Four years ago, America was on the cusp of the largest expansion of its welfare state since the 1960s.

Under Joe Biden in 2021, House Democrats passed legislation that would have established a monthly child allowance for most families, an expansion of Medicaid’s elder care services, federal child care subsidies, universal prekindergarten, and a paid family leave program, among other new social benefits.

But that bill failed — and then, so did Biden’s presidency.

Now, Republicans are on the brink of enacting the largest cut to public health insurance in American history. And the outlook for future expansions of the safety net looks dimmer than at any time in recent memory.

There are two primary reasons why progressives’ prospects for growing the welfare state have darkened.

This story was first featured in The Rebuild.

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First (and most straightforwardly), the Democrats are not well-positioned to win full control of the federal government anytime soon. To win a Senate majority in 2026, the party would need to win multiple states that Trump carried by double digits last year. And the 2028 map isn’t that much better. The basic problem is that Democrats have built a coalition that’s heavily concentrated on the coasts and thus, systematically underrepresented in the Senate. To win the robust congressional majorities typically necessary for enacting large social programs, Democrats would likely need to transform their party’s brand.

Second, although Democrats developed grander ambitions for social spending over the past decade, they simultaneously grew more averse to raising taxes on anyone but the super-rich. In the 2010s, when inflation and interest rates were persistently low, the party could paper over this tension with deficit spending. But Biden-era inflation revealed the limits of this strategy.

And if Congress passes President Donald Trump’s tax cut plan, then interest rates and inflationary risk are likely to remain elevated for years, while the cost of servicing America’s debts will soar. Add to this the impending exhaustion of Social Security’s trust fund, and space for new welfare programs is likely to be scant, unless Democrats find a way to enact broad-based tax increases.

Liberals could respond to all this by paring back their ambitions for the welfare state, while seeking to advance progressive goals through regulatory policy. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the two most prominent policy movements in Democratic circles today — the anti-monopoly and “abundance” crusades — are both principally concerned with reforms that require no new tax revenue (antitrust enforcement in the former case, zoning liberalization in the latter).

But expanding America’s safety net remains a moral imperative. In the long-term, Democrats must therefore strive to build the electoral power and political will necessary for raising taxes on the middle-class (or at least, on its upper reaches).

Democrats like social welfare programs. But they like low taxes on the upper middle-class even more.

Over the course of the 2010s, the Democratic leadership’s appetite for new social spending grew. Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaigns in 2016 and 2020 put Medicare-for-All at the center of the party’s discourse, and moved its consensus on the

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