When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he broadly demonized government and its programs that formed the foundation of the nation’s social safety net for the poor, elderly and sick. In the four decades that followed, both Republican and Democratic presidents marginalized and defunded many critical government programs, privatizing others, all while legislating big tax cuts for the nation’s wealthiest citizens and profitable corporations. In his 1996 State of the Union Address, Bill Clinton proclaimed that the “era of big government is over.”
During the last 40 years, many Americans have seen their standard of living stagnate or decline – while the nation has experienced levels of income and wealth inequality not seen since the “Gilded Age.” The Great Recession in 2008 further exacerbated an already dire situation.
When the coronavirus pandemic exposed the failure of the nation’s economy to deliver for working families, it was obvious to many that government must intervene in the crisis in a big way. In contrast to Donald Trump and the Republicans who weakened major COVID relief programs, Joe Biden came into office proposing and passing the American Rescue Plan and put forward bold initiatives including the American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan, with total expenditures of about $6 trillion. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with William Rivers Pitt, senior editor and lead columnist with Truthout.org, who talks about his recent opinion piece titled, “Biden’s Speech Pointed to a Possible End to Reagan’s Rancid Legacy.”
WILLIAM RIVERS PITT: When you sit up in a high place and you look down on the last 40 years and you realize that we’ve been kind of moldering in place as the things that we were so proud of 40, 50 years ago turned into dandelion fluff and blew away in the wind, as wages have stagnated as the money keeps moving upward periodically, the trickle-down nonsense gets ahead of itself and obliterates the economy and we have a Wall Street collapse. You have to understand my perspective as one who is a member of Generation X, I came into existence under Nixon as sort of the last vestiges of the honorable concept of an honorable White House were stripped away. The arc of economic and environmental degradation under the auspices of Reagan, who came in when I was about 10 and has been squatting over the landscape like one of those Easter Island totems for the last 40 years. The story of my life as a politically aware person and a political activist and a writer and the rest of it, is the story of that slow and steady arc of disillusion that started in the late ’70s and early’ 80s, when the last Democratic coalition collapsed. The Reagan yahoos came in. These are Barry Goldwater’s kids, they’ll burn the place down before they let anybody else have it, as we saw on the 6th of January.
And this elderly generation of Democratic leadership has spent the last 40 years on its knees to these people, because they don’t quite know how to react to it. They still think that if you’re nice to these people, nice things will happen. So to see somebody like Joe Biden, who is an avatar of that generation and one of the founding members of the sort of third way, DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) — you know, crime bill, banking bill, neoliberal economic forces within the Democratic party — suddenly it was like an Andy Kaufman prank. He jumped up and he was Bernie Sanders at the podium. And it was entirely refreshing, if more than a little bit astonishing,
SCOTT HARRIS: William, just to review some of the proposals that have come out of the Biden administration thus far, we have the American Rescue Plan that has passed. And it’s now law — $1.9 trillion addressing the COVID crisis. And then of course, we have the American Jobs Plan, a $2.3 trillion plan; and the American Families Plan, $1.8 trillion. The question is, will any of this be passed into law with the filibuster in the Senate? But in terms of Joe Biden’s commitment to see this through as much as possible, do you think there’s a sincere effort to make these things real?
WILLIAM RIVERS PITT: Well, he sure shoved the American Recovery Act right up Mitch McConnell’s nostril. That was heartening. They’ve been doing some investigations with the Senate parliamentarian who has agreed that under the rules, that they could try to pass as many as six other bills under what’s called Rule 304 of the reconciliation process. So that as long as it has something to do with the budget, they could go to reconciliation for a number of these bills, particularly the infrastructure bill, which has everything to do with the budget.
At which point we come around to my favorite floating blood clot, (Democratic West Virginia Sen.) Joe Manchin and the rock in the road that he’s going to prove to be. I get the sense that (Biden) put the American Recovery Act on a rocket sled to get it done as quickly as possible to sort of announce his position with authority. And it did a marvelous job of deranging the Republican caucus. But I get the sense that they’re taking a little bit of a slower road with the rest of this stuff. And I don’t know, I haven’t seen if a decision has been made yet to pursue any three or four passages of any of this other stuff under reconciliation. It may come down to that. At which point they’re going to have to — I don’t know — lock Joe Manchin a closet or something somewhere.
For more articles by William Rivers Pitt, visit Truthout.org
