Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter expressed my reaction to President Joe Biden’s speech to Congress. No boasting. No narcissism. A strong assertion that government must work for the people and use its resources to improve the lives of the people.
The most abnormal thing about Biden’s speech, however, was how normal it was. After four years of Donald Trump spewing his particular brand of dyspeptic, self-absorbed oratory, it felt a bit unfamiliar, and a bit exhilarating, watching Biden calmly discuss the challenges and the opportunities facing the nation, and discuss how he proposed to confront the one and exploit the other. A sense of déjà vu does not usually mix with the emotions kindled by promise, but when they do, the experience is centering. The speech felt like the country was getting back to normal.
The United States, in normal, pre-Trump times, believed democracy worked. Regrettably, Ronald Reagan pitted democracy against government, and set the terms of public policy for 40 years. The pandemic brought into sharp relief what had long been obvious to those of us schooled in Catholic social doctrine: Reaganism hollowed out the government’s ability to achieve its foremost objective, the common good.
But, the will of the people continued to voice skepticism about government overreach and the most memorable line from a State of the Union speech by the first Democratic president after Reagan, Bill Clinton, had the flavor of capitulation: “The era of big government is over.”
Biden announced that government focused on the common good was back and that the democratically expressed will of the people insisted on a more activist government.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I like that last line. “..a more activist government.” It’s not about the size of the government but its intentions and its actions in carrying out those intentions.
Thank you for this. I forwarded it to several family members, who vote as conservative Catholics…. but are actually liberal at heart ~ very open minded and liberal with their personal actions and beliefs (as are most Republican voters that I know). They are stuck in the “need to vote for the Republican candidate” mindset – wanting small government that is fiscally conservative (rather than the media narrative that if they vote Republican they must be racist). As this article articulates, we can’t have a healthy country if we don’t have robust funding for the “common good.”
beachteach I think Reagan’s
beachteach I think Reagan’s original “small government” speech was “code” for “dispensing with government regulations on business.” And for no capitalist constraints.
From our view now (and including Clinton’s “big government is over” speech) can be understood as the precursors to the movement to privatize everything and to dispense with democracy along the way.
To me, Biden has it right–it’s not that government is “big or small,” but that government should do what individual people or even groups cannot do. A democratic government the size of the U.S. needs to understand itself (so to speak) as foundational . . . not as meddling into everyone’s affairs, but as creating the conditions for we the people to pursue the common good and for it to thrive.
But these are issues that should be learned in K-12 . . . apparently way too many in the U.S. don’t have a clue about their own political ground and so (to repeat a cliche’) proceed to shoot themselves in the political foot with the thought that, if they vote for a plutocrat or even a fascist, everything will remain the same. They don’t seem to know that they already depend on the rule of law, etc., but that all that and more will be gone with someone like Trump at the wheel.
I think Republicans have been running on race since Goldwater and what this lefty thinks doesn’t matter . The small c conservative operatives who are leaving the Party since before Trump have all gone to the confessional to admit it . Be it Bruce Bartlet , Stewart Stevens, Mike Lofgren or a slew of others.
“It Was All A Lie ” It was always about Race from Goldwater’s refusal to vote for the Civil Rights act. (Don’t tell me how he felt about race and States Rights ,tell me what he did), to Nixon’s war on drugs and Southern Strategy, to Reagan’s Welfare Queens , to Bushes Willie Horton to Trump.
It was Race (Segregation )then, Race now and Race forever.
Thus the base of the Republican Party love Biden’s proposals as they loath the man.
I try to avoid discussing politics with my conservative neighbors. However, when they praise small government, I always tell them I am not concerned about the size of government, only that it serves the needs of the people. Like Biden I also believe that when health and well-being are at stake, government can generally provide the service more efficiently and equitably than any market based service.
Ask your neighbors if they would be willing to have waited a decade for the Pfizer / Moderna vaccines, built on Platforms created by NIH funded scientists . Of course Big Pharma will take credit for the miracles that were ready for human testing within weeks of the viruses sequencing being announced. And then that testing was paid for by big government. Ah the wonders of the free market.
The gap between rhetoric and reality grows daily.
This.
Speaking of Bill Clinton, James Carville was quoted this week. He claimed that Democrats have to be politically where Joe Manchin is. ( Similar to racist Republicans, Manchin opposes statehood for Wash. D.C.)
Bill Clinton’s friendship with the Bush’s is no more surprising than Hillary Clinton’s friendship with Wall Street bankers. The Aspen Institute credits Bill Clinton with the ed reform that we have learned is a scheme to steal public schools from Main Street for the benefit of Wall Street.
