From Hugh Jackson, Nevada Current's Editor, in this morning's Newsletter. I love Hugh's writing and thinking:

Sen. Zombie. Jamelle Bouie has an outstanding and clarifying column in the New York Times this morning, and for those of you who don't have a Times subscription, I want to share a couple quotes Bouie juxtaposes.

First, here's Joe Manchin, in January before Biden was inaugurated (and just a couple days after Jan. 6):

“I don’t ever remember F.D.R. recommending sending a damn penny to a human being. We gave ’em a job and gave ’em a paycheck. Yeah. Jesus criminy, can’t we start some infrastructure program to help people, get ’em back on their feet? Do we have to keep sending checks out?”

And here's a quote from a Roosevelt administration official, labor lawyer Donald Richberg, saying that when people are:

“...compelled by necessity to live in one kind of place and to work for one kind of employer, with no choice except to pay the rent demanded and to accept the wages offered — or else to starve — then the liberty of the property owner contains the power to enslave the worker. And that sort of liberty is intolerable and cannot be preserved by a democratic government.”

"The market, in other words," Bouie observes, "was made for man, not man for the market, and after a generation spent running away from this insight — which also helped animate Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” — Democrats are finally coming back to the idea..."

Elsewhere in the Times this morning, economics reporter Neil Irwin also takes a look at the "Democrats' divide" over economics. I'm generally a fan of Irwin, though I object to his framing that Manchin and his ilk are "holding to a view that was more widespread in the early Obama years, focusing on the risks of debt and spending." As regular readers of this newsletter probably know, I argue that the Democratic surrender to the right on economics far predates Obama. In fact, during Obama's administration, Democrats were starting, albeit ever so gingerly, to emerge from the Reagan-Thatcher fog that had clouded Democratic minds for decades.

At the outset of the Biden administration, it became clear the paradigm was shifting among the vast majority of Democrats in Congress, due in no small part to the inequities and injustices so starkly revealed by the pandemic. But old ideas die hard, especially in a system so dysfunctional it empowers a zombie like Manchin.