If the best evidence of the beginning of the end of neoliberal ideology and politics is the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan, the necessary, if not sufficient, condition for this shape shifting change was the defeat of Trump and the Republican Party in last fall’s election. Had that not happened, had Biden not won the presidency and Democrats majorities in the Senate and House, any weakening of neoliberalism would still be on the wish list of disgruntled activists. Indeed, the political ground, on which millions collide and contest the present and future, would be decidedly different. Democracy under siege and an out of control pandemic, not the first big body blow to neoliberal politics and the glimmerings of a pandemic free world, would be the reality facing the country. Elections sure matter!
It’s interesting to note that critics on the left, whose dislike of Biden and the Democratic Party is near congenital, are in a bit of a quandary with the passage of the American Rescue Plan. The Biden administration, is, after all, the architect of it and Congressional Democrats, in display of unity, passed it in the face of a wall of Republican opposition. To extricate themselves from this quandary the critics either remind us what is absent in it or claim that it was the “movement” or the “class struggle” that compelled Biden and Democrats to act as they did. If left to their own devices, they say, Biden and Congressional Democrats would have chose a series of half measures, they would have gone small rather than Big. My reaction to this line of argumentation is that both life and politics are more complicated than such simple schemes.
Microaggressions against people of color in the workplace and elsewhere are consequential. They hurt those targeted and poison the social environment in which they occur. Nevertheless, in an article I read recently, the author ends up minimizing this dimension of the anti-racist struggle in the name of fighting structural racism. But this is, I believe, mistaken. We should see these two dimensions of the struggle against racism as organic, interactive, and connected – not as separate and distinct, with one being of less significance than the other.
To minimize in any way the struggle against microaggressions can only weaken the anti-racist struggle. Or to put it differently, an approach to fighting structural racism (sometimes legitimized in the language of class and universalism) that makes the individual invisible or a small insignificant cog in a larger struggle, does little to advance the cause of racial justice and freedom.
The American Rescue Plan is the inverse of Trump’s tax cut insofar as it radically distributes income in a downward direction, not upward to the 1 per cent. Unlike the tax cut, not a single GOP senator voted for it. Nothing in the last half century approaches it in its broad and egalitarian sweep.
No less importantly, it goes against the grain of the governing and economic philosophy of the past 4 decades that systematically withdrew government from the provision of public goods like education, health care, jobs and unemployment relief, welfare, aid to city and state governments, public housing, etc., while giving free rein to the “magic of the market.” Biden and Democrats said they were going to go big. And they did conceptually and practically.
In short, it’s a BFD!
Joe Manchin is a big problem for the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats, and if anybody has to be part of the solution to his obstructionist role, it is the people of WV. Meanwhile, the rest of us can turn our attention to midterm elections and elect Democrats to the Senate.
