The argument that a politician deserves our contempt — and his own failure — if he insists on giving voters what he believes the nation needs rather than what polls say they want is a formula for pandering. Bill Clinton adroitly pandered after the Republicans took control of Congress; but America could afford to tread water amidst the boom of the mid-1990s. Now, at a moment of converging crises, a politics of preserving your political future through poll-tested solutions constitutes a failure of imagination.
In Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy defined “political courage” as defying the will of constituents in the name of the national good. Kennedy himself didn’t have the guts to do that on civil rights; Johnson did.
Johnson may not have actually said, “We have lost the South for a generation,” after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But he knew it was true — and still regarded it as a price that had to be paid. Then Johnson tried to use the power of suasion to convince the American people that what was good for Black people and impoverished people was good for the nation. On balance, you would have to say he failed; presidents often do. But do we really think LBJ would have done the nation a favor by avoiding the divisive issue of civil rights? (We should recall that LBJ also passed Medicare, a massive middle-class entitlement.)
The threat to American democracy constitutes the gravest moral crisis the nation has faced at least since the civil rights struggle. Both during the campaign and since taking office, Biden has said that his two great responsibilities are restoring American democracy and bringing the pandemic under control. It would have been startling — and grossly hypocritical — had he not marshaled whatever political capital he had behind legislation to prevent vote suppression and electoral rigging. The detractors have argued that the proposed bills would not prevent another Jan. 6; yet the Freedom to Vote Act would have eliminated partisan gerrymandering, criminalized threats to election workers and vastly increased access to the ballot. Biden would have felt justifiably proud had he been able to bring such a law to his democracy summit last December; his inability to do so constituted a very serious blow to America’s democratic bona fides.
Biden could not have gained anything by reducing the scope of the legislation. Manchin and Sinema objected not to the terms of the bills but to the changes in filibuster rules that would have been required to pass it without Republican support. The suggestion that 10 Republicans would have agreed to real reforms and then to a cloture vote, thus defeating a filibuster by their colleagues, doesn’t pass the laugh test. The GOP is not, it’s true, solely to blame for the collapse of Biden’s massive social welfare legislation, which could have passed on a straight party-line vote. If Manchin really would have accepted a $1.75 trillion version of the bill, (though with some different financing mechanisms), as he said late last year, then perhaps Sinema would have come around and today the administration would be making major investments in child care, health care and climate change. That may have been a lost opportunity.
Biden’s liberal critics would have welcomed such a victory; yet it would still have failed the test of giving voters what they want. Political analyst Ruy Texeira recently cited polls showing that working-class voters want the president to focus on fighting Covid and inflation. So that’s what Biden should do. But how? With what tools? While he can strike all sorts of appealing rhetorical postures, Biden can do frustratingly little about problems that now plague virtually every Western nation. Yes, he can dismantle some of the Trump tariffs that raise costs, and he can make rapid at-home Covid tests more widely available. Yet the electoral reform legislation for which Biden is now mocked would have gone much further to solve the problem of a threatened democracy than any of these minor adjustments would do to change the trajectory of Covid or inflation. As for the rhetorical posturing, how many of those working-class voters would Biden sway with his jawboning?
It’s not hard to understand where the anguish comes from, at least in the case of disappointed and deeply worried Biden supporters. The working-class base of the Democratic Party has been leaking away for more than half a century. The fact that virtually every labor or social democratic party in the West has the same problem doesn’t offer much consolation, since there aren’t nearly enough well-educated exiles from conservative parties to replace them. Efforts to court an alleged bloc of non-voting progressives with identity politics (something which Biden has largely avoided) is an act of delusion. You have to reach people where they are.
The giant investment of Build Back Better was the centerpiece of Biden’s effort to change the life prospects of ordinary Americans, and thus to weaken the virus of polarization and the threat of Trumpism. The voting bills were meant to counter the worst effects of that polarization. For all their defects, they were the right medicine for what ails us. And Biden would have had an easier case than LBJ had to argue that these were precious collective goods. Now that the bills have failed, Biden is left to salvage what he can. It is a very sad, very demoralizing, prospect. God knows I wish Biden had succeeded. But I don’t wish he hadn’t tried.