Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

LOOK EAST from the benches on top of Red Rocks Amphitheatre and Denver’s skyline is just visible in the distance. The venue, ringed by sandstone cliffs, is where many Coloradans saw their first concert and where fitness junkies gather for early-morning yoga. Less well known is the role the amphitheatre played in American history. It was built by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a New Deal programme that put some 3m men to work building infrastructure and parks during the Great Depression. Now “Roosevelt’s Tree Army”, as the corps was called, may be getting a 21st-century makeover. President Joe Biden, who has not been coy about his admiration for FDR or his desire to emulate the New Deal, wants to fund a new version of the CCC aimed at tackling climate change and its effects.

There is no shortage of work to be done. In 2020 nearly $12bn in maintenance was needed in America’s national parks. Western states want to increase controlled burns and forest thinning so blazes do not turn into megafires. The infrastructure bill Mr Biden signed doubles as a climate to-do list, allocating money to clean up abandoned mines, help communities prepare for and recover from natural disasters and set up charging stations for electric cars.

Mr Biden’s Civilian Climate Corps would be funded by the $1.7trn “Build Back Better” bill that lawmakers are haggling over. As it stands, about $15bn of the roughly $500bn devoted to climate measures would create 300,000 jobs through AmeriCorps, a national-service agency. Sceptics say the corps’ mission lacks focus. What exactly counts as conservation or resilience anyway? John Barrasso, a Republican senator from Wyoming, has interpreted the “tree army” nickname literally, arguing that the corps is a front for lefties to “wage war” on the fossil-fuel industry.

To get a sense of what a revamped CCC would actually do, turn to Colorado. The state recently announced the creation of its own climate corps, which supporters hope will act as a pilot for the federal programme. It awarded the Colorado Youth Corps Association (CYCA) a new AmeriCorps grant worth $1.7m a year for three years, creating 240 new positions for young people. The idea that the CCC is a brand-new programme isn’t true, says Scott Segerstrom, executive director of the CYCA: “It is building on existing infrastructure.” Each year between 1,400 and 1,800 people serve in Colorado’s conservation corps. The new grant will merely swell their ranks. Funding for a federal corps would similarly beef up existing programmes across the country.

Climate work conjures up images of physical labour in the backcountry. In Colorado, some new corps members will train as wildland firefighters or rip out invasive plants that suck up more water than the parched West can afford. But the Mile High Youth Corps, which serves 23 counties on Colorado’s Front Range, also offers an example of the work a federal climate corps could perform in cities and suburbs. Workers often install energy- and water-saving equipment, such as high-efficiency toilets or shower aerators, in poor communities.

All this sounds good in theory. But there are roadblocks to implementing a programme like Colorado’s in every state. When Roosevelt started the CCC in 1933, some 13m Americans were out of work. The Depression had squashed livelihoods and farmers had abandoned their fields as dust storms suffocated the Plains. The corps was meant to lift its workers and their families out of poverty. Shannon Dennison, a preservationist who is restoring the old CCC camp near Red Rocks, points out that corps members had to send $25 of the $30 they earned each month home.

In the early months of the pandemic, when at least 20m Americans were unemployed, the circumstances seemed comparable. But now firms across industries are scrambling to find workers. Even proponents of Mr Biden’s corps admit that recruiting enough young people to toil in labour-intensive jobs for little pay will be difficult. Joe Neguse, a Democratic congressman from Colorado who led the push for the CCC in the House of Representatives, says increasing pay and benefits is crucial to recruiting a more diverse corps than that of the 1930s, which consisted mostly of single white men. Still, half of Americans under 45 surveyed by Data for Progress, a left-leaning pollster, said they would consider working in a climate corps. Some may soon get their chance.

Today, Nate Cohn noted in the New York Times that the policies President Joe Biden and the Democrats are putting in place are hugely popular, and yet Biden’s own popularity numbers have dropped into the low 40s. It’s a weird disconnect that Cohn explains by suggesting that, above all, voters want “normalcy.”

Heaven knows that Biden, who took office in the midst of a pandemic that had crashed the economy and has had to deal with an unprecedented insurgency led by his predecessor, has not been able to provide normalcy.

In her own piece, journalist Magdi Semrau suggests that the media bears at least some of the responsibility for this disconnect, since it has given people a sense of the cost of Biden’s signature measures without specifying what’s in them, focused on negative information (negotiations are portrayed as “disarray,” for example), and ignored that Republicans have refused to participate in any lawmaking, choosing instead simply to be obstructionist. As Semrau puts it: "Democrats want to fix bridges, provide childcare and lower drug costs. Republicans don’t. These are political facts and voters should be aware of them."

To this I would add that Republican attacks on Democrats, which are simple and emotional, get far more traction and thus far more coverage in the mainstream press than the slow and successful navigation of our complicated world.

