Joe Biden is the Center of American Politics. So Step to the Left, Mr. President
PLUS: A review of "Making It"
A Starbucks just around the corner. Classic rock radio playing “Dream On” by Aerosmith. The U.S. women’s basketball team with gold medals around their necks. These are things we take for granted. Just like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC.
What’s the AMOC, you ask? It’s the current system that circulates ocean water from the tropics up along the eastern coast of the United States over to Europe and then back south to Antarctica. By redistributing heat around the globe and establishing weather patterns across four continents, the AMOC plays a pretty major role in shaping the earth’s climate.
Last week, Niklas Boers, a researcher affiliated with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published an article indicating the AMOC has grown unstable and is at risk of shutting down. Boers did not directly observe the AMOC slowing, but measures of the AMOC’s strength over time—such as the temperature and salinity of its water—suggest the conditions that would lead this mighty climatic engine to stall are present. If it did stop, scientists predict rising sea levels along the east coast of the United States, much cooler temperatures across Europe, and a disruption of the monsoons that bring rain to the crops of Africa.
The AMOC has stopped once before. As Al Gore explains in the clip below, near the end of the last ice age, a huge reservoir of cold melted glacial water burst into the Atlantic and brought the AMOC to a halt. That prolonged the ice age in Europe and North America for another millennium. Today, rising global temperatures brought about by increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide generated by human activity are melting the ice in Antarctica and Greenland. It’s possible global warming could lead to a new ice age.
If that’s not scary enough, a panel of scientists sanctioned by the United Nations published a report yesterday declaring that many of the effects of climate change are now irreversible. To keep the problem from getting worse, not only will nations need to drastically cut carbon dioxide emissions over the next ten years, but they will also need to remove carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. The only question is not whether or not a planetary climate catastrophe will occur but rather how bad it will get.
In the long run, human civilization is doomed. Something—an asteroid, the Yellowstone caldera, a plague, the cooling of the sun—is going to get us or, if it’s a lesser apocalypse, leave a few survivors behind to start afresh. That doesn’t leave me indifferent to the threat of human-generated climate change, though. Go ahead, call me a conservative, but I kind of like the earth’s climate as it is. If humans are the major contributors to global warming (the evidence is pretty clear we are) then we should probably do something about that before the AMOC quits churning and the glaciers start rolling south.
Sadly, the United States government keeps dragging its feet when it comes to addressing global warming. We’ve already wasted two decades we could have spent addressing this “hoax”/problem, and, while I’d love to be proven wrong on this, I still don’t see any current legislative majorities eager to act on this in a meaningful way. Right now, 52% of House Republicans and 60% of Senate Republicans have cast doubt on the idea that the earth is warming and that humans are responsible for it. That does leave a fair number of Republicans in Congress who at least admit humans are causing climate change, but it’s hard to believe any of them would sign on to a piece of legislation even half as ambitious as the Green New Deal. The bipartisan infrastructure bill currently working its way through Congress actually recognizes that global warming is a major problem. It allocates huge sums of money to programs designed to mitigate the effects of climate change, such as flood control, wildfire defense, and community relocation. Yet it does not address the causes of climate change; Republicans (and certainly some Democrats) don’t want to demand too much of the fossil fuel industry. In other words, Congress is prepared to help you move your house out of the way of an oncoming glacier, but it’s not going to keep a glacier from arriving in the first place.
But if a glacier did show up in a Republican’s neighborhood, how likely is it that would finally prompt them to support action on climate change? I would say there’s a 31-43% chance even that wouldn’t change their minds. Why? Because 43% of Republicans said in a recent Monmouth poll that, despite a pandemic that shut the country down for over a year and that’s killed over 600,000 of their fellow citizens, they had yet to receive a readily-available coronavirus vaccine, with 31% saying they likely will never get one. Appealing to the facts, one’s sense of civic duty, or one’s own experience with the pandemic isn’t going to move them, so good luck convincing them to support climate change legislation.
Maybe those numbers have dropped a tad since the poll was taken near the end of July, but I don’t have my fingers crossed. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—whose states currently account for one-third of all COVID-19 cases—may encourage their citizens to get the shot, but they also frame the decision as a matter of personal choice rather than public health. It also doesn’t help that they keep emphasizing that not getting a shot is an acceptable way to demonstrate one’s antipathy toward big government. Rather than reinstitute pandemic restrictions such as indoor face masking, these two governors have instead forbidden schools and localities in their states from reimposing them. In a move ripped from Mayor Quimby’s playbook, DeSantis is even now blaming illegal immigrants for the current surge. If the guy who speculated this whole pandemic thing could be solved with disinfectant injections doesn’t get the Republican nomination for president in 2024, most pundits have it going to DeSantis.
