Biden’s Next 100 Days: One Cheer, Two Fears
Arundhati Roy on India + May Day + New Public Events
This issue of The Platypus takes up the question of Biden’s theory of governance. We’re heartened by the embrace of progressive priorities and worried that neglect of a suite of issues and threats may leave the country vulnerable to resurgent authoritarianism. Read more below.
First, a few quick hits related to the launch of Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future. ICYMI:
Watch the launch event sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of NY, featuring Amaha Kassa, Ruth Milkman, Cecilia Munoz, Mae Ngai, moderated by Deepak.
Register for CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies book launch event featuring former SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Eliseo Medina, UNITE HERE President D Taylor, and SLU Faculty and book co-editors Ruth Milkman and Penny Lewis on Thursday, May 6th at noon.
Register for what is sure to be a fascinating discussion entitled “Immigration, Racial Justice & Public Policy: Assessing Biden’s First 100 Days,” sponsored by Cornell’s Price Initiative and will feature Cecilia Munoz, Sergio Garcia-Rios, Niambi Carter, and Deepak on Tuesday, May 4th at 7pm.
Read this interview Ruth Milkman and Deepak did with UNITE HERE President D Taylor, “The Nevada Turnaround: Immigrant Workers Build Political Power,” in the Los Angeles Review of Books. In the interview, which is drawn from the book, Taylor shares his reflections on the role of immigrants in the labor movement.
Read Ruth Milkman’s incisive piece “Employers, Not Immigrants, Hurt American Workers,” published in the Boston Review of Books and drawn from a chapter in the book.
Read the insightful “Our Great American Myths: On the Public Discourse About Immigration” by Cecilia Munoz, published in Lit Hub this week and excerpted from the book.
Listen to Deepak on the BradCast radio show on Pacifica Radio talk about the book and why Democrats should use “The Progressive Multiplier” to defang authoritarian threats.
Follow all the upcoming events, press coverage, and op-eds about the book here: https://linktr.ee/immigrationmatters
Biden’s Next 100 Days: One Cheer, Two Fears
Biden’s address to Congress at the 100-day mark of his presidency had millions of invisible authors. Nearly every substantive proposal — from green and care infrastructure to the proposed extension of the refundable child tax credit to paid family leave to expanded childcare to the open embrace of unions, immigrants, racial justice, and LGBTQ equality — marks the mainstreaming of ideas that were once on the fringes of political discourse. President Biden brought those ideas to the podium, and he and his team deserve enormous credit for going big. But those ideas were propelled by often unheralded movement and intellectual spadework done in the background over decades. Whatever differences there may be about the details of Biden’s plans, progressives should celebrate the tectonic shift it represents in the Democratic Party – because, to steal a phrase, “we built that.” That’s the cheer.
This issue of The Platypus focuses less on the specific policies Biden has proposed and more on the implicit theory of governance laying behind the administration’s priorities in the first and second hundred days. Compared to the Obama years, we see major advances, but we have two fears. First, we worry that some of the most progressive, gender- and race-conscious elements of the plan may end up on the cutting room floor in pursuit of a chimerical bi-partisan consensus or when moderate Democrats try to reshape the bill to their liking. Second, we worry that many Democrats and outside groups have taken up the challenge of governance as though the authoritarian threat has receded. This stance may prove to be a fatal mistake that we will come to regret if there’s not a simultaneous, rigorous, and deadly serious strategy to uphold the democracy side of the social democratic agenda.
First, more cheering. Biden has dispensed with tired nostrums that have constrained Democratic governance for decades.
Biden proposes bold investments with large price tags, abandoning preoccupations with deficits and inflation fears that have long hobbled the Democratic party. And he contends, in line with the left-Keynesian tradition and common sense, that there is nothing inherently worse about investments by government than by the private sector.
Biden forthrightly foregrounds government as the solution to the challenges we face. In his 1996 State of Union, Bill Clinton infamously signaled Democratic capitulation to the neoliberal paradigm when declared “the era of big government is over.” Biden may have initiated a new era when he stated “trickle-down economics has never worked. It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom and the middle out.”
Biden breaks the link between a job and benefits with the proposed extension of the fully refundable child tax credit as a magnificent centerpiece. In doing so, he has dropped the racial dog whistle that has undermined social policy for generations.
Biden centers a progressive response to climate change as an economic driver, rather than a liability, embracing much of the spirit of the Green New Deal.
