Joe Biden Is Waging Class Warfare Without the War – By Ben Mathis-Lilley (Slate) / April 7 2021
The president’s passive-aggressive leftism.
On March 12, President Joe Biden held a press conference with Vice President Kamala Harris, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to celebrate the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act—ARP, for short. With his party’s other leading figures around him in the Rose Garden, discussing the first major product of their “unified” control over the executive branch and Congress, it was as close to an official mission statement as the new president has taken the opportunity to make.
After emphasizing the parts of the huge, deficit-financed spending bill that provide direct payments to low-income and middle-class Americans, Biden took a metaphorical step back to describe what he believes it accomplishes philosophically. “The bill does one more thing, which I think is really important,” he said. “It changes the paradigm.” Specifically, he said, “for the first time in a long time, this bill puts working people in this nation first.” About three weeks later, Biden went to Pittsburgh to introduce an even larger spending proposal—ostensibly related to infrastructure, but really just a plan for trying to fix everything—and said he wants it financed by tax increases on wealthy individuals and corporations.
Changing the paradigm by redistributing money from the rich to the poor and the middle class is a plan Bernie Sanders could (and does) support, described in a way that’s only a thesaurus away from Elizabeth Warren’s call for big, structural change. It’s an embrace of the kind of populism that was described for years—by people like Joe Biden—as being too divisive and disruptive to appeal to the American public as a whole. And according to the polls, the American public as a whole loves it! They’re eating it up, like a bunch of hogs!
