In the wake of the over-hyped but still worrisome election results in Virginia and elsewhere last week, there is already pressure from some Democrats to scale back even more the broad social, environmental, and economic spending in the long-pending Build Back Better Act. The reasoning here would be that the Democrats’ loss of the Virginia governorship in particular was due to voters believing President Biden has governed in too liberal a fashion.
But as the dominant media and political narrative of the past several months is that Democratic infrastructure legislation has been in limbo, this argument from the center and right of the Democratic Party doesn’t make a lot of sense, and sensible pushback against it has already begun. At The New York Times, Paul Krugman notes that, “What’s crucial is that Democrats not take the election setbacks as an indication that they’ve overreached — that President Biden should back down on vaccine mandates, that their economic agenda is too left-wing. What the public perceives isn’t a party doing too much, but a party doing too little, and Biden and his allies need to end that sense of drift.” And at the Plum Line blog, Greg Sargent has a thorough takedown of the flaws in the reasoning of those urging a pullback in ambition, taking particular aim at those who say that Biden didn’t run on the big socio-economic polices he’s trying to pass, citing. . . actual things Biden said before he was elected president. I also like Sargent’s diagnosis of the basic contradiction in the moderate-conservative blaming of the BBB Act for tearing down Democratic chances in Virginia when the BBB Act hasn’t even been passed yet: “The critics are incoherent on this point: The ideological scope of the package alienated moderate voters, and so did the failure to pass it.”
If nothing else, misguided attempts to marshal limited election results into a story about a grand national repudiation of progressive economic policies embraced by Biden and the great majority of Democrats remind us that this conflict over legislative ambition is a central fight in the Democratic Party right now. But could it be that Biden and progressives have already won the battle far more than most of us realize? Zachary Carter makes this case, arguing that despite how the BBB Act has been whittled down over the past few months by the objections of a handful of representatives and senators, its vision of a government that helps Americans with such essentials as child care has largely won the battle of ideas in the party. Even the grinding pace of the BBB Act negotiations may have ultimately resulted in an underlying triumph: referring to the two Democratic senators most resistant to Biden’s agenda, Carter writes, “By repeatedly positioning themselves outside the Democratic mainstream, Manchin and Sinema have handed Biden a victory in the battle of ideas, even as they force him to scale back his policy ambitions.”
If Carter is correct in his assessment, then this strengthens another interpretation of the Democrats’ recent political infighting and lack of strength in the Virginia elections: that rather than being a party in disarray, the party is suffering through a last-ditch effort by moderate and conservative Democrats to oppose a huge shift in Democratic thinking about how to promote economic growth and social well-being, and that once the BBB Act is passed, this shift in direction will at last be able to face the test of reality, in the form of voters who can judge its benefits or shortcomings for themselves. Alongside evidence that a new intellectual framework has won over the majority of Democrats in Congress, it seems that greater legitimacy for ideas like child tax credits, pre-K for three- and four-year olds, and massive government investments in protecting Americans from tangible climate change will be difficult to reverse once voters actually start receiving those benefits.
I am not saying that these benefits will then result in Democrats handily winning elections — they will have to figure out how to deflect and demolish GOP race-baiting to have any hope of accomplishing that — but I would at least hope that positive reactions from constituents would create a feedback loop for Democrats to further double down on this new direction. It seems that a theory of governance that says Americans deserve nice things from the government they themselves elect, and whose legitimacy ultimately rests on reflecting their will, can in the long run beat a vision that says the role of government is to ensure that Americans are always and ever responsible for their own individual fates. To borrow a term from Joe Manchin, Americans may soon come to fully embrace the idea that they are entitled to quite a lot, and that such entitlement is just, democratic, and of enormous benefit to American society.