Reconcile This: Lessons From
The Latest Legislative Debacle
Jim Kavanagh
So the Biden administration has achieved passage of, and signed into law, its Infrastructure Bill, and its Reconciliation/Social Spending Bill, dubbed Build Back Better (BBB), has passed the House and is awaiting decision by the Senate. Watching this process play out over the past months has demonstrated, in a way that could not be more definitive, a couple of core truths about the prospects for achieving social policies that could provide socio-economic security and justice for working-class—most—Americans, let alone any kind of transformative, lasting change in socio-economic structures.
The Outer Limits
The first of those truths, which left-socialists have long understood and many more sincerely concerned progressives are finding inescapable, is that the necessary social policies will never be achieved through the extant two-party system and the normal legislative process. This is so, it is becoming hard not to acknowledge, because that process and those two parties—the Democrats (including their “progressive” squaddies and their “socialist” auxiliary) at least as much as the Republicans—are institutionally designed to be obstacles to any such reform. They are representatives of the donor caste, not of their ostensible popular constituencies.