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      ‘We’re here to deliver’: Biden touts infrastructure win as midterms loom

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      ‘We’re here to deliver’: Biden touts infrastructure win as midterms loom President hits the road to sell bill as Democrats, facing daunting odds in 2022, fight to reach votersThe Port of Baltimore dazzled in the setting sun. Giant cranes arched over the Chesapeake Bay, the shoreline stacked with colorful shipping containers. At the center of the tableau was the American president, on a mission to promote his hard-won $1tn infrastructure package.“Infrastructure week has finally arrived,” Biden said last week, beaming at the mix of elected officials and local union leaders in attendance.The president’s visit to the bustling port came at the start of a cross-country tour to sell his sprawling public works plan to the American public, in the hope of parlaying the policy achievement into a political victory that will help Democrats keep their slim majorities in Congress.But while his policies are popular, Biden and his party, presently, are not. Last week, voters turned sharply against Democrats, delivering a number of surprising Republican victories in states Biden won handily in 2020.America needs help. Yet Democrats are getting sucked into fake culture wars | Hamilton NolanRead moreThe losses jolted Democrats into action on Capitol Hill, even as some moderates wondered if the president had misread his mandate. Within days, they sent the infrastructure bill, gridlocked for months amid intra-party feuding over a separate pillar of Biden’s agenda, to his desk for his signature.In the weeks ahead, the president’s promotional tour will test his political salesmanship and his theory of governance: that delivering concrete benefits is the best way to rise above the political tribalism roiling the country. “The American people sent us here to deliver. The American people sent us here to make the government work,” Biden said on Friday, during a cabinet meeting to discuss the implementation of his infrastructure bill. “They sent us here to make a difference in their lives. And I believe we’re doing that.”Facing daunting odds in next year’s midterm elections, Democrats are pleading with “Amtrak Joe” to make the pitch loud and clear.Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who leads the campaign committee for House Democrats, pleaded with the White House to put Biden on the campaign trail as frequently as possible to trumpet his domestic agenda. In an interview with the New York Times, he said his message to the White House was, “Free Joe Biden.”“That campaign needs to start now before the next crisis takes over the news cycle,” he said.On Monday, Biden will sign the measure into law during a ceremony at the White House, surrounded by a bipartisan group of legislators, governors and mayors. Following that, the president will hit the road, with plans to visit a bridge in Woodstock, New Hampshire, and a GM electric vehicle plant in Detroit, according to the White House.In addition, Biden is dispatching his cabinet members, including the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg; energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm; and interior secretary, Deb Haaland, to promote the bill’s investments in states, cities, towns and tribal communities.So far, the strategy echoes the administration’s “Help is here” tour to showcase the Democrats’ $1.9tn coronavirus relief package Biden signed into law shortly after taking office. But the presidential messaging blitz was soon swamped by the US’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, a summertime resurgence of the pandemic and a rise in inflation.Even though the legislation sent $1,400 stimulus checks to millions of Americans, expanded the child tax credit program and increased unemployment insurance – all tangible, popular benefits – Democrats hardly reaped the political rewards. An August poll by Daily Kos/Civiqs found that 57% of voters said the Biden administration had not done anything that has benefited them personally.“Voters don’t go to the ballot box with a spreadsheet of policies. They go with a feeling about who values them,” said Jesse Ferguson, a senior Democratic strategist. The way to show that, he said, was “to deliver on the things that matter to people who work for a living”, like lowering the cost of prescription drug prices, making childcare more affordable and providing paid family and medical leave.​Whether a concerted appeal from the president ​can overcome ​a toxic political climate​ is an open question for Democrats. Biden’s standing with voters has dropped sharply, particularly among independents. Wide majorities say the nation is on the wrong track. A CNN poll released this week found that six in 10 American believe Biden has the wrong priorities. The number climbed among voters who ranked the economy as a top priority.As the administration’s messaging campaign ramps up, the White House says its digital team is developing explainer videos and other social content to educate voters about the Democrats’ initiatives. They are also planning for a burst of TV appearances, including with media outlets that serve Black and Latino communities.The push also includes an emphasis on local news organizations, such as WKRC-TV in Cincinnati, which sat down with Biden on Monday. In the interview, he predicted a long-overdue upgrade for the deteriorating Brent Spence Bridge that stretches between Ohio and the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s home state of Kentucky.McConnell was one of 32 Republicans in the House and Senate to vote for the legislation that has divided the party. Donald Trump savaged those in his party who supported the measure, blaming them for voting for “Democratic longevity” while his loyalists in the House accused them of disloyalty. Many of them have faced vicious backlash from constituents, including vulgar insults and even death threats.Speaking in Kentucky, McConnell squashed any suggestion that the unusual display of bipartisanship might extend beyond the realm of roads and bridges.