Biden supports “care infrastructure,” paid family leave, and defines care work as a core sector of the economy, not as a secondary support to other “real work” — all reflecting a gender- and race-conscious economic justice program that would have transformational benefits for women workers of color.
Biden embraces unions by calling for the passage of the PRO Act, and positions himself “as the most pro-union president in decades.”
Biden emphatically calls for racial justice and names white supremacy as “the most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland today.”
Biden understands the importance of people registering the benefits they receive. Obama’s middle-class tax cut was famously designed to be “submerged” – invisible to its beneficiaries. Though there is lots of work to be done to make sure eligible people can claim benefits under Biden’s American Rescue Plan, it seems clear that the intent of this administration is to make benefits legible; and
Biden proposes to change our flawed enforcement paradigm by proposing to go after wealthy tax cheats and fund greater enforcement of wage and hour laws, to cite two heartening examples.
Biden stands up for the newest group that the GOP has made the target of demonization, declaring in his State of the Union speech, “To all transgender Americans watching at home, especially young people, who are so brave, I want you to know, your president has your back.”
Deepak wrote a piece for The Nation early in 2020 critiquing the Obama administration’s approach to governance and arguing for a wholly new approach should the Democrats win the election. Biden has learned many of the right lessons from the mistakes of the Obama years. (We are also hopeful that Biden won’t wait around for Republicans to do a bipartisan deal on infrastructure in the way Obama did on health care.) Chuck Schumer acknowledged the failures of Democratic governance in the Obama years in an interview with Anand Giridharadas:
Well, look, I don't just blame Obama. I could blame all of us — everybody. The Democrats made two mistakes in 2009 and ’10. We let Republicans dilute the bills so that we stayed in recession for four or five years. Job growth was much too slow. And then we let them negotiate for a year and a half on the Affordable Care Act. And then they pulled out of the negotiations. We got something good done in the ACA, but it wasn't close to enough. We're not going to make either of those mistakes.
Our main substantive fear about the policy agenda that will be debated in the coming months is that some of the most progressive and gender- and race-conscious elements will be the ones sacrificed to assuage Senate moderates. For example, the Biden administration has proposed $400 billion for home care — to increase access to services for vulnerable people and wages for a workforce that is overwhelmingly women of color. It would be a tragedy if that amount is reduced or eliminated because mostly white male lawmakers can only conceive of “infrastructure” as bridges and roads. It would be disastrous if Democrats don’t fight to include citizenship for the farmworkers, Dreamers, and essential workers who cared for and fed the country during the pandemic in the American Jobs Act when they have a chance to do it with only 51 votes. Progressives will need to take to the streets to make sure that the legislation includes these and other priorities, just as Make the Road NY, CASA, and others did in Washington DC to honor May Day.
Our second fear is about whether the structural reforms needed to preserve our democracy will get lost as all energy focuses on the economic debate ahead. Biden’s underlying theory seems simple: if you respond effectively to the public health crisis and fix the economy — politics will take care of itself. Along these lines, Schumer says:
I believe in economic primacy. Improve people's economic conditions and they have hope and they believe in that American dream that I've mentioned before. Then the false gods of blaming somebody else don't work. But if they're stymied, that's when those demagogues like Trump gain popularity.
In fairness, there is some evidence for this class reductionist view of politics: Biden’s average approval rating at the 100-day mark was 54%, compared to 42% for Trump. But Obama’s comparable rating was 61%, and Bush and Clinton’s was 58% — a sign of the increasing polarization of our era. Governing well, which Biden has obviously done, does not automatically translate into overwhelming public support.
There’s also some basis for hope that a government-fueled economic boom could dampen the zeal of those who voted against Biden-Harris. Their administration is making a decisive break with the austerity politics of the past, and there is certainly evidence from history that austerity creates conditions in which authoritarianism flourishes. It’s no coincidence that the most pro-Trump parts of the country are those that have experienced the greatest economic dislocation (though the people who have experienced the greatest hardship are, contrary to Republican claims about working-class realignment, low-income people of color who are overwhelmingly Democrats).
Nonetheless, we fear that Schumer’s “economic primacy” argument is an overly economistic and technocratic diagnosis of the roots of authoritarian politics. Massive disinformation and the appeal of racism, nativism, and othering have proven sturdy and are likely to outlast changes in health and economic conditions. Too much progressive strategizing proceeds from the understandable but partly wrong assumption that if you make good policy and deliver substantive results, political benefits will inevitably accrue. (In fact, people’s political preferences have as much to do with identities and emotions as they do with “objective” material interests, something the right understands well.)
