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Matt Hagy's avatar

I understand the frustration with Manchin’s refusal to provide his specific priorities within a $1.5T bill. Yet I get the impression he doesn’t have strong preferences for one program versus another. Further I don’t think he wants to get the political flack for picking and choosing which programs make the cut.

And I think that is reasonable. Those hard decisions should ultimately reside with party leadership; chiefly, Schumer, Pelosi, and Biden. That is the job of being in a leadership role; making the hard calls that can build a voting block to pass legislation and receiving political flack for their decisions.

I personally blame these three leaders for eschewing their responsibilities. Yet I can understand their concerns about having to anger some political blocks, journalists, and twitterati “thought leaders” by explicitly endorsing certain priorities over others. E.g., stating they want to drop the CTC in favor of addressing climate change and deficit reducation. No matter what they choose they will anger someone and receive a fair amount of loud condemnation.

It’s even possible that these three leaders don’t see the possibility of reconciling these priorities into a package that can garner sufficient votes among congressional Democrats. Any proposed package may be vetoed by Dems that don’t see their hobby horse included. E.g., the SALT assholes. In which case our Democrat leadership finds themselves in the sisyphean task of going through the motions of developing and championing a cornucopia of Dem priorities while knowing no such bill will ever pass.

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THPacis's avatar

Yes! Yes! Yes! This should be a no-brainer. That the Democrats are not doing this, that in fact, despite the Trifecta we’re close to the midterms and they *still* haven’t corrected the horrible (an hugely unpopular) GOP tax cuts, show the party has a radical problem. How could they be so incompetent or clueless??

I have two main suspicions: 1. Weak leadership from the WH leaving a vacuum that makes it very difficult to get things done 2. Structural changes in the voter base mean that the Dems are no longer truly incentivized to pursue a classic left-wing economic agenda, not even a very moderate one.

As evidence for no. 2 I’ll point out that until quite recently the left-wing of the party used to be progressive in the original sense: Warren was all about anti-trust, regulation, taxation. Sanders basically the same just in a more populist and less-wonky style. But since Trump took power the Dems lost their North Star. Warren and even Sanders paying homage to woke agenda that they truly ignored (or that simply didn’t exist) until 2016 or later. Heck, Sanders used to be an immigration skeptic - a proud tradition in a labor left - but in the 2020 came out publicly for decriminalizing illegal border crossing !

And Warren nowadays still does some good work, but it seems her no. 1 issue now is student loan debt. What happened to them? I suppose they (naturally enough) fell inlove with their own new found popularity, and then got carried away by a hyper-educated and pretty wealthy base, that is not truly interested in economic-left policies beyond the occasional virtue-signal. Culture wars are far easier on the old pocket.

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