“Let me sum it up this way,” he said. “I think every step we took this year … except infrastructure is in the wrong direction.”At home during the congressional recess, Democrats donned hard hats and lined up next to union workers to highlight how the once-in-a-generation investment in the nation’s infrastructure would benefit the wishlist of long-neglected public works projects in their districts and states. The plan, they said, would touch all 50 states, creating high-paying jobs and helping to rejuvenate the economy.The package, which includes the largest investment in infrastructure since Dwight Eisenhower began the interstate highway system in the 1950s, is popular with voters. But many of the projects won’t be started, much less completed, until long after the midterm elections are decided.“It is part of our job to let people know exactly what Congress did for them,” Madeleine Dean, a Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania, said on a press call showcasing the infrastructure bill’s investments in her state. “We have a lot of educating to do.”A Monmouth University poll released this week found 65% of Americans support the infrastructure bill while 62% approve of the Democrats’ spending measure. Yet the poll showed that voters increasingly believe Biden’s policies have not helped middle-class or poor families.Taken together, the results suggest the White House and Democrats “lack a cohesive and concrete message about how this bill will help the American public”, said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Poll.The measure’s bipartisan passage has given some Democrats fresh optimism that they can muster the votes to pass a second, even larger domestic policy measure and begin to reverse their political fortunes ahead of next year’s midterm elections.“Democrats are delivering – and we are making sure that the American people know it,” Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. The DNC is “doubling down” on their outreach to voters, working with state and local parties to help translate how the plan will benefit their communities.Matt Barreto, a Democratic pollster and senior adviser to Building Back Together, a group advocating for Biden’s agenda, said voters were swayed by results.“I really like our chances if we are messaging on very popular policy that we have passed and signed into law and the other side is complaining about cultural issues,” he said.If Biden doesn’t pass the climate bill, it will be the betrayal of a generation | Daniel SherrellRead moreA Navigator Research survey found that Biden’s overall approval rating climbed in the days since Congress passed his bipartisan infrastructure deal. The same survey showed that support for the major pieces of Biden’s agenda remains high as a growing number of voters say they’ve heard about the bill.Yet the challenges threatening to derail Biden’s PR campaign are myriad. When Democrats return to Washington next week, a new fight awaits over the next phase of his agenda. Republicans are eager to weaponize rising inflation, using it to attack the spending plan as reckless. And even when Biden attempts to take a victory lap, as he did in Baltimore on Wednesday, the news of the day interferes.Designed as a solution to fix the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, Biden said the measure would also address immediate economic concerns caused by rising inflation and supply chain bottlenecks.The obstacles were underscored by his appearance in Baltimore. In his speech touting the “once-in-a-generation investment” in the nation’s infrastructure, he also delivered a lengthy explanation of supply chains and conceded that “consumer prices remain too high”.After his remarks concluded, Biden, a retail politician at heart, waded into the crowd, joking and laughing as he worked the rope line and glad-handed local officials.TopicsUS newsUS politicsDemocratsJoe BidenRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      What happens when Nancy Pelosi retires? Politics Weekly Extra

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      Known as one of the most powerful women in US politics, the speaker of the House of Representatives is due to retire in the next few years. Jonathan Freedland and Susan Page look back at the career of one of the longest-serving politicians on Capitol Hill, and what her eventual exit will mean for the Democratic party

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      Archive: PBS Newshour, C-Span, Vox You can find Susan Page’s book here: Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      America needs help. Yet Democrats are getting sucked into fake culture wars | Hamilton Nolan

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      America needs help. Yet Democrats are getting sucked into fake culture warsHamilton NolanThe hoopla about CRT and the like is a Republican game serious leaders would not play. But Democrats don’t have serious leaders I do not know if I can survive three more years of Democrats stumbling over themselves to disavow the Democratic platform in a doomed attempt to win bad-faith culture wars. It is too painful, like watching ruthless hunters herding panicked animals over the side of a cliff. The poor, dumb beasts inevitably go extinct if they are not able to outthink such a rudimentary strategy.Message to Democrats: embrace economic bread-and-butter issues to win | Matthew Karp and Dustin GuastellaRead moreWalk around your town. Explore a major American city. Drive across the country. What are the most important problems you see? There is poverty. Homelessness. A lack of affordable housing. Vast and jaw-dropping economic and racial inequality. There is a lack of public transportation, a broken healthcare system, environmental degradation, and a climate crisis that threatens to upend our way of life. These are real problems. These are