Though it’s difficult to remember now, there was a time when Joseph R Biden was hailed as a president with the transformative potential of a Franklin D Roosevelt or a Lyndon B Johnson. During the 2020 campaign, Biden had positioned himself explicitly as the moderate alternative to both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. After the election, however, he quickly made clear that he did not intend to govern as a doddering centrist placeholder. He seemed particularly keen to flatter the aspirations of the left wing of the Democratic party, which, despite Sanders’ defeat, was experiencing its most significant resurgence in half a century.
The early days of Biden’s presidency saw what appeared to be a new rapprochement between centrist liberals and the rising left. Tooze, a self-described “left-liberal”, was perhaps the representative intellectual figure of this development. Some of this had to do with Crashed, which established him as a leading economic commentator and found an admirer in Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats. Some of it also had to do with Tooze’s longstanding interest in climate policy, which was shaping up to be a central focus of the Biden administration. And some of it, too, had to do with a belated but intense engagement with Twitter, which he joined in 2015 at the urging of his daughter (then a teenager) when he was in his late 40s, where he soon gained a huge following.
Five years after Biden’s inauguration, the political atmosphere in the US could not be more different. Yet Tooze remains no less relevant as an intellectual force. Whereas once he had personified the appeal of high-technocratic expertise – the feeling that if you could just read widely enough and understand deeply enough, you might be able to chart a sensible approach to crises like climate change – today Tooze stands as one of the more eloquent analysts of a new and confusing world order.
“My basic wager in interpreting modern history is to bias toward the thought that it might be unprecedented,” Tooze told me. “I’m interested in the way the present continuously breaks us. It challenges us. It does not, when you’re honest and serious about it, confirm what you know.” In The Deluge, his 2014 book about the legacy of the first world war, Tooze described the way early-20th-century world leaders confronted “the radical novelty” of a world in which the US economy was newly dominant. These days, Tooze spends most of his time tracking a dynamic that he believes is similarly unprecedented and consequential: the rise of China as an economic superpower.
