It’s a consequence of the move away from policy toward grievance culture.
President Biden’s student loan forgiveness executive action has revealed both the crude self-interest of progressive politics and the policy fecklessness of the Republican Party.
America’s growing progressive movement has increasingly defined itself as champions of poor families held back by an economic system rigged for inequality. Framing politics as a battle of “the people versus the powerful,” progressives demand that government direct more resources toward working class and poor families. However, as working-class families have drifted rightward, and the professional class has moved leftward, progressive priorities have accordingly shifted to their new coastal, upwardly-mobile voter base. Much of the Democrats’ legislative push against the 2017 tax cuts has focused on restoring the full state-and-local tax (SALT) deduction that overwhelmingly benefits high-income coastal families. The American Rescue Plan spent heavily on rebates to upper-middle-class families that had suffered no pandemic income losses. The recent (and misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act spent most of its resources on climate policies that are championed largely by progressive students and professionals.
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Brian M. Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Dispatch