the things that we need our government to fix. These are what we need to hear politicians talk about. These are what we must debate and focus on, if we are really concerned about human rights and our children’s future and all the other big things we claim to value.I guarantee you that neither “cancel culture” nor “critical race theory” nor, worse of all, “wokeness” will grab you as enormous problems after your exploration of America, unless that exploration ranges only from a college faculty lounge to a cable TV studio to the office of a rightwing thinktank. These are all words that mean nothing. To the extent that they are real at all, they are niche concerns that plague such a small subset of Americans that they deserve to be addressed only after we have solved the many other, realer problems.All these terms function primarily as empty vessels into which bad-faith actors can pour racism, so that it may appear more palatable when it hits the public airwaves. Common sense tells us we should spend most of our time talking about the biggest problems, and less time on the lesser problems, and no time on the mythical problems. To engage in long and tortured debates over these slippery and indefinable culture war terms is to violate that rule, with awful consequences for everyone.Let’s not bullshit about this. Racism is a wonderfully effective political tool for Republicans, yet explicit racism is frowned upon in polite society now, so there is a constant flow of new issues to stand in for racism in political discourse. Lee Atwater, who invented Nixon’s “southern strategy”, explained this all decades ago, and it is still true. George Wallace could be outright racist, but subsequent generations of politicians have had to cloak it in “welfare reform” or being “tough on crime” or, now, opposition to “wokeness” and “critical race theory” – things which mean, by the way, “caring about racism”.Three-quarters of a million Americans are dead from a pandemic. We have a Democratic president and a booming economy. So we will get culture wars, and more culture wars, all of which are built on stoking various forms of hate. This is a game that serious leaders should not play. Unfortunately, we don’t have too many serious leaders. We have the Democratic party.Republicans will push these culture wars as far as they can, but it takes Democrats to make the strategy work. There are two types of Democrats falling for this trap now. One type is the group of fairly well-meaning people who assume that the fact there is a cottage industry dedicated to amplifying these terms in the media means there must be something to them. The other type are the opportunistic Democrats, who often brand themselves “centrists”, who see the culture wars as a way to steal power from the left wing of their own party, even if it comes at the cost of hurting millions of Americans.We have seen this movie before. The 1990s was the era of fiery and stupid debates over gay people in the military, flag burning and Sister Souljah. They were just an earlier iteration of the same thing we’re going through now. The decision of Democrats to lean into this dynamic by running to the right led to atrocities like Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform” and crime bills that won him momentary electoral power by immiserating an entire generation of poor, non-white people, many of whom are still caged in prison today. Choosing to give credence to the culture wars has real life consequences. Already, we can see panicked Democrats rushing to decry the very sort of social justice fights that give the decrepit party its only redeeming value.Here is the good news: we don’t have to do this. We can step off this train before it pulls out of Bad Faith Station on the way to the Trump 2024 victory party. What we need is some sort of broad force that can unite people of disparate races and persuasions around a shared, common interest. Something capable of demonstrating the value of the fight against inequality and corporate domination in a real, tangible way. Something that wages its fights in reality, not in the remote world of buzzwords and misdirection.Guess what? That thing already exists. It’s called the labor movement. And it’s energetic as hell right now. A wave of strikes across the nation that has been building for months is garnering levels of attention unseen in decades. The popularity of unions is high. This is a model of progressive values in action that a political party could rally around, if that party was not always so easily tempted to trip over its own shoelaces.In deep red rural Alabama, you can find hundreds of striking mine workers – black and white, Democratic and Republican – completely united and fighting hard, in unity, for economic justice. These people whom our society typically divides have come together in a union, and are sacrificing for one another, side by side. The military is the only other institution in American society that accomplishes this feat of unity, and unions can do it without shooting anyone. The labor movement is living proof that the substance of progressive politics – protecting the poor against the rich, promoting equality, giving everyone fair treatment no matter who they are or how much money they make – is a tool powerful enough to overcome the background drone of Fox News (and the Atlantic).Democrats do not need to wonder how to overcome the culture wars. We already know how: organizing working people to create power that can produce a more just and equal world. It works. But to make it work, you need to hold it up and promote it and help it and talk about it, rather than talking about whether things are “too woke”. Our problems are in the real world. Our solutions are in the real world as well. Our politicians? Many of them are floating in the ether. Come back down to earth, join the labor movement, and help people walk the path away from the incredibly dumb nightmare that awaits us if we get sucked into bullshit debates, with bullshit people, about bullshit.
