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In embracing the term Bidenomics, Joe Biden is clapping back at his critics. But he’s also attaching his legacy to a notoriously unwieldy part of American life.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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The Baggage of Bidenomics

The president is selling coffee mugs emblazoned with an image of himself with lasers shooting out of his eyes. The mugs are part of his campaign’s attempt to alchemize, with some success, the right-wing slogan “Let’s Go Brandon” (long story, but it’s MAGA-world slang for “Fuck Joe Biden”) into the “Dark Brandon” meme. In reclaiming the insult, Biden’s camp is turning a slogan used by Trump supporters into a self-aware catchphrase.

His team has attempted to pull a similar maneuver by taking ownership of Bidenomics, a term initially used as an insult. The exact origins of Bidenomics are a bit murky, but the portmanteau seems to have emerged in several newspaper columns critiquing Biden’s economic policy last year. Biden’s team ran with it, pushing the term on social media and in public statements. Reclaiming Bidenomics is a bit trickier than “Dark Brandon”: The term is less snappy, and it’s not being used in response to a clear foil.

The economy is notoriously hard to control, so an individual’s attempt to associate themselves with it can be risky. Lori Cox Han, a political-science professor at Chapman University, in California, who has written about Bidenomics, explained to me that presidents tend to be blamed when things are going badly with the economy, and try to get credit when all is well. But right now, the economy is a mixed bag. “I’m not sure a lot of people are feeling as enthusiastic about the economy as the Biden team wants them to be,” she said—and she’s not confident that a clever slogan will change people’s minds. Politico reported that several top Biden allies have privately raised concerns about the phrase to the White House.

One particular challenge of Bidenomics, Allen Adamson, a branding expert and a co-founder of the marketing firm Metaforce, told me, is that the term’s meaning is not inherently clear. Beyond simply linking Biden with the economy, the slogan doesn’t say much about the president’s policies, or about how Americans should make sense of the complexities of the economy right now. It doesn’t help matters for Biden that many Americans retain a negative view about broader economic trends: Although inflation has been cooling and unemployment is less than 4 percent, a recent NBC poll of 1,000 American voters found that fewer than 30 percent were very or somewhat satisfied with the economy.

Biden’s team has been defining Bidenomics in part by saying what it’s not: An adviser of his called it the opposite of Reaganomics, a policy that emphasized tax cuts, and a recent Instagram post from the president’s official account placed Bidenomics and “MAGAnomics” side by side in a split screen, comparing Donald Trump’s economic agenda unfavorably with Biden’s. Biden officials also reportedly said last month that highlighting the contrast between Biden’s economic plans and Trump’s policies will be crucial to Biden’s campaign.

Biden is not the first politician to try to use a jab for his own advantage. One-off political insults, especially against female politicians, have proved canny pegs for branding and fundraising efforts in the past. They often pack a double punch: They draw negative attention to the (usually male) rival who delivered the insult while highlighting whatever traits the insulted politician or their allies seek to foreground. Elizabeth Warren started selling “Nevertheless, She Persisted” merchandise after Mitch McConnell made the remark while rebuking her on the Senate floor in 2017. The same year, Hillary Clinton promoted “Nasty Woman” shirts, referencing Donald Trump’s name-calling during a presidential debate. And earlier this year, Nikki Haley sold beer koozies reading “Past My Prime?” after then–CNN host Don Lemon suggested that she was; she has said that the koozies raised $25,000.

With Bidenomics, the maneuver is not so clean. The term, emerging as it did in critical coverage, comes with baggage. Jacob Neiheisel, a political-science professor at SUNY Buffalo, told me that rebranding known terms tends to work best when leaders take something that’s already popular and inject it with new energy. When Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, for example, he took the term liberal and got the public to associate it with him and his New Deal projects.

Once public perception of a concept has solidified, it can be very hard to change. Coming up with a new slogan is much simpler than trying to remake a known one, Adamson told me. But taking on the challenge of redefining a jab can be “a bravado move,” he said. It sends the message that Biden’s team will not tolerate name-calling. Still, he said, Biden’s choice to tie his own reputation directly to a thriving economy is “phenomenally high-risk.”

If Biden is lucky, economic indicators (and attitudes) will improve, and he can claim some shine. But branding isn’t everything. And despite the administration’s best efforts, a lot of people may not have even heard of Bidenomics, whether in its newspaper-column or political-slogan era. Even Biden himself, asked by a group of reporters about Bidenomics this summer, joked, “I don’t know what the hell that is.”

Related:

The bad-vibes economy “My hometown is getting a $100 billion dose of Bidenomics.”

Today’s News

The House voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker. Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to gun charges in federal court. The United Nations Security Council will send armed forces to Haiti to combat violence from gangs.

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Work in Progress: The backlash to college has gone too far, David Deming writes. Getting a four-year degree is still a good investment.

