiring.” He fares better among Democrats on questions of honesty, empathy, and advocacy, and the UAW picket line is consistent with that.
As the above examples sort of suggest, presidents have been pretty cautious about how they express alignment with social movements. Until Trump, this has largely been true across the ideological spectrum – presidents rely on activists’ support, but tend to want to avoid photos that could associate them with views that will alienate moderate voters or aggravate fissures in their own party coalitions.
This is especially true when it comes to the fraught relationship between unions and the Democratic Party. Labor remains really important to the party, but for decades Democrats have also balanced this with pressures to also court business support and to respond to prevailing ideas about economic growth.
It’s one thing to go to a plant and talk to workers – it’s another to join a picket line. Strikes are disruptive by nature, just like mass protests, and presidents usually thread that needle carefully, suggesting that they understand the concerns, but ultimately keeping some distance. This point about the tension between direct action and elected officials has sort of been lost in the discussion of whether Biden’s presence on the picket line was unprecedented. It appears that it was – but the larger story is the merging of the power of the presidency, even if briefly, with a direct labor action like a strike. It’s the kind of action that’s designed not to just to get workers what they want, but to demonstrate worker power in a world where corporations hold considerable sway.
So in other words, Biden’s presence on the UAW picket line comes at the intersection of his own weakness at the public, symbolic aspect of the presidency on the one hand, and a limitation of the presidency as an institution to deal with social movements and demands for change on the other. And there are some implications for the Biden presidency in particular, and the presidency in general.
Biden’s struggles with harnessing the symbolic power of the presidency have been especially unfortunate in the timing: American democracy still faces serious internal threat. Biden has made some solid speeches about it and been much more forceful and partisan than his milquetoast reputation might suggest. He deserves some credit for this, but his statements haven’t really advanced the conversation about what to do. The proposed remedy is usually to vote for more Democrats, and that strategy has held off some of the worst election deniers in the 2022 elections, for example. But it’s not really a long-term answer to the problems the country faces, especially when the public is dissatisfied with the Democrats, too, and with the system in general.
Talking about union power is a real argument about rebuilding democracy, however. The purpose of unions is to address some of the things that Americans complain about – economic inequality and insecurity, and some semblance of control over their fates at work. They also connect their members to the political process, acting as building blocks of democracy. Thinking seriously about associational life is a more concrete path to improving democracy, instead of one more speech about the threat that hardline Republicans (or Trump, or whoever) pose.
But they’re not without serious critics. Not everyone supports organized labor, of course. And there are some tensions in the coalition on the left, usually over protectionism and sometimes environmental concerns. (Part of the issue in the current strike is over electric vehicles.) And this is where we see hints about how the presidency may have permanently transformed under Trump. The post-Trump presidency is a more confrontational and abrasive one. Norms that upheld blandness and avoiding offending anyone have been discarded. Even Biden – whose political career is the epitome of the old kind of politics – is showing how this might work.
The relative novelty of the situation also provides some clues as to why the news media have struggled so much to cover it. By covering Biden’s joining the picket line and Trump’s rally with non-union workers as comparable, some outlets really failed to engage with the power dynamics of the situation. Presidential actions are symbolic, but the story is not merely about an aesthetic horserace of photo ops. How presidents use the symbolic power of the office – and whom they choose to align with – matters. It matters even more if it’s connected to policy. But news media are not accustomed to grappling with this. Presidents have rarely given them the opportunity, as they don’t usually take the “speaking truth to power” stance. They are the power.
In that sense, the question of whether Biden’s actions were unprecedented isn’t just about historical trivia. There’s a reason it hasn’t happened before – the political logic of the presidency hasn’t really tilted in the direction of strikes and picket lines. That Biden and his team see things otherwise indicates a bigger change. The story isn’t just about Biden – it’s about the shifting politics in the country he leads and the office he occupies.