What happened to the Squad of Four? You remember them, don’t you? They were the set of leftish congresswomen that came into office after the 2018 election: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and, most notably, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes, the firebrand from the Bronx, quickly in the spotlight because she was so young and had a mouth on her. Trump and his acolytes were quick to pounce on the Squad of Four and proclaim that the Democratic Party had been taken over by Socialists (and AOC was indeed a member of Social Democrats of America). That was what Trump was going to run against in 2020. Right wing rhetoric quickly turned racist, asking these women to go back to where they came from though that meant, in the case of AOC, going back to the Bronx, three of the four women born here though one was black and two were Muslim and AOC was Puerto Rican. It doesn’t take much to see the racism there. Nancy Pelosi had to pass a resolution rejecting racism however much she held these four at arms length, at one point remarking that they were only four of her members and so hardly spoke for her caucus. AOC disappointed people like me who had hoped she would bring new life and fresh ideas to the Democratic Party by opposing the deal whereby Amazon would bring 50,000 jobs to New York City, even though the plan, including tax favors that wouldn’t occur until the project was done, was supported by labor unions, the local Congresswoman, and political leaders throughout the city. Enough with this jejune radicalism.
AOC went on, this year, to support Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination, his campaign sidetracked by the overwhelming consolidation of Democrats behind Joe Biden at the time of and just after the South Carolina Primary, an event that will be long studied as an example of how, in mysterious ways, public sentiment can come to a common conclusion in a brief period of time with no clear external motive, such as untold campaign spending, which Biden couldn’t do, and which did not help Michael Bloomberg. Hurrah for democratic politics-- except that the same thing happened with Donald Trump on the Republican side in 2016. A fancy becomes an understanding and then takes over a movement, which is what a political party is, just standing by to become the apparatus for a sentiment generated by a candidate, his or her campaign, or by the party itself, or by external events. Reagan’s advancement to the Presidency had been slow and steady ever since he was head of the Screen Actors Guild, but Jimmy Carter just caught fire and hung on after the convention that gave him the nomination, the Georgia Mafia congratulating itself too much for having secured the nomination and not really prepared to run a vigorous campaign or manage the White House.
So what have the Squad of Four done lately, in the time since the coming of the pandemic? I looked into that. AOC is raising a million dollars to help her poorer constituents. She says she will vote for Biden but will not endorse him, which is a fine distinction in that he needs the votes of those over whom she has influence, not her endorsement of him. Her supporters have nowhere else to go. Do they want the Hispanic hating Trump for another term? Ilhan Omar is pushing a bill to relieve renters of their rent burden at least temporarily and is mindful of the fact that some small landlords are also in a pickle. That seems a good idea in that it shouldn’t only be the rich who get financial support from the federal government at this juncture. Omar is also in favor of a guaranteed basic income, which is also a good idea, though historically that idea has been tied in the liberal mind to a guaranteed job to provide that income, on the grounds that holding down a job in society is a good thing for both the person and the society. So she may be getting ahead of herself but not irreparably so. Representative Tliab is pushing for increased SNAP payments (SNAP means “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). That is fine with any Liberal in that it is the latest version of the Food Stamp program pioneered by George McGovern and is still run out of the Department of Agriculture. For her part, Congresswoman Pressley is championing a mass dis-incarceration bill. She wants to abolish private prisons and promote bail reform and prevent the over-policing of minority communities, some of which will be accomplished by having police coordinate with local community councils. Most of this was inherent in the War on Poverty programs of the Johnson Era, which also advocated for community participation but nothing much came of that, and the general idea of de-incarceration is certainly appealing, though there is still the need for standards of who can be let go and who can’t. You don’t want to let out violent criminals even if the jails and prisons are places where coronavirus festers.
All of these programs and policies, if you get away from rhetorical overkill and so stop talking about “justice” but only refer to what is good for the individuals involved as that is balanced against the needs of society, are what I would call the social work approach to social problems, which is what Frances Perkins championed when she became Secretary of Labor in FDR’s Administration. Don’t worry about the basic nature of the social system, whether it is corrupt in the way capitalism inevitably must be; worry, rather, about what you can do to help people in need: the poor who need food, the prisoners who don’t need to be there; the renters who are presently out of work and so need a financial lift. That is not the change that the Squad of Four were originally touting, but that is alright. A year in Congress can teach you a lot about what is possible.
