What’s the logic behind the stimulus checks going to a broad swath of people, including families making over 150,000? To help individual families for sure. But it’s also to reinflate a deflated economy. It’s better to err, if you’re going to err on the side of too much stimulus, not too little. During the crisis in 2008, the Obama administration spent too little and thus the recovery was slow and the long term, negative political repercussions were pronounced.

The Republican Party is as much a racist mob as a political party. Trump is out of the White House, but he hasn’t vacated the GOP and he is not far from the minds of Republican Senators and House members. And few things demonstrate this more than the refusal of the House Republican caucus to discipline, let alone expel, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The stimulus plan isn’t simply the baby of President Biden and Vice President Harris. If polls are accurate it is embraced by roughly 70 per cent of the people, including Independents and Republicans. If it passes it will bring relief to millions in need, reinflate the economy, and ratchet up the fight against the coronavirus. But it doesn’t end here. It will also throw the Republican opposition on the defensive, give confidence to the diverse coalition that backed the legislation going forward, and send a signal to people across the country that the new administration and the federal government is on their side. No less important, it will set the stage for new legislative battles to address the multiple crises weighing heavily on the country and singled out by the Biden administration.

In these circumstances, progressive people and organizations would do well to make the case for Biden’s stimulus package, creatively turn mass sentiment into practical support, and call out the opposition of the GOP and any other detractors, including within the Democratic Party and elsewhere.

In doing so, they will enhance their own standing and grow their numbers.

Bravo to Paul Buhle! It’s easy for even great thinkers, like E.P. Thompson and their work to disappear into intellectual ether as new generations move on to new challenges, intellectual and political. Let’s hope your appreciation helps to recover Thompson’s life and legacy for today’s activists who face a far more complex reality than we did. I read Thompson later than most, in the 1990s. By then I had crossed enough streams and encountered enough dead ends to leave me wondering about my understanding of class, marxism, and socialism. Luckily my meet up with Thompson made all the difference in the world. It allowed me to look at theory, history, and practical politics with new eyes and in new ways, which I don’t regret, even though it got me in more trouble than I could have anticipated at the time.

Trump—and the thorough Trumpification of the Republican Party—to borrow Susan Glasser’s phrase, is the main obstacle to resolving the multiple crises facing the country. Or more to the point, to enacting the legislative program of the Biden administration.