Imagined letter to Susan Watkins and the New Left Review – Joe Biden’s ‘Wheelhouse’ and the Post-Neoliberal Era
A response to the article 'Paradigm Shifts' published by the New Left Review 128 (March/April, 2021). https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/susan-watkins-paradigm-shifts
Dear Ms. Watkins,
I very much enjoyed your article in NLR 128, March-April 2021 ‘Paradigm Shifts,’ a fascinating comparison of Biden’s American recovery plan and the EU’s New Generation package vis a vis this so-called shift to a post-neoliberal era. I did have one minor – although perhaps theoretically relevant – quibble with your clarification of an American sports metaphor. This is the baseball metaphor Joe Biden invokes to discuss how the solution to income inequality in American society is supposedly already “in our wheelhouse.” The quotation reads:
“When you have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it ferments political discord and basic revolution. It allows demagogues to step in and blame ‘the other’…you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins. But the truth of the matter is, it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change.”
You then very helpfully clarify the phrase for an international audience, describing ‘it’s all within our wheelhouse’ as “a baseball term, suggesting a comfortable position from which to hit a home run.” This is true. The ‘wheelhouse’ does indeed describe a comfortable position out of which might arise a home run, but what is ‘comfortable’ here is not simply the positioning of the batter, but the positioning of the ball in an ideal location over which the batter stands. The ‘wheelhouse,’ in other words, is not just a question of body positioning, it is also the position within a given batter’s ‘strike zone’ that gives the hitter the best chance of hitting with power. The batter is broadly static as they stand over this area (hence their ‘batting stance’ – although I should mention the history of strange and at times comedic batting stances. Compare, for example, the erect, giraffe-like stance of former Milwaukee Brewers second baseman Craig Counsel who hardly bends his knees, with the low wide-legged crouch of former Houston Astros first baseman Jeff Bagwell).
The choice of metaphor is perhaps not without political meaning, for what Biden implies is that the batter (here, individuals within American society) can maintain fundamentally the same ‘stance’ to ‘hit a home run’ (achieve freedom, equality, etc.). And it can do so precisely because the possibility of equality is already ‘in our wheelhouse,’ because of the way we (American society) already stand. American society and political class do not need to ‘change its batting stance.’
Lest I, uh, overextend the metaphor, what is unique about the ‘strike zone’ is that it is not straightforwardly formal or identical across all batters. It is not, in other words, pre-established, but dependent on the individual size (for example, their height) and stance of a given batter. Major League Baseball’s 1988 definition of the strike zone describes it as, “that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the top of the knees. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter's stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball." The question of the positioning and physical make-up of the batter, in other words, determines what is a ‘strike’ or a ‘ball’, as judged by the umpire who stands behind him. Who the pitcher, catcher, and umpire might be in this now definitively overextended metaphor may require further reflection.
A critique of Biden’s metaphor from the standpoint of the structural (some might say ‘constitutional’) obstacles to the possibility of equality in ‘American democracy’ however, might point out that American society simply does not possess a framework of rules that are, on the one hand, genuinely equally distributive of opportunity (strike zones pertain to each individual specifically, based not only on their bodily characteristics, but on their choice of stance) while retaining a consistent structure (the framework of a strike zone always remains). Obviously in practice there is relatively little variability in the body type of major league baseball players when compared to variability of starting social positions.
The point remains I think that perhaps American society is structured by the rules of a game with a different logic.