Build Back Never

How the Democrats Sabotaged Themselves

By Alex Stout

West Virginia Senator and coal baron Joe Manchin, along with other right-wing Democrats like Senator Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, have sabotaged efforts to pass significant legislation to tackle climate change, child poverty and more.

The Democratic Party is unable and unwilling to use its control of both houses of Congress and the White House to overcome this. In ruins are not just the hopes they created and the promises they made that brought them those majorities, but also any chance of salvaging their likely abysmal showing in the midterms.

The “Progressive Caucus” of the Democratic Party faces a complete disaster of its own making as well. Instead of leveraging the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill in order to force a vote on Build Back Better first, they surrendered and became completely insignificant as a force within the Democratic Party.

This also points to a major problem for Bernie Sanders and the Squad. Great speeches and even votes are not enough to pass or seriously alter legislation. If they don’t use their leverage outside of Congress, if they do not finally start to mobilize working class people, for example in DSA, for their interests and for a lasting change, they will not have the strength necessary to win the fights they pick in Congress.

What was at stake?

The “Build Back Better” Framework/Act, AKA the budget reconciliation bill, was supposed to be the centerpiece of Joe Biden’s first term as President. Even beyond the sizable bills (especially the American Rescue Plan Act) passed earlier in 2021, this legislation would have had an important impact on the millions of working families struggling under the weight of a pandemic and an economic crisis. Many have so far been forced to bear the weight of this crisis by working in unsafe conditions for poverty wages. 

A number of labor organizing efforts in 2021 and beyond is a welcome sign that working people are beginning to fight for their welfare and build power on their own terms. Although Biden’s administration was initially willing to spend more than expected, it’s delivered far less than what is needed to match the scale of the crisis, and workers are getting sick of waiting.

Before Striketober, we were promised what Vox happily called a “big fucking deal” and Sanders praised as “the most consequential piece of legislation…since the Great Depression”: universal pre-k; 2 years of free community college and expanded pell grants; an expansion of the child tax credit; expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision, hearing, and lower prescription costs; expanded ACA credits; a substantial investment in clean energy; and more. It was even supposed to open up a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

All in all this would mean $3.5 trillion in spending over 10 years – itself a negotiation down from the $6 trillion Sanders originally proposed. But we were told it was happening. The Democrats were going to bypass the filibuster and the Republicans, and they were going to deliver. Then the commitment to social spending slowly vanished, piece by piece. $3.5 trillion was cut in half to $1.75 trillion, and now the bill appears completely stalled.

So what happened?

Negotiation: A Question of Leverage

Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin in particular have been the primary roadblocks within the Democratic Party on this bill. Sinema has refused to commit to passing the bill and even refuses to give a reason why, offering no demands and seeming to simply plan on obstructing it regardless. Manchin has been the focus of negotiations, because at least he has focused on the total cost and called for certain measures to be removed or scaled back. Even at less than half of the first compromise’s $3.5 trillion figure, Manchin shows no signs of being swayed, no matter how many times the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot as a show of good faith.

If they still manage to pass the bill, it will be a pitiful showing, unlikely to impress the millions of struggling workers who were promised significant aid and then abandoned. The only way this would be different is if it were to pass under massive pressure from below, spurred on by a newly energized left with a highly visible national leadership.

The Democrats need all 48 of their senators (plus the two independents) to vote in favor, or it won’t pass. So they have tied themselves to the limits imposed by Manchin, and are desperately trying to please him enough to agree to some boost in social spending. Of course this isn’t working, because the Biden administration has not applied any serious pressure on these right-wing Democrats. Without threatening to support primary challengers to boot them out of office, without withholding the funding and resources of the party machine, how could it be otherwise? Sanders has since suggested pushing through individual popular pieces of the Build Back Better Act, such as extending the child tax credit, and forcing the Republicans and right-wing Democrats to openly vote against them. Of course this isn’t enough either and would leave out important pieces of the bill, especially its environmental components.

Shrewd parliamentary tactics will not work without being bolstered by mass pressure from below. Figures like Sanders and the House representatives who make up “the Squad” – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush – should try to make up for the weakness of the Biden administration by calling for and organizing mass protests directed at the Republican obstruction and at Sinema, Manchin, and other corporate Democrats. Smaller-scale demonstrations of this sort have already occurred in Arizona and West Virginia, but without the aid of a national spotlight they have so far been insufficient to force anyone’s hand.

Significant rallies and good messaging from Bernie and the Squad’s national platforms could have brought home that this is not about some numbers ($6 trillion or $1.7 trillion), but about keeping child benefits that reduced child poverty by 40 percent in the US. This is about a first, significant act to fight climate change. This is about expanding Medicare to vision, dental, and hearing care.

