Eric Levitz writes:

Much of Manchin’s worldview is deluded, classist, and wholly incompatible with meeting the challenges that the United States faces in the present moment. Manchin’s deficit-phobia is premised on basic misunderstandings about the nature of sovereign debt. His fear that providing cash aid to indigent families would only trap them in dependence is rooted in hateful folk wisdom, not actual social science (studies have demonstrated that giving unconditional cash benefits to low-income parents does not significantly depress their labor-force participation, but does improve their kids’ later-life outcomes, in part by increasing their labor-force participation). His stalwart support for ever-higher military budgets is born of a delusional faith in both the wisdom and plausibility of America’s absolute global dominance. His skepticism of green-energy subsidies proceeds from some admixture of his family’s financial interests and his region’s understandable yet destructive nostalgia for a long-dead coal economy.

Manchin’s contemptible convictions have plagued the Biden agenda. They effectively forced the president to slash the top-line cost of his Build Back Better program in half, and to abandon its central climate reform. In private negotiations, he has fought to cut off enhanced child tax credit payments to unemployed parents, a demand that rightly disgusts many of his colleagues.

And yet, if Democrats fail to pass any version of Build Back Better, fault probably won’t lie with Manchin alone.

Manchin’s worldview may be deplorable. But it isn’t alien or incomprehensible. A decade ago, the idea that the national debt was a crisis — which strictly limited America’s capacity to expand the welfare state — wasn’t a notion confined to the far-right corner of the Democratic coalition; it was Barack Obama’s official position. In 2016, the prospect of dispensing unconditional cash aid to Americans who didn’t earn a dollar in labor income was too left-wing for Hillary Clinton. [Continue reading…]