So I’m not counting on Republicans being more help than hindrance when it comes to addressing big political problems like climate change or the pandemic, let alone more medium-term yet still pressing problems like economic inequality and democratic reform. Democrats are going to have to do the heavy lifting here, and with paper-thin margins in both houses of Congress and a caucus that includes many members reluctant to take bold action on these issues, it won’t be easy to get genuinely transformational legislation to President Biden’s desk despite the urgency.
Maybe I’m overstating the dearth of cooperative spirit here. A divided Congress did pass massive pandemic relief packages in 2020 with hefty bipartisan support. Today, Congress is in the midst of legislating a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure plan that makes huge investments in transportation, the power grid, clean water, and high-speed internet. So it’s clear Republicans and Democrats can work together in Congress to pass major legislation.
Now don’t get me wrong: The infrastructure bill is a good idea, both in terms of policy and politics. Something like it should have been done years ago. And it’s a major piece of legislation. But when it comes to truly transformational legislation, I’m not here for the infrastructure bill. I’m here for the expanded child tax credit, national paid leave program, child care subsidies, expanded pre-k, free community college, Medicare expansion, drug price negotiation, elderly long-term care funding, affordable housing, and climate change legislation. Those programs are the bread and butter of the Democratic platform, and it’s all in the reconciliation bill put together by Bernie Sanders that the Senate is beginning to work on. (Hopefully the climate change legislation will be in the reconciliation bill; coal state senator Joe Manchin will have a big say in how that gets crafted and its provisions will have to get the approval of the Senate parliamentarian, who will rule on whether or not they impact the budget.)
If you recall, these provisions were originally in the infrastructure bill as part of a suite of “human infrastructure” proposals, but they got stripped from the legislation by the bipartisan team that negotiated the bill. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have indicated they intend to move the reconciliation bill forward in tandem with the infrastructure bill to ensure Democratic members of Congress remain committed to the passage of both. Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have suggested, however, they would like to see the cost of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill cut, which has led progressives to worry that moderate Democrats will water the final bill down.
Much of this drama will come down to Biden’s ability to convince Manchin, Sinema, and other moderate Democrats to tout their bipartisan work on the infrastructure bill and still vote with the team on the more partisan yet more transformational reconciliation bill without raising much of a stink. (I expect moderates will at least attempt to lower the final price tag of the reconciliation package to something under $3.5 trillion.) I hope that’s the game plan. What worries me is that with the bipartisan infrastructure bill all but a done deal, Biden will be less invested in the passage of the Democratic reconciliation bill. Rather than compel moderates to get behind a big reconciliation package that would be a game-changer for working class Americans, he’ll instead acquiesce to moderate demands for a drastically scaled back bill and insist progressives get onboard with that. Biden, Manchin, and Sinema would claim victory by denying Sanders and his coalition theirs.
It’s an appealing strategy for someone hoping to remain in the good graces of moderate voters. In a recent article in the Washington Post, Max Boot wrote, “Centrism got [Biden] into the White House and can keep him there. There is nothing more dangerous for our democracy than a Trump comeback. Biden needs to stay popular enough to prevent that from happening.” To this end, Boot noted that, “While [Biden] has thrown a few sops to the left (viz., a new eviction moratorium that probably won’t pass legal muster), he has not supported getting rid of the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation or other important bills. He has worked with moderate Senate Republicans to design a bipartisan infrastructure bill that lacks many of the spending programs liberals want.” While I think it is absolutely imperative that Biden fortify his political standing to fend off a challenge from Trump, it does seem strange to claim Biden is succeeding as a president by issuing toothless executive orders and holding up “important bills.”
Meanwhile, over in the New York Times, David Brooks is arguing Biden’s “governance-driven” approach is working. I agree with that to the extent that Biden and his team are experienced pols who have a strong sense for how to make the legislative process and administrative state hum. In fact, I really like that about Biden; it’s nice to have a president who can effectively run the ship of state and doesn’t try to govern through the media. But by the end of his article, Brooks shifts the meaning of “governance-driven” to “centrist” and essentially starts praising Biden for working with the political center and marginalizing liberal “show horses.” Suddenly, Biden’s virtues do not rest in his ability to get the wheels of Congress turning à la Lyndon Johnson but rather where he lands on the political spectrum. (I would also note there are many “governance-driven” politicians on the left who take the ins-and-outs of policy and its effect on Americans very seriously, just as there are centrist “show horses” who care less about good policy than they do the spectacle of deal making and all the backslapping and bromides about “bipartisanship” that go with it.)
