WATCHING CNN recently summed up the true state of US society. On the main screen, chatter about the continuing wrangling in DC, the vacuous Cop26 summit and Donald Trump’s idiocy.  

Running on a ticker tape along the bottom, updates on the latest industrial dispute in what’s been termed “Striketober” and seems likely to become “Strikevember”!

The chasm between Establishment politics — reflected in the mass media — and the daily struggles of working-class Americans continues to grow.  

Joe Biden staked his presidency on narrowing that gap and healing the wounds of Covid and the Black Lives Matter uprisings. After barely 10 months in office, he’s admitted that what happens in the next few weeks could wreck his plans.

The Build Back Better agenda, largely written and promoted by the Democratic Party’s Progressive caucus, has the potential to significantly improve the lives of millions of US citizens.

It could also signal a shift away from the neoliberal orthodoxy that has dominated capitalist governments worldwide for decades.  

It includes provisions to mediate climate change, extend public healthcare, invest in public housing, restrict the profits of private drug companies, provide free college education and increase rights for immigrants.  

Some of these reforms are relatively modest in scale, but the overall package adds up to a massive expansion of state intervention and — critically — an intention to tax the rich to pay for it.  

It’s not on the scale of the British welfare state, or the 1930s New Deal, but it would be a step in that direction.   

But this genuinely progressive move is stuck in the Washington DC mud, where a political stand-off engineered by the Establishment, but exposing Biden’s weakness, is frustrating working-class people who want — and were promised — change.  

This was confirmed in the elections earlier this month, when the Democrats did very badly.

The rising tide of union militancy is another sign of impatience and anger. During October, at least 100,000 US workers were involved in scores of strikes and disputes across the country.  

As well as walkouts at workplaces like Kellogg’s and John Deere, there are important drives to unionise at Starbucks and Amazon (significantly, the latter being pushed by a new, independent union).  

On Monday, I was walking through the normally quiet area of the Bronx where I’m living and came across a noisy protest of care home workers demanding better pay and conditions and threatening to strike if they don’t get them. 

All this reflects the economic crisis facing working-class America, while corporations and the super-wealthy get even richer.  

Covid has only deepened the divisions between Main Street and Wall Street. Housing, the often ignored but key indicator of social inequality, will become an even bigger issue as temporary eviction protections lapse.  

Millions of US citizens fell behind with rent or mortgage payments during the pandemic and many are now threatened with homelessness.  

Billions of dollars in arrears aren’t going away and will be compounded by rising rents and inflation.  

The underlying chronic shortage of genuinely affordable homes has been decades in the making and is one of the things Biden pledged to address.  

Now, spending on housing and other important measures, like family care leave, are being watered down or dropped in the name of achieving a compromise to pass Biden’s social and physical infrastructure programmes.  

The president’s credibility is crumbling because he has failed to deliver. Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York City, albeit one with a mandate from only 10 per cent of voters, summed it up as the need for politics that “gets stuff done.”  

Herein lie some important lessons for the left.  

With wafer-thin majorities, Biden was always going to struggle to get his reforms passed without them being held to hostage by reactionaries in his own party like Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema.  

Members of the Progressive caucus and their allies, including unions and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), need to move this critical debate beyond Congress and call for a national movement to demand the reforms that millions need and are consistently popular in polling.  

By not harnessing the growing anger of working-class Americans, they are allowing its future to be decided behind closed doors.

It’s always a mistake to overinterpret election results, but there are some ominous signs in what happened in the recent elections. The Democrats lost in the state, where Biden won comfortably a year ago. 

Worryingly, it seems turnout by young people and African-Americans was low.  

The Democrats won in New Jersey, but it was much closer than expected and suburban voters appear to have switched back to the Republicans.  

Worst of all, India Walton, a DSA grassroots activist, has not been elected mayor in Buffalo, losing to the previous incumbent who refused to stand aside when she beat him for the Democratic nomination.  

Some are eagerly interpreting all this as evidence that radical politics doesn’t work. But that oversimplification ignores tactical errors by liberals and leftists.  

The candidate for Virginia governor based his campaign on demonising Trump, an approach that failed, disastrously, in 2016.  

New Jersians, already struggling with the cost of living, were understandably alienated by a millionaire Democrat candidate telling them their property taxes needed to rise.  

The so-called culture war has been exploited by Republicans, pushing Democrats onto the defensive on issues like challenging racism and curtailing the power of the police.  

Sadly, as with Build Back Better, liberals and the progressive left have appeared reluctant to robustly defend such policies.  

On Saturday November 6, the US Congress passed the $1.2 trillion physical infrastructure Bill, with the support of nine Republicans. 

This makes the social infrastructure Bill very vulnerable to being cut to pieces and only delivering a fraction of the Build Back Better agenda.  

This will please Democratic moderates and the super-rich, but has left the Progressives looking outmanoeuvred and marginalised.  

Meanwhile, the limitations of the DSA’s strategy of placing and endorsing candidates who run on the Democratic ticket have been exposed. 

Sooner or later, socialist parties have to stand under their own flag, on their own policies.  

Buffalo should be the moment the DSA reaches that conclusion, otherwise, they risk being dragged down with the liberals. There are obvious parallels here for socialists in the Labour Party.

It’s too early to completely write off Biden’s administration and with a popular movement behind him, he could still deliver on his pledges.  

But November 2 has been called a “fire alarm” for the Democrats. It’s also one for the US and international left. The stakes couldn’t be higher.  

The inability to pass significant social reforms, by trying to beat the capitalist establishment at its own game, represents a massive obstacle to averting climate disaster.  

Ultimately, only a broad-based, independent socialist platform, offering real hope for the future, is capable of defeating the disillusion and desperation that fuels the kind of right-wing extremism that, after the elections, is now hoping to recapture the US — and could cost us the Earth.