It’s easy for liberals to explain away setbacks to programs and policies that they favor — ranging from infrastructure investment to food stamps to increased education budgets — as a result of the intransigence of the Republican Party, with its die-hard commitment to slashing government spending on nearly every front.

But that explanation is too facile.

Two years ago, Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, opened a productive line of inquiry in a blog post called “Are We at the Completion of the Liberal Project?”

Konczal described two approaches to the liberal state. In the first, “you would have the government maintaining full employment, empowering workers and giving them more bargaining power.” In the second, “you would have a safety net for those who fell through the cracks.”

These two approaches, according to Konczal, should not be looked at as an either-or proposition, but as mutually reinforcing and interdependent:

“I don’t believe those two can exist without each other. Without a strong middle and working class you don’t have natural constituencies ready to fight and defend the implementation and maintenance of a safety net and public goods. The welfare state is one part, complementing full employment, of empowering people and balancing power in a financial capitalist society.”

In practice, Konczal writes, the political left has abandoned its quest for deep structural reform — full employment and worker empowerment — and instead has “doubled-down” on the safety net strategy. The result, in his view, is “a kind of pity-charity liberal capitalism.”