Would this have been successful? There are no guarantees, but starting with a rally with tens of thousands by Sanders and AOC in New York to test the waters and then spreading this around the country, our chances of movement building would have been dramatically better. Unfortunately, this was not the focus of Sanders and the Squad, nore did DSA call for such action. If they had, big rallies could have escalated to other forms of mass pressure, like mass occupations of Manchin and Sinema’s offices, boycotts and pickets of their major donors, and launching a public campaign to recruit primary challengers. These types of tactics are not meant to convince the Democratic Party to fight for us. They are tactics that increase the awareness and organization of the working class while seeking to overcome the entrenched power of the Democrats, while providing substantial relief for working people.

By buying into the political methods of the Democratic Party and leaving the Biden administration to its own incompetence, left-wing representatives are forgetting the key advantage that put them in office in the first place: the working class.

The Progressives’ Gambit

Negotiation in politics is about power and leverage. And from June through October, it seemed that the Progressive Caucus under the leadership of Washington Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal understood this. The plan was to refuse to pass the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill unless the Build Back Better Act passed first. The Progressive Caucus has nearly 100 members in the House, a significant enough percentage to use this type of leverage. For once, a section of the Democratic Party was behaving militantly in order to help pass a major social spending bill, despite outcry from mainstream media outlets.

But sure that giving up their bargaining chip could be spun as a victory, they caved to the imaginary pressure of not passing anything. Jayapal vouched for moderate promises to support “Build Back Better”, but these were revealed to be worthless, and the action by Caucus members turned out to be a toothless capitulation. Jayapal assured us that we could trust the Biden White House to win Manchin’s support for the legislation. Nothing happened.

Only the 6 members of the Squad voted against the infrastructure bill, offering clear-eyed warnings about what would happen. Now that the Build Back Better Act looks stalled (or even killed), the Squad is free to tell the rest of the Progressive Caucus that they told them so. But being right about bad compromises isn’t enough. The left also needs power, and that comes from below.

Socialist Caucus Needed to Help Unleash the Working Class

Left-leaning commentators were generally convinced that the Squad had been right all along. This gives them a big boost in credibility and makes it harder for those who disagree with their politics to paint them as dumb or naive. It also shredded the credibility of the Progressive Caucus, which had raised expectations and then failed to meet them. This combination of factors makes it a perfect time for the Squad to increase their independence from the Progressive Caucus and to increase their cohesion as their own group – a Socialist Caucus.

The united public face and strategic bloc votes of a Socialist Caucus would make it clear to everyone that the socialists in office represent a different political trend than the Democratic Party, or even the “Progressive” Caucus. Using their own caucus and unified public messaging will help ensure that even when the left doesn’t win, the struggle still sharpens the division between the working class (and its broad left leadership) and the rest of the Democratic Party, which Bernie correctly pointed out has “turned its back on the working class.” By linking such critiques to a Socialist Caucus with clear demands and a clear record, instead of to individual politicians, a case can be built for socialist politics that will outlast the politicians making it. Without yet separating from the Democratic Party, the Socialist Caucus can serve as a midway point, a broad left formation to strengthen our standing for a full break with the Democrats later.

The branding and platform of the Socialist Caucus would be a lever that can help to move a wider part of the working class into action, and it is this mass action that holds the power. Taking the right votes and making the right points will not matter if the distinction this creates between left representatives and the rest of the Democratic Party is not used to call for mass action and organization. Business as usual means the left loses votes as a tiny minority, and faces intense pressure to water down politics in an attempt to gain allies (e.g. from the Progressive Caucus). Instead, relying on mass action can produce pressure to better reach and better organize the working class, e.g. by establishing a Socialist Caucus, supporting unions, and recruiting new forces to DSA and stay organized for the fights ahead.

The Progressive Caucus’s gambit would have been a good one had they not given up and relied on backroom deals and “good faith” negotiations. The most important thing for a Socialist Caucus would be to sharply disavow fruitless maneuvers and champion socialist politics and methods of struggle. Doing so would amplify its strength because it would root them more firmly within labor and social movements, even when a campaign fails to lead to an immediate victory. This could be done even more effectively if the announcement of the Socialist Caucus included a public break with the Progressive Caucus – openly framed as a sort of dress rehearsal for a future break from the Democratic Party.The Squad was elected because people saw representatives who promised to actually fight for what we needed, who promised to put human need ahead of the usual considerations of cost and “political viability”. It is time for these representatives to distance themselves from the stink of the Progressive Caucus, and more clearly, publicly, and boldly proclaim that they represent a different political trend from the rest of the Democratic Party. A Socialist Caucus is an immediate step that is achievable now, enhancing the efficacy and independent profile of elected socialists; and it is steps like this which can prepare the ground for the fully independent political position we need – a Democratic Socialist Party.