Infrastructure Weak
Why National Populists Should Not Be Celebrating Biden's Infrastructure Bill
A core tenant of the new right is a rejection of the antiquated, Reaganesque idea that “the best government is the one that does the least.”
Government has a purpose, and that purpose is more important than cutting taxes and bombing third-world, shithole countries. America’s political leaders are responsible for guiding a vision of our nation’s future – one that promotes greatness, achievement, and dominance into the next century – at least that is what they are supposed to do. But the lack of vision by our nation’s leaders is so obvious that it has left us with a glaring vacuum in our national soul, and politicians who stray from their party’s mainstream, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Donald Trump, seek to fill that vacuum.
National Populists believe that one of the ways to promote this vision is to rectify America’s disordered infrastructure. Today, the wealthiest nation on earth has lead pipes in its water systems, potholes on its highways, and dead zones from sea to shining sea. This much is common knowledge, but deeper reflection would help us realize the fact that our rapidly deindustrialized areas, which once produced steel, now produce deaths of despair and could be better used to harvest most of our essential needs.
Think of almost everything we have suffered shortages from during the pandemic until now. Most of it, from medicine to military equipment and even toilet paper, can and should be made in America. Returning these kinds of manufacturing plants into the United States would create millions of new jobs, reindustrialize working-class communities, and fulfill the need to be independent from the Chinese Communist Party for our country’s financial goals.
This may sound like a “pie-in-the-sky” idea, but it is obtainable with a correct vision and a proper application of resources. This is precisely why the Biden infrastructure bill is a huge disappointment – it does neither of these things.
Chase Reid, a very smart New Jersey zoomer, wrote a piece on his Substack chiding national populists for criticizing the infrastructure bill:
“It came as such a shock that, in the aftermath of the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework, the group most visibly unnerved by Republican defection in support of the bill weren’t libertarians, nor moderate pragmatists, and not even the hardline partisans ... but the national populists--the ones calling for a radical departure from the status quo,” he wrote. “Why would the faction of the American Right most amenable to state power and state spending be so perturbed by Republicans defecting in support of precisely that? So perturbed that they’d join a chorus of voices (consisting primarily of those for whom state power and state spending are an anathema) calling for the likes of Nicole Malliotakis and Don Bacon, doctrinaire conservatives, to be unseated.”
Reid misses one crucial political reality of the infrastructure package: we are likely not going to get another trillion-dollar infrastructure opportunity for a while. This was it, and Congress came nowhere near fulfilling the goals of a coherent, forward-thinking industrial policy.
The bill includes:
$110 billion for road repair – for context, it costs $6 million per mile of interstate highway in rural areas and $11 million per mile in urban areas. There are 46,876 miles of interstate highway in the country. So the bill only funds about 1/3 of the repairs needed on our interstate highway system.
$66 billion in railroads, with nothing going to high-speed rail. It costs about $1-$2 million per mile of rail, and there are 140,000 miles of rail in the country.
$65 billion for the power grid and $55 billion for water infrastructure.
$47 billion for cyber security/climate change – yep, so money wasted.
$39 billion for public transportation – it costs $50 billion to fix the New York City Subway system alone.
$7.5 billion for electric charging stations and another $7.5 billion for electric school buses – This will pay for about 18,750 school buses nationwide.
So, that’s it. What was possibly the one chance in the next decade to pass an infrastructure bill capable of making America independent of the Chinese Communist Party and leading our country into the 21st Century was squandered. We could have given a lifeline to the Rust Belt and built millions of good jobs with union-level wages to working-class Americans, giving them real opportunities they’ve long demanded from their government. Instead, we chose to use over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to moderately fulfill the goals of some of the dumbest ideological impulses – solving climate change and requiring electric school buses.
To make matters worse, the passage of the Infrastructure Bill gives Democrats a renewed focus and opportunity to pass the $1.2 trillion “Build Back Better” plan. My friend Rachel Bovard did a brilliant job of describing why that bill is so terrible.
Industrial policy is important. It’s what helps build parts of this country, and it didn’t all happen organically. Republicans need to take it more seriously than they have for the last decade, and it’s a terrible loss that the Trump Administration failed to propose anything effective.
Yet from Trump to Biden, we went from infrastructure week to infrastructure weak, and we may not have a chance to repair the lost opportunity for a long time to come.