The very boldness of Biden’s proposals is going to start a new generation of arguments about government’s role. Conservatives have lost much of their moral authority to object by acquiescence to Trump, who stood for neither personal responsibility or fiscal responsibility. More immediately, the coronavirus pandemic has created a moment of emergency when government typically grows. Over the long-term, it has become a vastly more diverse nation than when Biden entered public service. If the pendulum really has made a historic swing-from a Reagan vision of America needing simply to have its creative powers unleashed from government, to a Biden vision of America being able to compete in the world only if the talents of ordinary people are harnessed to creative government action-this is surely due to a convergence of factors. Without the benefit of political journalists helping translate, people might have missed Biden’s point that the climate debate must be removed from arcane discussions of science, and allegations that climate activists don’t care about people in heartland manufacturing states, and instead be portrayed as an economy-booster. For me, when I think about climate change, I think jobs.” On building a green economy, Biden said: “For too long, we have failed to use the most important word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Subscribe on Google Podcasts He celebrated the success in soaring far past his goal of 100 million vaccination shots in the first 100 days, and called vaccine distribution in his term, “one of the greatest logistical achievements our country has ever seen.” The speech was another marker suggesting that the ideological pendulum may have finally swung again at the closing end of Biden’s half-century in Washington.įor his part, Biden believes people are ready to support aggressively activist government if the debate is taken out of the realm of symbolism and political abstraction and into the realm of concrete realities of people’s lives. To support Democrats, many people needed constant reassurance that candidates weren’t brazenly or irresponsibly liberal. They knew that decadeslong erosion of respect in government and nongovernment institutions had helped fuel a contempt-driven conservative movement. They knew that the union movement that had been the foundation of the old Democratic coalition was steadily weakening. For most of his half-century in government, Biden has been operating in a climate in which Democrats of his generally centrist ilk had to practice defensive politics. The passage was a notable reminder of the arc of Biden’s career. Not some powerful force we have no control over. “Our Constitution opens with the words, ‘We the People.’ It’s time we remembered that ‘We the People’ are the government,” Biden implored. Speaking Wednesday to Congress, in which social distancing made the audience on the House floor a small fraction of its usual size for a presidential address, Biden explicitly rejected the conservative notion of government as an outside or hostile force, as distinct from average Americans. At his first inaugural address, Reagan declared, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” ![]() In fact there was a nod-was it subconscious, or were Biden and his speechwriters thinking of it explicitly?-to one of Reagan’s great arguments, made in 1981 when a 38-year-old Biden had already been in the Senate for eight years. a recovery that produces lots of working class jobs and allows families to more easily educate their children-can trump the cultural grievances that sent many of these people into the conservative movement over the past two generations, beginning with George Wallace’s hardhat supporters and later becoming a flood of “Reagan Democrats.” The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America.” Seventy-five percent don’t require an associate’s degree. Referring to his infrastructure proposal, Biden argued: “Nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree.
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