The unfolding story of the $2,000 survival checks may seem like merely a tale of one proposal at one moment in time, but it is a saga that almost perfectly illustrates a key change that explains much of the last seventy-five years of American politics.

For about fifty years in the mid-twentieth century, the Democratic Party was the labor-anchored vehicle of programmatic universalism and tax fairness. Its most popular social programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and public education were (eventually) structured to offer universal benefits to everyone, regardless of income, and this helped build some modicum of consensus support for the programs because everyone has skin in the game. Fairness was simultaneously championed with progressive tax policies that promoted higher levies on the rich.

But the Democratic Party changed — it became an organization enchanted with the best and brightest technocrats and business neoliberals whose obsession with hairsplitting precision and corporate fealty ended up fetishizing ever-more complex means testing while largely accepting tax inequity.