Biden's agenda and the redefinition of American liberalism

 It is time to check in on some arguments and observations I made periodically leading up to the 2020 election about the nature of ideology.  We are about three months into Joe Biden's administration, and while that "100 Days" thing is a stupid, pointless, arbitrary marker, as Biden stares down the barrel of it, so to speak, let's step back and look at what his presidential agenda has become, and what that means for the ongoing process of redefining American liberalism.

Some political science refreshers are in order.  Ideology, as we define it in political science, is constraint.  It is the binding between issue positions, such that one who has an ideology is bound-- constrained-- to hold the issue positions defined by the boundaries of the ideology in question.  There are, by Converse's model from "The Nature of Belief Systems In Mass Publics," three types of constraints-- logical, psychological and sociological.  Since logical constraints-- first principles-- are only one type of constraint, ideology is socially constructed, and that process is ever changing (see Hans Noel's book on the subject).  That's why the word, "liberal," means something different in American politics from British/European politics, creating that perfect combination of ignorance and arrogance that I so love from a certain category of scholar who likes to lecture people about the definition of "liberal."  Such people also tend to use the word, "neoliberal," un-ironically.  Avoid anyone who does so.

Where was I?  Oh, right.  American liberalism.  What is it today?  Well, that's complicated.  The word is derived from, "liberty," of course, and by Isaiah Berlin's analysis, we can conceive of liberty in two ways-- positive liberty and negative liberty.  Negative liberty is the freedom from intervention.  As long as the government does not prevent you from doing X, you have liberty.  Positive liberty requires the resources to take advantage of that non-intervention.  Telling a person that the government won't stop you from buying some expensive thing means little without the resources to do so.  As the saying goes, everyone is equally free to sleep under a bridge, but only a rich person is functionally free to sleep in a fancy hotel.  That distinction is the distinction between positive and negative liberty.  When discussing luxury expenditures, the distinction is of little moral concern, but it becomes more so when discussing costly necessities.  Franklin Roosevelt reoriented American liberalism around a positive conception of liberty in response to the Great Depression, and that became the ideology of the Democratic Party.  Its core policies, then, became the development of a welfare state for the purposes of positive rather than negative liberty.  Johnson's policy vision expanded the concept of positive liberty, and incorporated civil rights.

Where did that leave American liberalism at the start of the 21st Century?  From a policy perspective, in statutory terms, there was one big piece missing from the project of American liberalism.  Healthcare.  Roosevelt won a hell of a lot of victories for the concept of positive liberty, and Johnson expanded on them.  The New Deal was a complete transformation of the structure of government.  Johnson comes along, and you get Medicare, which is a single payer healthcare system for the elderly, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and 1965 Voting Rights Act, and yeah, the Supreme Court struck down pre-clearance in Shelby County, which did a lot of damage, but most of the VRA is still there... and then Nixon came along and kept signing Great Society legislation because Nixon was not what you think.  When he wasn't spouting racist and antisemitic shit into his tape recorder, he was cutting deals with Democrats in Congress.

What was the big piece left?  A hell of a lot of people still didn't have health insurance.  This was the biggest, and hardest piece of the project of American liberalism.  What did it take?  A 60-seat supermajority of pretty solid lefties in the Senate, a solid Democratic majority in the House, and a president willing to prioritize it.  Along with a hell of a lot of hard work.  That didn't come together until 2009.  There were a lot of attempts before then.  Clinton(s) tried it, but the Democratic majorities in Congress in the 103rd still had too many Blue Dogs and associated centrist-to-conservatives.  The party didn't get another bite at the apple until Obama came along, and I've been pretty clear that I think Pelosi was actually the one who got it done.

The Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act was a strange law, and it was certainly not what the party commies wanted.  It was, after all, based on the Mitt Romney plan, originally inspired by the Heritage Foundation's response to the Clinton proposal back in '93.  Everything Sarah Palin and the rest of the GOP said at the time was an idiotic lie, because... well... oy.  But in case anyone needed a refresher, there were three components.  Subsidies to help people buy private health insurance, regulations to prohibit companies from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, and a tax/mandate/Schrodinger's wave form policy (Roberts, you sophist*).  Then, a showboating phony named "John McCain" came along and voted with the rest of his party to repeal the Schrodinger's tax/mandate, after having been praised for voting against the very same.  You see, when McCain, Collins and Murkowski voted "no" on the Senate's bullshit "repeal" bill, it was actually a stripped down bill called "skinny repeal," which just repealed Erwin's quantum mindfuck.  It wasn't a real repeal-and-replace because the party never got together on a repeal-and-replace bill.  Then, when the GOP passed its one major bill under Trump-- a tax "reform"/cut-- they put "skinny repeal" into that bill, so when our showboating phony, McCain, voted yes, he undid the thing for which he was praised.  I always saw through McCain's shit, and never tolerated the "oh, he's such a maverick" thing.  Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Anyway, the ACA is still mostly there.  The subsidies, the regulations, and oh, yeah, Medicaid expansion, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, but basically, this Frankenstein's monster of a bill that isn't really what anyone wanted but is about as much as the left is ever going to get, so shut the fuck up, you moron, Bernie... it's still there.  And it was the last big piece of the New Deal/Great Society project.

So where is the left now?  There's a line I wish I could attribute, but it goes a little something like this.  The objective of every liberal should be to become a conservative.

Think about that.  Feel free to attribute it to me, even though I am not the original writer, but I don't know who first put the words in that order, so whatever.  But think about it.  Here's the idea.  The concept of American liberalism is progress towards some goal of a welfare state with civil rights.  That's why they have latched onto the term, "progressive," being often ignorant of the history of the actual Progressive Era, but whatever.  And once those goals are achieved, the task becomes protective.  At that point, the liberal becomes classically conservative, as in, averse to change.

The last big piece of the puzzle, for the American left in the model of FDR/Johnson was healthcare, and the Obama/Pelosi coalition kinda won that.

Of course, that doesn't mean total victory.  There are holes in the system, legal battles, enforcement battles, and blah, blah, blah, but in terms of magnitude, that was the big one.  Nothin' else came close.  That's why it was so fuckin' hard.  Why it took decades to pass that.

So what is American liberalism now?  What is Biden's agenda?  Note that the questions are closely related.

American liberalism is in a kind of a crisis of redefinition.  If we think of this in Noel's terms, and focus on the policy demanders and the coalition merchants, what's happening below the level of Biden?  The American left has shifted very much towards identity politics.  Note that I did not say "civil rights."  Why not?  Because "civil rights" connotes a specific policy agenda, whereas "identity politics" connotes a more broad style of politics.

What, though, is the legislative agenda?  There is nothing anywhere near as big, conceptually, as the ACA.  Why not?  Because that was the big thing, and that being done, the party is struggling to define itself.

What's happening?  To a certain degree, Biden is constrained by COVID.  His policy agenda is a response to the crisis of the moment.  Of course, so was FDR, and yet in the process, FDR redefined the Democratic Party.  Yet sending out some checks doesn't do that, fundamentally.  What's the agenda?

At some point, I will write some extended commentary on HR 1, if it goes anywhere, but that's not the big thing right now.  The big thing right now, such as it is, is "infrastructure."

Note the sarcasm-quotes, because what is, "infrastructure?"  I guess we're all postmodernists now.  I'm not, but I have to ask the postmodernist question, because thanks, Democrats.  Historically, the word has denoted the structures that undergird the nation's capacity to operate-- roads, bridges, buildings, yadda-yadda-yadda.  As business changes, the structures that constitute "infrastructure" change.  Broadband?  As business shifts to the internet, broadband serves the purpose served by conventional, historical understandings of "infrastructure," so yes, it does make sense to include it as, "infrastructure."

