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APRIL 25, 2023
Meyerson on TAP
The Choice Before You, Says Biden, Is About Choice
His announcement of candidacy highlights the Republicans' campaign
against personal freedom.
Anyone who thinks the abortion issue won't be the central focus of Joe
Biden's campaign for re-election hasn't seen the three-minute video
released this morning, in which he announced, to no one's surprise,
that he's seeking four more years in the Oval Office.
The video <[link removed]> begins with a few seconds of
montage showing some of the rioters at the failed January 6th
insurrection, then cutting to a peaceful demonstrator outside the
Supreme Court hold a sign reading, "Abortion is healthcare." Then it
immediately cuts to Biden, whose opening words are these:
Freedom-personal freedom-is fundamental to who we are as Americans.
There's nothing more important. Nothing more sacred. That's been the
work of my first term-to fight for our democracy.
Since the coming of the New Deal, if not before, "freedom" has been the
favorite battle cry of right-wingers defending big business against
governmental regulations and the government's infrequent creation of
non-market social provision. In the mid-1960s, Ronald Reagan termed
Medicare (then just a bill before Congress) an attack on freedom. Barry
Goldwater said the same about Social Security. Tax cuts for the rich
were championed for advancing freedom; the Affordable Care Act and
Dodd-Frank attacked for diminishing it.
But the right has defined itself by its opposition to freedom for those
outside the circle of white patriarchy and the realms of wealth. Even as
Goldwater attacked Social Security, he voted against the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. Generations of right-wingers have ferociously opposed the
freedom of workers to organize and have even supported employers'
subjecting their workers to noncompete agreements that keep them from
moving on to other jobs.
Until the mid-1970s, white Christian evangelicals were indifferent to,
and even sometimes supportive of, women's right to choose an abortion.
But the rise of feminism during that decade, along with the growing
number of women who took jobs outside the home, posed a threat to the
patriarchal order that was fundamental to these fundamentalists. They
quickly became the dominant force in the anti-abortion movement, even as
most lay Catholics were abandoning it. In the great reshuffling of
political constituencies in recent decades, they also became the largest
bloc within the Republican Party, whose various bigotries Republican
politicos felt compelled to enact into laws, and Republican judges to
instill in rulings when they felt the law wasn't bigoted enough.
Which has opened a rather wide door for Democrats in the 2024 election.
Biden's YouTube announcement of candidacy retakes the word "freedom"
from the right and repurposes it in a way that appeals to a host of key
constituencies: the suburban women who will be the swing voters in many
states, and the young voters who may not be keen on turning out to
support an octogenarian president, but who are also those directly
affected by laws forbidding abortions and who are clearly libertarian on
matters of personal and sexual autonomy.
Modern liberalism also has a more progressive definition of freedom,
best stated by Franklin Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union
address:
We have come to a clear realization of the fact, however, that true
individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and
independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry,
people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are
made.
I don't doubt that Biden subscribes to this definition, too, and his
almost mind-boggling record of job creation following the pandemic is an
achievement that historians are sure to credit him with. But I suspect
this form of freedom-of reducing the number of necessitous
Americans-along with those advanced by his other legislative
victories, will take a back seat in his forthcoming campaign to his
defense of freedom from governmental encroachment on a woman's right
to choose her own destiny, and his attack on Republicans'
determination to destroy it. As that determination has taken the form of
Republican judges revoking established law, and Republican state
legislators making it harder for voters to preserve abortion rights
through ballot measures, Biden's emphasis on freedom comports nicely
with his defense of democracy-another of his well-chosen campaign
themes.
Those themes come through loud and clear in his announcement of
candidacy, and we'll hear a great deal more of them between now and
Election Day.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter <[link removed]>
[link removed]
Democratic Child Care Bill Keeps Work Requirements
<[link removed]>
At a time when Democrats are savaging House Republicans for expanding
work requirements in Medicaid and SNAP, their signature child care bill
also contains them. BY DAVID DAYEN
The Smuggest Man On Air
<[link removed]>
Goodbye for now to Tucker Carlson, who punctured the lazy pieties of the
media class. BY LEE HARRIS & LUKE GOLDSTEIN
Drug Shortages as an Indictment of Capitalism
<[link removed]>
Here is a vital sector of the economy crying out for socialized
production and distribution. BY ROBERT KUTTNER
How a Firm Profiting From Deposit Insurance Caps Is Lobbying to Keep
Them
<[link removed]>
IntraFi, a private equity-owned company that offers the wealthy a
work-around to the $250,000 limit on FDIC insurance, sees an existential
threat in universal deposit guarantees. BY DAVID DAYEN
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