      Hamilton Nolan is a labor reporter at In These Times
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      Message to Democrats: embrace economic bread-and-butter issues to win | Matthew Karp and Dustin Guastella

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      OpinionDemocratsMessage to Democrats: embrace economic bread-and-butter issues to winMatthew Karp and Dustin GuastellaOur study finds that working-class voters respond better to economic policies than identity-based, activist-driven campaigns Tue 9 Nov 2021 06.20 ESTAs he set about disembowelling Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill last month, Joe Manchin paused to offer some cheerful advice for outraged progressives. “[A]ll they need to do,” said the West Virginia senator, “is elect more liberals.”There was something slightly perverse about Manchin counseling the leftwingers whose policy agenda he was helping tear apart: he sounded like a burglar recommending a home security system as he made off with his loot. And yet his point is undeniable: if progressives hope to gain more leverage in American politics, they must win more elections.If Democrats return to centrism, they are doomed to lose against Trump | Samuel MoynRead moreOf course, this is just what they have been trying to do. In the wake of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, an energetic cohort of progressives crashed into city halls, state legislatures, and Congress itself. In the House, “the Squad” may be the most visible avatar of this new leftwing politics, but the larger Progressive Caucus has grown from under 28% of all House Democrats in 2008 to over 43% today.Still, as the fate of Biden’s bill shows, leftwing influence on national politics remains limited. That’s because progressive gains have not been not responsible for changing the larger balance of power. By and large, progressives have replaced sitting Democrats in deep-blue districts. They’ve failed to prove themselves in contested seats, and have yet to win a major statewide election. Without expanding the Democratic base, progressive advances reflect a larger trend away from the party’s working-class constituency and toward educated urban professionals.American progressives aren’t alone facing this problem. Over the last half-century, center-left parties all around the world have suffered massive defections from their once-sturdy working-class electoral base. As labor unions have declined in size and power, and economies have shifted away from high-wage blue-collar jobs, millions of working-class voters have moved toward parties of the right. And though pundits obsess over the “white working class”, the phenomenon now clearly extends across racial lines, with non-white, non-college-educated voters breaking significantly toward Republicans since 2012.But in order to win more elections, especially in swing districts, both Democrats and progressives must win more working-class votes. The numbers here are just overwhelming: in 2020, well over 60% of American voters did not have college degrees. In Congress, over four-fifths of House seats – and 96 of 100 Senate seats – are chosen by electorates where 60% of the voters lack college degrees. For progressives to accept an inevitable decline in working-class support is to accept their position as a permanent and punchless minority.So how can progressives win back the working class? Here opinions divide sharply. Some liberal analysts argue that an increasingly professional-class Democratic party must restrain its own instincts to suit the preferences of less educated voters. These “popularists” urge liberal candidates to build their campaigns around the party’s safest, best-liked ideas, like lowering prescription drug prices, while tactically sidestepping less popular positions on immigration or police reform. In response, a range of progressive critics contend that such compromises with working-class opinion are either politically ineffectual – since candidate messaging doesn’t matter very much – or morally untenable, since, they say, it would mean replaying Bill Clinton’s rightwing racial pivot in the 1990s.In conjunction with Jacobin magazine and the public opinion firm YouGov, our team at the Center for Working Class Politics decided to dig deeper into this question than an ordinary survey would allow. Rather than polling voters on isolated policies or beliefs, we designed an experiment to test how potentially Democratic working-class voters respond to electoral matchups. By asking voters to choose between hypothetical candidates, who presented a range of personal characteristics and campaign messages, we were able