But let's be blunt.  The left has tried to pull a postmodernist, linguistic trick.  Let's take a bunch of policy ideas that are elements of the welfare state that we'd like, and call them "infrastructure," so that we can put them in a bill called, "infrastructure."  This is dishonest.  You may like these policies.  Arguments can be made.  I can make arguments for them, or against them.  I am not commenting on them at all, 'cuz I don't give a shit.  Remember, I only care about big stuff, and this ain't big stuff, so fuck it.  I do, however, get annoyed at dishonesty, and calling generic welfare state policies "infrastructure" so that you can include them in an "infrastructure" bill is the kind of thing liars do.  I don't like liars, but the difference between a postmodernist and a liar is that the postmodernist redefines the words in the sentence to make a false statement true.  Which does.  Not.  Impress.  Me.  Elderly care is not infrastructure.  Good policy?  Make your arguments.  But it ain't infrastructure.

OK, that's me being a linguistic stickler.  Ben Winters's "Golden State" would send you into exile in the desert for this shit.  Yeah, they do other vile shit too, but this is a lie.  Contrary to the Objectively So.  Stop it.

And yet, it's also small potatoes.  Penny-ante shit, in the grand scheme of things.  When you put a dollar figure on that bill, it's... I almost typed, "yuge," but then... fuck.  I just typed "yuge."  We can't escape that motherfucker.  Anyway, the totality of the dishonestly named, "infrastructure" bill is a fuckload of money.  Well spent?  You can make a case for any individual line item, and right now, in an economy that is still struggling, with Treasuries at low interest rates, I could make a case.  Should we be concerned about rates rising and inflation and all that?  All of these are to be balanced against each other.  But my point is that the dollar figure in the bill comes about from the conglomeration of a bunch of penny-ante shit.

Why?  Because once the liberals got the ACA, they won their big victory.  And now, what's next?

The activists are all about identity politics, but they don't exactly have a concrete policy agenda.  The proposals from the activists range from amorphous to things that sound like false flag proposals concocted by Trump to drive voters into the waiting arms of the GOP (e.g. "Defund the Police").  Some of what is happening is that the Democrats are playing a defensive game.  See, for example, Georgia.  Why?  Well, if you kind of won your big victories, your task becomes that of the classical conservative.  The Republicans aren't just going after the policies, though.  They are going after the concept of democracy, which makes things harder.

That still isn't a positive agenda.  Which is why the "infrastructure" bill is a hodgepodge of little things that add up to a big price tag rather than a coherent vision.

To be sure, there aren't many things that Biden could pass.  There's a guy named Joe Manchin who...

I fuckin' hate this guy.  Of course, you may get the impression that there aren't a lot of people I do like, but that's called "misanthropy."  Anyway, I'm not a fan of the left, and I'm not a fan of the right.  Conventionally, that means I'm supposed to gush about how wonderful "centrists" are, but you know who really gets my goat?  "Centrists."  Bunch of fuckin' frauds, they are.

(Me = misanthrope.  Books > people.)

So here's the thing about "centrists."  What is it to be a "centrist?"  Does it mean that they just happen to take the "middle" position on every issue down the line?  Do they combine extreme left and extreme right positions?  Mathematically, those combinations are identical, when we collapse them onto the left-right dimension.  And then there are the virtue-signaling centrism > extremism public figures.  The ones who act like if you split the difference between the Democratic and Republican positions on every issue, somehow, mystically and mathematically, goodness ensues.  Why?  'Cuz.  Does that make any logical sense?  No.  Is there any empirical evidence for the proposition?  No.

Why do politicians do it?  For electoral reasons.  And in fact, "centrists" do tend to fare better than extremists.  This is particularly important for someone in Joe Manchin's position.  He is a Democratic Senator from West Virginia.  West Virginia has a lot of things.  Illiterate people.  Racists.  People who think professional wrestling is real.  People who kill-n-grill their own possums.

You know what they don't have?  Books, arugula, people who have ever heard a John Coltrane album...  Democrats...  So, to keep that seat, Manchin acts like a Republican.  I keep telling you, he won't vote for any of the ambitious plans Democrats have.  Democrats muse about nuking the filibuster.  I keep telling you, he won't go for it, and in a 50-50 Senate, without Manchin, you lose.  And just this week, he reconfirmed what I keep telling you, but with an extra-stupid twist.  He says that January 6 "changed" him.

