A quarter century ago, I and other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet urged him to reject the Republican’s proposal to end welfare. It was too punitive, we said, subjecting poor Americans to deep and abiding poverty. But Clinton’s political advisers warned that unless he went along, he jeopardized his reelection.

That was the end of welfare as we knew it. As Clinton boasted in his State of the Union address to Congress that year, “the era of big government is over.”

Until last Thursday, that is, when Joe Biden signed into law the biggest expansion of government assistance since the 1960s – a guaranteed income for most families with children, raising the maximum benefit by up to 80 percent per child.

As Biden put it in his address to the nation, as if answering Clinton, “the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us, all of us, we the people.”

As a senator, Biden had supported Clinton’s 1996 welfare restrictions as did most Americans. What happened between then and now? Three big things.

First, COVID. The pandemic has been a national wake-up call on the fragility of middle-class incomes. The deep COVID recession has revealed the harsh consequences of most Americans now living paycheck to paycheck.

For years, Republicans used welfare to drive a wedge between the white working middle class and the poor. Ronald Reagan portrayed black, inner-city mothers as freeloaders and con artists, repeatedly referring to “a woman in Chicago” as the “welfare queen.”

Whites who were putting more hours into paid work than ever – women had streamed into the workforce in the 1970s in order to prop up family incomes decimated by the decline in male factory jobs – were particularly susceptible to the message. Why should “they” get help for not working when “we” get no help, and we work?

By the time Clinton campaigned for president, “ending welfare as we knew it” had become a talisman of so-called New Democrats, even though there was little or no evidence that welfare benefits discouraged the unemployed from taking jobs. (In Britain, enlarged child benefits actually increased employment among single mothers.)

Yet when COVID hit, public assistance was no longer necessary just for “them.” It was needed by “us.”

The second big thing was Donald Trump. He exploited racism, to be sure, but replaced economic Reaganism with narcissistic grievances, claims of voter fraud, and cultural paranoia stretching from Dr. Seuss to Mr. Potato Head.  

Trump obliterated concerns about government giving away money. The CARES Act, which he signed into law at the end of March, gave most Americans checks of $1,200 (to which he calculatedly attached his name). When this proved enormously popular, he demanded the next round of stimulus checks be $2,000.  

Part of the GOP’s incapacity to respond to Biden’s momentous redistribution was due to the Party’s equally momentous distribution upward – its $1.9 trillion 2018 tax cut whose benefits went overwhelmingly to the top 20 percent. Despite promises of higher wages for everyone else, nothing trickled down.

Meanwhile, during the pandemic, America’s 660 billionaires – major beneficiaries of the Trump tax cut – became $1.3 trillion wealthier, enough to give every American a $3,900 check and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic.

The third big thing is the breadth of Biden’s plan. Under it, more than 93 percent of the nation’s children — 69 million — receive benefits. Americans in the lowest quintile increase their incomes by 20 percent; those in the second-lowest, 9 percent; those in the middle, 6 percent.

Rather than pit the working middle class against the poor, this unites them. Over 70 percent of Americans support the bill, including 63 percent of low-income Republicans (a quarter of all Republican voters). Younger conservatives are particularly supportive, presumably because people under 50 have felt the brunt of the four-decade slowdown in real wage growth.

Given all this, it’s amazing that zero Republican members of Congress voted for it, while 278 voted for Trump’s tax cut for corporations and the rich.  

The political lesson is that today’s Democrats – who enjoy popular vote majorities in presidential elections (having won seven of the past eight) – can gain political majorities by raising the wages of both middle class and poor voters, while fighting Republican efforts to suppress the votes of likely Democrats.

The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. For years, conservative economists have argued that tax cuts for the rich create job-creating investments, while assistance to the poor creates dependency. Rubbish.

Bidenomics is exactly the reverse: Give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone. This is far more plausible. We’ll learn how much in coming months.

In 1963, when the newly sworn-in Lyndon Baines Johnson was advised against using his limited political capital on the controversial issue of civil and voting rights for Black Americans, he responded: “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

America is again approaching a crucial decision-point on the most fundamental right of all in a democracy – the right to vote. The result will either be the biggest advance since LBJ’s landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, or the biggest setback since the end of Reconstruction and start of Jim Crow in the 1870s.

The decisive factor will be President Joe Biden.

