Friday, October 1, 2021

The Morning: Democrats, divided

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October 1, 2021

By David Leonhardt

Good morning. House Democrats delayed a vote on a major infrastructure bill, a sign of divisions within the party.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

A late-night turnabout

For more than a decade, congressional Democrats have been a notably unified and functional bunch.

They responded forcefully to both the financial crisis that began in 2007 and the Covid-19 pandemic. They passed Barack Obama's signature health care law, succeeding on an issue that had bedeviled Washington for decades. And they remained almost completely united against Donald Trump's legislative agenda and attacks on democracy.

But the era of productive Democratic unity is now in doubt — as is President Biden's domestic agenda.

This morning, I'll explain last night's developments on Capitol Hill and look at where things may go from here.

Shortly before 11 p.m., Steny Hoyer of Maryland — the second-ranking Democrat in the House — announced that "no further votes are expected tonight," an acknowledgment that the party did not have the votes to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been insisting throughout the day that the vote would happen. It was one of the few times in her almost two decades as the leader of House Democrats that she did not appear to be in control of her caucus, reminiscent of the chaos that has instead tended to surround House Republicans this century.

"It's a serious setback," Carl Hulse, The Times's chief Washington correspondent, told me, "but I don't think it's the end of the effort."

Perhaps the most surprising part of last night's developments is that many analysts believe that congressional Democrats have made progress toward a deal over the past 24 hours — even if they are not there yet, and the talks could still collapse.

The background

The Senate has already passed the infrastructure bill, and Democrats overwhelmingly favor it. But House progressives have refused to vote for it without assurances that moderate Democrats also support the other major piece of Biden's agenda — a larger bill (sometimes called a "safety net" bill) that would expand health care access and education, fight climate change and reduce poverty, among other measures.

Progressives are worried that if they pass the infrastructure bill, moderates will abandon the safety-net bill, which is a higher priority for many Democrats.

These are precisely the sort of disagreements that Democrats managed to surmount in recent years. During the debate over Obama's health law, for example, moderates were worried about its size and ambition, while progressives were deeply disappointed about what it lacked (including an option for anybody to buy into Medicare). Yet nearly all congressional Democrats ultimately voted for the bill, seeing it as far preferable to failure.

This time, moderates and progressives are having a harder time coming to an agreement. The left, unhappy about the compromises it needs to make, has decided to use tougher negotiating tactics than in the past — thus the lack of an infrastructure vote last night. And the moderates, like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have been publicly vague about what they are willing to support in the safety-net bill.

Encouragingly for Democrats, Manchin's stance did become clearer yesterday, potentially allowing the party to come to a deal on both major bills. It is not out of the question that a deal could come together quickly and the House might vote on the infrastructure bill today or next week.

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia in Washington yesterday.Jason Andrew for The New York Times

Manchin said yesterday that he favored a safety-net bill that cost about $1.5 trillion, rather than the $3.5 trillion many other Democrats, including Biden, favor. He also listed several policies that he could support in the bill, including higher taxes on the rich; a reduction in drug prices; and expansions of pre-K, home health care, clean energy and child tax credits.

These are many of the same priorities that progressives have, even if Manchin's proposed cost means that the party will need to make hard choices about what to exclude from the bill. But the terms of the negotiations now seem clearer than they have been.

Manchin himself suggested as much. "We need a little bit more time," he said yesterday, according to Chad Pergram of Fox News. "We're going to come to an agreement."

Several political analysts echoed that confidence:

Matt Glassman of Georgetown: "Oddly, now that the progressives have done their flex, I think the prospects for a deal increased a bit."
Russell Berman, The Atlantic: "These setbacks are not final or fatal, and time is still on their side. The deadlines Democrats missed this week were largely artificial, and House leaders said a vote on the infrastructure bill could still happen as early as Friday."
Karen Tumulty, Washington Post: "My theory: We are moving toward a deal. … What everyone is waiting for at this point is an announcement by Biden of a deal, and a call from the president for Democrats to rally around it."

