Returning to the topic of covertigo, “the constellation of symptoms associated with the pandemic lockdown” and its social and political consequences, The Washington Post’s Michele Lewis considers how the virus we once thought vanquished is not yet done with us. When eventually the contagion burns itself out, she writes, we may all need psychological help.
The military finally has recognized that soldiers returning from war should not have to ask for it. The services have shifted “from providing psychological support primarily to those who ask for help, to one in which it assumes that anyone who has returned from combat will have some kind of delayed reaction to trauma.” And so with all of us, Lewis writes. What long-term damage has the pandemic done to Americans of all ages and stations?
Add that to the list of human infrastructure needs the Build Back Better plan needs to address but will fail to if the plan itself fails in Congress. Add to covertigo the stress of seeing the promise of transformational change evaporate as a result of Republican intransigence or moderate Democrats’ pig-headedness.
E.J. Dionne reminds readers how discussion of the bill’s price tag obscures what it is designed to do “for children, families, education, health care, housing and climate.” For that mis-messaging, there is plenty of blame to go around:
“When Democrats allow a debate to be only about a number,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a leading moderate, said in an interview, “it’s like talking about a Christmas party and only discussing the hangover.”
Substantively, added Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), starting the discussion this way gets things exactly backward. “We should work from what policies we want to enact,” he said, “rather than an arbitrary number.”
Yes, as Van Hollen recognizes, Democrats will eventually have to agree on an overall spending level to work out what fits. Still, the question of what would constitute an acceptable outcome cannot be divorced from deciding which projects would have to be scaled back under a lower figure — or thrown over the side altogether.
Moderate hold-outs fixated in the abstract on cost — $3.5 trillion — refuse to itemize their objections. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), specifically, refuses to name what he does and does not want in a package he would support.
Just like Democrats not to be able to say what they are for.
At his news conference on Friday, Biden said this was a central theme in his meetings with congressional Democrats this past week. “Forget a number,” Biden told them. “What do you think we should be doing?” He added that when some of his interlocutors listed all their priorities, they discovered that “it adds up to a number higher than they said they were for.”
As for cost, Biden notes that it is actually $350 billion per year for 10 years and, if passed as proposed, will add nothing to the debt. Etc., etc.
Wrangling as seemingly endless as the pandemic leads us to wonder if “Democrats have a political death wish,” Dionne laments, or are blind to the cost of failure. If in the end Democrats must settle on something less ambitious, that is preferable to failure.
“What would not be okay: for Democrats to walk away from the best opportunity they have had in at least two generations to repair and reconstruct our nation’s social contract,” he believes. More than elections in 2022 and 2024 are at stake.
A threat as long-term as climate change is the noisy faction of Americans-in-name-only who share no interest in reconstructing anything other than a Republican-led, white-nationalist, Christian patriarchy where an emerging, multi-ethnic state now stands. Someone tell them this is the 21st century, not the middle of the 20th.
That faction sees Democrats’ failure as its success. But the horse-trading among congressional Democrats, or lack of it, as negotiations drag out is adding to the covertigo of watching and waiting for disaster to strike, or not. Nobody needs the supplemental stress. If Covid doesn’t kill us, the suspense might.