It’s at once a punchline and a serious declaration from Democrats of all stripes:
Paid leave is infrastructure.
Childcare is infrastructure.
Health care is infrastructure.
Climate action is infrastructure.
Affordable housing is infrastructure.
It’s time to pass the Build Back Better Act and deliver on each of these critical priorities.
— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) September 29, 2021
That list by Rep. Pramila Jayapal at least tries to hew to some very vague idea of infrastructure. The things she lists are either literal structures or are, proverbially, “support structures.”
President Joe Biden has used “infrastructure” to describe in-home elder care.
So why have Democrats started calling everything, including abortion, infrastructure?
There’s a surface explanation for this: An “infrastructure” bill is a stated priority of Biden’s, and so you can tack your priority on to his bill by calling it infrastructure.
But there’s a deeper argument here. I wrote about it a bit in the summer.
We all agree that government, at some level, has a primary role in building and maintaining roads, bridges, sewers, and levees. That is, infrastructure is an inherently governmental realm.
So expanding the definition of infrastructure is expanding the realm of government control and government responsibility.
This is an aggressive push in the long-running campaign by the Left and the center-left to expand the public’s view of what is the government’s proper role.
I wrote on this in July:
This was an extension of an argument then-Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren had made a year earlier. In arguing that nobody in America ever “got rich on his own,” Warren said:
“You built a factory out there? Good for you. … You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.”
“Everything is infrastructure” thus means “everything is the responsibility of the government.”