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Guy Billout

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

(From 2008)

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing … Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on.

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The former US president is standing trial, accused of carrying out business fraud in New York.

In addition to going on expensive vacations with wealthy right-wing donors who have interests before the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas has, ProPublica reported last week, secretly participated in fundraising efforts for organizations bankrolled by the Koch network, the right-wing advocacy organization founded by the billionaire brothers Charles and the late David Koch. Thomas was “brought in to speak,” staffers told ProPublica, “in the hopes that such access would encourage donors to continue giving.”

Although the failure to disclose the trip to Palm Springs, California, on the Kochs’ dime might have violated federal law, it’s hardly the only example of Thomas hiding financial relationships with wealthy conservatives. Harlan Crow, the right-wing billionaire who frequently brings Thomas on luxury vacations—although by no means the only right-wing billionaire who has done so—also owns the land Thomas’s mother currently lives on, and has paid private-school tuition for Thomas’s nephew, whom Thomas is raising. Thomas is not the sole right-wing justice benefiting from his cozy relationships with affluent ideologues; Justice Samuel Alito has also enjoyed the generosity of such men. Thomas is also implacably opposed to financial-disclosure laws that illuminate connections between the wealthy and the powerful, and the rest of the Court’s conservatives are inching closer to his view.

If you want to understand the brazen indifference to ethics standards exhibited here, it helps to go back to Robert Bork.

Bork, the father of the legal doctrine of originalism, was supposed to be a Supreme Court justice. Originalism promises to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time its provisions were adopted, but in practice it is most often a semi-spiritual, therapeutic approach in which conservatives look back at the Founders and see themselves, affirming as their original intent whatever the popular opinions on the contemporary right happen to be. Originalists mock “living constitutionalism,” or the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted in light of modern circumstances, but their own constitutionalism is simply undead.  

[Adam Serwer: What was Clarence Thomas thinking?]

President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork for the high court in 1987, but instead of becoming a justice, he became a martyr. Bork’s nomination was defeated because of his opposition to laws that bar discrimination on the basis of race and sex and his opposition to legal abortion, and because he was a willing participant in Richard Nixon’s corrupt schemes to shield his own criminal acts.

The Bork nomination is an early example of something we’ve seen often in the Trump years—an underlying agreement about the basic facts that is obscured by heated disagreement over whether those facts are good. No one disputes that Bork described the Civil Rights Act’s non-discrimination requirement as based on a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness,” there is only disagreement over whether the federal government can outlaw Jim Crow businesses.

Conservatives frequently invoke Bork’s name as a representation of Democratic ruthlessness and partisanship, but the most vicious critiques of Bork were accurate, if uncharitable, and the qualities that liberals found objectionable were precisely those that endeared him to the conservative legal movement. Indeed, with six right-wing ideologues on the Court, Republicans are now demanding that the justices impose on the country the very unpopular version of America that Bork wanted to live in.

The Bork nomination went down. It was not the first, but the 11th, Supreme Court nomination to fail, and unlike Barack Obama’s 2016 nominee, Merrick Garland, Bork actually got a hearing and a vote. The important event, however, is what came next: The nomination of Anthony Kennedy, who had once compared the Roe v. Wade decision finding a constitutional right to an abortion to the Dred Scott decision, which upheld slavery. Kennedy was confirmed almost unanimously and took the seat that was supposed to go to Bork.

By 1991, as the legal reporter Jeffrey Toobin wrote in his book The Nine, when Thomas was confirmed to replace retiring Justice Thurgood Marshall, eight of the nine justices had been appointed by Republicans and the lone Democratic appointed justice was Byron White, who himself opposed abortion. With those numbers, the Roe precedent was supposed to be living on borrowed time. Indeed, the Supreme Court was about to take up another abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey—one in which the future justice and then–federal judge Samuel Alito had argued that Roe should be overturned—that would provide a perfect opportunity to destroy Roe.

Instead, it would take another 30 years to overturn, because three of the recent Republican appointees—Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and David Souter—joined Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens in preserving the right to an abortion. This is partly why the conservative myth that Bork was mistreated endures—had Bork been on the bench instead of Kennedy, the right would have won this particular fight decades ago, and many others besides.

The conservative legal movement needed judicial nominees to be more partisan, more ideological, and more tightly controlled. That is the context in which the regular stories of the conservative justices’ closeness to wealthy right-wing donors and partisan organizations should be understood. You could call this the conservative legal movement’s Good Behavior Project: One aspect is making sure that nominees are sufficiently ideological not to diverge from the party line, or to do so rarely. The Federalist Society’s role in nominating judges resolves this pipeline problem. Another aspect is ensuring that they do not grow more ideologically idiosyncratic with age, something that can happen to appointees from either party.