Agreed
Really dislike Joe Manchin, except…
The fact that he is still calling himself a democrat is the only thing keeping Mitch McConnell from power. Such a thin line. Would love to see a time when he is not the only thing, but there it is.
I wish for a huge blue wave in 2022 but until then, even if the Dems get rid of the filibuster, they still have a problem getting 51 votes.
Manchin opposes statehood for DC because then he loses all his power. In fact, if he were a Republican, he would also lose his power because then he does whatever Mitch orders him to do.
So we are stuck. We need to convince voters that the Democrats aren’t the problem, individual Senators are the problem, and they need to get out and vote the way they did in Georgia and make Manchin’s vote unnecessary.
Getting more Democrats in the Senate means that Manchin can’t call the shots. The right wingers know that, which is why their propaganda will work overtime to get progressives to think “Dems” are the real problem, so Mitch can get his power back. Right now, Manchin is the only thing preventing that.
Wealthy Nancy Pelosi, who admittedly has strengths, also loathes Justice Democrats at a time when their appeal should be expanded. Schumer, is he as weak as he appears in interviews?
Going forward, the root cause of the problem could be addressed. The Democratic Party’s pivot to serve billionaires began during Bill Clinton’s terms and continued with Obama who fully turned over the Departments of Health. Education, the FCC, FTC etc. to men like Gates or those sympathetic to them.
Cozying up to Wall Street and tech tyrants led to the concentration of wealth in the U.S. and, the antagonism of the 50% toward those on lower rungs on the economic ladder. Trump and the GOP are benefitting from the Democrat’s groundwork. Additionally, powerful Democrats had no interest in protecting the wages and rights of labor, a reluctance still evident in how long it took Biden to support Amazon workers.
Trump’s populist appeal found home in the GOP, a party traditionally and currently, the tool of the rich. Rhetorically, why didn’t a populist without Trump’s racism, develop as a candidate from the left, the logical locus?
Bill Clinton’s political strategist attended a private religious high school in the Deep South who said his conservative religion was part of his DNA. He was married to a Republican strategist who recently declared as libertarian. What could possibly have gone wrong with Carville and school privatizing John Podesto steering Democratic messaging? But, more importantly, what has changed? Currying favor with the father of Mylan’s price gouging CEO- really, that’s the only option?
I hope Biden understands that PUBLIC EDUCATION is “FOR THE COMMON GOOD,” not tests, not the stupid Common GORE standards, and not charters and vouchers.
Public education is a key common good that has served our country well. Biden openly expresses support for unions as one of his central goals is to help rebuild the middle class. Biden also expresses support for women. By supporting public schools Biden is also showing support for middle class jobs, most of which belong to women.
Charter schools and vouchers are the opposite of the common good. They represent the interests of wealthy while that seek to make education a private commodity. These schools generally pay teachers less while most of the funds pay for an inflated administration. They are generally anti-union and segregated.
Most of those that serve in Biden’s DOE represent the same failed neoliberal policies that have contributed to our huge income inequality. They want to dismantle public education through the same failed test and punish policies of the past. Biden’s words and deeds are suffering from a clear disconnect.
The same failed neoliberal policies….
The architects of RTTT are back.
Race til we Drop
The Arne Dunkin crop —
Still racing to the top —
Will never ever stop
“it’s race until we drop”
I think calling these people ” architects” is far too kind.
If these people designed a house, it would have no foundation and no roof (ie, no “top” How’s that for irony?)
Race to the Flop
The race to “top”
Was bound to flop
Cuz house was built
On river silt
It’s built on mud
In plain of flood
And you can bet
That we’ll get wet
Arne’s Architects
An architect
Of edu-wreck
An Arne Dunkin hire
A crazy drafter
Of ed disaster
“Designer” of a fire
But one thing (and probably only one thing) is good.
I can simply dust off and reuse all my old Duncan poems and change a few names here and there.
“The Common Good” at this point in time means protecting the world (not just the US and Europe) from covid-19.
Biden should do what he promised ALS patient Ady Barkan during the election:
Barkan asked Biden: “If the U.S. discovers a vaccine first, will you commit to sharing that technology with other countries? And will you ensure there are no patents to stand in the way of other countries and companies mass-producing those life-saving vaccines?”
Bidens unequivocal response: “Absolutely, positively. This is the only humane thing in the world to do.”
