Dear loyal Platypus readers,
As you know, The Platypus hibernated for much longer than expected this year. Both Deepak and Harry have taken on major new commitments. Deepak accepted a new job as president of the JPB Foundation and will start part-time in August, then move to full-time in February 2024. Harry is working on an important documentary project, which we’ll be able to say more about soon. We’re sorry to say that The Platypus will stop publishing at the end of this year. We expect only occasional posts for the rest of the year, sharing things we’ve written or resources and ideas we think you’ll find of interest. This newsletter, which began as a series of emails sent to friends during the pandemic, has brought us both a lot of joy and insight, and it’s been rewarding to see the response from our intensely loyal subscribers! We appreciate all of you for being on the journey with us.
We also want to let you know that the latest issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas features a 5000-word essay entitled “The Death of Deliverism,” which we wrote with our wonderful colleague Shahrzad Shams of the Roosevelt Institute. The article explores the paradox that progressive economic policies enacted under the Biden administration have not reduced the threat of authoritarian movement, contradicting a view held by many that “delivering” material benefits for people inevitably has a political payoff. That assumption has proved wrong repeatedly, and understanding why is crucial to progressive strategy and to the defense of multi-racial democracy.
The text of the full article is here.
And here are the opening paragraphs, which frame the dilemma:.
How could it be that the largest-ever recorded drop in childhood poverty had next to no political resonance?
One of us became intrigued by this question when he walked into a graduate class one evening in 2021 and received unexpected and bracing lessons about the limits of progressive economic policy from his students.
Deepak had worked on various efforts to secure expanded income support for a long time—and was part of a successful push over two decades earlier to increase the child tax credit, a rare win under the George W. Bush presidency. His students were mostly working-class adults of color with full-time jobs, and many were parents. Knowing that the newly expanded child tax credit would be particularly helpful to his students, he entered the class elated. The money had started to hit people’s bank accounts, and he was eager to hear about how the extra income would improve their lives. He asked how many of them had received the check. More than half raised their hands. Then he asked those students whether they were happy about it. Not one hand went up.
Baffled, Deepak asked why. One student gave voice to the vibe, asking, “What’s the catch?” As the class unfolded, students shared that they had not experienced government as a benevolent force. They assumed that the money would be recaptured later with penalties. It was, surely, a trap. And of course, in light of centuries of exploitation and deceit—in criminal justice, housing, and safety net systems—working-class people of color are not wrong to mistrust government bureaucracies and institutions. The real passion in the class that night, and many nights, was about crime and what it was like to take the subway at night after class. These students were overwhelmingly progressive on economic and social issues, but many of their everyday concerns were spoken to by the right, not the left.
The American Rescue Plan’s temporary expansion of the child tax credit lifted more than 2 million children out of poverty, resulting in an astounding 46 percent reduction in child poverty. Yet the policy’s lapse sparked almost no political response, either from its champions or its beneficiaries. Democrats hardly campaigned on the remarkable achievement they had just delivered, and the millions of parents impacted by the policy did not seem to feel that it made much difference in their day-to-day lives. Even those who experienced the greatest benefit from the expanded child tax credit appeared unmoved by the policy. In fact, during the same time span in which monthly deposits landed in beneficiaries’ bank accounts, the percentage of Black voters—a group that especially benefited from the policy—who said their lives had improved under the Biden Administration actually declined.
Explaining the Disconnect
More broadly, the suite of progressive economic policies Biden enacted hasn’t made a dent in his approval ratings. Sixty-two percent of Americans said in a poll from early 2023 that Biden has accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing” during his presidency. The ambitious drive to “Build Back Better” after the COVID-19 economic shock wasn’t as far-reaching as progressives (or Biden) had hoped, but taken together, the American Rescue Plan, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act constitute a sweeping effort to remake the U.S. economy. Many progressive groups are turning their attention to implementation of these major pieces of legislation, which is worthy work, whether it has political consequences or not. But it’s a remarkable feat to spend trillions in an attempt to usher in an economic transformation and to get such an underwhelming response.
It has long been an article of faith among liberals and leftists that if you “deliver” for people—specifically, if you deliver economic improvements in people’s lives through policy—these changes will solidify or shift people’s political allegiances. Ironically, this transactional vision of politics echoes a naive assumption more commonly associated with economists, particularly neoliberals: that humans are rational actors motivated above all by immediate material interests. After the 2022 midterm election, Elizabeth Warren wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that exemplifies this way of thinking. She contended that “Voters rewarded Democrats for protecting the lives and livelihoods of struggling families,” citing things like allowing Medicare to lower drug prices, capping insulin costs, and increasing corporate taxes. A more accurate look at the 2022 election results, however, shows that they were highly geographically uneven, and that the unusually good results for Democrats came in places where reproductive rights were under threat and where people felt their votes mattered as a stand against MAGA extremism. Biden’s economic record played little role in persuading voters—and in much of the country, authoritarian candidates prevailed.
We use the term “deliverism” to describe the presumption of a linear and direct relationship between economic policy and people’s political allegiances. Originally coined by Matt Stoller and expanded on by David Dayen, the word broadly describes an approach to governing that focuses on enacting and implementing policies to improve people’s lives. Stoller and Dayen situate the concept as an alternative to popularism, arguing that it’s not enough for progressives to simply talk about popular policies—they must also actually deliver on the policies they claim to support. In exchange for enacting these policies, deliverism holds, voters will reward progressives at the ballot box. Centrists, liberals, and progressives in politics and in outside social movements disagree about many things, but deliverism is a worldview that unites most of them.
However, progressive economic policies do not necessarily lead to the political outcomes that deliverism predicts they should, and deliverism is proving ineffectual as a response to authoritarianism. People are fully capable of supporting or ignoring progressive economic policies while voting for authoritarians. In 2020 in Florida, for example, more than 60 percent of voters supported a ballot initiative to raise the state minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2026—the same state where a majority also voted for Trump. Last year Nebraska passed a similar measure despite overwhelming support for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. And we’ve seen this movie before: Political scientist Dan Hopkins shows that President Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, did virtually nothing to shift political allegiances and had a minimal impact on the political behavior of even its direct beneficiaries.
Although we have long been sympathetic to deliverism, we now believe that it is mostly wrong. Delivering for people on economic issues is an important goal in itself, but it is not an antivenom for the snakebite of authoritarianism.
There are many reasons why economic policy and political behavior might be disconnected. People might not know about a policy, why it happened, or who brought it about. (There is a long history of politicians blaming faulty “messaging” for the lack of popularity of their policies. And to be sure, getting better at communicating with voters is important.) A policy may not be large enough or not get implemented soon or well enough for people to see a direct impact in their lives. (Sometimes policies are designed to make their impact on beneficiaries invisible, as was the case with Obama’s middle-class tax cuts.) In some cases, a policy simply may not feel particularly salient to some people. The media frequently fail to explain the relationship between policies and people’s everyday lives. Often the right has already done such a good job of inoculating people against the idea of government as a benevolent force that many are unable to see it working to make their lives better. And both parties have created programs that are demeaning, confusing, and demoralizing to their beneficiaries, leading to the deep and grounded skepticism of government that Deepak heard from his students.
But there is another factor we want to highlight to help explain this disconnect—a dramatic cultural turn that has been weaponized by the authoritarian right and neglected by the technocratic, policy-obsessed left.
To continue reading, visit Democracy: A Journal of Ideas here.]