Why this one is different

I don’t usually pay much attention to the machinations in Congress because I feel that most of what goes on in that remote, opaque, and corporate-dominated forum affects everyday life very little.

They do “so much.” In the modern period, since the Civil War 160 years ago, do you notice that wealth inequality has decreased? No, it’s increased. In the balance of power between labor and capital, has Congress made sure that the capitalist elite is constrained? No. Labor unions have been decimated and the treadmill life of wage-labor remains the affliction that it always has been.

Lincoln, way back, said it’s supposed to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Whatever it is that Congress does . . . are we any closer to that ideal? No, so my conclusion is that what they do is mostly trivial, usually beneficial for the power elites.

Once in a blue moon commoners-life-improvement legislation like Social Security, Medicare, suffrage extension, gay marriage, pollution clean-up, etc. gets enacted. Of interest today is that there is:
* a determined socialist caucus;
* a piece of legislation they see as transformational;
* a new idea about deficit spending.

The members of the caucus are not really socialists, as that word is defined in the dictionary (“advocating collective, instead of private, ownership of society’s productive assets”). Rather, they are co-thinkers of the social democracy ideology that Bernie Sanders has made famous as a step in the direction of “democratic socialism.” But, anyway, they are determined. Because they remember when Barack Obama had Democratic majorities in the House and Senate during the first two years of his term (2009–2011) and failed to get transformational legislation enacted. This time they say: “We’re not settling for a pittance. And don’t trudge out that old canard about ‘too much deficit spending’ … because we’ve been reading Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy. It says there’s no reason the government can’t Go Big and fund whatever.”

So this time they’re trying to play hardball. As I write, on the night of September 30, they’ve already seen Nancy Pelosi foil their strategy of tying the New Great Society bill to the infrastructure bill. And, so far, a couple of Democratic senators are not on board enough to assure stand-alone passage of the former.

The scenario, for once, is of interest to the broad left.