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/187/ The Huge Package State ft. Anton Jäger (Patreon)

Published:
2021-04-20 06:01:00
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

On cash welfarism and state investment. Plus regionalism in Belgium & the UK.

Anton Jäger is back on the pod to discuss the emerging 'transfer state'. We examine Biden's massive trillion-dollar spending plans and ask if this means we're leaving neoliberalism. What are the limitations to the 'cashification of welfare'? Also comparisons with cash transfers or lack thereof in the UK, Brazil and Belgium.Plus Anton talks us through recent Belgian history and why its immobilism and bureaucracy has actually prevented a full-on neoliberal assault.

Readings:

“Welfare without the welfare state”: the death of the postwar welfarist consensus, Anton Jäger & Daniel Zamora, New Statesman

Joe Biden Is a Transformational President, David Brooks, NYT

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Comments

W

very wrong

Nathan Beesley

Antons always a joy to listen to. Thanks for this guys

Blake

Always love the Anton episodes.

Davka Smolah Collective

If you were going to ask me "who" had done "this" (cash-transfer welfarism), at least in the USA, I'd point to Andrew Yang.

Paul Brewer

I know it was almost a throw-away comment at the end, but I'm going to push back on Phil's linkage of Trump and Brexit as 'working-class politics' again. It was very clear in 2016 that many people in the media or with some kind of agenda within the Democratic party signed-on to the narrative that Trump's rhetoric had elements of a 'working-class agenda'. However, in the context of the really-existing 2016 USA this idea is hard to sustain, even in terms of the response Trump got from the voters. Trump fell far short of the penetration of union households that was accomplished by the much-less 'workerist' Reagan. Meanwhile, by any proxy one cares to use to identify a 'working class' (income, education, race), Clinton led in all but 'white, no college'. I haven't found comparable data yet for all elections, but certainly the GOP have won the 'white, no college' category in all elections since 1980, with the exception of the Bill Clinton interregnum. (It amuses me no end how Hilary couldn't repeat that. Imagine Bill's smirk!) I would make a small wager that it goes back to 1972, as well, with the exception of a Carter interregnum. Describing Trump's 2016 rhetoric as an appeal to 'The Working Class' neglects its limited definition of that class. His anti-NAFTA, anti-Outscourcing voice was predominantly targeting one fraction, the largely white factory workers of the old Rust Belt steel and manufacturing industries. These were being hollowed-out long before NAFTA. It seems likely Trump's margin of victory in 2016 can be attributed to a combination of this appeal and a lower turnout among African-Americans in Wayne County, Michigan, and the Milwaukee area in Wisconsin. (I have 'inside knowledge' about the Wisconsin GOP and spent most of my childhood amongst the white working class of Wayne County before heading off to Blighty.) This was exceptionally shrewd targeting by Trump's team, even if wholly accidental. For other fractions (or strata), such as the Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, who recently rejected unionisation in a ballot, NAFTA and outsourcing wouldn't resonate so much. (The failure of union drives in Southern states is a complex issue that really needs an episode, unless I've missed it.) And Biden won in part because those same deindustrialised voters saw Trump prove to be an empty vessel in this area, failing to deliver in the way Boris Johnson's Tories delivered a Brexit. It punctures the idea that the GOP is tracking Boris Johnson's Tories. DeSantis here in Florida is one of the leading claimants on Trump's mantle, and has yet to say anything remotely akin to Trump's assault on deindustrialisation. If you are looking for a 'red wall' moment in the US, I would suggest looking at the 2000 presidential election, when Roman Catholics -- historically a very 'working class' religion here -- abandoned their traditional Democratic lean, seemingly permanently, although it does look like white Catholics have driven this trend, and Hispanics might cause the Catholic group to flip back eventually. Religion is too often narrowly defined as the Evangelical factor in US politics, when historically it was one of the most important identifiers of the two parties' distinct constituencies. While I think Phil is right about the idea that Brexit is a 'working class' issue mobilised against the 'Left party', I don't see Trump as having any but superficial equivalence and the GOP has largely ignored the strategy and are even positioning themselves against the 'transfer state', at least in terms of The Masses. Please, convince me otherwise, because I love Phil's irascible interventions just as much as George's jokes.

Paul Brewer

On another matter, I was thinking about how the years I lived in Canada showed me a state where neoliberalism's grip was far less firm, and this episode made me consider a parallel it was with Belgium -- the confederation gives provinces some latitude in the internal market, which has become a bit of a political issue in recent years. It would be interesting to find some Bungacast angle on the True North, a frequently neglected topic in the Anglosphere, where a 'labour party' has had consistent difficulty challenging the hegemony of a centrist, opportunist party that can always edge leftwards when it feels threatened on that flank.

Joel

Interesting interview. I'm not sure that Anton's distinction between the Biden infrastructure package and Medicare for All in terms of subcontracting vs direct state provisioning really holds up. Medicare for All just means the federal government pays private healthcare and pharmaceutical companies to provide healthcare for citizens, like the infrastructure plan pays contractors to provide infrastructure and conduct R&D. In fact, the Biden infrastructure bill does include direct state provisioning of services in its expansion of home healthcare, since home health aides are directly employed by some state governments because of policies pushed by unions to make collective bargaining feasible for these workers (the final bill may expand this model to all states). I would grant that Biden ignoring Medicare for All is a highly salient issue for the U.S. left, since it's basically the last major part of its platform that hasn't been adopted by the Democratic leadership and isn’t wildly unpopular and ill-conceived (like defund the police, etc.). Even then, mainstream Democrats increasingly support M4A, including about half the Congressional caucus and the governor of California, who ran on implementing it at the state level. I wouldn’t hold my breath for them to achieve anything on this front, but the mainstream Democrats’ failings here aren't enough on their own to motivate a distinct left political identity for practically any voters, especially with all of the left's other baggage. To be clear, the fact that mainstream Democrats have made the left obsolete isn't reason to celebrate them, but it certainly says something about the state of the left.

R

I am somewhat surprised, given Anton's work on basic income, that Philippe Van Parijs wasn't mentioned in this episode.