Joe Biden’s travails and the deep roots of liberal despair

Joe Biden’s travails and the deep roots of liberal despair

By Greg Sargent

Columnist

Today at 10:49 a.m. EST

These are strange times for American liberals. We’re in what you might call a split-screen moment.

On one screen, Democrats are close to passing massive investments in our country and its people that rival the great progressive achievements of the 20th century. If you had told liberals 18 months ago that something this potentially transformative was on the horizon, many would have laughed bitterly in your face.

On the other screen, things look as dark as ever. Republicans are entrenching minority rule everywhere. The Virginia results suggest Republicans won’t pay a price for their embrace of insurrection and political violence. Republicans are all but certain to capture at least the House. President Biden’s sliding approval suggests a deep chasm between voter approval of Democrats’ actual agenda and the political fate that voters may soon mete out to them.

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And a Donald Trump comeback seems entirely plausible.

Given these whiplash-inducing story lines, how should liberals feel about this moment?

A trio of New York Times columnists has just taken on this question, and because these are ambitious and challenging pieces, it’s worth trying to synthesize big-picture narratives from all of them.

Paul Krugman argues for the first screen. As he notes, the vast Build Back Better expenditures are in keeping with our history of investment in infrastructure (the Erie Canal, the interstate highway system) and in our people (expanded high school and university education).

Biden’s agenda will spend hundreds of billions of dollars apiece on traditional infrastructure, on transitioning toward a decarbonized future, and on children via the expanded child tax credit and universal pre-K. All these, says Krugman, will have a “high social rate of return.”

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The returns on climate and infrastructure spending are obvious, and spending on children pays big dividends in healthier, happier, productive adults. In sum, Krugman notes, Biden is reviving our “tradition of public spending oriented toward the future.”

All this is cause for optimism, and I’d like to suggest an additional reason for it. If this goes well, it should perhaps be regarded as a serious down payment on a rehabilitated liberalism.

Over the past 50 years, liberal theorists have elaborated a more egalitarian version of liberalism in keeping with the rise of welfare states in Western democracies. With variations, this held roughly that justice requires investing substantial social and material resources in rectifying vastly unequal starting positions to achieve genuine moral equality.

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This was thrown badly on the defensive by the conservative revolution of the 1980s, and the possibilities opened up by the 2008 financial crisis went largely unfulfilled. Yet now, as Corey Robin notes, Biden may realize the most ambitious first presidential term in memory: The Trump challenge seems to have persuaded Democrats to make a more ambitious investment of resources in our people and future than in decades.

And so this might be seen as an effort to respond to the illiberal challenge to liberalism’s future with a much more egalitarian version of it. Yet as promising as that is, it may also prove a source of liberal despair.

Too see why, read Michelle Goldberg’s case for screen two. As she notes, with Republicans taking over election machinery in many states for plainly nefarious ends, and locking down a decade of gerrymanders, we now see that “dislodging Trump has brought American democracy only a brief reprieve.”

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That, along with ongoing GOP radicalization carrying no political price, could lead to “progressives retreating into private life to preserve their sanity.” Which would further facilitate a reactionary takeover.

Allow me to add: Democrats might have done something about this. But two centrist senators’ utterly unjustified addiction to a Jim Crow procedural relic that helps preserve minority rule said no, and Biden didn’t prevail over them.

Liberals might despair about something else: Despite this moment representing a historic down payment on a more egalitarian liberalism, there is no indication the public will reward it.

You might have thought otherwise. The increasing horrors of the climate crisis and the pandemic’s unmasking of profound injustices in the economy seemed to open up vast new political possibilities for social spending.

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Yet the same polls showing high approval of Biden’s agenda on paper also show deep disapproval of Biden and a likely takeover of the House by the party that uniformly opposes that agenda.

We can debate endlessly why this is: Perhaps it’s inflation and supply chain woes. Or maybe Democrats overreached on school closings, or allowed activist terminology to define them, or took their eye off the ball on covid-19, or let centrists envelop BBB in unsightly sausage making.

Which brings us to Jamelle Bouie’s column rebutting such short-term diagnoses. As he argues, much of this is structural: “Thermostatic” public opinion ensures that a president doing big things will face backlash. So do the inevitably polarizing tendencies of the presidency and the fact that being president in deeply divided times is, you know, hard.

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But even so, those implacable factors also suggest reasons for liberal despair. In even optimistic scenarios, the GOP’s ability to recapture the House via extreme gerrymanders alone likely means years of grueling trench warfare, and inevitable efforts to repeal whatever progress is made.

That voters already appear to be turning on Democrats amid legislative struggles that are inevitably part of the process suggests that once again, they’ll have only a two-year window to clean up a catastrophic mess left behind by GOP rule. That pattern suggests how tenuous our prospects are for building on a rehabilitated liberalism or averting climate catastrophe.

And depressingly, liberal hopes that a real investment in the nation and people might tamp down illiberal reactionary tendencies seem likely to be dashed.