Social ties between justices and partisan actors are not novel, of course. During the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt—who made eight appointments over his four terms—many of the justices were very close socially to partisan actors with whom they shared an ideologically liberal outlook.

So it shouldn't surprise us that the justices are political actors, or that their rulings often find pretexts to favor their personal beliefs. The revelation that they profit off their jobs and hobnob with the wealthy is both shocking and banal. The asymmetry is that conservatives built an effective infrastructure for reinforcing and rewarding that sort of partisan loyalty, approaching the courts (as FDR did) as a question of political power and getting the right people in the right places at the right time, while liberals continue to subscribe to babble about the majesty and impartiality of the law. It is one thing to engage in such rhetoric for political purposes as the conservative legal movement does, while actually building political power, it is quite another to act as though the law and Constitution are genuinely self-enforcing while doing little to enforce them.

[From the September 2019 issue: Deconstructing Clarence Thomas]

The justices should be held accountable for breaking the rules or the law when they do so, and for the many ways they are making American life more dangerous, less democratic, and less free, while hiding their ideological crusade behind a facade of neutrality. But you cannot fault conservative legal movement for doing everything it can to build the world they want to live in. You can fault their opposition for not doing the same. The recent reporting on the justices tight social and financial relationships with right-wing billionaires is valuable—and threatening to their agenda—because it exposes the justices’ deceptions and self-deceptions about how the system really works.

By financing the justices’ lavish lifestyles and forging close social ties between donors with interests before the Court and the justices themselves, donors with interests before the Court and social ties to the justices can apply pressure that ensures the justices avoid making decisions that could alienate them from the luxury and companionship to which they have become accustomed, without ever making specific demands. This assures Good Behavior.

I am not saying that the justices reach opinions they believe are wrong—but that in most cases, they would not even allow themselves to consider the alternative. An act as direct as a bribe risks the possibility of the target growing a conscience, because there is no way to rationalize the act. Not wanting to be ostracized from one’s social circle, one’s friends and political allies—that is the kind of thing that keeps justices from even considering changing their minds. The motivation feels internal rather than external, and therefore does not feel like corruption in the way that accepting a wad of cash would.

As the justices themselves have ruled—unanimously, I might add—the absence of explicit this-for-that exchanges of money for “official acts” means that such leverage does not count as bribery. This is one of the ironies of the modern era: There was certainly more individual corruption in the past, more suitcases of cash changing hands, more personal profiteering. There is more institutional corruption now—explicit ideological rejection of duty toward segments of the public that are not part of one’s faction. A democratic society can survive, even thrive, with the former. The latter is potentially terminal.

With the news last month that the Ultimate Fighting Championship (brand: authentic, highly skilled violence) has merged, in a deal worth billions upon billions, with World Wrestling Entertainment (brand: fabulously stylized, highly skilled violence), it appears to be time to reset the reality levels. Again. What new form of narrative, what gory amalgam of truth and spectacle, what double-talking rough beast approaches? In other words: Are you ready to rumble?

If you doubt the importance of this bit of business, consider that braided into the corporate histories of both the UFC and WWE, and into their respective anthropologies (we’ll be coming back to this), is the rise of Donald Trump. Trumpism has expressed and explored itself through both of these entities. And as they coalesce, and as Trumpism itself further coalesces, we are surely heading into—as the great New Hampshire metal band Scissorfight once put it—the “high tide of the big grotesque.”

For a primer on the UFC side of things, you won’t do better than Michael Thomsen’s new book, Cage Kings: How an Unlikely Group of Moguls, Champions & Hustlers Transformed the UFC Into a $10 Billion Industry. A fine writer and a very good reporter, Thomsen tracks in detail the journey from the primal chaos of the promotion’s first event—1993’s UFC 1, where grapplers fought thumpers, bone-breakers fought chokers, and a Dutch kickboxer, with a blow of his foot, sent a Samoan sumo wrestler’s tooth flying into the crowd—to the streamlined pay-per-view mercilessness of today’s UFC.

The rise of the UFC is checkered but, in hindsight, unstoppable. Along the way, as if by accident, in response to the pressures brought to bear by various regulatory bodies, the converging impulses and skill sets of the fighters themselves, the demands of a just-discovered audience, and an ambient societal sense of what might be gotten away with, a new style of fighting was was invented: mixed martial arts (MMA). The rules were hammered out at a multiparty meeting in April 2001, with consulting physicians in attendance, where (as Thomsen writes) “soccer kicks, head butts, knees to the head of a grounded opponent” were outlawed.