On one side are Republican lawmakers who now control most state legislatures and are using false claims of election fraud to enact an avalanche of voting restrictions on everything from early voting and voting by mail to voter IDs. They also plan to gerrymander their way back to a House majority.

After losing the Senate and the presidency, they’re determined to win back power by rigging the rules againstlikely Democrats, disproportionately Black and brown voters. As a lawyer for the Arizona Republican party put it baldly before the Supreme Court, without such restrictions Republicans are “at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”

On the other side are congressional Democrats advancing the most significant democracy reform legislation since Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights and voting rights laws – a sprawling 791-page “For the People Act” establishing national standards for federal elections.

The proposed law mandates automatic registration of new voters, voting by mail, and at least 15 days of early voting. It bans restrictive voter ID laws and purges of voter rolls – changes that studies suggest would increase voter participation, especially by racial minorities. It also requires that congressional redistricting be done by independent commissions and creates a system of public financing for congressional campaigns.

The legislation sailed through the House last week on a party-line vote. The showdown will occur in the U.S. Senate, where Republicans are determined to kill it. Although Democrats now possess a razor-thin majority, the bill doesn’t stand a chance unless Democrats can overcome two big obstacles.

The first is the filibuster, requiring 60 votes to pass regular legislation. Notably, the filibuster is not in the Constitution and not even in law. It’s a rule that has historically been used against civil rights and voting rights bills, as it was in the 1960s when LBJ narrowly overcame it.

Democrats can – and must — finally end it now, with their 51-vote majority.

But if they try, they face a second obstacle. Two Democratic senators – West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema – have said they won’t vote to end the filibuster, presumably because they want to preserve their centrist image and appeal to Republican voters in their states. A few other Democratic senators are lukewarm to the idea.

Well, I’m sorry. The stakes are too high. If Democrats fail to enact the “For the People Act,” Republicans will send voting rights into retreat for decades. There’s no excuse for Manchin and Sinema or any other Senate Democrat letting Republicans pull America backwards towards Jim Crow.

And no reason Biden should let them. It’s time for him to assert the kind of leadership LBJ asserted more than a half-century ago on civil and voting rights.

Johnson used every tool at his disposal, described by journalist Mary McGrory as “an incredible, potent mixture of persuasion, badgering, flattery, threats, reminders of past favors and future advantages.”

He warned Georgia Senator Richard Russell, a dedicated segregationist, “Dick, I love you and I owe you. But….I’m going to run over you if you challenge me on this civil-rights bill.” He demanded his allies join him in pressuring holdouts. Senator Hubert Humphrey later recalled “the president grabbed me by my shoulder and damn near broke my arm.”

Historians say Johnson’s importuning, bribing, and threatening may have shifted the votes of close to a dozen senators, breaking the longest filibuster in Senate history and clearing the way for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

We are once again at a crucial juncture for civil rights and voting rights that could shape America for the next half century or more. Joe Biden is not LBJ, and the times are different from the mid-1960s. But the stakes are as high.

Biden must wield the power of the presidency to make senators fall in line with the larger goals of the nation. Otherwise, as LBJ asked, “what the hell’s the presidency for?”

Donald Trump formally anointed himself head of the Republican Party at Sunday’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

The Grand Old Party, founded in 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin, is now dead. What’s left is a dwindling number of elected officials who have stood up to Trump but are now being purged. Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s popularity has dropped 29 points among Kentucky Republicans since he broke with Trump.

In its place is the Trump Party, whose major goal is to advance Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Its agenda is to exact vengeance on Republicans who didn’t or won’t support the lie or who voted to impeach or convict Trump for inciting the violence that the lie generated, and to keep attention on his grievances.  

As the Trump Party takes over the GOP, anti-Trump Republicans are abandoning the party in droves – thereby weakening it for general elections while simultaneously strengthening Trump’s hand inside it.

It’s great news for Democrats and Joe Biden.

Democrats couldn’t hope for a more perfect foil – a defeated one-term president who never cracked 47 percent of the popular vote, left office with just 39 percent approval and is now hovering at an abysmal 34 percent, whom most Americans dislike or loathe, and a majority believe incited an insurrection against the United States.

