His "radical base" would be centrists in Europe and Canada. It's so annoying to constantly her right-wingers denounce the Democratic party as being overrun by "radical leftists" when it's mostly a moderate neoliberal party with some progressive and more recent DSA types. And the Democrat's economic policies are normal ones in most advanced economies. Bernie and AOC are basically the 21st century equivalent of FDR.

the American economy is stronger than both Canada and the EU. the US consistently has more growth and GDP per capita than Europe. what defines something as an advanced economy?

Macroeconomic strength is famously … let’s say “only tenuously correlated” with things like quality of life, social mobility, household-level economic stability, and lots of other aspects of social welfare (e.g. education, health risks and access to treatment, sustainable demographic trends and infrastructure practices).

I’m not saying Europe is automatically better on those axes, but even the least charitable assessments have it very competitive with the US on several.

All of which is to say: “well if our politics are so backwards how come we have so much economic/military power?” is a structurally useless question to ask, because those things are not correlates the way people think they are. It’s like asking “if your car is so much safer than mine, how come mine is so much faster?”

> The end result was the start of the shitty economy and job market we see today.

The current economy being Biden’s fault, and not tariffs, corrupt tax cuts for the rich, and oil blockades, is certainly a take.

Judging by the recent elections, I’d say most US voters don’t agree with that take.

This is revisionism.

It's a "shitty economy" today because

(1) Interest rates were generationally low for an extended period of time from 2009 - 2022. We will likely never see that kind of sugar rush again in our lifetimes.

(2) Trump made a deal with OPEC+ during the early days of Covid to drastically cut supply for some fixed time interval. That agreement hurt our economy coming out of Covid.

(3) Consumers completely changed their behaviors and the supply chain had lots of random kinks in the flow of goods. Some countries still maintained closed borders. Ports had months log backlogs of ships waiting to offload cargo as shipping containers were in short supply where they were needed.

(4) The price of eggs and pork were massively inflated because of avian+swine flu outbreaks which we normally deal with by killing the entire flock.

(5) The west coast had a massive drought and a terrible fire season. This was awful for farming/ranching and we still haven't rebuilt the cow herds that shrunk from those years.

Biden's regulatory regime had almost nothing to do with the efficiency of the economy during his term. Just because he didn't open more of Alaska's wilderness to fresh drilling or because he didn't approve the KeyStone XL pipeline didn't have any noticeable effect on the US economy (except perhaps to keep some more truck drivers employed).

I remember the Biden years being quite good for finding a job, and the Trump years being quite bad.