The more important issue, however, may be that all of these programs are side issues or, at best, supplementary issues, while the coronavirus epidemic is going on. The main issue is managing the pandemic and for this Marxism is not well suited, however much it is suited to point out that there is no occasion, even a pandemic, during which rich people don’t try to further enrich themselves. That said, how do you manage a pandemic? The answer seems to be that Conservatives want the states to do it and Conservative governors want to reopen for business more quickly than do Liberal Governors, and Liberals want the Federal government to step in with its heavy hand to make sure that masks are available and research proceeds on a treatment and a vaccine. There may be Conservatives who could have managed this better than Trump, who is not really a Conservative, just a demagogue, but there you have it: he is the manager we have and he is the one who has to be held accountable and so the Squad of Four are irrelevant to the management issues that currently prevail. Now is not the time to reconsider whether we want a Socialist society or not, just how to get the job done, a leader always thinking about what to do next and what steps will there need to be taken further down the road. What is needed is a manager not an ideologue.
Think of what a good manager could do now, never mind what a good manager would have done when first informed in his intelligence briefings in January that a pandemic was on the way, and what he could have done to see that the financial bailout legislation had been better crafted so as not to make it such a boondoggle for the rich. A manager pays attention to the key details even if, as in FDR’s case, he did not master the details of the legislation he signed. A manager can recognize the difference between technical and political issues. Is there really a Conservative and a Liberal way to deal with reopening? It would seem to be a scientific question of making sure to have the markers in place so that you can tell if and when there are adverse consequences of reopening in one place or another. Liberal governors keep saying that they will heed science and even most Conservative governors will not say that they are disregarding science.
What a good manager would do is sidestep the whole controversy of whether to follow science or not by asserting his authority in the field he knows best, which is politics. It is that manager’s duty, that President’s duty, to articulate the fact that scientists can deal with taking steps to control a pandemic, however disruptive that may be to society, while the civil authority has to do with the maintenance of social life, which has been its job even as public health officials started doing their duty in the Fourteenth Century, at the time of the Black Plague, and so the civil authority has to weigh how many additional casualties will be created by restoring the society to some sort of economic and cultural normalcy, as hard as such a tradeoff might be. That is their job, just as it was the job of the Pope, the leading political figure of his times, to decide whether it was more calming to a population to blame a plague on the Jews or not to do so. Presidents run for office, don’t they? I didn’t notice that Trump turned down the nomination. And so it behooves him to announce the tough line he will take, whatever that might be, to reopen the society and to keep on top of that, turning the spigot of reopenings on and off as both science and public opinion dictate.
What may come out of all of this is a new respect for government as the only institution that in the modern world can take responsibility for managing a crisis, whether biological or not, and actually carry out those responsibilities, however much money it has to create in order to do so. It should be a long time before we hear the refrain that the government can’t do anything right while the private sector, in its wisdom, can do no wrong. Every month the Social Security Administration mails out billions in checks without appreciable fraud, and every year government agencies warn of pending health crises, until, that is, their budgets are cut back or they are disbanded, which is what Trump did. Sure, the private sector produces ventilators to stockpile now that the crunch is past, but where were they when PPE’s were in scarce supply? Waiting on their foreign suppliers? I hope that a new confidence in government and a sense of the need for capable management will last us for a while and so allow, in a Biden Administration, for the worthy projects endorsed by the Squad of Four to come to fruition. De-incarceration, for example, is a practical and therefore technical problem of penology in that it requires an assessment of which categories of prisoners are more likely to reoffend or to become more violent when they reoffend if they are released. It is easy to say on a layman’s basis that old people are less likely to reoffend, but what about gang members or drug dealers? Facts make a difference and the government can figure that out. What politics does is move one or another program to the front burner. Let us keep our perspective so as not to allow ideology to trump informed or scientific opinion about how society works.