That implies at least temporarily suspending intellectual property protections on covid vaccines so that the production can be substantially ramped up and countries like India (which have pharmaceutical companies that could quickly be capable of producing hundreds of millions of doses per year, by the way) and other developing countries where the virus is running rampant can bring things under control.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/04/30/keep-your-promise-ady-barkan-urges-biden-support-covid-19-vaccine-patent-waiver
Ignoring the self-serving advice of Big Pharma and people like Bill Gates on this issue is not just the moral thing to do but the right thing to do from the standpoint of protecting people here in the US. The longer the pandemic rages in places like India, the more covid “escape mutants” are likely to develop that can not be controlled with current vaccines and thereby necessitating development of new vaccines (which may actually be part of Big pharmas plan).
You mean Joe lied again? How shocking.
The outcome is supposedly not yet set in stone (the White House says they are “noncommittal” so far) but make no mistake, the choice is quite clearly up to Biden in this case.
Biden can “encourage” the WTO to at least temporarily waive IP rights in order to increase vaccine supply and availability to the developing world and thereby avoid what is certain to be a large number of unnecessary covid related deaths around the world.
Or Biden can side with Big Pharma and with Shill… I mean Bill… Gates (thereby violating his personal promise to Ady Barkan).
Which way Biden has decided to go will become clear within just a few days from what comes out of the meeting at the WTO on May 5.
Stay tuned.
The White House announced that the US will support a patent waiver on the covid vaccines.
Since the WTO decisions work on consensus, it remains to be seen what the final outcome of this will be, but the US pulls a lot of weight in the WTO and at a minimum, Biden has followed through on his promise to Ady Barkan to support the waiver.
I wrote this a few years ago.
“Public schools, and the communities they serve, have opportunities to work together out of sacrifice and love. They are places that cannot serve the self, as their ultimate duty is to prepare all citizens for a democracy of worth: community members devote themselves to providing all children the chance to reach their optimal potential. Children are allowed to use their strengths and talents towards the common good. Democracy of worth should be the goal for these schools, where our focus is on a love for all.
Unfortunately, our public education system is currently following the democracy of desire model, in which the pursuit of individual self is over riding the devotion to the good. With the Department of Education’s introduction of the competitive “Race to the Top” grant, schools are now encouraged to act like the free market, promoting competition as the vehicle to “better serve students’ needs and priorities.” I don’t want my own children to have to compete with their peers for a quality education. That’s not what learning is about. Learning is about working together to understand concepts, each other, and about finding our place to help each other. “Race to the Top” forces states to implement policies in which students, parents, and teachers compete with each other for school funding that focuses on collecting data instead of nurturing a learning environment that supports the common good.”
https://sojo.net/articles/public-education-common-good
“And who is impacted the most by all this? Our children. No longer are they encouraged to play, explore and develop the underlying concepts necessary to their learning foundation. Instead of maximizing the potential of all, we’re minimizing the learning for many.”
This definitely speaks to my experience with the changes that have happened in elementary education.
Excellent article Stef. Thank you for posting.
4-29-2021, National Catholic Reporter, “Support of Trump within Church has driven some Catholics to the exits.” The article references Ohio.
btw- The website of Archbishop Thompson of Indianapolis has a “social concerns” department which I assume has a relationship to Church social doctrine.
The concern I expressed to the department relates to the article in Today’s Catholic, 4-27-2021, “School Choice Expansion among Legislative successes for Indiana Catholic Conference”. I mentioned in my e-mail that other state Catholic Conferences had co-hosted school choice rallies with the Koch’s AFP (known to be against government spending). I followed up with a question about how much research the Bishop’s staff conducted to substantiate the claims made about “School Choice Myths” (Episode 11, Indiana Catholic Action Network podcast that related to Indiana’s HB 1005).
I very rarely receive a response when I write with questions to the Catholic hierarchy’s websites . As has been pointed out at this blog, in defense of the hierarchy, it is not a democracy.
I have have seen little in Biden’s plans that express anything other than
praise for public education as a tool for work-force development.
He seems to be committed to that with an occasional nod to entrepreneurial
skills for corporate audiences. I wish it were otherwise.
Meanwhile there are 72 House Republicans hell bent on putting federal
restrictions on the right to vote, with very little attention to this last leg
of massive state and local efforts at voter suppression. The https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/322/cosponsors
The Democratic Party pivoted to serve billionaires during Bill Clinton’s two terms. Clinton’s political strategist was James Carville of Louisiana. Can Carville provide insights into the relative distance or lack thereof between the Koch brothers and Clinton’s policies (and Obama’s?) ? Carville continues to give political advice to the Democratic party. He said this week that the Dems should not position themselves any farther to the left than Joe Manchin. Manchin is opposed to Washington D.C. becoming a state, an opinion he shares with Republicans.