to develop a richer portrait of voter attitudes at the ballot box. And by presenting this survey to a representative group of 2,000 working-class voters in five swing states – a much larger sample of this demographic than appears in most polls – we were able to focus on these voters in much greater depth.What we learned in the “Commonsense Solidarity” report may confound both sides of the ongoing debate. The strongest candidates in our sample made bread-and-butter issues their top priorities – jobs and the economy, rather than immigration and racial justice – and spoke about those priorities in universalist, rather than “woke”, identity-centered rhetoric. These differences were even more pronounced among the working-class voters that Democrats and progressives have struggled most to reach, including rural and small-town voters and voters in blue-collar jobs.In this sense, our findings support the view that working-class voters are sensitive to candidate messaging, and that progressives who want to win their support should put economic issues at the center of their campaigns. But does that mean that Democrats must either tack hard to the center, or abandon their effort to win back a fundamentally “conservative” working class, as some analysts have argued? Not at all.The voters in our sample preferred candidates who endorsed Medicare for All to those who supported an anodyne centrist alternative, “increase access to affordable healthcare”. And given a choice of political messages, they chose a populist, Bernie Sanders-style soundbite – pitting working-class Americans against wealthy elites – somewhat more often than a moderate, Biden-style message.Nor does our study suggest that Democrats must “play it safe” by avoiding discussions of racism. Working-class respondents strongly backed candidates who promised to “end systematic racism” over those who offered a bland pronouncement of “equal rights for all”. They did not punish female or non-white candidates – in fact, black candidates performed significantly better than any other group in our sample, even among white voters.Working-class voters will not punish candidates for advocating for civil rights. But when Democrats frame this struggle in a way that overshadows their commitment to delivering bread-and-butter goods, and when they adopt an activist-inspired, identity-based rhetoric, they are likely to lose working-class votes. Our survey turned up some very large gaps on this front. A populist candidate with a central focus on the economy earned 63% support, for example, while moderates and “woke” progressives with a focus on immigration or racial justice won under 50%.Combining a populist message with a candidate from a working-class background, meanwhile, stretched these gaps even further. While a moderate military veteran – the kind of Democratic candidate often celebrated by party leaders and the press – received just 51% support, a progressive populist teacher earned over 65%. Strikingly, these preferences were shared not only by Democratic voters, but the critical swing demographic of working-class independents.To be sure, a choice between hypothetical candidates is different from an actual campaign but unlike most other studies of this kind (using surveys or election data), our experimental approach allowed us to isolate the characteristics that either attract or repel working-class voters to a particular candidate.Last week’s elections offered one demonstration of what happens when workers’ issues are ignored. In Virginia, Democratic ex-governor Terry McAuliffe was lured into a culture war with Republican Glenn Youngkin, with Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved claiming headlines in the campaign’s final weeks. As economic issues disappeared from view, McAuliffe – a paradigmatic “woke” moderate with no ability to reframe the debate – found himself swamped by working-class defections. Where Biden had won Virginia voters without college degrees by seven points, McAuliffe lost them by 20.Joe Manchin’s arithmetic is unyielding. If progressives want to exert real power in American politics, they cannot be content to replace establishment liberals in deep-blue seats: they must also prove themselves as an alternative to the cautious centrism that swing-district Democrats prefer. The good news is that this doesn’t have to mean sacrificing bold economic policies or evocative populist rhetoric. But if progressives continue to insist that political messaging is inconsequential, or that it is impossible to adjust their program to the priorities of the working-class electorate, they risk condemning themselves to permanent irrelevance.
