Creative Commons
President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders bumping elbows
President Joe Biden’s historic $4 trillion economic agenda, the likes of which the United States hasn’t seen since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, is transformational.
Biden did not get where he is by embracing progressive ideas. But he is embracing them now, as President, and that’s all that matters.
It has been gratifying to see Biden lean into his bold, progressive plan, announcing it in a joint session of Congress and hitting the road along with Vice President Kamala Harris to tout the administration’s achievements of the first 100 days and their ambitious plans for the future. Learning the lesson of the Obama Administration, which failed to take credit for its accomplishments, Biden is going on the offense. Good for him.
And good for progressives, who are seeing their long-term goals written into federal legislation with the backing of the administration and a real chance of passing.
Biden did not look like a progressive candidate on the campaign trail. Those of us who voted for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were bracing for centrism and compromise in an era when Republican Party leaders have openly embraced sedition, violence, and white supremacy.
To many of us, Biden did not seem like the right answer to Trump. But he has proven us wrong. On KPFA radio in Berkeley, California, the day after Biden’s speech, the host of the morning show, where I was a guest, posed this question: Does Biden actually believe in progressive goals? Or is he just playing politics?
My answer: Who cares?
Biden did not get where he is in his long political career by embracing progressive ideas. But he is embracing them now, as President, and that’s all that matters.
There’s no point trying to peer into his soul to try to determine if his intentions are pure. Yes, Biden spent his whole career building a reputation for reaching across the aisle. But he is now taking Democratic priorities to the hoop, getting things passed before the midterm elections, while the Democrats still hold slim Congressional majorities, and not waiting around for Republican support.
Yes, he carried water for the banks when he was the Senator representing the corporate tax haven of Delaware. But now he’s taking a page from Bernie Sanders, citing research by the progressive Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy showing fifty-five of the United States’ biggest corporations paid no federal income tax last year on $40 billion in profits, and demanding that they “pay their fair share.”
Biden’s reputation as a middle-of-the-road establishment type actually helps him play the role he is now playing: building a broad coalition for progressive policies, and helping bring us out of the nihilistic nightmare of the Trump era.
Republicans, meanwhile, have abandoned the discussion when it comes to broadly popular economic policies. They’ve disappeared down the rabbit hole of QAnon conspiracy theories about a stolen election and Democratic pizza parlor sex rings. They’ve pretty much ceded the whole field of reality to the Democrats. And they have positioned themselves as the party of “no.”
In state after state, Republicans have fought to overturn common-sense public health orders that require mask-wearing and social distancing. They’ve turned away billions in federal money offered to the states to expand Medicaid. They’ve stoked vaccine resistance and opposed extensions to unemployment insurance and increases in the minimum wage.
It’s not a great record, and it’s gratifying to see it challenged.
Biden is marshaling popular support during this historic moment, brought to us by COVID-19 and Donald Trump. But who would have guessed that Biden would attack not only the virus and Trump’s toxic politics, but also the anti-government legacy of Ronald Reagan?
The pandemic has exposed the necessary, life-saving role of government in an emergency. The private market cannot rescue an economy in freefall or protect the public from the rapid spread of disease.
Even before Biden was elected, the country was undergoing a paradigm shift as the Trump Administration approved—and Congressional Republicans voted for—$2 trillion in spending to help mitigate the disastrous effects of the pandemic. Trump sent checks directly to people’s homes. He poured political and economic capital into Operation Warp Speed to develop successful vaccines in record time.
People noticed that the government was helping. Decades of Republican rhetoric about making government small enough to drown in the bathtub—and crushing civil society to make more room for the live-and-let-die free market—went up in smoke.
Biden is building on the idea that the government can help people in an emergency. And he is putting real money where Trump’s mouth was regarding the nation’s “forgotten men and women.”
He’s raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $15 an hour, rebuilding our infrastructure with a massive federal investment, extending educational opportunities to working-class students. He’s backing unions and fighting back against “right to work” through the PRO Act, and using his bully pulpit to spread the word that, as he put it in his address to Congress, “the middle class built this country and unions built the middle class.” And he’s pushing to reform the tax code to eliminate massive tax loopholes for corporations and the wealthy.
Biden is also pushing Buy American as Trump never did, with green-energy contracts focused on U.S. companies, and he’s connecting urgent action on climate change to “jobs, jobs, jobs.”
It’s an exciting vision, and one the country is ready for.
Biden’s packages include the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure system, which he described as “a blue-collar blueprint to build America.” His second proposal, the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, recognizes for the first time the reality that the 1950s are over and we are not a nation of stay-at-home moms. It would provide money for universal pre-K education; more affordable child care; a federal paid family and medical leave program; two years of free community college; and expanded federal efforts to fight poverty.
To pay for these efforts, Biden wants to hike taxes on corporations, capital gains, and those who make more than $400,000 a year.
In his first address to Congress in late April, Biden not only reeled off statistics about the mega-corporations who pay nothing in taxes; he also talked about ending systemic racism. He painted a picture of a better United States, and invited Republicans to join him in confronting the most serious problems the country faces.
What will Republicans do?
During Biden’s speech, they sat on their hands and refused to applaud when he declared we are on track to cut child poverty in half by the end of the year. They scowled and remained sitting when he said it’s time to get the lead out of Americans’ drinking water. They didn’t even applaud the news that hundreds of millions of Americans are getting their vaccines.
When Biden said we must confront the current crisis, and that “doing nothing is not an option,” Democratic members of Congress stood to give him a standing ovation. Republicans sat silently—doing nothing.
Republican leaders continue to defend people who make more than $400,000 a year and giant corporations against the threat of progressive taxation. Their political positions are so unpopular, it’s no wonder they’re putting so much energy into state-by-state efforts to stop people from voting.
They are up against a formidable opponent in Biden, who is smarter and more skilled than he looked to his opponents, Republicans and progressives alike, during the election campaign, and who is now enjoying going after big, ambitious goals.
“This is what helping looks like. People like it,” a lobbyist for the Milwaukee public schools told me recently, during legislative hearings during which Wisconsin Republicans expressed outrage over the $2.2 billion in federal money pouring into the state’s public schools, threatening to cut state aid to reimpose austerity on low-income children.
Most people are relieved, not outraged, to get a helping hand from the government.
Across the country, Republicans have made not helping their brand—that and white supremacist mob violence. They deserve a strong pushback. And they are getting it from Biden. The President has clearly stated that the most lethal terrorist threat facing the United States today comes not from Al-Qaeda, but from white supremacists.
“We have stared into an abyss,” Biden told the country, but our democracy will endure. The “lies, anger, hate, and fears that have pulled us apart” won’t win out, he promised. It’s a comforting idea. But we’re not there yet.
The policy goals Biden has laid out could help get us there—especially his defense of voting rights against the Jim Crow policies that Republicans are trying to revive in order to cling to power. Good for Biden for backing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.
At some point, the Republicans will have to pay a price for the destructiveness of their agenda. And the nation as a whole needs to realize that we are better off helping each other have a decent society than tearing that society apart. We may have just reached that point.