No, it fucking didn't.  That's a cute line, asshole, but no, it fucking didn't.  Joe Manchin has always been this way.  Like, I could tell you that January 6 turned me into a foul-mouthed asshole who hates Trump, but... there's this thing called a written record.  You can go back and read what I wrote before January 6.  And you know what?  I was a foul-mouthed asshole who hated Trump long before January 6, so if I tell you that January 6 changed me, there better be a difference in the before-and-after.

And for Joe Manchin, there isn't.  He says he wants to "work with" Republicans because of January 6.  As a point of empiricism, Republicans won't work with Democrats on anything ever, so that's stupid, but that's also not my point.  Manchin is a lying fucking asshole.  This is why I hate centrists.  They're liars.  Here's what's going on.  He is a Democrat from West Virginia, doing what he has always done.  He'll vote for Chuck Schumer, and mostly vote for Biden's nominees, so McConnell can't do his McConnell thing, but that's all the Democrats can get out of him...

... because he represents West Fucking Virginia.

Would you rather have West Virginia elect the kind of Republican who would win a GOP nomination from that redneck hellhole?  No?  OK, then.  It's Manchin, or your worst fucking nightmare.  Take your pick.

And that means the Democrats ain't passin' shit anyway.

...

The Democrats have until the end of next year before the Republicans win back Congress.  Until that time, they won't get anything.  The Democrats do not have a working majority.  They don't even really have a 50-50 Senate.  They have 49 seats plus Joe Manchin, who is an unprincipled asshole.  But it's him, or the local grand wizard of the kkk.  Take your pick.  Yay democracy, right?

What happens until then?  We watch as the Democratic Party, and American liberalism struggle to redefine themselves.  Right now, it's a lot of little stuff, defined primarily by the price tag when you put it all together.  That, plus playing defense against Georgia-type attacks on democracy.  And... the mess of identitarian stuff with an incoherent policy agenda.

Of course, it doesn't much matter right now since the Democrats can't actually pass anything.  But at some point, they're going to need to figure it out.

If anyone were to ask me, of course, I'd have a suggestion.  [Cough, cough... climate change].  It matters somewhat more than the piddly, little shit about which self-righteous activists obsess on twitter, but oh, fuck it.  Where's the dog pile?  Did someone say the wrong thing on social media?  Get 'em!!!

What's the carbon footprint of self-righteous tweets?  Yeah, it's small, but they're operating computers, and those computers run on electricity, you've got servers, and...  These people are doing damage to the environment, for the sake of self-righteous tweets.  Just sayin'...

Anyway, my point is that nothing is going to happen for a while.  I do wonder how liberalism will redefine itself.

And some music.  Today, one of the greatest guitarists, and musical visionaries in history.  Steve Tibbetts, in a rare, live recording of "Vision."  The studio version is on Safe Journey.

*In John Roberts's opinion in NFIB v. Sebelius, Roberts wanted to rule that the tax/mandate was constitutional, but the problem was a principle called "anti-injunction."  The Court can't rule on a tax policy before it goes into effect, and the case went before the Court before the policy went into effect.  So here's what Roberts said.  For the purposes of anti-injunction, it's a mandate, so it can be evaluated by the Court.  Then, so-observed, it becomes a tax.  That's a dead, fuckin' cat, Article I applies, and the plaintiffs are full of shit.  However, if it's a tax, anti-injunction should have applied, and he shouldn't have been able to rule, right?  Yeah... you may like the result, but Roberts tied himself into pretzel logic to get there.  This is why I always tell you that constitutional law, and the courts are all a fuckin' joke.  I have no respect for the lot of them.  Kids, don't go to law school.  Do something useful, like telemarketing scams, or staying in your parents' basements playing computer games.  Just, whatever you do, don't go to law school.