The gift will keep giving. Courtesy of the Supreme Court, Trump’s tax returns will soon be raked across America like barnyard manure. Expect more of his shady business dealings to be exposed – more payoffs, cheats, and cons – as well as civil and criminal prosecutions.

The Trump Party isn’t interested in appealing to the nation as a whole, anyway.  It’s interested only in appealing to Trump and the base that worships him.

All this is making it nearly impossible for congressional Republicans to mount a strong opposition to Biden’s ambitious plans for COVID relief followed by major investments in infrastructure and jobs. Lacking unity, leadership, strategy, clarity or a coherent message on anything other than Trump’s grievances, the Trump Party is irrelevant to the large choices facing the nation. Democrats in Washington have the public square all to themselves.

Biden is in the enviable position of getting most of America behind his agenda – and he can do so without a single Republican vote if Senate Democrats end the filibuster.

Democrats have proven themselves capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But if they and Biden use this opportunity as they should, by this time next year COVID will be a tragic memory, and the nation will be in the midst of a strong economic recovery propelling it toward full employment and rising wages. With the GOP in disarray and rabid Trumpism turning off ever more voters, the 2022 midterm elections could swell Democratic majorities in Congress.

But the emergence of the Trump Party is deeply worrisome for America. It is a dangerous, deluded, authoritarian, and potentially violent faction that has no responsible role in a democracy.

Its Big Lie enables supporters of the former president to believe their efforts to overturn the 2020 election were necessary to protect American democracy, and that they must continue to fight a “deep state” conspiracy to thwart Trump. This is an open invitation to violence.

The Big lie also justifies Trump Party efforts to suppress votes considered “fraudulent.” In 33 states, Trumplawmakers are already pushing more than 165 bills intended to stop mail-in voting, increase voter ID requirements, make it harder to register to vote, and expand purges of voter rolls.

Democrats in Congress are responding with their proposed “For the People Act,” to expand voting through automatic voter registration across the country, early voting, and enlarged mail-in voting.

The incipient civil war pits a national Democratic Party representing America’s majority against a state-based Trump Party composed of a defiant and overwhelmingly white, working-class minority. It’s a recipe for a harsh clash between democracy and authoritarianism.  

Plus, there’s the small possibility Trump will run again in 2024 and win.

What’s good for Biden and the Democrats in the short run is potentially disastrous for America over the longer term. One of its two major parties is centered on a Big Lie that threatens to blow up the nation, figuratively if not literally.

While most of official Washington has been consumed with the Senate impeachment trial, another part of Washington is preparing the most far-ranging changes in American social policy in a generation.

Congress is moving ahead with Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which expands health care and unemployment benefits, and contains one of the most ambitious efforts to reduce child poverty since the New Deal. Right behind it is Biden’s plan for infrastructure and jobs.

The juxtaposition of Trump’s impeachment trial and Biden’s ambitious plans is no coincidence.

Trump left Republicans badly fractured and on the defensive. The Republican Party is imploding. Since January 6^th, growing numbers of Republicans have deserted it. State and county committees are becoming wackier by the day. Big business no longer has a home in the crackpot GOP.

Republican infighting has created a political void into which Democrats are stepping with far-reaching reforms. Biden and the Democrats, who now control the White House and both houses of Congress, are responding boldly to the largest social and economic crisis since Great Depression.

Importantly, they are now free to disregard conservative canards that have hobbled America’s ability to respond to public needs ever since Ronald Reagan convinced the nation that big government was the problem.

The first is the supposed omnipresent danger of inflation and the accompanying worry that public spending can easily overheat the economy.

Rubbish. Inflation hasn’t reared its head in years, not even during the roaring job market of 2018 and 2019. “Overheating” may no longer even be a problem for globalized, high-tech economies whose goods and services are so easily replaceable.

Biden’s ambitious plans are worth the small risk, in any event. If you hadn’t noticed, the American economy is becoming more unequal by the day. Bringing it to a boil may be the only way to lift the wages of the bottom half. The hope is that record low interest rates and vast public spending generate enough demand that employers will need to raise wages to find the workers they need.

A few Democratic economists who should know better are sounding the false alarm about inflation, but Biden is wisely ignoring them. So should Democrats in Congress.

Another conservative bromide is that a larger national debt crowds out private investment and slows growth. This view hamstrung the Clinton and Obama administrations as deficit hawks warned against public spending unaccompanied by tax increases to pay for it. (I still have some old injuries from those hawks.)

