Why is The Quiet New Deal so quiet?
The antidote to Project 2025 is happening now and will die if Trump seizes power. So let’s make some noise.
Almost every day, I see headlines like this:
And quite often, I see charts like this:
And a little less rarely, you see a headline like this:
Or a tweet like this:
Or a graphic like this:
And who can forget a headline like this:
Which inevitably gets paired with a headline like this:
And, of course:
There’s a Quiet New Deal going on. And Republicans hate it. And Trump and his Project 2025 cronies will do everything they can to stop it the moment they have the chance.
And the quietness of this Quiet New Deal will help them.
Wikipedia describes the original New Deal as “a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938 to rescue the U.S. from the Great Depression.”
But it was far more significant than that. It was about preventing more depressions and radically reshaping the economy in favor of those who do most of the work.
The Quiet New Deal builds on what Mike Grunwald called “THE NEW NEW DEAL,” which came from Barack Obama’s first term and the “Stimulus,” helping to pull America out of the Great Recession. Republicans were largely successful in shaming Democrats out of celebrating the successes of these massive investments.
That helps explain why this New Deal is so quiet. Who wants to talk about it?
But I also think this Quiet New Deal is broader and much more revolutionary than what Obama rolled out because it has also been enacted by a Democratic party that has become more proudly progressive in their support of workers and savvier in how they approach government.
I would include three BFDs in this one Quiet New Deal:
- A massive investment in America’s infrastructure and manufacturing capacity focusing on clean energy to drive down the price and accelerate the transition from fossil fuels.
- A new commitment to workers’ rights and enabling their ability to organize and profit from their labor.
- A strategic focus on making government work better in ways that taxpayers notice by reducing administrative burdens and eliminating excessive personal burdens, such as education debt.
As far as the successes in each go, I think they’re ranked in the correct order above. There’s so much more to do on all three. However, when you assess Joe Biden compared to any other president of our lifetime, only Obama comes close on number one, and no one even touches Joe on the other two.
The Quiet New Deal is the alternative to Project 2025. That’s the argument here.
It’s the alternative vision of a fairer, cleaner, and better society that’s already in progress, and the right will do anything it can to destroy it. Of course, the Republicans on the Supreme Court will do all they can to sabotage these efforts, but that’s another story.
So, let’s add this to the list of the earlyworm projects we’re taking on before the election. It’s the last one, and I think it fills out our commitment to do everything we can to save democracy and minimize regret in 2024.
So, we’ll be constantly hyping the Quiet New Deal, looking for any examples and ways to spread the word. Whatever you can do to help or support us is needed and always appreciated.
We’re launching a placeholder page that joins the navigation of our site, which is as much of a to-do list as a collection of pages.
We’re just getting started and just in time, as election season is about to kick off. But now, at least, we have the outlines of our mission, and we believe these are all things that need to be done and won’t be done unless we do them.
And doing the right thing is what democracy should be all about.