Biden’s big bet: He’s found the kryptonite that will defeat Trumpism

Biden’s big bet: He’s found the kryptonite that will defeat Trumpism

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

April 1, 2021 at 1:34 a.m. GMT+9

If you read the official summary of President Biden’s new $2 trillion infrastructure package, which he will introduce Wednesday, what’s striking is its air of what you might call forward-looking nostalgia.

It’s nostalgic in its emphasis on boosting public investment to levels not seen since the prosperous 1960s, and in its faith that vast brick-and-mortar public works will restore national greatness.

But it’s forward-looking in its vow to direct such spending toward challenges such as climate change, racial inequities and the needs of the new, multiracial, care-economy-oriented working class.

This points to a big bet embedded in the new plan: That in this combination lies a kind of kryptonite that will further weaken Trumpism, that amalgam of plutocracy and reactionary authoritarian nationalism, fueled by hallucinatory anti-leftism, that continues to hold large swaths of the opposition in its thrall.

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Biden’s plan envisions an ambitious overhaul of the U.S. economy, rebuilding roads, bridges, sewer systems and electric grids. It would expand digital infrastructure such as rural broadband and retrofit the future decarbonized economy, incentivizing renewable energy and electric cars, packaged as industrial policy to stay competitive with China.

But beyond the details, what’s notable is its sheer ambition. As Jim Tankersley notes:

The scale of the proposal underscores how fully Mr. Biden has embraced the opportunity to use federal spending to address longstanding social and economic challenges in a way not seen in half a century. Officials said that, if approved, the spending in the plan would end decades of stagnation in federal investment in research and infrastructure — and would return government investment in those areas, as a share of the economy, to its highest levels since the 1960s.

You can’t miss the nostalgia about the economy between World War II and the subsequent neoliberal revolution. The summary cites the vast public investments and national projects that buoyed that economy, while blaming public under-investment for debilitating America since.

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The plan “will invest in America in a way we have not invested since we built the interstate highways and won the Space Race,” the summary vows, lamenting that “public domestic investment as a share of the economy has fallen by more than 40 percent since the 1960s.”

But the plan also vows to subsidize a new green economy that creates jobs and addresses both environmental racism and rural needs. If successful, this could give working people a stake in a future oriented toward decarbonization and combating structural racism.

It also promises to rebuild the “care economy” and boost the wages of caregivers, who are “disproportionately women of color.” This recognizes that the multiracial working class, that of health-care workers servicing aging America, faces different challenges from the hardhat white working class our politics valorizes, as Gabriel Winant notes.

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What’s audacious is how idealized a vision this is of what a broad Democratic center-left alliance can achieve. Yes, the left is calling for still more spending. Yes, moderates have their own objections. Yes, this plan faces immense hurdles. Yes, we should wait until the economists dissect its details and inevitable shortcomings.

But in its broad strokes, it at least aspires to unite the values and priorities of a very broad ideological swath of Democrats. (In another time, it would have appealed to moderate Republicans, too.)

Which is where Trumpism comes in.

Trumpism’s deranged anti-leftism

Right now, while Democrats are rolling out the most ambitious policies in a half century, Tucker Carlson, the Trumpist right’s leading commentator, has sparked a week-long debate with a segment on how the left’s extremism might provoke the right into fully embracing fascism.

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The softer version of this argument, embraced by some right-leaning intellectuals, is that a form of leftist intolerance has been loosed upon the land that might contribute, albeit not as much as the authoritarian right, toward pushing the country into civil collapse.

But as John Ganz argues, that misses the fundamental asymmetry here: We might be heading toward a different fate, in which the progressive forces in our country successfully “preserved institutions” while the “most reactionary were trying to destroy them.”

This helps illuminate the possibilities in this center-left alliance. While Trumpists fantasize about a monolithic, rampaging left pushing the country over the edge, we’re seeing center and left working hard to secure ambitious public investments to solve vast public problems.

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If this can in some measure succeed, which is hardly assured, it could weaken the hold of that deranged anti-leftism on the imagination of so many.

Big public investments as the answer

Economist Mike Konczal notes that Trumpism has multiple elements. It involved a plutocratic sellout of the public interest — via vast high-end tax cuts for the rich and a deregulatory spree that showered benefits on employers and corporations.

It also promised that this would help working families (by making employers stronger) while vowing to protect workers from immigrants, pointy-headed climate regulators and cosmopolitan globalist elites.

But this vision fails workers, because it “doesn’t actually provide real security,” Konczal told me, and won’t accept that our capitalist order cannot address the “large-scale market failures that only the public can address.”

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“Ultimately, it points all our resources in the wrong direction,” said Konczal, the author of a book on the need for a robust new progressive economics.

“The real problem is capitalism writ large," Konczal told me, "which does not invest sufficiently in the infrastructure the public needs, does not invest in family security and the also-necessary infrastructure of care work, and cannot handle large-scale challenges like climate change.”

By contrast, Konczal noted, the Biden plan broadly embodies the ideal that the better answer is “large-scale public investments in these key issues, done in the right way.”

Could huge public investments help flush Trumpism out of the body politic? With luck, we’ll soon find out.

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