How Militarism Suffocates Real Democracy

Even many progressives miss the connection between gendered labor markets, gendered politics, and a hyper-violent foreign policy.

There’s a piece just out in Dissent Magazine called “A Man’s Economy.” It argued Biden’s turn to manufacturing in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and industrial policy has been highly gendered.

The piece has caused a huge amount of controversy.

Basically, before the IRA legislation was passed, the original version, known as Build Back Better (BBB), included $3.5 trillion in funding for not just manufacturing but also poverty alleviation, social services support for women and economically insecure people, and serious financing for a just green transition. It was “Great Society”-level spending on social infrastructure for America’s future.

That level of spending, of course, never happened.

The author of the Dissent piece rightly points out that the massive funding amounts for what wonks call the “care economy” were gutted, distilling BBB into the desiccated male-favoring war instrument that became the IRA.¹

Because labor markets are segmented (some sectors are historically male-dominated, like manufacturing, and some are historically female-dominated, like nursing), and because care-economy provisions disproportionately benefit women (and disproportionately women of color at that), this meant the remaining benefits of the IRA got funneled, on balance, to whites, men, skilled workers, and holders of wealth.

The author is right about all this. The IRA had gendered effects. Manufacturing investments were deployed in a highly inegalitarian way. And the BBB precursor to the IRA would have improved the lives of millions of people (disproportionately women).

But two things about this piece really frustrate me because they reflect pathologies among well-meaning liberals and progressives.

First, immediately after the IRA passed, Biden turned to austerity politics, and the fallout from that most impacted economically vulnerable women.² The piece doesn’t mention the turn to post-IRA austerity, which is curious. The name “Inflation Reduction Act” says it all, but so did Biden’s press release announcing the IRA, which stressed the IRA was above all about reducing “deficit spending” (ie, social welfare spending).

Second, the piece offers no useful account of why the IRA could pass but BBB could not. To put it starkly, why could a manufacturing and electric-vehicle bill pass but a care-economy and climate-financing bill could not?

The structural answer goes by many names: militarism; primacy; jingoism; the imperial mode of living; national security Keynesianism. How you choose to precisely phrase this depends on your flair as a writer. But in any case, the American economy is held hostage to American global primacy and the national security Keynesianism that sustains it. That’s the structural cause of why BBB became the IRA, and therefore why Bidenomics had gendered outcomes.

That’s where the video rant above was coming from.

But wait, there’s more.