Biden’s approach to governance appeals to many outside groups, who have been waiting for years to have a chance to achieve long-sought policy goals. So, their focus has turned to maximizing the potential of the moment, with all the difficulty a 50/50 Senate entails. Culturally, many in the liberal policy establishment are trained as rationalists and technocrats. Policy wonks, given the chance, are going to get wonky. They didn’t train in the very different skills needed to win a long civil war, and so the return after January 6th to what seems more like normal times, when familiar skills can be put to use, has arrived as a relief. And, of course, we’d all like to think the Trump years and January 6th were aberrant – that we’ve returned to some kind of “normal” and can turn the page.
But the country’s democracy is still imperiled, and good governance on public health and the economy by themselves might not be enough to save it. We’re still living in the world that brought us January 6th’s insurrection. Like a hologram, the seriousness of that threat occasionally flashes into view.
You will remember that Obama’s agenda was essentially stopped in its tracks by midterm elections in 2010 that delivered Republican majorities in state legislatures across the country. Those Republicans then ruthlessly passed a suite of infamous voter suppression and anti-union laws to undercut the sources of progressive power. That’s still the political landscape we are living with at the state level, with increasingly radicalized Republican trifectas in politically crucial states like Arizona, Georgia, Florida and Texas. While Washington has been moving left, many of those states have been moving right. In Arizona, an outrageous, secretive effort to retabulate votes has been moving forward in an effort to legitimize the “big lie” that Trump won. Georgia has enacted a scandalously bad voter suppression bill, while Arizona defeated one only because a legislator found it not suppressive enough. Perhaps most chilling, state legislatures are taking up bills to criminalize peaceful protest. And oh, by the way, one of the country’s two main political parties, the Republican Party, has now been captured by ethno-nationalist forces.
It may be that the health and economic program Biden has outlined will, by itself, curb the authoritarian threat. Or, it may be that after those crises are addressed, there will be enough political energy left to eliminate the filibuster and pass the For the People Act (H.R. 1), the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and other measures to strengthen democracy.
But if those gambles turn out to be wrong, we could be witnessing not the beginning of a new age of social democracy but a brief effulgence before the deluge, something akin to the Weimar Republic before the Nazis’ rise.
What are the implications of this view of the continuing potency of the authoritarian threat? If competent governance on public health and economics might not by itself be enough to counter the authoritarian threat, what are the other options?
Intensify the conversation about January 6th, rather than change the subject, and pursue a national conversation, accountability for not only perpetrators but also enablers in the Republican Party.
Lean into racial reckoning. If what we are experiencing is white backlash, projects of national truth and reconciliation of the kind Megan Ming Francis and Deepak proposed recently in The Nation are necessary to lay a foundation for a new, stable consensus.
Defang nativism, the biggest weapon authoritarians currently possess, by legalizing and naturalizing as many people as possible through all available means.
Prosecute crimes by white nationalists and hate groups and purge their influence from the ranks of government agencies, especially the security state. (Some of this is happening, though we’re unsure whether the zeal is sufficient to the scale of the problem). Simultaneously, we need to build off-ramps from right-wing radicalization, bearing in mind C. T. Vivian’s wise words: “When you ask people to give up hate, you have to be there for them when they do.”
Defund the enforcement apparatus in policing and immigration that does so much violence to Black and brown Americans, erodes democratic culture, and funds the constituencies for authoritarian politics.
Most important of all, taking the authoritarian threat seriously would mean prioritizing the kinds of structural reforms that would permanently alter power relations in society. Legislative priorities include the PRO Act (discussed in last week’s issue), the For the People Act (H.R. 1) and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and immigration reform with a path to citizenship for all 11 million undocumented immigrants. All of these ultimately depend on eliminating the filibuster. (Smaller numbers of immigrants can and should be given a path to citizenship in the American Jobs Act and another 9 million Legal Permanent Residents can be naturalized and turned into voters before 2022 without Congressional action). If there’s a real plan to eliminate the filibuster and get those big structural reforms done, The Platypus can’t see it from its burrow, and that is a big source of worry. If we don’t get any of these structural reforms done this year, we will find ourselves in an even worse version of the post-2010 landscape after the 2022 midterm elections.