Fortunately, Biden isn’t buying this, either.  

Four decades of chronic underemployment and stagnant wages have shown how important public spending is for sustained growth. Not incidentally, growth reduces the debt as a share of the overall economy. The real danger is the opposite: fiscal austerity shrinks economies and causes national debts to grow in proportion.

The third canard is that generous safety nets discourage work.

Democratic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson sought to alleviate poverty and economic insecurity with broad-based relief. But after Reagan tied public assistance to racism – deriding single-mother “welfare queens” – conservatives began demanding stringent work requirements so that only the “truly deserving” received help. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama acquiesced to this nonsense.

Not Biden. His proposal would not only expand jobless benefits but also provide assistance to parents who are not working – thereby extending relief to 27 million children, including about half of all Black and Latino children. Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah has put forward a similar plan.

This is just common sense. Tens of millions are hurting. A record number of American children are impoverished, according to the most recent Census data.

The pandemic has also caused a large number of women to drop out of the labor force in order to care for children. With financial help, some of them will be able to pay for childcare and move back into paid work. After Canada enacted a national child allowance in 2006, employment rates for mothers increased. A decade later, when Canada increased its annual child allowance, its economy added jobs.

It’s still unclear exactly what form Biden’s final plans will take as they work their way through Congress. He has razor-thin majorities in both chambers. In addition, most of his proposals are designed for the current emergency; they would need to be made permanent.

But the stars are now better aligned for fundamental reform than they’ve been since Reagan.

It’s no small irony that a half century after Reagan persuaded Americans that big government was the problem, Trump’s demise is finally liberating America from Reaganism – and letting the richest nation on earth give its people the social supports they desperately need.

Ten Senate Republican have proposed a COVID relief bill of about $600 billion. That’s less than a third of Biden’s plan. They promise “bipartisan support” if he agrees.

Their proposal isn’t a compromise. It would be a total surrender. It trims direct payments and unemployment aid that Americans desperately need. Biden should reject it out of hand.

Republicans say America can’t afford Biden’s plan. “We just passed a program with over $900 billion in it,” groused Senator Mitt Romney.

Rubbish. We can’t afford not to. Millions of people are hurting.

Besides, with the economy in the doldrums it’s no time to worry about too much spending. The best way to reduce the debt as a share of the economy is to get the economy growing again.

Beyond COVID relief, Biden has other proposals waiting in the wings, such as repairing aging infrastructure and building a new energy-efficient one. These would make the economy grow even faster over the long term – further reducing the debt’s share.

There’s no chance that public spending will “crowd out” private investment. If you hadn’t noticed, borrowing is especially cheap right now. Money is sloshing around the world in search of borrowers.  

It’s hard to take Republican concerns about debt seriously when just four years ago they had zero qualms about enacting one of the largest tax cuts in history, largely for big corporations and the super-wealthy.

If they really don’t want to add to the debt, they have another alternative: A tax on super-wealthy Americans.

The total wealth of America’s 660 billionaires has grown by a staggering $1.1 trillion since the start of the pandemic, a 40 percent increase. They alone could finance almost all of Biden’s COVID relief package and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic. So why not a temporary emergency COVID wealth tax?

Let’s be honest. The real reason Republicans don’t want Biden’s plan is they fear it will work.

This would be the Republican’s worst nightmare: All the anti-government claptrap they’ve been selling since Ronald Reagan will be revealed as nonsense.

Government isn’t the problem and never was. Bad government is the problem, and Americans have just had four years of it. Biden’s success would put into sharp relief Trump and Republicans’ utter failures on COVID and jobs.

If Biden gets his plans through, he and the Democrats would reap the political rewards in 2022 and beyond.Democrats might even capture the presidency and Congress for a generation. After FDR rescued America, the Republican Party went dark for two decades.

Trumpian Republicans in Congress have an even more diabolical motive for blocking Biden. They figure if Americans remain in perpetual crises and ever-deepening fear, they’ll lose faith in democracy itself.

This would open the way for another strongman demagogue in 2024 – if not Trump, a Trump-impersonator like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, or Trump Junior.

If Biden is successful, though, Americans’ faith in democracy might begin to rebound – marking the end of the nation’s flirtation with fascism. If he helps build a new economy of green jobs with good wages, even Trump’s angry white working-class base might come around.