I’m not arguing Biden ought to disregard the political center. It’s wise to court them and address their concerns, particularly since many Republicans have quit doing so in an attempt to maximize turn-out among a dwindling base. I also don’t expect progressives to get everything they want from Biden; the Democratic Party is a big tent and needs to find a way to accommodate the interests of all those inside it. It requires some give and take from everyone involved. Biden I suspect is probably pretty good at managing that sort of negotiation.
But Biden should be careful about curtailing his policy ambitions just so he can plant his flag in the political center. One of the reasons Biden won in 2020 is because voters in the midst of a pandemic and after four years of craziness desired steadiness and normalcy. Biden was able to deliver that in spades. As president, he also may have concluded that hewing to the center was the best way for him to continue to project those traits to the American people and the moderates he hopes to keep in his electoral camp. But centrist policies may not be enough to adequately address today’s major issues. Issues like climate change and economic inequality demand bolder action.
Biden should also remember the lesson of 2016, which is that Democratic voters expect Democratic politicians to act like Democrats. That means advancing a progressive agenda, addressing the serious problems afflicting America, and sticking up for the working class, the little guy, and the marginalized, not throwing a “sop” to them every now and then to make it look like you care more about them than corporate America. There’s been a lot of talk recently about the success of moderate politicians running against progressives in Democratic primaries. My worry is that if they govern as moderates and don’t follow through on the policy prescriptions and priorities Democrats expect, they will end up disillusioning progressive voters. If you don’t believe me, just ask Hillary Clinton how her presidency went. Joe Biden should take heed.
A major advantage Biden possesses as president is that he is a known and trusted quantity. His opponents struggle to redefine him. There is no doubt about who he might really be; he is who he is, and that’s a decidedly mainstream American. There is nothing weird or radical about him. Within the spectrum of American politics, his position is always a “reasonable” one.
That presents Biden with an amazing opportunity. He does not have to move to the center to become the center. He is the center. He could move the center. Biden could use his presidency to redefine popular assumptions about the role government ought to play in American life so that the public is more amenable to Democratic ideas. He could lend his credibility to a progressive policy agenda and shepherd it through Congress. He could bring the center with him.
Perhaps that’s overly ambitious. Again, his congressional margins are tiny. It would only take a couple moderate Democrats in Congress to pull him back to the center if they stuck to their guns. But it’s also possible for Biden to create the space they need to move to the left. If Biden could do that, he could begin to address the major crises confronting the United States today, including both the crisis of inequality and the climate crisis. If, on the other hand, Biden is content to burnish his centrist credentials by governing as a centrist, he may learn the hard way that he shouldn’t take the Democratic left for granted.
Photo credit: President Joe Biden Facebook page
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Vincent’s Picks
(Vincent’s Picks theme song here)
If you’re suffering from Olympic withdrawal and in the market for some mindless summer television, you may want to check out “Making It,” airing Thursdays on NBC at 9/8 central and streaming the next day on Hulu (where you can also check out the first two seasons). The reality competition show hosted by Parks and Recreation co-stars Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman pits a handful of craftspeople against one another as they attempt to complete a crafting challenge (usually two per episode, although sometimes whole episodes are devoted to a “megacraft.”) Judges Dayna Isom Johnson and Simon Doonan give the winners of each challenge a cute little patch they can sew onto their crafting aprons. At the end of each episode, the crafter with the least impressive creation that week leaves the crafting barn.
This is all very lighthearted, though. It’s full of positive vibes and corny jokes, and the creativity of these everyman and everywoman crafters is celebrated (although for whatever reason—maybe related to the pandemic—the judges this season seem kind of annoyed to be there.) Poehler is funny as always, but the real star is Offerman, who comes across as a droll lumberjack. An accomplished woodworker himself, Offerman knows his way around the “manly” crafts, so when he relates to the contestants as fellow creative spirits, you can kind of see the masculine facade fade away. It’s often a touching moment on a show that’s always pulling hard at the heart strings by emphasizing how the crafters turn personal adversity into beautiful homemade art that heals their souls.
The only thing that feels out of place on the program are the eliminations that occur at the end of every hour. For such a cheery show, it leaves viewers on a down note (although it tries to mend that with a silly skit as the credits start to roll.) The reality competition show format begs for a winnowing of contestants, but why not just assign points to each completed craft and declare the contestant with the most points at the end of the season the winner? I don’t care who wins, really, I just want to watch these people make a lot of cool stuff, but each week we get to see one less person making something in the barn. The more people there are, the more inspiration for viewers at home, which is the most valuable thing you’ll get from this show. Watch it, and you may be inspired to start crafting yourself. It would be good for your soul, and a good way to wind down the summer.
Thanks for reading.
Exit music: “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” by Soul II Soul (1989, Club Classics Vol. One)