Carville is married to a former Republican strategist. Political theater presents the couple as political opposites which seems suspect. In the past few years, Carville’s wife changed her political position to libertarian, a label some associate with social Darwinism. She converted to her husband’s religion a long time ago. Carville described his religion as “part of his DNA. It’s kind of hard to separate me from the church, to try to say where one starts and the other stops”. Carville and Manchin share a religious faith. The conservative Napa Institute, which has a legal group for cases that focus on potential intersections of church and state e.g. the Little Sisters of the Poor, Biel and Espinosa cases, posted an article about the “remarkable similarity” between one of the two major conservative U.S. religions and Charles Koch’s recent book.
I’m partial to Fred Klonsky’s take: https://preaprez.wordpress.com/2021/04/29/joe-bidens-speech-what-does-providing-affordable-health-care-have-to-do-with-wind-turbines-in-china/
Grateful each day for not having to get up wondering what new outrage the day will offer from the breathtakingly vile, ignorant, and stupid Donald Trump.
Imagine having had the opportunity that Donald Trump had–all that direct and indirect power–and to have made with it such horror–hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths of Americans from a pandemic that could have been mitigated, the trauma of children and parents separated from one another, allies abandoned to terrible fates, hate crimes fueled by violent white supremacist rhetoric–and such farce–allied leaders literally laughing in his face when he gave speeches to international audiences, aides forced to grovel as before some historical despot, political allies pretending that they didn’t hear him say that doctors should look into having people inject disinfectants or that stealth airplanes were literally invisible.
What a contrast in President Biden. I admit that I did not support his candidacy. I want, and still want, an undoing of the disastrous Obama Education Deform legacy and universal single-payer healthcare for all. However, 100 days into the Biden presidency, I can say that I am proud of our President again. He could well end up being one of the greats, and I mean FDR great.
Thank you, Joe. A nation reeling is now a nation healing.
Healing???? LOL You are out of touch with 157 million Americans that KNOW the election was stolen. You are in for a surprise. Watch AZ.
That’s hilarious, O’Donnells. Got any more? Of course, no comment you could make would be as extreme and inadvertently hilarious as idiotic bile spewed by THE GUY IN THE ORANGE CLOWN MAKEUP always is.
Arizona has hired a company to audit the ballots. That company has hired MAGA zealots to do the audit
Yeah, Diane. And the idiots in Arizona are testing the ballots to see if they contain bamboo on the wacko conspiracy theory that there were millions of fake ballots for Biden made in China. You can’t make up stuff more crazy than that which the current instantiation of the Repugnican Party readily believes. These people seem to have taken lessons from Glorious Leader Who Shines More Orange Than Does the Sun: Let’s send astronauts to the sun! Frederick Douglass is alive and doing a great job!
From the fascinating Politico story about the raid on Osama bin Ladin’s compound:
Jay Carney, press secretary, White House: It was right as I became press secretary in February 2011 that Donald Trump started doing the birther sh*t and when it got traction. It was just so appalling—all of it—but we were, including the president, a bit naive about it. We thought it was hard to take it seriously, because Trump was such—as I think Obama once referred to him—a carnival barker.
What the 2020 presidential election proved is that at least 74,222,958 Americans are rubes on the carnival Midway. “D’chew see, Bubbah? They got a gal in thar’s half woman ‘n’ half gator!”
cxL Laden, ofc
There is NOTHING normal about #beijingBiden the #fakepresident. He’s so disgusting and such a pedophile and distorted in his soul I can hardly stand to look at him much less listen to him. He’ll be gone soon.
Is that a threat? I have read much criticism of Trump when he was president, but not threats posted by someone who was absolutely certain he would be “gone soon”. Your threatening language directed to the President mark you as someone who would violently overthrow democracy because not enough voters agreed with their wanting a liar who preached hate and violence to continue as president. You sound just like the insurrectionists who wanted to kill police and congressmen when they lost an election. Were you there in January trying to kill and destroy because you only understand violence? You feel such hate for people like Biden who don’t embrace the hate and violence that Trump does.
Sorry, you will have to go somewhere other than this blog to find people like you who wish this country was as full of hate as Trump is. But your threatening language, while similar to other Trump supporters, means someone should be investigating you. You frighten me.
Should we be scared of your threatening language, or are you just a paid troll who is fomenting hate and violence for money?
Hello O Joe Biden is a pedophile? Hahaha! I’m reminded of an old episode of WKRP in Cincinnati . . . where Les Nesman was dating a prostitute and the rest wanted to let him down easily . . . and someone said that Loraine (the prostitute) was a “member of the oldest profession in the world.” Whereupon, Les responds:
“Loraine is a farmer!?” CBK