Biden doesn’t really need Republicans, anyway. With their razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress, Democrats can enact Biden’s plans without a single Republican vote.  

My worry is Biden may want so much to demonstrate bipartisanship that his plans get diluted to the point where Republicans get what they want: Failure.

Forget bipartisanship. Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans didn’t give a hoot about bipartisanship when they and Trump were in power.

If Republicans try to stonewall Biden’s COVID relief plan, Biden and the Democrats should go it alone through a maneuver called “reconciliation,” allowing a simple majority to pass budget legislation.

If Republicans try to block anything else, Biden and the Democrats should scrap the filibuster – which now requires 60 senators to end debate. The filibuster isn’t in the Constitution. It’s anti-democratic, giving a minority of senators the power to block the majority. It was rarely used for most of the nation’s history.

The filibuster can be ended by a simple majority vote. Democrats now have the power to scrap it. Biden will have to twist the arms of a few recalcitrant Democrats, but that’s what presidential leadership often requires.

The multiple crises engulfing America are huge. The window of opportunity for addressing them is small. If ever there was a time for boldness, it is now.

What Election Day Revealed About Progressive Policies

Voters have given Joe Biden and Congress a progressive mandate to enact real change.

Americans are hungry for change, as evidenced by what happened on Election Day.

Voters handily supported progressive ballot initiatives across the country. 

In Florida, an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour passed with 61 percent support, even though the state went for Trump. 

And that wasn’t the only successful progressive ballot initiative to succeed in a redder state: Both Montana and South Dakota voted to legalize recreational marijuana, along with the bluer states of New Jersey and Arizona. Arizona continued its progressive streak by approving a tax increase on the wealthy to fund its education system, as did Colorado. Colorado also voted to fund a public paid family leave program.

And measures tackling our brutal systems of mass incarceration and policing prevailed in multiple states: California restored the voting rights of 50,000 people with felony convictions on parole, while Michigan overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment limiting police powers. 

On the local level, 18 ballot initiatives addressing police violence and accountability passed in major cities across the country. And in Los Angeles, voters passed a measure to invest in communities that have been impacted by our racist police and prison systems – prioritizing jobs, housing, and alternatives to incarceration.

All these ballot victories show that bold, progressive policies are enormously popular regardless of ideology. They’re proof that embracing humanity and dignity is both a sound moral choice and a winning electoral strategy.

Every incumbent House Democrat who co-sponsored Medicare for All kept their seat in the general election – including several of them in Republican-leaning districts, like Pennsylvania Representative Matt Cartwright, whose district went for Trump. And 92 out of the 93 co-sponsors of the Green New Deal legislation in the House won reelection, including four representatives in battleground districts.

The success of these candidates shouldn’t be surprising, given the broad support for both of these policies. A pre-election report from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of Americans favor a national health-care option, including 58 percent of independents. 

Exit polling this year found that 66 percent of voters believe climate change is a serious problem. 

Support for systemic action doesn’t end there: early exit polls indicated that 57 percent of all voters across the country support the Black Lives Matter movement. The movement’s historic summer protests appear to have secured Democratic victories. A recent study found that registration of Democratic and unaffiliated voters surged in June, at the peak of the protests. That voter registration effort, combined with tireless grassroots organizing by communities of color, helped carry Biden to victory.

The writing is on the wall. Voters passed progressive ballot initiatives, even in red states; they reelected progressive candidates who embraced bold policies; and they expressed support for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and an end to systemic racism.

The people have given Biden and Congress a mandate for bold, progressive change. Now they must deliver.

Joe Biden’s Biggest Challenge

“Life is going to return to normal,” Joe Biden promised in a recent address to the nation. He was talking about life after Covid, but he might as well have been making a promise about life after Trump.

But a return to “normal” would be disastrous. We can’t give in to the allure of “normal” – because normal is what got us here. Normal led to Trump. 

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the last four years have been traumatic for the nation. After Trump’s abuses of power, human rights violations, blatant racism, and maliciously incompetent response to the pandemic, people are understandably exhaling a sigh of relief. 

But we can’t return to “normal” because “normal” was four decades of stagnant wages and widening inequality when almost all economic gains went to the top. 

