The US president’s speech was pitched at marginalising the Trumpist right. Kevin Ovenden analyses whether he will succeed

Joe Biden’s State of the Union address to the US Congress on Tuesday was significant. The rituals around the occasion are even more ridiculous than those of the state opening of parliament in Britain. US spectacle lacks even the fake historical depth of the British. It is just fake – and cheap. 

But some of these occasions are significant. This one was. 

Biden is 80 years old and is pitching to stand in November next year for a second term as US president. 

He is expected to declare his candidacy in weeks. More important than that was the political thrust of what he said. 

He may be regarded in liberal quarters as the bane of (76-year-old) Donald Trump, but Biden’s speech was very much ‘America First’, without using the phrase. Instead of ‘make America great again’ it was ‘rebuild America’. And that is on the basis of an America-first policy of arms and technological procurement, investment, jobs, supply chains and military dominance. Our supply chains will ‘begin in America’, said Biden. How? Every rare earth metal or specialist input into complex production systems must be within the territory of the US? That only makes sense if you picture a Greater America. And Biden’s speech did that. 

His appeal to politicians in Congress – Democrats and Republicans, who have a fractious majority in the lower chamber – was the restoration of US power which he cited throughout as his achievement so far. ‘There is more to do,’ was his refrain throughout. At one point it was Democrats on their feet leading Republicans to chant ‘U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A!’

The overarching story was one of previous American decline and now reversal. We are back. And we are certainly back militarily. Though foreign policy was not the major part of his speech it was the backdrop. It was explicit in the hawkish passages on Ukraine and Russia, and upon China. 

That is the context for the domestic policy he outlined. Biden has been lucky to have a recent sweet spot economically. That is at least according to the official figures. There is considerable doubt about those and whether they capture the number of people driven out of or retreating from formal economic activity. 

In short, Biden’s programmatic speech can be summed up in his reference to 1950s Republican president Eisenhower. Biden said his infrastructure bill passed by the last Congress with considerable Republican support would mean the biggest building programme since Eisenhower ‘built the interstate highway system’ nearly 70 years ago. US big business wants infrastructure spending. It does not want bridges falling down and freight trains derailing, possibly blowing up towns and losing precious industrial chemicals. It does not want either to pay for social spending – that’s why Biden’s modest proposals on that front did not get through Congress two years ago. 

So this was an urgent appeal from a man who has been a creature of the Washington machine for nearly half a century to rally around his vision of restoring US power. The biggest applause during his speech was when he warned the rest of the world ‘never underestimate the USA’.  It drew in Republicans. Politically, he made a clever cut between what is still in Congress a big chunk of old-style Republicans and the ultra Trumpists – or worse – that the right-wing party has incubated over the decades. So he baited the ultras – who played their role by heckling and embarrassing themselves on cue. 

In rhetoric Joe Biden is no Bill Clinton. In political thrust, he certainly is. His aim electorally and in dealing with a hostile House of Representatives in the hands of the Republicans is to ‘triangulate’ on a vast scale in the name of confronting the wingnuts of the Republican right. 

So his most heartfelt appeal over immigration reform was not about the part of his policy allowing a path to citizenship for those without papers. It was to the Republican ‘mainstream’ not to vote against his plan to militarise the border with Mexico.

Like Eisenhower 70 years ago he presented himself as a non-partisan figure. That, indeed, has been Biden’s selling point for 40 years – that he can appeal to sensible Republicans as well as Democrats. And it was wrapped up in the mythology of ‘rebuilding the American middle class’, which largely means workers in secure jobs with pay that enables a family life and prospects. A big appeal to the 1950s. But it is without the soaring US economy of then – though it is with the renewed Cold War against China and those perceived as enemies connected in some way to it. 

There were some gestures to the daily police violence against black people. Tyre Nichols was name-checked. Perfunctory. All in the dying moments of the address. There was a nod to workers being able to organise in the workplace. There was a commitment to use executive power to veto any move to a federal ban on abortion. So there were winks and nods to the Democrat base. But this was no call to transformation. It was to reconsolidation of the US bi-party political system after years of upheaval.

Given the specific weight of the US this approach can already be felt on the centre-left in Europe as it pulses out from Washington. It is a key reference point for the leadership of the Labour Party in Britain, just as the Democrats under Bill Clinton were three decades ago.

This time it is in conditions of much more profound and multiple crises. The left on both sides of the Atlantic have to confront this and cannot be dragged behind Biden in the name of opposing Trump or whoever monstrosity the Republicans choose to put up.