The trillion-dollar infrastructure package backed by a bipartisan group of 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats surely has plenty of waste in it. But what’s in the package is not nearly as interesting as what is left out of the package — which points in turn to how a divided Washington can once again work.
Despite Democrats’ often triumphalist talk and their “trifecta” on the federal level, controlling the House, the Senate, and the White House, this is still a very divided country. Democrats control the 50-50 Senate solely on the strength of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote. Democrats have a razor-thin House majority of 220 to 211. President Joe Biden was about 43,000 votes in three states from losing the 2020 election.
This is a divided country, and Democrats need to join with Republicans in order to govern. Democrats will cry that this is impossible, that Republicans are determined to oppose anything Democrats could ever propose. This is their cover story for proposing radical policies — heck, Republicans simply want us to fail, so why should we play ball with them?
This past week proved that lie. Ten Democrats more interested in infrastructure funding than in the political or ideological projects of the Biden administration reached across the aisle and found 11 like-minded Republicans willing to make a deal. How did they do it? Largely by acting on a central tenet of coalition building: Less is more.
Picture a Venn diagram with two large circles: Republican interests and Democratic interests. The majority of either circle is pretty far from the other circle. But there’s a narrow slice of agreement: It is the government’s job to fund roads, bridges, sewers, and other public goods, and currently, the nation’s infrastructure needs a large sum of money.
The general principle: To build bigger coalitions, make the goal as narrow as possible.
This insight cuts against today’s Left’s ideology in multiple ways. First, the Democrats want to expand the role of the federal government in everybody’s life. That’s why Biden’s original proposal absurdly included child care and home healthcare under the infrastructure umbrella. If everyone agrees infrastructure is a government responsibility, let’s call everything infrastructure, and thus everything becomes a government responsibility.
Nobody was fooled by that White House ploy, and this new bipartisan package has stripped out all the more absurd riders.
The Left has a deeper ideological problem here, and it’s got to do with the concept of “intersectionality.” Intersectionality is the teaching that all struggles are interconnected. The nice way of putting it is that you can’t battle racism without battling sexism or antisemitism. In practice, it means that you can’t ever join forces with anyone who is “problematic” on anything else.
Thus you’ve seen Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explicitly say she wouldn’t join with Sen. Ted Cruz on an effort to curtail the revolving door because of Cruz’s other actions. You saw Democrats abandon bipartisan criminal justice reform under the previous administration because it would normalize Trump.
This intolerant mindset — you’re with us on everything, or we’re against you on everything — doesn’t allow for bipartisanship, and thus it doesn’t allow for any governing in our current setting. We are gratified to see some Democrats reject this thinking and instead believe that we can on occasion set aside our disagreements to work on our agreements.
