John Bredin for BuzzFlash: Joe Biden Never Flinched as He Ignored GOP Threats Against Passing COVID Relief Through Reconciliation
March 14, 2021
Think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation (with Donald Rumsfeld pictured above) have played a key role in Republican public messaging. (Medill DC)
By John Bredin
The Democratic Party is no longer lost in the woods. Its identity crisis is finally over. After four decades of mushy centrism, cowering to a weak-kneed, “Republican Lite” agenda that lacked moral courage, Scranton’s Joe Biden has arrived on a white horse (i.e., the train from Wilmington) just in time to save the day.
The historic passage of Biden’s widely popular American Rescue Plan, in addition to driving a stake in the heart of the “zombie economics” of the Reagan years—based on the false idea that if you only make rich people richer (one yacht is never enough) everything will be fine and dandy—also rescues the Democrats from a soulless drift in principles that gave Trump an opening to sell his faux populist snake oil in the first place.
Though I believe Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both meant well, and were certainly progressive in many ways, their timid reluctance to “go big” (like Biden, LBJ, and FDR) was the result of a complex matrix of factors. Like the need to please corporate donors in an increasingly corrupt system of campaign finance; fear of right-wing media; and making far too much of the left-leaning McGovern’s defeat to Nixon in 1972.
But that was then and this is now. Maybe it took the historic collision of a monster in the White House, a medieval plague, and an overdue reckoning on race—sparked by the murder of George Floyd—to help us remember that government really is the solution, not the problem. Despite a slavish worshipping of the “free market” by right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Republican politicians, and Fox News shills.
Speaking of right-wing think tanks (a topic that needs more scrutiny by liberal media), can you name the very first one? Give up? It was the American Liberty League. Founded in 1934 by my distant relatives the Du Ponts…ostensibly to destroy FDR but disguised as a champion of the free market…they were nicknamed the “cellophane league” by the NY Times, which wrote that “like a certain Du Pont product, you can see right through them.”
In her brilliant 2009 book Invisible Hands: The Businessman’s Crusade Against the New Deal, NYU historian Kim Philips-Fein tells the fascinating story of how right-wing oligarchs used think tanks to strategize their return to power after being dethroned by one of their own, the super progressive FDR. The project took fifty years to bear fruit, which it finally did with the election of Reagan in 1980.
I’m harping a bit on think tanks here because, if the progressive Biden counter-revolution is to stick and not be a mere aberration—wiped out by the next Republican victory—Democrats need to pay more attention to education, both in the more traditional sense of reemphasizing civics, the humanities, and critical thinking in schools, but also by revitalizing their own infrastructure of think tanks and progressive media.
Indeed, the “pedagogy of progressivism” needs to be more broadly felt in society to counter the right-wing bromides (free market good, regulations bad) which have infiltrated our consciousness via a slick, decades long, well-financed marketing campaign. Uncle Joe himself, a walking empathy machine, is his own best salesman for making cool the idea of a caring society again. But he needs a pedagogical apparatus to back him up.
In part, this might be cultural. We need more movies like Nomadland, which highlights the power of community, empathy, and loving relationships while critiquing the meanspirited, anti-union policies of companies like Amazon. But we also need to champion the humanities again in higher ed. Literature, history, and philosophy not only teach critical thinking, they give us what Matthew Arnold called “sweetness and light.”
And who, as we emerge from this dark winter of our discontent, couldn’t use a little more sweetness and light? When she appeared as a guest on our TV show in 2019, the noted education historian Diane Ravitch said that in her day (the 1950s) only the dumb kids studied business. With business being the current most popular college major, we need to ask ourselves seriously: have the dumb kids taken over?
My response is that, with Trump—and his horrific coup attempt on 1/6—they almost did take over. It’s not too late to make sure this never happens again.
Joe Bredin is an educator, writer, and host of Public Voice Salon: a nonprofit TV show on culture and ideas. He’s in a doctoral program in education leadership at Drexel University.
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