The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 6

Erratic.

I’ve been following the negotiations around the two infrastructure bills. Again, given what Biden actually asked for (in fact not just what Biden asked for, but what he’s likely to GET), it’s important that those of us paid to study politics for a living, as well as those of us interested in politics from a left perspective get that what Biden’s doing wasn’t predicted by a thick slice of the left. This slice would’ve seen Biden be the one pushing against the closest thing to post-secondary education for all that we’ve seen, it’d be Biden pushing against dismantling the welfare regime in lieu of just giving people money. Those folk were wrong, and it’s important that we interrogate the way, in academic articles, in Jacobin web posts, and in everyday life, that they got this wrong. Because they did. When I think about this group I think primarily about Adolph Reed but there are others.

Anyway.

Erratic.

So the two senators viewed as being most in the way of the type of infrastructure bill that would take us closer to a new deal type rearrangement of politics since the new deal are Joe Manchin out of West Virginia, and then Krysten Sinema out of Arizona. Joe Manchin’s politics are straightforward. He not only represents a state that went for trump by large numbers, he is a major stakeholder in the coal industry. When he says that he doesn’t want an “entitlement society” (as if he isn’t the product of entitlement) he is what we thought he was.

Sinema on the other hand? She’s in another category. She began as a Green Party candidate, and has then moved more and more to the right until she’s mostly unrecognizable.

I think her politics are bad, and that she needs to be primaried. She isn’t up for re-election again until 2024 so it’ll likely be difficult to institutionalize this sentiment in such a way that it comes to bite her in 2024, but then again, given where we are, it is possible that’ll be the least of our worries.

But what I want to focus on briefly, is the way her identity shapes how she’s analyzed.

Sinema is the first openly bisexual Senate representative. There’s all types of stereotypes of queer men and women going back to the beginning of the twentieth century. One stereotype is that they were particularly prone to flights of fancy and can’t be trusted. We see this most notably I think in the laws that prevent homo/bisexual men and women from serving in the military and in intelligence services. These laws were partially based on the idea that this population of men and women couldn’t be trusted with state secrets and they were more likely to be susceptible to spy-craft than other populations.

I’ve read more than one critique of Sinema’s political behavior in this moment that suggests Sinema is “erratic”. I think these critiques are homophobic. Sinema’s eschewed public disclosure of her preferences, preferring to engage directly with the President and the leader of the Senate (Chuch Schumer) and a small select group of colleagues in the Senate and the House. Her preferences go against the preferences of the House and Senate in general and against the preferences she expressed as a green candidate. They are the preferences of the business interests that have increasingly filled her campaign coffers. In this brief moment Sinema, like Manchin, wields a disproportionate amount of power in the Senate, power that can be used to further institutionalize her individual power, power that can be used to further build a democratic majority. I think she’s chosen to further institutionalize her individual power over that of the democratic majority. The ways she’s choosing to do so are wrong politically, but far from erratic.

…..

Back to the Biden transformation. Although I write of the “Biden transformation” it’s worth stating that it really isn’t a Biden transformation as much as it is a transformation of the Democratic Party in general. How else do we explain something like the growth of the idea that renters should receive checks in order to subsidize their rent. This goes against decades of practice, but supports decades of research that suggests that bureaucracy generates all types of challenging problems which include but aren’t limited to kludgeocracy and rent seeking. Giving people resources directly is almost always less expensive (and to the extent that it matters, more empowering) than creating a bureaucracy designed to give and administer those resources through means-testing or some other vehicle. In this case the entire voucher program which was designed to move people out of public housing, to increase support for the idea that housing is a private rather than a public good, and to control the behavior of poor populations (or at least the outlay of resources to poor populations), has all sorts of bureaucratic problems that make it harder to get the resources and then make it harder to fight for the idea of the public good more generally (or even the idea that poor people have the capacity to manage their resources specifically). I don’t know what’s going to happen here but it’s clear that we can’t look solely to material circumstances to understand this ideational transition.

…..

Last week was Howard University’s homecoming. Black colleges have undergone a significant transition over the past several years, a transition again driven in part by political activism that has both push factors (increasing racism on non-black college campuses cause individuals to rethink their college choices) and pull factors (increased resources, increased black elite attention whether we’re talking about Deion Sanders coaching at Jackson State or Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nicole Hannah-Jones joining Howard’s faculty or even going Beyonce’s Netflix concert video “Homecoming”). This transition should be lauded. However black colleges aren’t immune to student protest. Hampton University basically disappeared a group of late seventies graduates because of their protests (by disappeared I mean they destroyed their academic records making it seem as if they never attended Hampton in the first place). In the late eighties Howard University students protested Howard for including known racist Lee Atwater on its Board of Trustees (Atwater later resigned). Last week students at several black colleges took to the streets against their universities, asking for more resources and asking for significant infrastructure repair. Historically, black college protests have followed white college protests—black students first protest at white colleges because their actions are often more racially egregious and then black students at black colleges protest because their actions are intra-racially egregious. While it’s worth keeping in mind the large differences between black colleges and white colleges as far as endowments go, it’s also worth noting that there is no way out. There is no safe space, outside of politics. Its got to be politics all the way across, all the way down, all the way through.

….