A focus on the authoritarian threat also affects how we think about geography and time. Outside groups should reserve lots of attention and resources for the ongoing work of organizing people outside the Beltway, both to connect people to timely national and state fights, but also to recruit people who are disengaged from politics altogether into work that does engage them, even if that’s unrelated to what’s in the news cycle. The ongoing work of democracy outside Washington is arguably far more important than what happens inside Washington. And the deeper, long-term democratic challenges that underlie the authoritarian menace need just as much attention as the short-term policy fights.
The Platypus does not want to be the skunk at the garden party. Biden’s speech was inspiring in its boldness and vision, and we cheered. Progressives have a collective stake in the success of the Biden administration’s program because it reflects our own agenda and because we are in a united front against authoritarianism. But we should demand strategies to protect the progressive, race- and gender-conscious elements of the American Jobs Act and American Families Plan that make it truly transformational. And we should demand concrete plans, not just intentions, to alter the underlying structures of power that would empower workers, people of color, and immigrants. Our democracy hangs in the balance.
One of the country’s best organizers and strategists, Anna Galland, co-authored a great new call to action, urging all of us to bring the same intensity to the fights in 2021 that we did to the struggle to oust Trump in 2020.
Many people were involved in the 2020 election via campaigns, and are less familiar with year-round organizing, mobilization, power-building, and accountability efforts — but there are many organizations doing precisely this work. . . . The worst thing we could do in this moment would be to take our feet off the gas. If we allow our intensity and determination to ebb, we’ll quickly be back in an even more acute collective crisis. But if we lean in now, we might emerge from this time of loss and challenge to truly realize the dream of what author and advocate Heather McGhee calls “the world’s boldest experiment in democracy.” It’s an experiment that can only succeed if we all stay engaged.
Indeed.
Reading Recommendations
Today, we offer just one must-read article, the incomparable Arundhati Roy’s reflection on the Covid-19 catastrophe in India: “We Are Witnessing a Crime Against Humanity.”
The system hasn’t collapsed. The government has failed. Perhaps “failed” is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity. Virologists predict that the number of cases in India will grow exponentially to more than 500,000 a day. They predict the death of many hundreds of thousands in the coming months, perhaps more. My friends and I have agreed to call each other every day just to mark ourselves present, like roll call in our school classrooms. We speak to those we love in tears, and with trepidation, not knowing if we will ever see each other again. We write, we work, not knowing if we will live to finish what we started. Not knowing what horror and humiliation awaits us. The indignity of it all. That is what breaks us.
The hashtag #ModiMustResign is trending on social media. Some of the memes and illustrations show Modi with a heap of skulls peeping out from behind the curtain of his beard. Modi the Messiah speaking at a public rally of corpses. Modi and Amit Shah as vultures, scanning the horizon for corpses to harvest votes from. But that is only one part of the story. The other part is that the man with no feelings, the man with empty eyes and a mirthless smile, can, like so many tyrants in the past, arouse passionate feelings in others. His pathology is infectious. And that is what sets him apart. In north India, which is home to his largest voting base, and which, by dint of sheer numbers, tends to decide the political fate of the country, the pain he inflicts seems to turn into a peculiar pleasure.
Fredrick Douglass said it right: “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” How we in India pride ourselves on our capacity to endure. How beautifully we have trained ourselves to meditate, to turn inward, to exorcise our fury as well as justify our inability to be egalitarian. How meekly we embrace our humiliation. . .
Despite knowing all this, many of India’s so-called public intellectuals, the CEOs of its major corporations and the media houses they own, worked hard to pave the way for Modi to become the prime minister. They humiliated and shouted down those of us who persisted in our criticism. “Move on”, was their mantra. Even today, they mitigate their harsh words for Modi with praise for his oratory skills and his “hard work”. Their denunciation and bullying contempt for politicians in opposition parties is far more strident. They reserve their special scorn for Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, the only politician who has consistently warned of the coming Covid crisis and repeatedly asked the government to prepare itself as best it could. To assist the ruling party in its campaign to destroy all opposition parties amounts to colluding with the destruction of democracy.
So here we are now, in the hell of their collective making, with every independent institution essential to the functioning of a democracy compromised and hollowed out, and a virus that is out of control. . .
No, India cannot be isolated. We need help.
Delights and Provocations
We loved the new HBO documentary Tina, about the magnificent Tina Turner.
And, for May Day, how about a little Billy Bragg singing “There is Power in a Union.”
Or Souljazz Orchestra’s class-war anthem Greet the Dawn?
Finally, there’s this excellent two-minute video by the Painters’ Union explaining why labor laws are rigged in favor of employers — and why American workers deserve the PRO Act.