We shouldn’t let it be forgotten that Donald Trump ran for reelection on a monstrous lie. If Joe Biden won, then-President Trump told us, the mentally declining Biden would fall captive to his party’s rabid socialist left flank, which would immediately drive the country into a depression.

This lie lives on — Republicans continue to tell repurposed versions of it right now — yet precisely the opposite is happening. It’s not just that the center and left of the Democratic Party are working together more collaboratively than expected. It’s also that Biden’s willing incorporation of leftist ideas is exactly why he’s posting some early successes.

New details about the next big phase of President Biden’s jobs and infrastructure package provide an occasion to consider how and why this is happening, and what it means for our politics.

That next phase will involve another $1 trillion in proposed spending on various family support programs, on top of the $2 trillion infrastructure plan that congressional Democrats are assembling. The Post reports on some of the new plan’s emerging details:

While final numbers had not been determined, the largest efforts are expected to center on roughly $225 billion for child-care funding; $225 billion for paid family and medical leave; $200 billion for universal prekindergarten instruction; hundreds of billions in education funding, including tuition-free community colleges across the country; and other sums for nutritional assistance, the people familiar with the matter said.
The tax-credits section includes an extension of the expanded child tax credit through 2025, the people said.

This plan embodies some core insights of progressive economics: Our caregiving economy has been woefully underfunded, and the crucial societal contribution of care work — including child care — is badly undercompensated. Far too many are denied basic human goods like college education and the opportunity to take time off work to heal or spend time with a newborn.

And throughout U.S. history, amid periods where the economy failed large numbers of Americans, government policy has created new foundations for better life prospects and expanded economic opportunity. It must do so again.

Similar insights undergird the $2 trillion jobs plan and the already-passed $2 trillion covid-19 rescue package. The former would employ large public investments to rebuild infrastructure and engineer our inevitable transition to a decarbonized economy. The latter uses them to stimulate the economy and bail out those suffering terrible economic travails amid the covid-19 collapse.

Republicans have attacked all of these as a “liberal wish list,” as not “real” infrastructure or as reckless spending that will drive up the deficits that only matter under Democratic presidents. They have declared that corporate tax hikes to pay for the plans will scuttle the recovery.

Supposedly radical ideas are proving very popular

In short, Republicans have repurposed the lie that Democrats are captive to leftist ideas that are fundamentally radical and destructive. Yet they are proving overwhelmingly popular. Large majorities approve of the infrastructure proposals and approve of the covid rescue package. If these are radical leftist ideas, then big majorities of Americans approve of radical leftist ideas.

Why is this happening? In a good column, Paul Krugman tries to explain it. GOP criticism is shockingly weak, in part because Republicans are adrift in a separate information universe where the only thing that resonates is that everything Democrats propose is scary socialism.

What’s more, Democrats no longer fear that bold progressive policies will attract grumbling about undermining economic “confidence” from either deficit scolds or Wall Street “job creators.”

“Biden’s economic advisers evidently believe that if you build a better economy, confidence will take care of itself,” Krugman notes, adding that “all indications are that we’re heading for an economic boom,” which means “Biden’s policies might get even more popular.”

I’d like to add another potential reason to this mix: The coronavirus crisis has laid bare realities about our economy that for too many people had long remained out of sight.

Economic realities, laid bare

Just as the Great Depression was a “shattering event” for previous ideologies, the covid-19 collapse revealed how heavily we rely on essential workers and how economically vulnerable they are. As Mike Konczal recently told this blog, this has attuned us to profound economic injustice.

The collapse, by upending our daily lives, also revealed huge gaps in our caregiving economy. Meanwhile, the largely successful administering of the vaccine has shown that effective government can successfully address a severe crisis — indeed, that big government is essential.

Which leads back to the lie that Trump campaigned on.

At a fundamental level, Trump’s argument wasn’t just that electing a Democrat would drive the country into a socialism-engineered economic catastrophe. It was also that the country was already soaring back to greatness — coronavirus was merely a temporary distortion that Trump had vanquished — and would continue to do so without ambitious, concerted government action.

The Republican version of this argument right now is that anything that departs from doing little to nothing is radical, extreme and destructive. But majorities appear to be rejecting this ideology with a newfound decisiveness.

Sure, a lot could go wrong. Biden’s plans could fail in Congress or at implementation. The left might blast them as insufficient. Voters could turn on all this spending, as Ronald Brownstein has gamed out. Republicans could capture the House through anti-majoritarian tactics alone, while being entirely absent from the mainstream conversation about our biggest national challenges.

But for now, the apparent broad public rejection of GOP arguments is awfully heartening. And if Biden and Democrats can successfully pass and implement their new infrastructure and caregiving plans, it could reinforce that rejection, to even greater effect.

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