OPINION
DAVID
BROOKS
The Biden Approach Is Working
Aug. 5,
2021
David
Brooks
By David
Brooks
Opinion
Columnist
If Joe
Biden stands for one idea, it is that our system can work. We live in a big,
diverse country, but good leaders can bring people together across difference
to do big things. In essence Biden is defending liberal democracy and the
notion that you can’t govern a nation based on the premise that the other half
of the country is irredeemably awful.
The
progressive wing of the Democratic Party is skeptical: The Republican Party has
gone authoritarian. Mitch McConnell is obstructionist. Big money pulls the
strings. The system is broken. The only way to bring change is to mobilize the
Democratic base and push partisan transformation.
If all you
knew about politics was what goes on in the media circus, you’d have to say the
progressives have the better argument. Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie
Taylor Greene — healthy bipartisan compromise seems completely hopeless with
this crew.
But
underneath that circus, there has always been another layer of politics — led
by people who are not as ratings-driven, but are more governance-driven. So
over the past 20 years or so, while the circus has been at full roar, Congress
has continued to pass bipartisan legislation: the Every Student Succeeds
rewrite of federal K-12 education policy, the Obama budget compromise of 2013,
the Trump criminal justice reform law of 2018, the FAST infrastructure act, the
Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, the Trump-era ban on surprise billing in
health care. In June the Senate passed, 68 to 32, the United States Innovation
and Competition Act of 2021, which would devote roughly $250 billion to
scientific projects.
Matthew
Yglesias and Simon Bazelon call this the “Secret Congress” — the everyday
business of governing that works precisely because it isn’t on cable TV.
When Covid
hit, the same two-track pattern prevailed. The circus gave us the mask and
vaccination wars. But Congress was productive and bipartisan. The Senate passed
a Covid relief measure 96 to 1 in early March 2020, another 90 to 8 in
mid-March, another 96 to 0 in late March and another 92 to 6 in December. The
House votes were also landslides. If you had told me two years ago that
Congress would respond to a pandemic in some ways better than the C.D.C., I
would have been surprised, but that’s what happened.
After Biden
was elected, the two-track pattern was still going strong. The circus realm
gave us the horror of Jan. 6. But the dull, governing part of America carried
on. For example, the Senate confirmed Biden’s cabinet picks in largely
bipartisan fashion.
Biden’s
legislative strategy owes something to each side of the Democratic Party. He
wants to ram through a lot on party-line votes using reconciliation. But he
also insists on a bipartisan approach whenever possible. Over the past few
months the bipartisan track has, somewhat surprisingly, been moving faster than
the partisan track.
Republicans
and Democrats have been involved in a complex set of negotiations about
infrastructure spending. It’s been messy and complicated, the way politics
always is, but the two sides have worked together productively.
“You can
tell the difference between an adversarial negotiation and a collaborative
one,” Mitt Romney told The Washington Post. “In this case, when one side had a
problem, the other side tried to solve the problem, rather than to walk away
from the table.” When the Senate advanced the roughly $1 trillion measure by a
vote of 67 to 32, that was a sign that experienced politicians can, as Biden
suggested, make the system work.
The Biden
administration has moved to separate government from the culture wars. It has
shifted power away from the Green New Deal and Freedom Caucus show horses and
lodged it with the congressional workhorses — people like Republican Rob
Portman and Democrat Mark Warner, who are in no danger of becoming social media
stars.
The
moderates are suddenly in strong shape. The progressives say they won’t support
this Biden infrastructure bill unless it is passed simultaneously with a larger
spending bill. But if the Democrats can’t agree on that larger bill, will
progressives really sink their president’s infrastructure initiative? In the
negotiations over the larger bill, the moderates have most of the power because
they are the ones whose seats are at risk.
We have
come a long way since the A.O.C. glory days of 2019. Biden won the presidential
nomination, not Bernie Sanders. Progressive excesses like “defund the police”
cost Democrats dearly down-ballot. Over the past months there have been primary
contests between regular Democrats and progressives, including House races in
Louisiana, New Mexico and Ohio, a governor’s race in Virginia and a mayoral
race in New York. The party regulars have won all of them.
As former
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel notes, the problem with the progressive base
mobilization strategy is that progressives think they’re the base. But a
faction that keeps losing primaries can’t be the base. Joe Biden is the base.
And Biden, and the 91 percent of Democrats who view him favorably, want to make
the system work. American politics is in God-awful shape, but we’re seeing a
reasonably successful attempt to build it back better.
David
Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of “The
Road to Character” and, most recently, “The Second Mountain.” @nytdavidbrooks
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