The Republican Party’s core response has been stoking division and hate while suppressing the votes of communities of color. And the Democratic Party abandoned the working class. 

Another reason we can’t go back to normal is that “normal” led to our staggering Covid death toll and devastating economic fallout that have most brutally harmed lower-income Americans, especially communities of color. 

That’s because normal in this case has been decades of systemic racism as well as shredded safety nets for everyone in need, the most expensive but least adequate healthcare system in the modern world, and a growing climate catastrophe that’s steadily undermining public health.

Unless these trends change, the pandemic and economic crisis America is experiencing will be nothing compared to what’s to come. And after Biden, we could have Trumps as far as the eye can see. 

The only way to avoid this is to fundamentally change course.

It’s a mistake to see this task as placating the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Fighting these systemic problems is not a matter of ideology. It’s a matter of morality and common sense. 

If we don’t address them now, they will be even more destructive in the years to come.

In other words – back-to-normal complacency would be deadly. Joe Biden’s great challenge is to restore America to sanity after four years of Trumpian chaos while at the same time offering bold solutions to the crises of our time.

Our task must be to ensure he finds the energy and political will to do so.

The Biden Administration: Who Will Hold the Power?

Joe Biden is in the process of appointing several hundred people who are critical to what the administration gets done over the next four years. But not all these people will wield the same amount of power – as I discovered during my own time as a cabinet secretary. Here’s what you need to know about where the power really lies.

Appointments can generally be separated into three categories: cabinet members, presidential advisors, and heads of task forces.

 1. CABINET APPOINTMENTS
Cabinet appointments usually get the most media attention, so we’ll start there. But just because you’re in the cabinet doesn’t mean you’re in the loop. In fact, as I discovered as Labor Secretary, it’s possible to be in the cabinet and not in the loop – and sometimes not even know the loop exists. 

Despite the media coverage – and the hoopla over Senate confirmations – most cabinet members don’t actually play a large role in a president’s major decisions. Presidents almost never meet with their full cabinets, and most cabinet members rarely see a president. Cabinet members run departments which implement or enforce laws enacted by Congress. A capable and conscientious cabinet member keeps everything on track and rarely makes headlines.

Now, there are a few cabinet positions that have a significant influence on public policy, and you should pay attention to who fills them. A cabinet member’s role in policymaking varies depending on a president, but generally, the big four are the Secretary of the Treasury, who plays a major role in economic policy; the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, on foreign policy; and the Attorney General, in the administration of justice. 

Health and Human Services is important because of the coronavirus as well as the Affordable Care Act and any move toward Medicare for All. Homeland Security is important because of all the abuses that can occur under it. 

But Commerce, Transportation, Energy, Interior, Veterans Affairs, even, dare I say it? Labor – well, they’re not at the same level.

2. PRESIDENTIAL ADVISORS

The most important influencers on day-to-day policy-making, who are very much in the loop, are presidential advisors, who don’t need Senate confirmation. The most influential of them work inside the West Wing of the White House – and the closer their office is to the Oval Office, the more influence they have. 

From the view of the White House staff, cabinet officials are provincial governors presiding over independent domains. Anything of any importance occurs in the center – the West Wing – a rabbit warren of offices squeezed into three floors clustered around the Oval. It’s such a maze that I used to get lost in it more times than I’d care to admit. 

The advisor with the most influence on day-to-day economic policy is the chairman of the National Economic Council. The advisor with the most influence on foreign policy is the National Security Advisor.

Then there are the assistants to the president, such as on international trade; a director of the Office of Management and Budget; a Council of Economic Advisors, and a variety of people with titles like Counselor to the President. 

A good rule of thumb for understanding who really wields power is the location of their office. If it’s in the West Wing, they’re in the loop and you need to know who they are. If it’s in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which lies west of the White House, they’re more likely to be staff who don’t directly advise the president – and aren’t in the loop.

The president’s most important and powerful advisor is the Chief of Staff, whose office is just down the hall from the president. They control the flow of paperwork and people into the Oval Office and manage the President’s schedule, setting the President’s agenda. In other words, the Chief of Staff controls and manages the loop.

Even with a competent, experienced chief of staff, day-to-day life in the West Wing of the White House in any administration is one of controlled chaos. Don’t be misled by the TV series the West Wing, where everyone’s witty and loves each other. Realistically, the West Wing is intense, sometimes even backbiting and competitive, but this is where crucial policies are made.

