Before assessing Biden’s initiative to change America’s social structure through government, let’s stand back and consider these other initiatives to do this in the course of, say, the last hundred and twenty years, when government emerged out of a Wild West culture where businesses jousted with one another to industrialize America without much government intervention. Remember that wars, or the Space Program, or establishing national parks, or conventional infrastructure, such as building the Continental Railroad or the Interstate Highway System, however admirable they may be and of considerable consequence, are not part of these social initiatives, all of which, whether Republican or Democratic, failed or successful, have tried to expand entitlements and regulations, where an entitlement means awarding money or some other favor, such as ten points oxtra on a civil service exam for veterans, and a regulation is the stipulated procedures for an organization, such as regulating the way to calculate utility charges for the consumer, and these entitlements and regulations have been opposed by those who had preferred whatever had already been there, or thought government was too intrusive and so a danger to individual liberty, or were simply oppositional, in that the other party was always to be opposed against the incumbents for that reason alone, and that is the present case, where Mitch McConnell is against Biden’s programs just because Biden is proposing them, and think that Republicans can win the Congress and the White House just by being contrary.
Theodore Roosevelt's initiative, the Square Deal, had largely done otherwise than to elaborate entitlements and regulations. It tried to deal with big business not by regulating it but by breaking it up, through antitrust laws, and that divide between regulation and break up has remained an issue onto the present, when Amy Klobacher is in favor of dismantling monopolies or even particularly large corporations, even if Walmart is larger than Amazon and even if Amazon provides services and allows the creation of businesses whose wares it sells on Amazon. Also, technological innovation outstrips monopolization. By the time AT&T agreed to divest into smaller entities, telephonics were about to switch from long lines to cell phones, just as the industry knew would happen, and so AT&T was just dropping off of itself the soon to be least remunerative part of the business. The New Tenement Law of 1901 regulated ventilation and water and which also required indoor plumbing was passed in New York City, not a federal law, even if TR was very concerned with addressing what had now become the era of urban slums. A true example of regulation was imposed under Roosevelt with the regulation of the food and drug industry, consumers more upset of bad meat than how meat workers were treated. Food regulation remains a model for what even libertarians might acknowledge: that the government should supervise whether what is sold in supermarkets and pharmacies should not be tainted and so inspection is necessary so as to assure that is so. But the Square Deal was just a small start at regulation.
The greatest achievement of these plans to expand entitlement and regulations, the model for all subsequent other such plans, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, ambitious in conception as well as in its mpact. FDR created new agencies to deal with each one of the problems and dispensed with those, like the NRA, not just because it was found unconstitutional, but because it was no longer useful once the nation had adopted a spirit of cooperativeness that treated industry as part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Even an early New Deal project, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, did not just offer oodles of money so as to allow economic forces to work their way. The Agriculture Department had to develop a giant bureaucracy where technicalities had to be applied to how many piglets should be harvested so as to keep up pork prices or how many acres could be set aside as pasture and for what price so as not to overproduce wheat and other commodities. Not to speak of creating the National Labor Relations Board to administer collective bargaining, with all its technicalities of what constitutes legitimate bargaining or how to conduct an election. Or creating the Tennessee Valley Authority so as to create rather than just subsidize the electrification of the South. Republicans have dined for generations on how cumbersome bureaucracy is without attending to what it accomplished.
Truman’s Fair Deal did not get anywhere because of Republican opposition, but it did bring forward issues of entitlement and regulation that bore fruit generations later. Truman was in favor of raising the minimum wage, providing national health insurance, and providing some protection for minorities, however meagre was the last of these, merely providing for a mechanism to discuss discrimination in jobs. Lyndon Johnson did succeed in passing national health insurance for the elderly and the poor and passed robust civil rights legislation but was a failure in the “War on Poverty” because the measures used to fund services that would alleviate the poor were too small to make much of an impression on interfering into the life cycle of poverty. Providing food and medical care and education was not enough and I remember people who had supported the War on Poverty, as I had, thinking that we would have to figure out some new or more robust programs to turn the trick.
