Activism and politics

Sam Smith - The Senate approval of two huge spending bills is something we haven't seen in decades. Hopefully, the House will do its job and the measures will go to the White House but even their present status is unprecedented in a long, long time. 

You can thank in no small part the politics of Joe Biden, trained in the hyper pragmatic state of Delaware. He is no hero to progressive activists but getting something like this passed is no more the work of the virtuous than a big winning in Las Vegas can be expected of a Catholic priest. As I've noted before, politicians are reactivists, not activists. 

Even though I have spent my life working on behalf of major change,  I learned my politics in Philly and Cambridge, Massachusetts and early realized that those pressing substantial change and those turning it into law were two different species. 

Just like you wouldn't physically bury a close relative and allow the mortician to deliver the requiem, so activists and politicians have different roles in the same effort. Which is why, say, someone as unlikely as Lyndon Johnson could have gotten such an amazing amount of good legslation passed and why, with some luck, Biden will follow in his footsteps.