Biden appears to be a transformational president

This has been one of the most quietly consequential weeks in recent American politics.

The COVID-19 relief law that was just enacted is one of the most important pieces of legislation of our lifetimes. As Eric Levitz writes in New York magazine, the poorest fifth of households will see their income rise by 20%; a family of four with one working and one unemployed parent will receive $12,460 in benefits. Child poverty will be cut in half.

The law stretches far beyond COVID-19 relief. There’s a billion for national service programs. Black farmers will receive over

$4 billion in what looks like a step toward reparations. There’s a huge expansion of health insurance subsidies. Many of these changes, like the child tax credit, may well become permanent.

As Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute notes, America spent $4.8 trillion in today’s dollars fighting World War II. Over the past year, America has spent over

$5.5 trillion fighting the pandemic.

In a polarized era, the legislation is widely popular. Three-quarters of Americans support the law, including 60% of Republicans, according to a Morning Consult survey. The Republican members of Congress voted against it, but the GOP shows no interest in turning this into a great partisan battle. As I began to write this on Thursday morning, the Fox News homepage had only two stories on the COVID relief bill and dozens on things like the royal family and cancel culture.

Somehow low-key Joe Biden gets yawns when he promotes progressive policies that would generate howls if promoted by a President Bernie Sanders or a President Elizabeth Warren.

This moment is like 1981, the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, except in reverse. It’s not just that government is heading in a new direction; it’s that the whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting. Biden is not causing these tectonic plates to shift, but he is riding them.

Reaganism was the right response to the stagflation of the 1970s, but Bidenism is a sensible response to a very different set of economic problems. Let one set of statistics stand in for hundreds: According to a team of researchers led by Raj Chetty, in 1970, 90% of 30-year-olds were making more than their parents had at that age. By 2010, only 50% were.

There was a premise through American history that if you worked hard, you would earn economic security. That’s not as true for millennials and Gen Z or many other people across America.

These realities have created a different emotional climate that the pandemic has magnified — a climate of insecurity and precarity. These realities have also produced an intellectual revolution.

It was assumed, even only a decade ago, that the Fed could not just print money with abandon. It was assumed that the government could not rack up huge debt without spurring inflation and crippling debt payment costs. Both of these concerns have been thrown out the window by large numbers of thinkers. We’ve seen years of high debt and loose monetary policy, but inflation has not come.

We are now experiencing monetary and fiscal policies that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. This is like the moment when the GOP abandoned fiscal conservatism for the go-go excitement of supply-side economics — which eventually devolved into mindless tax cuts for the rich.

The role of government is being redefined. There is now an assumption that government should step in to reduce economic insecurity and inequality. Even

Republicans like Tom Cotton and Mitt Romney, for example, are cooking up a plan to actively boost wages for American workers.

This is not socialism. This is not the federal government taking control of the commanding heights of the economy. This is not a bunch of programs to restrain corporate power. Americans’ trust in government is still low. This is the Transfer State: government redistributing massive amounts of money by cutting checks to people and having faith that they spend it in the right ways.

I’m worried about a world in which we spend borrowed money with abandon. The skeptical headline on the final preretirement column of the great Washington Post economics columnist Steven Pearlstein resonated with me: “In Democrats’ progressive paradise, borrowing is free, spending pays for itself and interest rates never rise.”

But income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time. It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this. At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/ Obama center-left era. But this is something new.

It would be easier to believe that Republican lawmakers intend to fix the problems that corrupted Florida’s last election if Florida’s last election had actually been corrupted.

It would be easier to believe their meddling with the electoral process was unsullied by racist motives if the legislation wasn’t sponsored by Dennis Baxley.

Sen. Baxley has a history.

But first: the 2020 election. Florida defied its ignominious reputation for mucking up elections. No long lines. No delayed vote computations. No phantom ballots. No hanging chads. No dispute over which presidential candidate carried the state. None of the chaos that had previously made “Florida election” a recurring punchline on late night TV. Gov. DeSantis bragged on Twitter that our election was “a model for the rest of the nation to follow.”

When Donald Trump railed about the reliability of mail-in ballots, he didn’t mention Florida, although 4.8 million of the state’s 11 million voters — heeding CDC warnings to avoid crowds — mailed their ballots or used the handy drop-off boxes at early voting sites. Trump himself voted absentee in the Florida primary.

Of course, he carried Florida, which, to Trump, was the lone determinant of a clean election.

Nonetheless, Republicans, led by Sen. Baxley, are adding a huge dollop of inconvenience to Florida’s elections. The majority party is pushing legislation that would ban drop-off boxes, require voters to re-apply for absentee ballots ahead of each general election and limit who can collect and deliver completed ballots to election offices.

That 680,000 more Democrats than Republicans voted absentee last November has nothing to do with this, Baxley insists. The Ocala undertaker, however, can cite no transgressions that justify his legislation. “The challenge is that you don’t know what you don’t know,” he said.

What Floridians do know is that the non-partisan League of Women Voters said Baxley’s legislation “makes absolutely no sense unless you’re looking for ways to suppress the vote.”

Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley testified before a Senate committee that he and his fellow election supervisors, Republicans and Democrats alike, “are against this bill, vehemently.” Broward elections supervisor Joe Scott told the Sun Sentinel that Baxley’s legislation “amounted to massive voter suppression.”

We also know that attaching Dennis Baxley’s name to legislation ought to provoke a wariness among Hispanics and Blacks, key constituencies in the Democratic Party coalition. They wonder about his longtime association with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and his fervent defense of Confederate flags and Confederate war memorials. In 2008, he objected when the word “darkeys” was removed from the lyrics of Florida’s anachronistic state song, “Old Folks At Home.” He complained, “It just seems in this age of multiculturalism we can celebrate everyone’s culture but mine.

In 2013, Baxley thwarted a proposed memorial at Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park for the Union soldiers killed in Florida’s bloodiest Civil War encounter. (Perhaps, his opposition had something to do with the aftermath of the battle, when rebel soldiers systematically executed wounded Black soldiers left behind after the Union retreat.)

In 2017, Baxley used his leadership position in the Senate to kill a proposed memorial at the Capitol for victims of slavery. (The measure passed the following year.)

Two years ago, he told WLRN Public Radio that he opposed abortion in part because it reduced the birthrate among citizens of European decent, while immigrants, who “don’t wish to assimilate into society” were busy cranking out babies.

In 2019, he was the only state legislator who voted against removing the name of an arch-segregationist state Supreme Court justice from a law building at Florida State University.

Easy to understand why Blacks, a key constituency in the Florida Democratic Party coalition, might doubt that Baxley cares about their rights.

Not that Florida Republicans are alone in their campaign to tamp down voter turnout. The Brennan Center for Justice reports that Florida is among 43 states where Republican lawmakers are pushing legislation — at least 250 bills — that would add new restrictions to voting, particularly vote-by-mail procedures. The party is gambling, apparently, that their voter suppression tactics will discourage more Democrats, especially Black Democrats, than Republicans.

Florida has not joined other states in the Old Confederacy — not yet anyway — where Republicans are also contriving to eliminate early voting on the last Sunday before the general election — Souls to the Polls Day, when Black churches bus their congregants to voting sites.

Back when segregationists ruled the South, it was the southern Democrats, the infamous Dixiecrats, who conspired to keep minorities from voting. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Dennis Baxley’s old buddy Jim Crow has found a home in the Republican Party.