I don’t know if it is true or not, but supposedly FDR once met with a group of activists who sought his support for bold legislation. He listened to their arguments for some time and then said, “You’ve convinced me. Now go out and make me do it.” Even if it isn’t quite factual, it was, and still is, good advice for democratic minded and progressive activists, when a Democrat sits in the White House. Like now, we have a Democratic President in the White House who is meeting opposition from Republicans and a handful of Democrats to his signature piece of legislation that would materially improve the lives of tens of millions – not to mention represent a break from neoliberalism and Reaganism.

This being so one would think it would be a no brainer for the coalition that elected Biden to “make Congress do it,” that is to, weigh in on the side of this transformative legislation and President in ways that rattle the country and shake up the opponents of this bill. But that hasn’t happened. In fact, the advice has been turned on its head in some progressive and left circles.

Emblematic is a column that appeared in the Nation this week, written by one its most respected journalists, John Nichols. Instead of making a case for popular and massive action in support of Biden’s legislation, Nichols is critical of Biden for his failure to campaign across the country for the bill. I don’t entirely dismiss Nichols’ argument, but it strikes me as ducking the larger problem: the passivity of progressive (and left) organizations and people in the face of this monumental legislative struggle, for their failure to lift barely a finger to “make Congress do it.” I

Isn’t that what the present moment calls for, isn’t the rumbling of hundreds of thousands, better yet a million and more, on the streets what is urgently needed?

It was during the Trump interregnum that I gained a fuller appreciation of the importance of the relative independence of the media and judicial system from the dictates of the political bloc in power, not to mention a more nuanced understanding of the role of the Democratic Party in our politics. Each in their own way were instrumental in bringing down Trump. In fact, it is fair to say in their absence Trump would be sending out his destructive, daily, and sometimes deadly rants from the White House and white nationalist, plutocratic authoritarianism or, maybe worse, would be riding roughshod over the “relative independence” of the institutions of our Republic as well as the rights and liberties of tens of millions.

It also caused me to reflect on my willingness to accept, even defend, their absence in the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries that went belly up 3 decades ago. In that era, I understood democracy in socialist society instrumentally, that is, subordinate to the “wisdom,” decisions, and power requirements of the “Marxist Leninist vanguard party” and mistook, perhaps conveniently, the formal representations of democratic governance and rights as actual ones.

Life is complicated, isn’t it.

To say that you are for a cross class, all peoples coalition to defeat the existential menace of white nationalist, plutocratic authoritarianism, while at the same time remaining in practice at arm’s length from the many positive initiatives of the Biden administration reveals a failure to understand the “concrete” strategic and tactical requirements of this moment if we hope to advance democracy, social progress, and humanity’s future – not to mention win next year’s midterm elections.

One thing I learned in politics – and it took a while – is the importance of taking a sober and objective look at what people are thinking and what they are ready to do. I would sometimes say in meetings of the Communist Party that it didn’t really matter what we think or are ready to do. What matters, I would argue, is what others are thinking and prepared to do. There was some overstatement and one sideness on my part here.

But I thought it was necessary at the time in order to counter the ingrained habit in our ranks of constructing demands and slogans out of wishful thinking and ideological zeal. Or to frame it a little differently, it was a response to the idea embedded in our political culture that the level of radicalization of the working class and the trend line of the class struggle, no matter the political and economic conjuncture, are uninterruptedly upward and only await a leadership and a political appeal that correspond with this rising radicalization.

This shouldn’t be understood as an argument for passivity or retreat necessarily. Only an insistence that political realism should be coupled with radicalism at every stage of struggle. And in today’s circumstances in which the dangers are existential and the opportunities for advance palpable, such a political methodology is all the more imperative.

Biden and Congressional Democrats, like it or not, will have to make some hard spending decisions as it appears that Manchin, Sinema, and a few others are dug in in their opposition to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. How to do this in a way that maintains the unity of Democrats and the larger coalition that elected Biden will be a challenge.

Hopefully we won’t see a lot of posturing and grandstanding from leaders and activists that militantly, but, in the end opportunistically, insist that the full package could have been won. A far better response would be a renewed commitment to win larger Democratic Congressional majorities in next year’s elections and an acknowledgement that the coalition that elected Biden – not least the left broadly defined – stood largely on the sidelines during this struggle.