In illustration of the unequal weight between emotion and policymaking, Biden’s poll numbers took a major hit between mid-August and mid-September, dropping six points. That month saw the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was widely portrayed as a disaster at Biden’s hands that had badly hurt U.S. credibility. In fact, Biden inherited Trump’s deal with the Taliban under which the U.S. promised to withdraw from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, so long as the Taliban met several requirements, including that it stop killing U.S. soldiers.

When Biden took office, there were only 3500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, down from a high of 100,000 during the Obama administration. Biden had made no secret of his dislike of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and, faced with the problem of whether to honor Trump’s agreement or send troops back into the country, committed to complete the withdrawal, although he pushed back the date to September.

What he did not know, in part because Trump’s drawdown had taken so many intelligence officers out of the country, was that as soon as Trump’s administration cut the deal with the Taliban, Afghan troops began to make their own agreements to lay down their arms. The Biden administration appears to have been surprised by the sudden collapse of the Afghan government on August 15. As the Taliban took the capital city of Kabul, Afghans terrified by the Taliban takeover rushed to the Kabul airport, where an attack killed 13 U.S. military personnel who were trying to manage the crowd.

Republicans reacted to the mid-August chaos by calling for Biden’s impeachment, and the press compared the moment to the 1975 fall of Saigon. That coverage overshadowed the extraordinary fact that the U.S. airlifted more than 124,000 people, including about 6000 U.S. citizens, out of Afghanistan in the six weeks before the U.S. officially left. This is the largest airlift in U.S. history—the U.S. evacuated about 7000 out of Saigon—and evacuations have continued since, largely on chartered flights.

By comparison, in October 2019 under Trump, the U.S. simply left Northern Syria without helping former allies; the senior American diplomat in Syria, William V. Roebuck, later said the U.S. had “stood by and watched” an “intention-laced effort at ethnic cleansing.” And yet, that lack of evacuation received almost no coverage.

Complicating matters further, rather than agreeing that the withdrawal was a foreign policy disaster, many experts say that it helped U.S. credibility rather than hurt it. According to Graham Allison, the former dean of Harvard Kennedy School, “The anomaly was that we were there, not that we left.”

And yet, in mid-September, while 66% of the people in the U.S. supported leaving Afghanistan, 48% thought Biden “seriously mishandled” the situation.

Aside from getting the U.S. out of Afghanistan, is it true that Biden has not accomplished much?

Biden set out to prove that democracies could deliver for their people, and that the U.S. could, once again, lead the world. He promptly reentered the international agreements Trump had left, including the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization, and renewed those Trump had weakened, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Biden set out to lead the world in coronavirus vaccinations, making the U.S. the world’s largest donor of vaccines globally, although U.S. vaccinations, which started out fast, slowed significantly after Republicans began to turn supporters against them.

Under Biden, the U.S. has recovered economically from the pandemic faster than other nations that did not invest as heavily in stimulus. In March 2021, the Democrats passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan stimulus package to rebuild the economy, and it has worked spectacularly. Real gross domestic product growth this quarter is expected to be 5%, and the stock market has hit new highs, as did Black Friday sales yesterday. Two thirds of Americans are content with their household’s financial situation.

The pandemic tangled supply chains both because of shortages and because Americans have shifted spending away from restaurants and services and toward consumer goods. The Biden administration mobilized workers, industry leaders, and port managers to clear the freight piled on wharves. In the past three weeks, the number of containers sitting on docks is down 33%—and shipping prices are down 25%. Major retailers Walmart, Target, and Home Depot all say they have plenty of inventory on hand for the holiday season.

With more than 5.5 million new jobs created in ten months, unemployment claims are the lowest they have been since 1969, prompting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) office to tweet, “Armstrong Walks the Moon!... Wait, sorry! That’s a headline from the last year unemployment claims were this low.” Workers’ pay has jumped as much as 13% in certain industries, and there are openings across the labor market.

The American Rescue Plan started the reorientation of our government to address the needs of ordinary Americans rather than the wealthy who have dominated our policymaking since 1981. It provided more than $5 billion in rental assistance, for example, and expanded the Child Tax Credit, so that by the end of October, $66 billion had gone to more than 36 million households, cutting the child poverty rate in half.

Over the course of the summer, Biden negotiated an extraordinarily complicated infrastructure package, winning a $1.2 trillion bipartisan bill that will repair roads and bridges and provide broadband across the country, and getting the larger, $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill through the House. Now before the Senate, the bill calls for universal pre-kindergarten, funding for child care and elder care, a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and protection against climate change.

Has the Biden administration accomplished anything? It has created a sea change in our country, rebuilding its strength by orienting the government away from the supply-side economics that led lawmakers to protect the interests of the wealthy, and toward the far more traditional focus on building the economy by supporting regular Americans.