Democrats’ Cynical Ploy: Everything Is Infrastructure

‘ What’s in a name?” asks Shakespeare’s Juliet. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” The president of the United States appears to have taken these words to heart when considering his entire policy wish list. Social care, housing policy, transportation policy, labor policy, social-justice projects, tax policy, environmental policy, Medicaid expansion, industrial policy, and education policy are all included and addressed in the Biden administration’s new “infrastructure” bill. Roads and bridges are also mentioned here and there.

Politically, the decision to describe everything under the sun as infrastructure is very clever. Investment in infrastructure is a huge policy initiative among both Democrats and Republicans. Gretchen Whitmer won her gubernatorial race in Michigan on the strength of the decidedly bipartisan slogan, “Fix the Damn Roads.” Hostility toward potholes is one of the few things that still brings Americans together.

Of course, the tactic of trying to sell every item in the Democratic platform as a necessary companion to pouring new concrete on top of old concrete is also hugely cynical, but there’s a sense in which the Biden administration isn’t fully to blame. Conservatives are quick to point out that governments get more of the behavior they subsidize. But the reverse is also true. If voters allow the government to indulge in bad behavior without consequences, they’ll suffer more of it. The Biden administration’s “coronavirus-relief bill,” for instance, played the same trick on the American people as this “infrastructure bill” does. The president his allies figured that COVID relief would be so popular that they could tack whatever else onto the bill they wanted without consequence. Voters, after all, would be too disengaged to pay attention to anything more than the top-line name of the law. They were right. Polling on the relief package was very positive for the administration. Is it any small wonder, then, that the president thinks he can get away with foisting a phrase like “physical, social, and civic infrastructure” upon the public when the public has not exacted a price from him for lying so brazenly and so recently?

Happily, there are some indications that the wider public are gradually getting wise to the scam, not least because some of the president’s allies are saying the quiet part loud:

This incident isn’t an isolated one, and we would be remiss to let it pass without reminding ourselves why the redefinition of words plays such a consistently prominent role in the rhetorical strategy of progressives.

Since the middle of the last century, when the ideas of thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes started to gain traction in the academy, it’s been an article of faith in certain circles of the liberal literati that language constructs and constrains our experience of ourselves and each other to an overwhelming extent. In fact, Derrida taught that the connection we all assume between language and objective reality is an illusion. Commenting on a passage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions, he writes:

There is nothing outside of the text . . . what one calls the real life of these existences ‘of flesh and bone’, beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau’s text, there has never been anything but writing …

In other words, language is just language all the way down. It never touches on anything outside of itself. If you find this kind of thinking impenetrable, you’re not alone, but there’s no denying that it’s been hugely influential as it’s cascaded down from the ivory towers of academia into other cultural rivulets. (If readers are interested in reading a profound response to Derrida’s approach to language, I’d recommend this book by his compatriot, Michel Henry.) If the link between language and reality is severed, then those who would radically alter the human social and political arrangements can turn their attention away from the illusion of “objectivity” and simply manipulate language to bend others to their will. Those who are of this view, who believe that virtually all of our experiences are social constructs, see language as the building blocks. Controlling language, then, becomes a huge part of wielding power.

We’ve seen how this manipulation of language has been used in politics before. Progressives will habitually take a popular term like “justice” and try to cram as much of their agenda into this word as possible. This allows them to circumnavigate arguments over the merits of a given policy. Who, after all, wants to be in the anti-justice camp? And so, we’re fed phrases like “environmental justice,” “reproductive justice,” and “economic justice.” Underwriting this rhetorical revisionism is the belief that the battle for proprietary ownership over certain terms is among the most important political conflicts in society.

I hardly need to list too many examples of this. At least five or six have probably crossed your mind as you’ve been reading, the most obvious of which concerns transgenderism and the accompanying pronoun wars. The global environmental Left has even had some success in granting legal personhood to rivers, clothing them in a whole host of protections that our society systematically denies to unborn boys and girls. “Person,” as it happens, is probably the most powerful political word in our political vocabulary, which is why abortion advocates insist on using the Latin word for “little one” (foetus) instead when championing their cause. So much of the Left’s strategy for electoral conquest turns on this annexation of the English language. It’s a strategy of which voters are insufficiently aware.

Observing that literate Americans abandoned the field of this rhetorical battle when it came to COVID relief, the president clearly felt emboldened to advance upon the word “infrastructure” and capture it for his own political ends. As a result, we’re now faced with an “infrastructure” bill that would set the corporate tax rate at 28 percent, impose punitive measures on domestic-energy producers, expand long-term care services under Medicaid, drop $400 billion on a huge house-building scheme, eliminate the use of paper plates in school cafeterias, rewrite the country’s zoning laws, and expand collective-bargaining privileges for unions.

If the electorate allows President Biden to get away with this kind of deception on such a massive and costly scale again, we can expect more and more sweeping legislative packages from the administration thinly disguised as popular bipartisan measures which just happen to have little Republican support. The president is banking on the cognitive laziness and civic apathy of the American public in order to get the laws that he wants onto the statute book and, so far, he’s been handsomely rewarded. But since this whole argument is apparently over language, it would probably be fitting and proper to address Joe Biden hereon on his own ridiculous terms; not as the 46th president of the United States but as the first federal secretary of Infrastructure. Maybe then people would begin to suspect that there’s something rotten in the state of the union.