The Democrats have enormous incentives to come to agreement. If they fail, Biden's domestic agenda is largely sunk, and the party will have forfeited a chance to pass major legislation while controlling the White House, the Senate and House — a combination that does not come along often. Democrats will also have to face voters in next year's midterms looking divided if not incompetent.

All of that suggests they will find a path to an agreement. But it's far from assured. The tensions within the party are more serious than they have been in years.

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

Representative Cori Bush, left, on Thursday.Jason Andrew for The New York Times

Biden signed a short-term spending bill that averted a government shutdown. It also provided emergency aid for Afghan refugees and disaster relief.
Three Democratic congresswomen shared their abortion experiences with a House panel, including Cori Bush of Missouri, who said she got pregnant after being raped as a teenager.
In a combative speech, Justice Samuel Alito defended recent Supreme Court "shadow docket" rulings, including one on abortion.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear a campaign finance law case brought by Senator Ted Cruz.

The Virus

South Korea and Japan, whose vaccine campaigns started slowly, have given shots to a greater share of people than the U.S.
Only 34 percent of U.S. parents support vaccinating their children, up from 26 percent in July.

International

The British police officer who murdered Sarah Everard, 33, after falsely arresting her in March was sentenced to life in prison.
The German police arrested a 96-year-old former concentration camp worker after she tried to skip a hearing.
Ethiopia ordered the expulsion of U.N. officials who sounded the alarm about the humanitarian crisis in Tigray.

MORNING READS

NLE Choppa and Big Scarr trying on pieces.Icebox

Icebox: Step inside an Atlanta store where hip-hop's big names buy their jewelry.

Next act: The bassist of Pearl Jam is making Montana a skateboarding oasis.

An unroyal wedding: Princess Mako of Japan is getting married. It's no fairy tale.

Advice from Wirecutter: Charge all your devices in one place.

Modern Love: Four years into their marriage, her husband matched with her on OkCupid.

Lives Lived: Carlisle Floyd composed operas that explored the passions and prejudices of the South, drawing on the Great Depression and the aftermath of the Civil War. He died at 95.

ARTS AND IDEAS

Daniel Craig is bidding farewell to 007.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times

'Maybe I'll be remembered as the Grumpy Bond'

After 15 years of playing James Bond — longer than any other actor — Daniel Craig will make his final appearance as 007 in the franchise's latest entry, "No Time to Die." (Read A.O. Scott's review). Craig spoke with The Times about his send-off. Some highlights:

Craig never thought he'd land the part: "I was just amongst the mix — someone to dismiss," he said, adding that, at best, he figured he'd get a one-off villain role: "'Here you go, have a baddie.'"

You won't have to wait long to see him again: Craig has already filmed a sequel to the popular 2019 whodunit "Knives Out," reprising his role as a gentleman sleuth. Next year, he'll also star in a new Broadway production of "Macbeth," alongside Ruth Negga as Lady Macbeth.

Who might the next Bond be? He has no idea. "Whoever does it, good luck to them. I hope they have just as great a time as I've had," he said. Frequently mentioned possibilities include Idris Elba, Lashana Lynch and Tom Hardy.

On becoming a meme: There's a clip of Craig on "Saturday Night Live," where he introduces the singer The Weeknd with relish, that many people like to post at the end of the week. "They do? It's amazing. I don't know what that is, but thank you. That's lovely. I suppose I'd have to have social media to know what that was all about." — Sanam Yar, a Morning writer

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

Linda Xiao for The New York Times

Embrace autumn with Norwegian apple cake. (It will make everything smell like cinnamon.)

What to Watch

The movie prequel to "The Sopranos" is a "busy, unnecessary, disappointingly ordinary origin story," Manohla Dargis writes in a review.

What to Listen to

Here are five classical albums to hear now.

Take the News Quiz

How do you compare with other Times readers on our weekly News Quiz?

