Undoubtedly the biggest political news of the week is the Democrats’ passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Apart from the general benefit of addressing health needs related to the coronavirus, it also delivers massive amounts of cash to Americans and government spending that together will keep our damaged economy on the path to recovery. But as Jamelle Bouie elucidates, it’s also a massively progressive piece of legislation that “is expected to reduce overall poverty by more than a third and child poverty by more than half. It is, with no exaggeration, the single most important piece of anti-poverty legislation since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.”
After the derangements and gutting of the public weal during the Trump years, the size of the ambition here is pretty dizzying; the door seems suddenly open to a renewed federal role in the economy and moving the United States toward greater equality after years of growing income and wealth gaps.
But this ambition didn’t come from nowhere; economists, political thinkers, and others have been talking for years about reviving an activist ideal for American government (which I think is ultimately intertwined with reviving American democracy itself — the American people have every right to employ their common government for shared economic ends).
For a great overview of some of this progressive thinking, I highly recommend Noah Smith’s interview of Saikat Chakrabarti, who among other things wrote the Green New Deal while he was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff. Not only does Chakrabarti’s deep involvement in progressive thinking make him a compelling narrator of recent trends in the movement, the interview captures a sense of deep intellectual and moral ferment, in which erstwhile “radical” ideas have been moved closer and closer to the realm of common sense. The interview hits on topics that you may have heard about before; but for me, it brought a lot of ideas into more of a coherent whole, while highlighting some essential insights of contemporary progressivism.
Probably the most striking point that I’ve encountered elsewhere, but which hit me with a fresh perspective, is the insight that shifting the economy to fight climate change doesn’t necessarily mean limiting economic growth, but could actually be the key to developing a new, sustainable prosperity for the country; that the United States has lulled itself into thinking that we are already a fully-developed economy. Along these lines, Chakrabarti’s explanation of the political strategizing behind development of the Green New Deal is gripping stuff, all the more so as we’ve reached a point where attempts to open the public discussion have paid off. The conversation about the need for an American industrial policy is also pretty hot; in it, you can see the outlines of a policy that, among other things, can neutralize Trump-Republican fake populism that pretends to put America first but always ends up putting Americans last. Just a great stimulating and challenging read.