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.
I’m not sure that everyone on the democratic, progressive, and left side of politics believes that their future is tied to the political and legislative success of the Biden administration. But I do.
If the administration is successful in moving its agenda – an agenda that is progressive in nearly every respect aside from its foreign policies – the ground will be set for further progressive legislation, Democratic pickups in the mid-term elections next year and 2 years later, and, not least, the extension and consolidation of a progressive, social democratic coalition for the longer haul.
If, on the other hand, the administration’s agenda is stymied and sees an erosion in its support, the stage will be set for a comeback for Trump and his retrograde coalition and all the perils to democracy and social progress that such an outcome would entail.
Or to put if differently, it is hard to exaggerate the dangers to our democracy and any progressive, let alone socialist, future if Biden fails. In that event, initiative would shift, but not to the left, (don’t kid yourself) but to the clear advantage of the Trumpists.
Moreover, thinking that this could be their “last chance” to secure their political dominance and “way of life,” there is little doubt that they would use their regained political power to do whatever it takes to secure their long term dominance, including the destruction of any expression of democratic opposition and the evisceration of democratic institutions and rights.