Late Night

The hosts discussed the congressional baseball game.

Now Time to Play

The pangram from yesterday's Spelling Bee was belittlement. Here is today's puzzle — or you can play online.

Here's today's Mini Crossword, and a clue: Bored, blah feeling (five letters).

If you're in the mood to play more, find all our games here.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you Monday. — David

Correction: Yesterday's newsletter incorrectly stated that AT&T's vaccine mandate was part of a labor agreement. The company imposed the policy after negotiations with the union broke down.

P.S. The Times won five news and documentary Emmy Awards, including for a documentary about the police killing of Breonna Taylor.

Here's today's print front page.

"The Daily" is about abortion. "The Ezra Klein Show" features Eric Adams.

Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti, Ashley Wu and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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The Interpreter: The end of U.S. exceptionalism?

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October 1, 2021

Welcome to The Interpreter newsletter, by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, who write a column by the same name.

On our minds: Changing American attitudes about their country's role in the world.

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The End of American Crusaderism?

Taliban fighters watching as a C-17 military transport plane left Kabul, Afghanistan, at sunset on Monday.Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

We may, someday soon, look back with puzzlement at the time in which Americans believed their country was so innately superior, so ordained with special virtue — so exceptional — that it was their right and responsibility to dictate affairs overseas.

There have been indications for years that belief in American exceptionalism is declining. Now, the latest report from a four-year study by the Eurasia Group Foundation, tracking American attitudes on foreign policy matters, suggests that exceptionalism could end outright — and, with it, perhaps even the era of America as global crusader.

Continue reading the main story

On a host of issues, the study found declining support for all that exceptionalism implies: desire for open-ended military commitments, faith in armed force to resolve complex problems, pressure on presidents to maintain global dominance. Americans increasingly support the use of diplomacy abroad, coming to terms with adversaries like Iran or China rather than confronting them, and cooperating on shared challenges like climate change.

Perhaps most telling: Americans seem more and more skeptical about not only whether the U.S. can or should act as the self-appointed global leader, but also whether it has a right to do so at all. This shows up in several results, but most telling may be how Americans answer when asked whether they see the U.S. as "an exceptional nation."

Among Americans over age 60, nearly 80 percent say yes. For those age 45 to 60, it's about 70 percent. Age 30 to 44, just over 50 percent say that is the case. But, for those age 18 to 29, only 40 percent, with the other 60 percent affirmatively stating that the U.S. is "not an exceptional nation." A steady and sharp decline by age.

This shift is often attributed to dissolution with 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, as the study makes clear, this is a factor but not quite what's going on. We're not seeing the onset of American exhaustion so much as the ebbing of exceptionalist beliefs that — while long misperceived as innate and eternal — were always tied to one-off events and therefore most likely to fade with time.

Continue reading the main story

The story of American exceptionalism is often mistold as beginning with Puritanism, World War II or the Cold War. In fact, as the historian James W. Ceasar documents in a comprehensive history, it originated around 1900 amid America's war with Spain, as justification for seizing several Spanish colonies.

Taking control of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and others did not qualify as imperialism, a senator from Indiana named Albert Beveridge argued in a seminal speech, because God had "marked the American people as his chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world."

That ideology was solidified by the first world war. President Woodrow Wilson sold a skeptical public on intervening in what Americans saw as a messy European matter by saying that the U.S. had been ordained by God with a special mission to make the world "safe for democracy" and to spread "the principles that gave her birth and happiness."

The back-to-back wars instilled what Mr. Ceasar called "America's self-designation as a special nation endowed with a great historical task." The apocalyptic stakes of World War II and the ideological charge of the Cold War, in which U.S. leaders portrayed American hegemony as righteous and predestined, deepened this belief into something like a civic religion. By the 1990s, victory in the Cold War, and then against a handful of small countries such as Serbia and Panama, made exceptionalism's provisions a matter of consensus.