Richard Nixon might have been credited with having had an initiative to bolster regulations and entitlements, a Conservative approach to having done so when all the other deals had been Democratic since the beginning of the New Deal, but he squandered his legacy with Watergate. Remember that he was often innovative, including using wage and price controls, an old World War II measure, to combat inflation. His introduction to regulation was the Environmental Protection Act, which supervised myriad details about toxic stream runoffs and getting rid of the pollution that, at the time, seemed to put Lake Erie, near Cleveland, on fire. It may well be that environmentalism was a project that was able to deflect activists from the politically highly charged and divisive movements of the period. It always seemed that Earth Day meant burying an automobile rather than starting a riot, but be that as it may, it was a movement that could be controlled as well as sustained and so a wise political decision. Conservation was Conservative. As was Nixon’s extension of entitlements, which was to allow for Affirmative Action, which was a way to increase minority participation in universities and business. Nixon was anti-racist even though he had mobilized the once Solid Democratic South into the Southern Strategy whereby, as LBJ had predicted, the South would become a Republican stronghold. Affirmative Action was a way of dividing Liberals by setting meritocracy against entitlements and that division remains. Was there a political cost for intergroup cooperation by giving quotas or other advantages to minority students or was it a necessary evil to deal with the pressure of minorities to achieve their accomplishments? No way to tell.
Now to Joe Biden. His principle for his own deal to expand entitlements and regulations is so simple and clear, so elegant, that it is treated as a platitude rather than an insight into the nature of social structure. Biden argues, invoking his sainted father, that jobs provide pride in work rather than just an income. So what Biden wants to do is create all the circumstances that are necessary so that people can engage with employment. Old people and the disabled need nursing homes and adult day care so that people, especially women, can get jobs they would have to forego because of family responsibilities. Pre school education provides women free to work as well as prepare those who grow up to be able to get employment. Two year colleges also prepare people to work. The same goes to so many of the measures that are part of the non physical infrastructure, which can be defined as the social arrangements that allow for people to work.
It is important to remember that what Biden is suggesting in his self apparent way is really quite controversial. The purpose of college is not to prepare people to work but to become civilized educated people and so know about history and literature that extend their consciousness rather than just as people prepared for their jobs. Educating children is too formal a structure for pre-kindergarteners in that they will learn their numbers and letters soon enough if they are exposed to people reading to them and conversing with them. And most of all jobs need not be considered to be all and end all of human existence. People can also cultivate their garden or their souls and that is worthwhile even if you don’t earn a living except that you have to so as to economically survive. Another problem with his major extension of school programs is that he offers no new mechanism for improving educational attainment, none of the other mechanisms not having shortened the gap between affluent and non affluent students, and so as well the gap between Black and white students. Maybe just more of the same will do the job, but I am not at all sure of it, given the weakness of the family structure of the poor.
Biden has decided that what a President does is keep track of the long view, the fundamental issues having to do with covid recovery and then to restructure the economy so as to insure American prosperity for the next fifty years. This is a tall order for any President to achieve especially in that his margin in Congress is so slim and legislation depends on getting unanimity of Democratic Senators. This from the mountain approach can be thwarted by immediate political problems that have to be dealt with because the nation itself is at risk. There is the unprecedented attack on the Capital and most Republicans, whether as citizens or as legislators, do not agree with the legitimacy of Biden’s election. Biden seems to avoid the issue by letting the Justice Department prosecute the offenders and leave off the hook the legislators who abetted or still support the idea of the insurrection even if they dismiss it as just unfortunate or just a riot or just a version of a tour through Statuary Hall. Also, and clearly following a precedent, is the attempt by largely Southern legislatures, to abridge voting rights for minority people some few years after the Supreme Court, in its often misguided and naive wisdom, thought it was no longer necessary to keep in operation the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required preclearance for changes in voting procedures in states with a long history of voting practices to keep black people from voting. The old penny turns up. Biden wants to pass a voting rights bill that will restore the Sixty Five act but is not yet willing to deal with it by breaking the filibuster because he won't get the unanimity of the Democratic Senators that it would require. Maybe it is time to arm twist Manchin. Hasn’t he had enough time to see that the Republicans are obstructionists rather than reasonable? So Biden skirts the immediate crises, however serious they are as threats to democracy, because he is acting in view of an even larger view, that we can ride out these other issues to get his major issues. I hope his guess is right.