      Matthew Karp is an associate professor of history at Princeton University and a contributing editor at Jacobin. Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia
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      If Biden doesn’t pass the climate bill, it will be the betrayal of a generation | Daniel Sherrell

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      OpinionClimate crisisIf Biden doesn’t pass the climate bill, it will be the betrayal of a generationDaniel SherrellFailure to pass Build Back Better would disillusion a generation of voters, and potentially fracture the Democratic party Tue 9 Nov 2021 06.16 ESTLast modified on Tue 9 Nov 2021 13.10 ESTDeep into the night last Friday, long past the hour when most Americans had ceased paying attention, Congress passed the $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure bill otherwise known as the BIF. Its passage was heralded as a victory for President Biden, and the daily news chyrons dutifully marked a point in his column. But beyond the horserace myopia of the Beltway – and especially among young people – the news came tinged with the threat of disaster. Because for those of us interested in sustained human civilization on a habitable planet, the most relevant fact about the BIF is this: without consequent passage of the clean energy and social welfare bill known as Build Back Better, the BIF alone will exacerbate the climate crisis.AOC says Republican who posted sword attack video ‘cheered on’ by partyRead moreThe reasons are manifold. The bill is riddled with exemptions and subsidies for corporations like ExxonMobil, whose lobbyists were caught bragging about their role in shaping the text. It invests in highways, bridges and airports that – in the absence of an aggressive drive to electrify cars and planes – will only add to emissions from the transportation sector. And the climate funding it does contain is focused not on drawing down emissions but on preparing Americans for worsening floods, fires and superstorms. If this is all we get, the message to young people is clear: Exxon will continue to be allowed to drown your homes, but not to worry, the government is investing in some life vests. Good luck!When it comes to passing the Build Back Better bill, the handful of extremist, Wall Street-backed Democrats who have obstructed it for months are now asking for something they have done very little to earn: trust. It would be one thing if congresspeople like Josh Gottheimer and Abigail Spanberger gave the impression of fully understanding the gravity of the climate crisis and pulling out all the stops to make a commensurate response politically possible. Instead, they come off as narrow-minded political animals, too blinkered by the game to see the world around them burning.It seems doubtful that any of them have read – much less internalized – the findings of the latest IPCC report. If she had, Representative Spanberger might have registered the irony in her insisting that Biden “be normal and stop the chaos”. As if it weren’t precisely those ideas long considered “normal” – massive fossil fuel subsidies, economic austerity, energy market deregulation – that are leading us straight into planetary chaos.Even more worrisome, their excuse for obstructing Build Back Better seems less than fully genuine. They insist they need to see an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office on how the bill would affect the national deficit. But they seemed little bothered when the CBO made it known that their BIF would expand it by $256bn. They also seem intent on ignoring the many analyses – including several from the treasury department itself – showing that Build Back Better would actually reduce the deficit. And that’s not to even mention the fact – still rarely mentioned, somehow! – that climate disasters cost Americans $1.9tn in 2020 alone.Even if their concern about the deficit is genuine, it’s grounded in a fundamental misapprehension of contemporary macroeconomics, which is undergoing a revolution in how it understands national debt and deficit spending. It’s as if they made some sort of superstitious pact, circa 1980, to admit no additional research from either economists or climate scientists. Even the former chief economist of the CBO made it clear that their insistence on a CBO score is ludicrous. “This is a really important package that will change people’s lives, and that should be the guiding principle,” she said in reference to Build Back Better. “The 10-year window [for CBO scoring] is arbitrary. Aiming for deficit neutrality is arbitrary – it’s arbitrariness on top of arbitrariness.”But despite all of these red flags, most of the self-styled House “moderates” – with a few notable exceptions, including Spanberger – have promised to eventually vote for Build Back Better in its current form. It is hard to overstate how much rests on that single-paragraph promise. A failure to pass Build Back Better would, at this point, amount to a betrayal so large it would disillusion an entire generation of young voters, and potentially fracture the Democratic party itself. The muted applause for BIF would be completely drowned out by recriminations, and the party would stumble into the midterms in open civil war, having failed to pull us back from the brink of worldwide catastrophe.Maybe Abigail Spanberger would hold on to her seat, but she would probably find herself isolated and ineffectual in a Republican Congress, desperately clinging to her fantasy of “normality” as she cranked up the A/C on another blistering summer day.Meanwhile, President Biden’s legacy would be sealed. For all his adulation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he would have failed to live up to the one test that cemented his predecessor as a hero. It’s worth remembering that FDR passed the New Deal over the violent protestations of Wall Street bankers, some of whom tried to stage a coup to replace him. Biden faces a similar test on Build Back Better: can he discipline the wealthiest and most dangerous industry in history, who will stop at nothing to make the “moderates” kill the bill? Can he wrest the helm of history from the fossil fuel executives, who would just as soon watch it all go down in flames?If he fails to pass Build Back Better, China’s taunts will ring true, though for the wrong reasons. The American political system will have proven itself incapable of passing extremely popular policies to address the climate crisis – not because it was too democratic, but because it was never democratic enough.With stakes this high, it’s no wonder the Progressive Caucus leader, Representative Pramila Jayapal, asked each “moderate” to look her in the eye as they signed their name to the Build Back Better promise. That look might have contained the anxiety of my entire generation. Not only our fear of being played, not only our dread of inheriting a squandered planet, but our ongoing hope – despite all evidence to the contrary – that our leaders may actually choose to lead.
      Daniel Sherrell is the author of Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World (Penguin Books) and a climate activist
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