The first blow to "exceptionalism" came in the 2000s, in backlash to the war in Iraq, which raised doubts over whether American power was really so special. Because the war became a partisan issue, so did exceptionalism, with belief fading somewhat for Democrats. But it remained closely enough held by the median voter that even then-President Barack Obama, an impassioned critic of interventionism, once said, "My entire career has been a testimony to American exceptionalism."

Donald J. Trump's presidency appears to have accelerated exceptionalism's decline among Americans in two important ways. First, his presidency led to the plummeting of Americans' faith in both U.S. democracy and the quality of American society. And, second, he dislodged exceptionalism from the grips of partisanship. Mr. Trump himself rejected exceptionalism's precepts of American power as morally righteous, for example by saying to an interviewer who challenged his praise of Russia's leaders: "We've got a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?" This gave conservative voters permission to question exceptionalism themselves, as many were already doing by the end of the Iraq war.

Attitudes toward the withdrawal from Afghanistan, as captured in the Eurasia Group study, drive home how much has changed. Only 18.6 percent agreed that leaving the country "hurt America's reputation and credibility as a global leader" — the answer most closely reflecting the exceptionalist belief that the world relies on open-ended American interventions to keep it spinning. The most popular view of the withdrawal, with twice the level of support, was that the U.S. "had a failed mission from the start" and should not be "in the business of nation-building."

In other words, the study suggests that Americans see the war as not just a failure but also a rebuke to the exceptionalist notions that have guided U.S. foreign policy for nearly 100 years.

But this is not the same as isolationism or a desire to withdraw from the world. Support for diplomatic engagement abroad is actually growing, as well as for international cooperation for issues like the fight against climate change. Younger Americans are less supportive of military interventions or ideological missions like "defending democracy around the world," but they are more supportive of "reinforcing global economic integration."

Consider how Americans responded when asked how the U.S. should respond to overseas humanitarian crises. The least popular answer was that the U.S. should use its influence and military might to "stop human rights abuses around the globe." But that doesn't mean Americans are growing more isolationist; the number of respondents who said that the U.S. should fix its own problems at home before getting involved abroad has actually declined. Rather, the most popular answer by far was for Washington to support cooperative institutions like the U.N. in handling crises.

There is a conventional wisdom that Americans respond to economic crises or international setbacks by turning inward for a time. But this implies that exceptionalist attitudes are still the default to which Americans will, in time, naturally revert. The Eurasia Group study is another data point suggesting that exceptionalism is not the norm at all, but a 120-year digression that may already face an inevitable decline.

"In a lot of ways, the public's views of the so-called global War on Terror have remained stable over time," the study's authors write. "What reads as war weariness might simply be journalists' newfound attention to an enduring public skepticism of — if not longstanding opposition to — America's wars in the Middle East."

Quote of the Day

Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard scholar of democracy, reviews a new book on the subject by the Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Müller:

In Müller's account, the problem is not that voters have become disaffected from democracy, though that is a common diagnosis. Instead, it's that the intermediary institutions that structured our democracies, linking voters to power-holders, have vanished. The fracturing of establishment parties — that is, the decline of the mass center-right and center-left parties of the postwar years and the rise of social media — have made these institutions more inclusive. At the same time, it is easier now than ever before to found one's own party. With the rise of primaries within political parties, the pathway to candidacies within many existing parties is more open than ever before. Likewise, it has never been easier to communicate directly with fellow citizens, through Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. But the decline of gatekeeping institutions has paradoxically also opened the door to demagogues and populist outsiders.

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What We're Reading

Over the next 30 years, the working-age populations of many high-income countries will decline, even as the number of people in retirement rise. This is expected to change pretty much everything.
A powerful new report documenting the persecution of ethnic Uyghurs beyond China's borders.
Adam Tooze's comprehensive explainer on China's not-quite-Lehmann financial crisis, written with expert-level depth and beginner-level approachability.

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Pool photo by Michel Euler

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