IT'S NOT A pROGRESSIVE PARTY:

It shouldn't come as a surprise that the Biden wing of the party has disappointed liberals. They campaigned on politically empowering the poor and people of color, on implementing a $15 minimum wage, on expanding access to health care through a public option, on providing relief on the student loan front, and combating the steadily intensifying climate crisis. Thus far, there has been little by way of delivery. The "For the People Act," which is meant to combat Republican efforts to suppress voting among the poor and poor people of color, has passed the House by 220-210 votes, but remains stalled in the Senate by a few conservative Democratic holdouts - Senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. The party hasn't acted on passing a $15 minimum wage due to resistance from these senators and a few others who have also blocked action. Biden has refused to prioritize action on student loan debt relief, claiming he doesn't have executive authority to grant it, and only calling for $10,000 in forgiveness for each federal borrower. On health care, Biden has proposed $200 billion to expand the Affordable Care Act's subsidies, but failed to put forward as promised a proposal for a "public option," and his opposition to Medicare for All is well known.

On foreign policy, the Biden administration delivered more of the same on Israel Palestine, granting continued military support for a settler colonial government that's been conducting an illegal occupation for more than a half century, which is responsible for ethnic cleansing, maintaining an apartheid state, and pursues massive violence that has produced asymmetrical deaths in the latest round of the "conflict" (May 2021), with 12 Israeli civilians killed compared to 212 Palestinians - or an imbalance of more than 17:1. The U.S. has continued its support for Israel's settler colonialism over the decades, despite this asymmetry, with 87 percent of the deaths falling on the Palestinian side in the 2000s and 2010s. None of this seemed to matter much to the Democrats - Obama or Biden - who have continued to enable the bloodshed.

Perhaps the brightest spot (or the least depressing thing) one could point to for the Democrats is their willingness to act on climate change, as Biden's 2022 budget proposal calls for $36 billion to combat global warming - up from $14 billion in 2021 - including a renewed emphasis on clean energy projects, climate change-related research, and on green improvements to U.S. infrastructure that are geared toward cutting U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2030. But even these changes fall short of the ambitious progressive "Green New Deal" goals of Bernie Sanders and AOC, which aimed at achieving a carbon neutral economy by 2030, at a time when global warming is rapidly spiraling out of control and scientists are warning that a net zero global economy must be achieved "well before 2040" to maximize humanity's chances for a sustainable future.

Hey, Did You Know that Joe Biden is a Neoliberal?

It's a challenge to write about the Democratic Party from the left. It's obviously the case that the Democrats are a neoliberal party, meaning that they produce policies that favor the wealthy, leaving the many and the poor behind. But this simple observation hardly counts as an insight after more than three decades of Clinton-Obama-Biden style neoliberalism, which has produced an endless stream of laments from left writers in an era of rising inequality and mass economic insecurity - both trends that are now widely documented by not-so-radical sources such as mainstream journalists and social scientists. If left intellectuals spend the next four years simply pointing out that Biden is a neoliberal, we will be in a very sorry position at the end of this administration. There was a place for this sort of commentary during the Obama years, when the afterglow of the first black President meant that the man with the silver tongue was able to pull the wool over liberals' eyes with false promises of "hope" and "change." Those promises went unfulfilled as Obama perfected the role of neoliberal caretaker-in-chief.

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