Tuesday 3.41: More Power

When it was finally announced that Joe Biden won the presidential election on an unseasonably warm Saturday last November, my girlfriend and I rode our bikes to Prospect Park, where we met a couple of friends. We sat in a small field on the park’s east side, sipping from celebratory cups or flasks, as evening turned to night. Like most people in New York that day, we knew the moment would be fleeting, but we wanted to enjoy it. We knew Biden didn’t embody the radical change we hoped for, but it was nice to feel a little relieved. When it got too dark to see, we toyed with the idea of going somewhere, doing something else, but thought better of it, and went our separate ways. There was still the plague to think about.

Most everything we expected has come to pass. It appears as though Biden’s decades of government experience are an advantage when it comes to handling a pandemic. I’ll admit that I chuckled when I learned that he’d managed to take credit for a deal between two competing pharmaceutical companies to increase vaccine production. A “huge deal.” Trump must be beside himself.

But like that first evening in the park, these moments are fleeting, and often cheap. Democrats’ abandonment of a $15 minimum wage, citing the lack of support from frowny, centrist representatives of states whose constituents overwhelmingly support things like $15-For-All and Medicare-For-All, is a reminder that after circling the wagons to stop Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Partydeliberately alienated its progressive wing and spent an inordinate amount of time talking about “unity,” which essentially means nothing will change.

As if to symbolically assert this position, a few hours after spiking $15 For All, Biden bombed Syria.

After all the functional bureaucratic disasters of the Trump administration, an easy win and obvious bright spot so far for Biden has been Covid’s retreat. It’s hard to know, exactly, what kind of damage the Trump presidency really did without the contextual relief of a capable administration, but there is some hope in the general feeling that for all Trump’s bluster, he didn’t really achieve anything. Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that migrants, undocumented immigrants, and refugees around the world are breathing a sigh of relief, though many troubling practices remain in place. Four years of Republican control also cemented for a generation, we have to assume, a conservative Supreme Court. Who knows what that group of constitutional weirdos will come up with.

It’s too early to know what effect Biden’s relief bill will have, although early response has been somewhat dispirited.1 In general, we’ve heard more about the concessions than we have about what’s included, and it feels like a bill in lock step with Biden’s particular brand of stasis, which feels all too familiar at a time when we need something dramatically different. It already feels like Democrats will be scrambling for substantive benefits of the stimulus plan to point to by the time mid-term elections roll around.

While much has been made about where the Republican party goes from here, the question is really more urgent for Democrats. If Republicans managed to properly harness the vitriolic stupidity of Trump once, I have no doubt they’re capable of doing it again. When it comes to the Democrats, however, I think the opposite is true: They are a party seemingly baffled by their own positions, principles, even characteristics. In this way, they are exemplified by today’s Andrew Cuomo.

The Cuomo debacle provides a window into the politics we can expect from Democrats if the existing order is further bolstered under Biden. That it’s unclear precisely what that is is kind of my point. Andrew Cuomo is essentially Liberal Trump. Obsessed with image and the appearance of power, the actuality of his governance is largely a simulation.

When Cuomo touted his successes in the fight against Covid, I always felt like I was watching a baseball analyst commend a young player for hustling down the line on a ground ball—he’s just doing what he’s supposed to be doing. And when it all came out in the wash, he’d fudged the numbers and wrote a book about it. All the creepy grab-assing just seals the deal. It’s mostly a big show, and there isn’t much substance. Actual policy as it related to Covid was always confusing, questionable, and as we now know, only might have been working. But Cuomo was there, being a guy on TV, speaking firmly and occasionally bristling at journalists with a superficial, jock-like amiability that filled a need for an anxious public that’s beginning to recognize he wasn’t actually doing all that much, and when he fucked up, he was lying about it.

This is the kind of power that American Stasis rewards and thrives on. When our expectations remain low, when we expect that change is impossible or must be incremental, we begin to develop an understanding that politicians are mostly there to manage a narrative and pull the levers that have always needed pulling. It’s not just Ted Cruz loyalists who are willing to forgive his trip to Mexico when his state was freezing and starving to death—it’s cynics and “fiscal” conservatives too. “Well, what do you want him to do? Stay here and help pass out bread, or repair power lines?”2 When conspiracy theorists talk about oligarchs behind the scenes of government secretly calling all the shots, this is the reality of what they’re talking about: Not exactly a dark, deliberative cabal of elites, but an understanding among them, an unwritten rule that says “stay the course.”

The progressive left, for its part, falls too often into the short-term traps. To use another baseball analogy, the left steals a base in the ninth inning of a three-run game. That is to say, it takes unnecessary risks3 and celebrates Pyrrhic victories.

So that leaves us with a relatively unsexy blend of idealism and pragmatism, principles and a roadmap—two things the Democrats have struggled to articulate for years now.

There will always be a Joe Manchin, or a filibuster, or a Senate Parliamentarian working to maintain the existing structure,4 and a Cuomo to take credit for the ebb or flow of the zero-sum politics cycle. And it’s not just the most powerful among us who work, however subtly, against real progress.

The sweeping, fundamental changes to existing socioeconomic orders necessary to substantively combat the challenges of climate, inequality, and global conflict will be uncomfortable for lots of people. I’m probably one of them. But if there’s one thing the plague has taught us (and of course there are tons of things), it’s that the short-term comfort of stasis comes at a horrendous cost.

This week, the House of Representatives passed the PRO Act, which aims to create a more equitable environment for workers, providing protections for those who organize, and establishing a foundational opposition to the disastrous Proposition 22, which made California’s Uber drivers contract workers who don’t qualify for the protections of standard employment. It is a glimmer of hope, an indication that while Joe Biden may not be the man to drive the fundamental change progressives are after, he’s in favor of setting the stage for someone else to.

Seeing the recent outpouring of support—the success of mutual aid efforts, the unionization push at Amazon in Alabama, the recognition among so many groups that the government isn’t interested in helping them, that our neighbors are all we have—the precedent and the possibility of PRO Act is heartening. If working people have a platform, they’ll use it. If they can organize, they can drive change, whether the purveyors of Stasis Politics like it or not. Maybe this is where the left can start to define the principles in the void the Democratic Party has left them.

The powers of stasis are already hard at work, shouting as loudly and as cynically as possible that the PRO Act will die in the Senate. Don’t listen to them.

You can email your senator to pass the PRO Act here, or even better, sign up to phone bank in critical support areas here.