The celebration is over.
Don’t get me wrong. It was well deserved, the defeat of Donald J. Trump an important milestone in the rescue of democracy in the United States. The dream hung in the balance, ready to topple with just a few more votes cast for an autocrat. Just a few carefully placed votes would reveal the vulnerabilities in a system that was designed to thwart them. We were unprepared for not just an unscrupulous president but a majority party in the senate just as unscrupulous and unwilling to stand up to him. January 20th was a day of grace, a release from the throes of a mounting evil.
Now that we have passed that threshold, we have to face the challenges left behind, and they are daunting.
If it were not for Georgia, the whole game would have been for naught. With two narrow victories by neophyte candidates the Senate switched from Red to Blue. The new President has a majority in both the House and the Senate and the political power to start to right the ship of state.
It was such a narrow victory though, the Senate is actually split, 50-50. With the political scene being no longer an exercise in governance but rather a sad game of partisan warfare, the Vice President is now the sole voice in American democracy.
That is, if the lines hold.
In the defensive position in this childish exercise, the Republicans have consolidated into a monolithic obstructive force, their internal wars only showing when it doesn’t really count. But with the power to make policy, the Democrats also have the seed for self-destruction.
Every Democratic senator is capable of toppling the entire house of cards. It is a party of 50 fiefdoms.
Joe Manchin is the poster child for this dynamic. The West Virginia senator is a democrat in a state that is probably just as conservative as any in the country. Though the state was formed during the Civil War feeling itself incompatible with the now Confederate state of Virginia, their roles gradually reversed, an ideological dosey doe occurring over decades. Now a largely rural red state, Manchin has managed to run as a democrat while having a voting record that would disappoint either party. Having won his seat in the senate after the retirement of the controversial Democrat Robert Byrd, a leftover from a bygone era of a very different southern Democratic Party, Manchin is not really a democrat, he’s a West Virginia democrat. Priding himself on his bipartisanship, he is a constant thorn in the side of the national party, voting with republicans on hot button issues like abortion and gun rights, while supporting his party against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and against the Republican tax giveaway of 2017.
This past week he almost cut the legs out from under the 1.9 trillion dollar economic relief plan that finally passed after compromising to Manchin’s objections to unemployment benefits being tax free and cutting the tax relief to only the first $10k received and curtailing federal subsidies to unemployment, ending them in the summer rather than the fall.
While Manchin’s influence in this process is massively out of proportion to the number of citizens he represents, it reveals the reality of the tenuous majority the democrats enjoy. It is largely a mirage.
The Democratic Party often crows about being a party of diversity, a big tent that encompasses a true melting pot comprised of every variety of the American experience. It is fundamentally true, but that is the danger. When the majority is held by three or four votes, a single senator representing the quirky needs of their home state is good for the senator and harmless to the party. But in an evenly divided Senate, someone straying from the party line can be the difference between being the majority party and effectively being a self-imposed minority.
Republicans have morphed into something other than a political party. They have become a power party, with power being the single issue that motivates it. They have become the Al Davis of politics. “Win, baby, win!” An Orwellian caricature of what party politics can evolve into. Movies like “A Face In The Crowd” seem almost naive in considering how the process can be abused and the public manipulated. But even if some rogue senator should undermine the Republican’s best plans for domination, it only makes their minority greater. It doesn’t create their minority status. That was cooked in with the vote, and that just barely.
In the Senate, the Republicans represent 45 million fewer Americans than Democrats do, and yet they enjoy half of the seats. Power being the only goal, they have concentrated on voter suppression, gerrymandered districts and winning states that are largely unpopulated yet have the same number of senators as California and New York. The strategy has been successful and in addition their further concentration on funding state legislator campaigns have created state houses with far right agendas that are in the process of making voting a very privileged activity. Right now, forty states collectively have over 200 bills aimed directly at making voting more difficult for their populations. The justification being used is The Big Lie of voting corruption on a mass scale, in spite of no evidence being provided to support it.
If you think the two parties are essentially the same (and in some respects I’d agree), remember that the Democratic Party is seeking to pass the most encompassing voter rights bill in our history right now, surpassing even the 1964 Voting Rights Act which they crafted as well, while the Republican Party is trying to keep as many people from voting as humanly possible. The one right that ensures all the others, as President Biden pointed out this past week, is a fault line between the two parties. This is the one way for Republicans to maintain power, a point that was actually argued before the Supreme Court by an attorney defending voting restrictions for the state of Arizona. When asked what the interest was of the Arizona Republican National Committee in certain suppression measures, attorney Michael Carvin replied “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”
Well, at least they were being transparent.
With everything at stake there is nothing that Republicans will not do, no unethical practice or outright fraud they will not commit, to get just one more vote. They are the minority, and they will not accept that status as the will of the people. Frankly the will of the people is irrelevant. Win baby win.
And yet, ironically it’s the Democrats that have everything to lose. One outlier in their midst, a rebel, a freethinker, iconoclast, subversive and the whole house of cards tumbles. The illusion of majority rule is revealed.
The Democratic Party is now a collection of 50 independent fiefdoms. Fifty monarchs, each with the power to change a nation with one vote. Today’s headlines feature King Joe of West Virginia, but tomorrow? Who knows. Maybe Bernie Sanders or Liz Warren or the new liberal Georgians will find a bill crafted too close to the center is worth scuttling along ideological lines. The crack could come from anywhere, and it will only take a single voice to change the whip count, the one vote likely being fatal as the relentless pursuit of power consolidates the other side of the aisle, intractable and united.
So yes, the celebration is over. Now the very hard work begins. True progressives will find the results disappointing, which will include me, But disappointment is a big step away from our most recent despair, and voting rights keep progressivism alive, and with that, hope.