3. TASK FORCES

The last category of presidential appointments to pay attention to are the heads of task forces the president sets up – composed of cabinet and sub-cabinet members from different departments and agencies, usually assistant secretaries and the heads of various bureaus. Particularly important are task force heads who meet often with a president – such as John Kerry and his upcoming climate group. 

Finally, keep in mind that every president has a different way of making policy decisions and using advisors and cabinet members. George W. Bush, in his response to 9/11, deferred almost entirely to his chief of staff and Secretary of Defense. Barack Obama responded to the financial crisis by drawing on several economic advisors simultaneously. Donald Trump rejected all expertise and focused only on issues that fed his ego. 

My guess is Joe Biden, in tackling the pandemic and reviving the economy, will rely heavily on experts in Health and Human Services, the Treasury Department, and his National Economic Council. 

All of these people – cabinet members, White House advisers, and special appointees who run task forces – formally answer to the president, but they work for the people, for you. This is where your power lies. Let’s make sure Biden’s appointees never forget who they work for.

“It’s time we address the structural inequalities in our economy that the pandemic has laid bare,” President-elect Joe Biden said last week, as he introduced his economic team.

It’s a good team. They’re competent and they care, in sharp contrast to Trump’s goon squad. Many of them were in the trenches with Biden and Barack Obama in 2009 when the economy last needed rescuing.

But reversing “structural inequalities” is a fundamentally different challenge from reversing economic downturns. They may overlap – last week the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high at the same time Americans experienced the highest rate of hunger in 22 years. Yet the problem of widening inequality is distinct from the problem of recession.

Recessions are caused by sudden drops in demand for goods and services, as occurred in February and March when the pandemic began. Pulling out of a recession requires low interest rates and enough government spending to jump-start private spending. This one will also necessitate the successful inoculation of millions against Covid-19.

By contrast, structural inequalities are caused by a lopsided allocation of power. Wealth and power are inseparable – wealth flows from power and power from wealth. That means reversing structural inequalities requires altering the distribution of power.

Franklin D Roosevelt did this in the 1930s, when he enacted legislation requiring employers to bargain with unionized employees. Lyndon Johnson did it in the 1960s with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, which increased the political power of Black people.

Since then, though, not even Democratic presidents have tried to alter the distribution of power in America. They and their economic teams have focused instead on jobs and growth. In consequence, inequality has continued to widen – during both recessions and expansions.

For the last 40 years, hourly wages have stagnated and almost all economic gains have gone to the top. The stock market’s meteoric rise has benefited the wealthy at the expense of wage earners. The richest 1 percent of US households now own 50 percent of the value of stocks held by Americans. The richest 10 percent, 92 percent.

Why have recent Democratic presidents been reluctant to take on structural inequality?

First, because they have taken office during deep recessions, which posed a more immediate challenge. The initial task facing Biden will be to restore jobs, requiring that his administration contain Covid-19 and get a major stimulus bill through Congress.  Biden has said any stimulus bill passed in the lame duck session will be “just the start.”

Second, it’s because politicians’ time horizons rarely extend beyond the next election. Reallocating power can take years. Union membership didn’t expand significantly until more than a decade after FDR’s Wagner Act. Black voters didn’t emerge as a major force in American politics until a half-century after LBJ’s landmark legislation.

Third, reallocating power is hugely difficult. Economic expansions can be a positive-sum game because growth enables those at the bottom to do somewhat better even if those at the top do far better. 

But power is a zero-sum game. The more of it held by those at the top, the less held by others. And those at the top won’t relinquish it without a fight. Both FDR and LBJ won at significant political cost.

Today’s corporate leaders are happy to support stimulus bills, not because they give a fig about unemployment but because more jobs mean higher profits.

“Is it $2.2tn, $1.5tn?” JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon said recently in support of congressional action. “Just split the baby and move on.”

But Dimon and his ilk will doubtless continue to fight any encroachments on their power and wealth. They will battle antitrust enforcement against their giant corporations, including Dimon’s “too big to fail” bank. They’re dead set against stronger unions and will resist attempts to put workers on their boards.

