I heard the highlights of President Biden’s speech to the nation via the New York Times’ Daily Podcast, in which White House reporter Jim Tankersley broke it down with host Michael Barbaro. The theme, as they characterized it, was, “Big government and big spending are back, and it’s going to be really great for you personally.” I agree with much of what the president said, especially on the “How are we going to pay for this?” front. But on his spending ideas front, I am struck by how a commitment to one complicates and contradicts the possibility of the other.
Biden first went back to times when “public investment in infrastructure has transformed America,” then proposed plans that would total 4 trillion dollars in investment, money that would come from raising taxes on incomes of over 400,000 dollars per year. Great, that’s a no-brainer. Let’s do that tomorrow, along with, as he said, changing the rules so no one can offshore the money they earn on this soil. (While we’re at it, let’s also revisit the idea Obama put forward in 2015 — and then was forced to back off from by members of his own party — to remove the tax benefits associated with 529 college-savings accounts that accrue overwhelmingly to already wealthy families.) Among other good and long overdue programs he put forth were paid family and medical leave, universal pre-K, and reductions in childcare costs.
But I’m stuck on what I see as Biden’s two opposing, or shall I say “competing,” ideas. I’ll address the second one first.
America, he argued, must up her infrastructure game because we all need good highways and solid bridges, and the climate change crisis demands an expansion of our sources of renewable energy. But that’s not the only reason. Did you know that we’re actually rats living inside a brutal worldwide rat race where only the fittest rats survive, and the winner takes it all? Do you realize that, if we don’t get serious about this stuff, China will beat us in the rat race? As Tankersley summarized the threat laid out by Biden, if we don’t invest in our families and workers and infrastructure, “we’re not gonna keep up with China and our other big competitors on a global scale right now to win the economic future of the world.”
Who established a race with China as our national ambition? Right here at home, today, we have 11,000 children literally living on the street and we’re worried about “keeping up” with China?
I’m going to have to do a deep dive and figure out who we have to blame for the ridiculous extremes to which we’ve taken our national obsession with competition, and I’ll have to go back a ways to do that, as evidenced by the common rhetoric of our recent presidents.
Introduction to GOALS 2000, President Bill Clinton’s education initiative, 1999: Without the goals and standards that GOALS 2000 provides, we won’t be able to rebuild our educational system and begin competing in the worldwide market.
Introduction to No Child Left Behind, George W. Bush’s education initiative, 2004: Satisfying the demand for highly skilled workers is the key to maintaining competitiveness and prosperity in the global economy.
Introduction to Race To The Top, Obama White House education initiative, 2009: America’s ability to compete begins each day, in classrooms across the nation.
Donald Trump, in a speech at the end of 2017: Whether we like it or not, we are engaged in a new era of competition … American success is not a foregone conclusion … We are declaring that America is in the game and that America is going to win.
Our students must compete. Our workers must compete. America must win the race or be left in the dust. Good God, the Cold War is over. So’s the Space Race. The global pandemic, however, is not. If we’d been focusing on the pursuit of equity on a global scale, rather than framing everything as a game only one of us can win, maybe we would not have lost more than 2 million people — and counting — to the virus.
I came to this way of thinking thanks to one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Marilynne Robinson, who had the audacity to say something heretical to President Obama’s face when he sat down to interview her in 2015. “If I strike one word from the American vocabulary,” she said, “it would be ‘competition.’” Needless to say, he did not agree. “Now, you’re talking to a guy who likes to play basketball and has been known to be pretty competitive.”
But she didn’t back down from contradicting the leader of the free world. “… all the competition has meant, it seems, is that labor is cheap and environmental standards are low. Look at, frankly, China. China has a vile ecology around its industrial centers. It’s running out of appropriate cheap labor. And it’s going into crisis. And what does that mean? It means that all of that capital will bundle itself up and land in another place that’s relatively more advantageous. So what are we competing with? We run China into the ground, is that our great mission?” Five years and many disasters later, it’s still, apparently, our great mission.
The notion of looking at education, looking at everything, with a competitive lens, does not square with the first part of Biden’s speech. He framed his “American Jobs Plan” as a way to address the climate change crisis while putting people to work repairing our transportation infrastructure and expanding our sources of renewable energy. He called this a “blue collar blueprint to build America,” and repeated the word “jobs” more times than would seem necessary to stress his commitment to putting folks, like the guys he grew up with in Scranton, into good-paying jobs using their hands to build stuff. He insisted, “There’s simply no reason why the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing.”
Uh, yes there is, Mr. President. We’re in thrall to competition, otherwise known as the “meritocracy,” the system whereby we elevate and reward only those who have gained access to those who are winning the race, who have gained admission to the country’s most exclusive institutions and who are our best hopes of “beating” China and other competitors. Our education system forces everyone else to aspire to be like them.
Since when do we encourage people to go into blue collar work, and since when do we see blue collar workers as valuable members of society? For decades now the federal government has been, in their terror of falling behind in the grand competition to “win the economic future of the world,” been pushing for college for all. If you don’t commit to your education, you’re letting your country down, went Obama’s exhortation to American youth.
So, where are all these blade-building workers going to come from? Don’t you know that plumbers and electricians and carpenters and welders can’t retire these days because there’s no one to replace them?
Vocational education advocate Mike Rowe, TV host of shows including “Dirty Jobs,” schooled me in this. He said in Congressional testimony in 2011, “In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished. We’ve elevated the importance of ‘higher education’ to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled ‘alternative.’… And still, we talk about millions of ‘shovel-ready’ jobs for a society that doesn’t encourage people to pick up a shovel.”
It’s true, thank God, that vocational programs have been making a slow comeback since then, but not at the rates necessary to get millions of Americans fired up about building stuff. It’s not even the job of schools to do that, either. To get to that point will require nothing short of a seismic shift in the way educators, parents, and all of us as citizens, conceive of “success.” As it is now, no one is getting the message that you can be a successful American by bypassing higher education and heading straight to the job site.
So, if President Biden wants to inspire the nation to implement his infrastructure plans, he’s going to have to make a sharp rhetorical turn from all of his recent predecessors away from “competition,” in which everyone is pitted against everyone else, and toward that word’s opposites: cooperation, unity, collaboration, partnership, and connection. We can’t continue to frame our national work in competitive terms. It’s time to stop that approach from infecting every aspect of our common life, and to, as Robinson put it, “keep it on the basketball court.”
President Biden, and all of us, will be fighting against mighty, ancient forces. As John Adams wrote in a letter to his wife Abigail more than two centuries ago, “I believe there is no one principle which predominates in human nature so much in every stage of life, from the cradle to the grave, in males and females, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, high and low, as this passion for superiority.”