And then there's pro wrestling. The UFC exerts a grim, surface-level fascination, but pro wrestling is deep. Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, by Abraham Josephine Riesman, published earlier this year, will help you get your mind around it. And you need help. Pro wrestling is a thunderdome of images, the human comedy at near-celestial scale. Its lingo, its carny slang, expresses some kind of hierarchy of awareness, but where wrestling begins and where it ends, no one can say. If you’re a “mark,” you’re way down there: You’re taken in by the “kayfabe,” the fakery, and you think it’s all real. If you’re a “smart,” you’re higher up the great chain: You know what’s going on, you can tell a “work” (something prefabricated) from a “shoot” (an improvisation), and you can take an ironist’s or an aesthete’s pleasure in the pageantry and the bombast and the medieval moral drama.

But is anybody really a mark? And is anybody really a smart? “When you start to think about it,” Riesman muses, “the existence of marks in great numbers starts to seem unlikely. It’s possible that the majority of wrestling fans may have always been smarts. It’s possible that the illusion at the heart of wrestling was not that fans believed wrestling was real, but that wrestlers believed that fans believed it.” (This is an irresistible idea: the puffed and strutting wrestlers, maintained in their dreamworld by the gallantry of the fans.)

Both books have a focal strongman character. For Thomsen, it’s Dana White, once a penniless personal trainer who listened to Tony Robbins for inspiration, now the UFC’s abrasively charismatic caudillo and defining personality. For Riesman, it’s Vince McMahon, the demonically transformative former chairman and CEO of WWE (previously the World Wrestling Federation.) White bought the UFC in 2000, with his partners and moneymen the Fertitta brothers, when the promotion was at a low ebb. McMahon inherited the WWF from his father, Vince Sr. But in some respects—on a business level, at least—the story is the same: the aggressive  absorption of smaller fighting promoters; the wooing of legislatures and athletic commissions; the territorial expansions and TV deals; the escalation of hubris, razzmatazz, blood.

Where the two men differ is in their nature. White is a farseeing brawler-businessman. McMahon, unclassifiably but undeniably, is an artist—a creator/destroyer. And in 1998, having “booked”—that is, written narratives—for WWF for years, building up and blowing down characters according to his own uniquely despotic dramaturgical whim, Vince McMahon, at the age of 52, wildly entered his own creation. He became a character. As pumped and glistening as any of his “boys,” with a proper wrestler’s physique and carriage—he’d been building muscle, under those baggy suits, for years—he climbed into the ring as “Mr. McMahon.” A villain. A heel. What Riesman calls, in another context, a “sizzling” heel. “He’s a horrible human being,” says McMahon of this version of himself, “uncaring, a powermonger, manipulative, very manipulative.” “Ass-hole! Ass-hole!” chants the delirious crowd. Mr. McMahon’s antics, over the succeeding years, will include making out with the wrestler Trish Stratus as his wife, Linda, watches on, and peeing himself with fear while “Stone Cold” Steve Austin holds a gun to his head. (“Mr. McMahon looked up,” Riesman writes rather beautifully. “He saw what the viewers saw: his own tear-stained visage. His face looked like a kabuki mask of weeping terror.”)

Over both of these books, and both of these organizations, looms—I was going to write “the shadow of Trump,” but Trump has no shadow. No secret darkness, no buried awareness: Every inch of him is lit up. Better perhaps to say that the Trumpiness of all this is baked in. The story of the world as told by the UFC and WWE—it’s not exactly a liberal’s vision. Booming characters preen and dominate; nuance is banished. This is heavy-metal America. Trump is a longtime wrestling fan, and playing himself (who else?) he feuded publicly with Mr. McMahon, at one point shaving the character’s head at ringside. Much of Trump’s most appalling public behavior—say, that impression of a disabled reporter—is in the repertoire of a classic heel: To loudly deplore it, to boo and hiss, only reassures his fans. He was also an early supporter of the UFC, and Dana White has repaid him with many loud pledges of fealty, most notably in a speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention: “Let me tell you something! I’ve been in the fight business my whole life. I know fighters. Ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump is a fighter, and I know he will fight for this country!” Always close to the McMahons, Trump in 2017 appointed Linda McMahon as the head of the Small Business Administration.

So now what? High theater, high narrative, has merged with what Kipling called “the undoctored incident.” The kayfabe has merged with the fist in the face. Is some kind of grotesque UFC-WWE blend in the cards? White has pooh-poohed the idea: “If you look at the WWE,” he said last week, “they have an entertainment value, and they have these guys that are incredible athletes that go in there and do their thing. It’s well known that it’s scripted. When you look at the UFC, this is as real as it gets. That’s our tagline.” But there’s life after the UFC: Former MMA stars such as Ronda Rousey and Brock Lesnar have already found that they can cash in as wrestlers for WWE. Will this process, this pipeline of talent, now be accelerated? Conor McGregor—the most wrestlerlike, in his self-presentation, of all the UFC champions—is surely watching these developments carefully. As are, from the stands, the howling wrestling fans, the bloodthirsty UFC fans, and the rest of us with an interest in the American evolution.