The Build Back Better agenda creates more options for working people. Conservatives calling such measures antithetical to freedom have things the wrong way around
Politics is not just talk, but no major political project can do without someone crafting persuasive language. Democrats have done a singularly bad job at making the case for what is still only known as “the $3.5tn bill”. They have advanced neither symbols nor even comprehensible concepts for what this supposed monster piece of legislation is really about. As a consequence, it has become all too easy to discredit the bill as an incoherent progressive wishlist from which items can be arbitrarily subtracted. What’s worse, the right has been able to portray the bill as inherently un-American, since it supposedly erects a – God forbid – European-style “cradle-to-grave” nanny state. It might sound counterintuitive, but the Democrats should ground their plans in the very value conservatives love to claim for themselves: freedom.
The fact that the bill is so large and combines what is now commonly described as strengthening the social safety net and tackling the climate emergency is not just due to Democrat’s strategic failures: it is partly dictated by the constraints of the reconciliation process. But putting together two seemingly disjointed agendas has also made it easy to portray the legislation as incoherent; it has provided self-described “centrists” (mostly self-centered, rather than offering any principled notion of a “center”) with a politically costless way of calling for cuts to what they characterize as a bloated bill. Similarly, the hefty price tag is a chance for what lazy journalists still keep describing as “moderates” to prove their fiscal rectitude and adherence to a zombie ethos of bipartisan “responsibility”.
Jan-Werner Müller teaches politics at Princeton University. His book Democracy Rules was published in July by Allen Lane