Post-Neoliberalism: The fight over what post-neoliberalism will be continues. Noah Smith has an excellent rant against the thinking of the smart and well-intentioned but often wrong David Dayen and Marshall Steinbaum. It is, as I said, a rant. But in my view it is constructive and productive ranting:
Noah Smith: “Biden's tarnished industrial legacy”: ‘He began our Great Rebuilding, but his approach had fundamental flaws…. “More than a half-dozen senior administration officials… Jonathan Fine… Antony Blinken… Kurt Campbell… Rahm Emanuel… Janet L. Yellen… Jared Bernstein and top Commerce officials… argued against or expressed reservations about the [US Steel] position Biden ultimately took.”… Biden scuttled the Nippon Steel deal… [because] United Steelworkers president David McCall… [was] against the deal[,] even though the merger would probably have… created more good union jobs…. Just as progressive leaders confuse advocacy groups <washingtonpost.com/busi… with the “communities” of people they claim to represent, Biden seems to have confused union leaders with union workers…. Progressives refuse to engage with or appeal to the American public… and instead insist on engaging only through opportunistic middlemen….
It also represents a fundamental ideological orientation.,,, David Dayen: “There’s something uniquely un-American about [supply-side progressivism]. ‘A liberalism that builds boils down to the idea that people can’t be trusted’, said [Marshall] Steinbaum. ‘Elites must make the sound enlightened decisions because they don’t trust democracy or politics’. Supply-side progressives like [Matt] Yglesias and [Ezra] Klein are skilled at detecting the structural problems in American government. They’re less concerned with the problem of power as an impediment to progress. And they’re certainly not interested in equalizing that power”…. A rhetorical sleight of hand [here]… [not] power to get things done… [instead Dayen] means activists’ and unions’ power to extract money and other concessions from progressives by blocking them from getting things done. The power Dayen envisions is not power over nature or the state or America in general, but power within the Democratic party….
It was this same vision of “power” that led the Biden administration to hobble many of its own efforts with “community benefit” programs and other contracting requirements… which Dayen explicitly endorses…. Mandating that the Department of Transportation hold a block party in order to build an EV charger is, frankly, silly. Once again, it’s emblematic of how out-of-touch the people who make these policies are — they have so little first-hand knowledge of underprivileged communities that they struggle to imagine how or where they might express their opinions about development.
But it’s also indicative of a focus on veto power within the Democratic party and veto power over the state, instead of on building state power itself…. This approach,,, utterly neglects the question of how to make sure that power within the Democratic party matters at all…. The activists and union leaders and anti-neoliberal think tankers… won their battle to squeeze power out of the Biden administration, only to lose the wider war. As a result, Biden’s legacy as America’s Great Rebuilder will be severely tarnished. <noahpinion.blog/p/biden…>
As I have said before, it is rich for David Dayen and Marshall Steinbaum to say that Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein are doubleplusungood for not instinctively trusting “democracy” and “politics”. The United States is a country where a majority of those who could be bothered to bestir themselves and vote voted for Donald Trump in 2024 and for George W. Bush in 2004 and for Ronald Reagan in 1980. If you trust “democracy” and “politics”, full stop, then you are right now out there cheerleading for Donald Trump on the principle that vox populi, vox dei. And if you try to excuse yourselves by saying that we distrust élites and they must submit to a democracy that has all the power, but only to the “democracy” of how the people ought to have voted—well, then, you are on the road to the very same hell that Rosa Luxemburg vainly pleaded to Vladimir Lenin to turn aside from.