They will surely oppose substantial tax hikes to finance trillions of dollars of spending on education, infrastructure and a Green New Deal. And they don’t want campaign finance reforms or any other measures that would dampen the influence of big money in politics.

Even if the Senate flips to the Democrats on 5 January, therefore, these three impediments may discourage Biden from tackling structural inequality.

This doesn’t make the objective any less important or even less feasible. It means only that, as a practical matter, the responsibility for summoning the political will to reverse inequality will fall to lower-income Americans of whatever race, progressives and their political allies. They will need to organize, mobilize and put sufficient pressure on Biden and other elected leaders to act. As it was in the time of FDR and LBJ, power is redistributed only when those without it demand it.

Leave it to Trump and his Republican allies to spend more energy fighting non-existent voter fraud than containing a virus that has killed 244,000 Americans and counting.

The cost of this misplaced attention is incalculable. While Covid-19 surges to record levels, there’s still no national strategy for equipment, stay at home orders, mask mandates or disaster relief.

The other cost is found in the millions of Trump voters who are being led to believe the election was stolen and who will be a hostile force for years to come – making it harder to do much of anything the nation needs, including actions to contain the virus.

Trump is continuing this charade because it pulls money into his newly formed political action committee and allows him to assume the mantle of presumed presidential candidate for 2024, whether he intends to run or merely keep himself the center of attention.

Leading Republicans like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell are going along with it because donors are refilling GOP coffers.

The biggest beneficiaries are the party’s biggest patrons – the billionaire class, including the heads of the nation’s largest corporations and financial institutions, private-equity partnerships and hedge funds – whom a deeply divided nation serves by giving them unfettered access to the economy’s gains.

Their heist started four decades ago. According to a recent Rand study, if America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades following the second world war, the bottom 90% would now be $47 trillion richer.

A low-income American earning $35,000 this year would be earning $61,000. A college-educated worker now earning $72,000 would be earning $120,000. Overall, the grotesque surge in inequality that began 40 years ago is costing the median American worker $42,000 per year.

The upward redistribution of $47 trillion wasn’t due to natural forces. It was contrived. As wealth accumulated at the top, so did political power to siphon off even more wealth and shaft everyone else.

Monopolies expanded because antitrust laws were neutered. Labor unions shriveled because corporations were allowed to bust unions. Wall Street was permitted to gamble with other peoples’ money and was bailed out when its bets soured even as millions lost their homes and savings. Taxes on the top were cut, tax loopholes widened.

When Covid-19 hit, Big Tech cornered the market, the rich traded on inside information, and the Treasury and the Fed bailed out big corporations but let small businesses go under. Since March, billionaire wealth has soared while most Americans have become poorer.

How could the oligarchy get away with this in a democracy where the bottom 90% have the votes? Because the bottom 90% are bitterly divided.

Long before Trump, the GOP suggested to white working-class voters that their real enemies were Black people, Latinos, immigrants, “coastal elites,” bureaucrats and “socialists.” Trump rode their anger and frustration into the White House with more explicit and incendiary messages. He’s still at it with his bonkers claim of a stolen election.

The oligarchy surely appreciates the Trump-GOP tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks and the most business-friendly Supreme Court since the early 1930s. But the Trump-GOP’s biggest gift has been an electorate more fiercely split than ever.

Into this melee comes Joe Biden, who speaks of being “president of all Americans” and collaborating with the Republican party. But the GOP doesn’t want to collaborate. When Biden holds out an olive branch, McConnell and other Republican leaders will respond just as they did to Barack Obama – with more warfare, because that maintains their power and keeps the big money rolling in.

The president-elect aspires to find a moderate middle ground. This will be difficult because there’s no middle. The real divide is no longer left versus right but the bottom 90% versus the oligarchy.

Biden and the Democrats will better serve the nation by becoming the party of the bottom 90% – of the poor and the working middle class, of black and white and brown, and of all those who would be $47 trillion richer today had the oligarchy not taken over America.

This would require that Democrats abandon the fiction of political centrism and establish a countervailing force to the oligarchy – and, not incidentally, sever their own links to it.

They’d have to show white working-class voters how badly racism and xenophobia have hurt them as well as people of color. And change the Democratic narrative from kumbaya to economic and social justice.

Easy to say, hugely difficult to accomplish. But if today’s bizarre standoff in Washington is seen for what it really is, there’s no alternative.