The Blame Game

After Manchin: Will Democrats save democracy or devour each other?

Photo by Afif Kusuma on Unsplash

Democrats shouldn’t be so shocked and outraged. It’s been over a week now, yet the progressive elected officials’ and liberal commentators’ outrage directed at Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia continues. It’s not going to help their cause. It’s not going to be productive. It’s time for Democrats to tone it down. The guest opinion prices, the outspoken, outraged interviews with equally appalled liberal elite reporters and pundits, activists showing up at Manchin’s houseboat or haranguing Senator Manchin at dinner are counterproductive.

Sometime Democrat, definite socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been especially vociferous in his personal attacks on Senator Manchin and to a lesser extent Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). Members of “The Squad" have appeared regularly on some of the all news channels to continue the assault on Senator Manchin.

These actions show a profound misunderstanding of Joe Manchin and West Virginia politics.

Senator Manchin has said that he could not, he would not, support the massive spending package of programs that included the priorities of almost every progressive constituency in the Democratic Party. He’s said this in a letter to Senator Chuck Schumer, interviews and in written guest opinion pieces. He’s said it not once, but repeatedly.

Even though the Biden administration says that Manchin broke his word to vote for BBB, as Biden promised the Progressives to get the separate bipartisan infrastructure bill passed into law, Manchin never confirmed that to the press.

Other Democratic senators and, of course outraged Progressives in the House frame this as a betrayal of the president, the Democratic Party and the American voters, especially in his home state of West Virginia. Democrats in the House, the Senate and the White House seem prepared to play the “blame game". And, because the Democratic majority is so very hair thin, it required 100% of Democrats to go along in the Senate. Because Senator Manchin has been so openly vocal about his opposition to the size and organization of BBB, he provides cover for other moderate and conservative senators who also may have concerns about the size and expensive of the progressive Democrats' attempt to reshape major aspects of American society through a single, massive legislation.

Although most of the drama revolved around Senator Manchin for months, it’s likely BBB wouldn’t have passed anyway because the other moderate Democratic senator whose support is absolutely necessary, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has also said that there are huge sections of BBB that she cannot support.

While much less in the media spotlight, Sinema has also not hidden her opposition to the massive programs and funding methods in Build Back Better Act.

The mess the Democrats now find themselves in, they put themselves in. They believed a lie — a different lie than the Republicans, but a lie nevertheless, and built an ineffectual progressive strategy based on that lie.

Based on the successful passage of Biden’s COVID-19 emergency package, Progressives convinced the president and themselves that he has a massive mandate to lead the largest American social and policy transformation that simply doesn’t exist.

As his administration did with the heartbreaking, disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden misread the mood of the nation and, in the case of Build Back Better, the political realities facing various diverse members of the Democratic Party.

This is largely Biden’s fault because he tied the successful bipartisan infrastructure package (now law) with the disastrous, ever expanding, bloated BBB.

For for a person who spent a lifetime in Congress, was vice president for 8 years and ran on restoring competency, this is yet another blow. It shows the limits in the current environment of Biden’s legendary ability to successfully negotiate.

Biden has said that the most important legislation to pass is protecting voting rights. Pundits, Senators and representatives say this on shows, interviews and opinion columns, but neither Biden nor the Democrats in general have been acting as if that is most important.

Writing and getting a law passed that actually counters Republican multi-state efforts to suppress the vote seems to be an afterthought for many elected Democrats, even though those voter suppression efforts pose the biggest risk to “small d" democracy.

Rather than pivoting to making certain that a strong voting rights bill passes into law, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the chair of The House Progressive Caucus, wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post the day after Christmas blasting Senator Joe Manchin for, according to her, reneging on his commitments and calling on President Biden to still focus on getting the Build Back Better Act passed into law in some form and to make extensive use of executive orders to push through whatever the agenda that he can do so in that way.

Rather than focusing on a few projects, doing those well and taking the much needed wins, Democrats seem determined to continue their policy civil war in full public view. While this provides plenty of content for political commentators, the consequences may be disastrous if America lose democracy in the process.

Democrats have been at a structural disadvantage for years now because of the electoral college — that weird American take on representative democracy, rather than direct democracy, that our Founders came up with. Even when Democrats have won the popular vote in presidential elections— which Democrats love to make a big deal about — it means nothing when they lose according to the electoral college. The Democrats love to crow about increasing “voter engagement", that’s always the elusive solution that liberals and progressive promise. It’s disappointment because each time, including the 2020 election, the promised “voter engagement" didn’t happen, especially the promised massive participation by younger progressive voters. As usual, this was an unrealized progressive pipedream. Increased voter engagement is not going to counter the anti-democratic moves being put into place in state after state while Democrats fight and do virtually nothing to stop it. We all will pay the price and they still won’t get their massive social programs but we very well could lose our democracy, even if the trappings remain.

If Democrats don’t get it together, by the time they realize what’s happened, it’ll be too late for all of us. Time is running out.