As a Republican lost the presidential election, letting Joe Biden into the White House, the future was the left’s to author. Governments had just intervened to the tune of several percentage points of national output to save livelihoods. What could be fairly described as a contagion had torn through a dangerously globalised world. No crisis like it had been seen since the first half of the 20th century.
In the end, the financial crisis of 2008 did not inaugurate a progressive imperium across the democratic west. The left misread public support for emergency measures as a lasting shift to their way of thinking. To judge by today’s stalled and overambitious Biden presidency, it has repeated the error. Extrication from this mess is still entirely possible. But the left has to accept that a revolution that seemed at hand when the pandemic began is probably not coming.
It can start by no longer talking about the pre-pandemic world as a Dickensian ordeal. Whatever the uses of alliteration, Build Back Better is an odd name for a social-spending bill. It assumes a widespread disillusion with the status quo ante that tallies with nothing in survey data or the collective memory. According to Gallup, 70 per cent of Americans in 2019 felt it was a good time to find a “quality job”, far more than at the peak of the previous boom. About 12 per cent named economic issues as the nation’s main problem.