Biden’s pitch on public investment. It’s not just a misrepresentation of the US–China conflict. It’s also a child’s conceptualization of the global crisis of democracy: USA=democracy, but no one will like us if we’re not big and strong! And then they won’t want to be like us! 1/ 
As this and endless versions of the same op-ed show, the US elite does not take democracy seriously. Rule by the people requires not just a periodic option to vote but, first, a meaningful choice—real differences among candidates leading to different outcomes in governance. 2/
And second, it requires that the voters, outside the one day they get to cast a ballot, are living lives that equip them with the self-confidence, knowledge, status, and sense of belonging in the community to make participation in politics both desirable and meaningful. 3/
This is a substantive concept of democracy as opposed to the merely formal concept of voting+free speech. The crucial distinction is nowhere to be seen in the repetitious discussions of why democracy is in retreat. 4/
Yet this is the essence of the problem: under neoliberal globalization, the growth of political liberalism around the world—including in China!—proceeded in tandem with the steady erosion of the social conditions required for genuine democracy. 5/
Corruption, the dismantling of organized labor, and business capture made candidates largely indistinguishable and their promises for change empty. No matter who you voted for, they didn’t address the chronic instability afflicting people. 6/
Deepening exploitation and inequality shaped lives in ways that disempowered and marginalized a growing number of people just as surely as if they lived under formally autocracy. 6/
In other words, the social foundations for democracy are rotting within each country. The only solution is a *global* egalitarian politics to confront exclusion and restructure economic growth—integrating people into society and empowering them to participate in ruling it. 7/
Instead we get this idea: one major country marked by extreme inequality and exclusion leads the democracy team, facing off against another major country marked by extreme inequality and exclusion that leads the autocracy team. 8/
If the corporations of the democracy-country preserve domination of high profit sectors of the global economy, and if the military of the democracy-country preserves domination of the autocracy-country’s immediate vicinity, then democracy wins! 9/
The Biden team is edging toward the kind of economic policy *at home* that might revive genuine democracy in the US. However, that’s not an end in itself but a means to the end of defending US global hegemony—which is their definition of democracy. 10/
If Biden pulls this off it’s still an open question how it plays out domestically because great power conflict will also strengthen the enemies of democracy in the US—nativists, white nationalists, militarists, the GOP. 11/
What’s not in question is what it does to the rest of the world. If reviving the US economy is premised on suppressing that of China and no second thought to impact on others, then showing democracy works in the US will profoundly deepen the crisis of democracy globally. /12
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