You know something’s really off when you see David Brooks quoted here twice in one week. Here, he addresses Joe Biden’s efforts at meeting the needs of people in “left behind” places in the country that did not vote for him. If Larry Summers thinks lifting wages at the bottom will cause inflation, Brooks writes, “so be it. The trade-off is worth it to prevent a national rupture.”
Brooks continues in unsettling past tense:
As president, Biden had mostly economic levers to try to bridge this cold civil war. He championed three gigantic pieces of legislation to create a more equal, more just and more united society: the Covid stimulus bill, the infrastructure bill and what became Build Back Better, to invest in human infrastructure.
All of these bills were written to funnel money to the parts of the country that were less educated, less affluent, left behind. Adam Hersh, a visiting economist at the Economic Policy Institute, projects that more than 80 percent of the new jobs created by the infrastructure plan will not require a college degree.
But that’s just the beginning, says Brooks:
The Biden $1.9 trillion stimulus package passed and has been tremendously successful. It heated the overall economy. The Conference Board projects that real G.D.P. growth will be about 5 percent this quarter. The unemployment rate is falling. Retail sales are surging. About two-thirds of Americans feel their household’s financial situation is good.
But the best part is that the benefits are flowing to those down the educational and income ladder. In just the first month of payments, the expanded Child Tax Credit piece of the stimulus bill kept three million American children out of poverty. Pay for hourly workers in the leisure and hospitality sector jumped 13 percent in August compared with the previous year. By June, there were more nonfarm job openings than there had been at any time in American history. Workers have tremendous power these days.
The infrastructure bill Biden just signed will boost American productivity for years to come. As Ellen Zentner of Morgan Stanley told The Economist recently, it’s a rule of thumb that an extra $100 billion in annual infrastructure spending could increase growth by roughly a tenth of a percentage point — which is significant in an economy the size of ours. Federal infrastructure spending will be almost as large a share of annual GDP as the average level during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Voters look askance at big changes, Brooks suggests, and, citing Michigan State political scientist Matt Grossmann, they punish both Republican and Democratic first-term presidents in mid-terms. “That’s especially true if the president achieved big things.”
History will judge Biden in the end, he concludes, and if Democrats lose control of Congress in 2022, ” it will have totally been worth it.” If they don’t screw up by making some programs temporary so Republicans can let them expire.
Brooks is jumping the gun on the Biden administration’s “tremendously successful” infrastructure bill and his other unpassed human infrastructure package.
What he is right about (indirectly) is that Republicans are no longer a political party, but an insurgency, an insurgency of unserious vandals more interested in irritating opponents than in public service.
Witness the glee (CNN video) with which former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows ponders naming Donald Trump the Republican Speaker of the House to replace Nancy Pelosi.
“You talk about melting down. People would go crazy,” Meadows told Steve Bannon’s podcast. “She would go from tearing up a speech to having to give the gavel to Donald Trump. Oh, she would go crazy.”
Maggie Haberman told CNN, “You could almost see Steve Bannon as the ventriloquist moving Mark Meadows’ mouth.”
But unserious and disruptive is what recent polls show the public wants, as both Brooks and Martin Longman note. Longman warns:
As presently comprised, the Republican Party is fascist and undemocratic, and they will not allow free and fair elections going forward. What this means is that we’ll be powerless to organize the inevitable backlash and ride it back to power. They won’t concede elections that they lose, and that assumes we can even win elections for these noncompetitive seats that are overseen by radical election officials and even more radical state legislatures.
Normal isn’t returning soon, the “not ordinarily a pessimist” Longman explains:
I’d say that we should do away with the legislative filibuster and pass voter reforms, and that we should develop an intelligent and politically savvy legislative plan for 2022, and that we should do more and better messaging. But most of that won’t happen and the rest won’t be sufficient. The coup-plotters are in the driver’s seat and if we don’t have a radical and preemptive response, they’ll do next November what they failed to do on January 6.
And we won’t come back from that.
Brooks and Longman should compare notes. Hell, David Brooks of The Atlantic and David Brooks of The New York Times should compare notes.