Liberty Expose: The Political Meaning Of Biden’s Infrastructure Plan
Joe Raedle
With a new administration underway and a whole host of seismic challenges spanning public health, racial justice, economic security, and climate change, America may be in the midst of re-thinking parts of its social contract.
Like in the 1930s, we now face a catalogue of national crises that have not only tested the agility of our political system, but also loosened the grip of mainstream political assumptions. Faced with viral and economic catastrophe, and the realities of a changing economic and social order that still eludes the reach of a polarized, gridlocked system, the immediate desire for an energetic government that delivers solutions has become more important than ever before. In consequence, approaches that would have been dismissed by political orthodoxy just a few years ago (e.g. direct cash benefits) have garnered more legitimacy and popularity. Even the notion of “big government”—a rhetorical nonstarter for the right, and even many on the left—seems to be gaining traction among Democrats.
Notwithstanding the persistence of legislative gridlock and political polarization, these developments mark a clear departure (again reminiscent of the 1930s) away from laissez-faire preferences towards stronger government action in areas directly relevant to the felt freedom of Americans, from employment and protection from precarity to infrastructure investment. Indeed, despite President Biden’s more restrained presentation during the election season, his administration’s agenda during its opening months seems reminiscent of the kind of pivot initiated by Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Having already passed the monumental $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to jumpstart the U.S. economy in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the Biden administration has proposed an even larger $2 trillion sequel focused on infrastructure investment across the country. According to the White House, the American Jobs Plan “is an investment in America that will create millions of good jobs, rebuild our country’s infrastructure, and position the United States to out-compete China.” Fundamentally, it aims “to reimagine and rebuild a new economy,” and at that, in a manner that addresses climate change, racial injustice, and the economic burdens of rural communities simultaneously. Add to this the anticipated follow-up plan focused on human infrastructure, and we have a program of historic proportions not seen since the national liberal period of the 20th century.
Despite concerns from progressive leaders that the proposed plan remains too modest to meet the country’s needs, its breadth of investment proves quite remarkable given the mediocre, defeatist politics we’ve become accustomed to. In addition to traditional infrastructure investments into bridges and roads ($115 billion), railways ($80 billion), and water systems ($56 billion), the plan calls for new investments in affordable housing ($213 billion), schools ($100 billion), child care facilities ($25 billion), and high-speed broadband ($100 billion). Furthermore, through investments in electric vehicles ($174 billion), the electric grid and clean energy ($100 billion), climate-related research and development ($180 billion), and even a Civilian Climate Corps ($10 billion), it aims to encourage the development of green energy industries. Most strikingly, the proposal includes $400 billion for home and community-based care for the elderly and those with disabilities.
While deliberations on the American Jobs Plan remain in the early stages, signs of Republican opposition have already casted doubt over whether it could get passed this year without the reconciliation process used to pass the American Rescue Plan. Denouncing the proposal as a liberal wish list that is too broad, costly, and worst of all, tied to a corporate tax rate increase from 21-28%, Republicans seem unlikely to lend their support, especially considering the fact that none were willing to vote for even the emergency Rescue Plan.
However, with reconciliation now approved as an available option for the second time this fiscal year, it seems likely that a version of the proposal could get passed sometime this summer without Republican support. Even if Republicans effectively leverage this scenario as an indication of progressive overreach, it remains uncertain whether failure to achieve bipartisan support (one of Biden’s strong preferences) will actually end up being politically consequential for the 2022 midterms.
In any event, it seems that most Republican leaders have not had a change of heart even after the catastrophes of last year, and remain wedded as ever to the same combination of anti-statist deregulation, corporate arrogation, and race-to-the-bottom economics that has proved its moral failing since the latter decades of the past century. Indeed, this effective commitment to oligarchy and its attendant failure to invest proactively in the needs of working and middle-class Americans has not only generated anti-democratic forms of populism, it has left the Party either blind or indifferent to (northern) conservatism’s grand old calling as the guardian of America’s democratic promise. If it were attuned to this calling, then the efforts of the new administration to update the nation’s physical and human infrastructure would be seen as common sense investments wholly within the center of American politics—not dismissed as a liberal wish list.
Part of the reason for this dilemma has to do with a general political shift towards the laissez-faire right during the last 60 years. Despite its divergence from mainstream American opinion, this paradigm has managed to reboot itself by instigating cynicism in the functions of government and camouflaging its true meaning in the language of an older, more noble tradition of American freedom. Where freedom for most conservative Americans means the dignity of self-employed independence (as it did for Jefferson and his political descendants), freedom for the Republican Party has for a long time been the liberty of moneyed elites to “run” the government in their favor, buttressed by faux appeals to state’s rights and “freedom of contract.”
My criticism of the Republican Party is not new, nor does it constitute a deviation from conservative principles. Even conservative temperaments writing in the 1900s and 1910s (e.g. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) recognized the need for proactive federal intervention in order to curb the excesses of plutocratic rule and preserve the country’s basic promise of freedom for all Americans. By the 1930s, this prescient insight would become mainstream and serve as a focal point for a more robust social contract between the American people and their government—one characterized by greater federal energy, unprecedented investment in the country’s physical and human infrastructure, and a higher conception of citizenship.
In consequence, we have a peculiar situation in which our modern establishment Republicans would have been a radical fringe in the inter-war and post-war periods, which were held together by a national liberal consensus spanning moderates in both Parties, from Franklin Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower. For leaders in this consensus, the basic premises of the New Deal were not only valid, but indispensable for the healthy functioning of a democratic society. By then it was obvious that the security of working and middle-class Americans could not be preserved by a laissez-faire agenda of diminished government, tax cuts for the wealthy, and deregulation. The state had to play a proactive, energetic role in national life in order to fulfill the country's democratic errand and make long-term investments in the country’s competitive advantage. Unfortunately, it has been far too long since our experiment has taken these lessons to heart.
The opening proposals of the Biden administration are neither radical deviations from the American consensus, nor fantastical wish lists dreamed up by opportunistic progressives, but rather indications that, after decades of chronic under-investment in the sources of American prosperity, we are finally trying to reclaim the old national consensus that produced the greatest achievements of the last century.