Author: jamesgillen@yahoo.com

You have to understand. Most people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured and so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.

-Morpheus, The Matrix

I could be talking about… all this… that happened Tuesday, over the last weekend, or over the last month or so, but I’m going to talk about something else that seems to be unrelated but actually touches upon exactly how this country got so fucked up.

There was a recent article on The Nevada Independent website showing how the state’s Democratic Party establishment is speaking out against a ranked choice voting reform that is on the ballot for this year. In his statement to the Independent, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak said the initiative was “a rushed constitutional change that would make our system more confusing, error-prone and exclusionary.” Senator Jacky Rosen said that it would “make casting a ballot more confusing and time-consuming, lead to increased errors that cause eligible votes to be thrown out, and disproportionately impact communities of color.”

Not only is this a really patronizing attitude in and of itself, it actually plays into the “Great Replacement Theory” of Tucker Carlson and other professional racists, who state that the liberals are out to undermine America’s system of government with an influx of brown, “obedient“, easily led immigrants who need voting to be as easy as possible. For Republicans like Carlson, the fact that they want to make voting a more complicated pain in the ass than a do-it-yourself colonoscopy is exactly the point, because they don’t think voting is a right for all but a privilege of the select. Voting should be left to those square-headed folk of good Nordic stock who grasp Western concepts like analytical thinking.

The Democrats might indeed have a point about how the change would make casting a ballot more complicated, but the actual wording of the initiative isn’t that hard to figure out: “The general election ballots for partisan office shall be designed so that the voter is directed to mark candidates in order of preference and to mark as many candidates as the voter wishes, but not to assign the same ranking to more than one candidate for the same office.” In and of itself, that’s hardly different from the process Nevada Democrats themselves used for the Nevada presidential caucus in 2020. Reading deeper, the establishment’s objection seems to be the creation of a new Section 17 in the state Constitution’s Article 15, stating “A person may become a candidate at the primary election for a partisan office regardless of the person’s association with a political party, or lack thereof.” Further: “Any registered voter may cast a primary ballot for any candidate regardless of the political party affiliation of the voter or any political party preference indicated by the candidate. The primary election for partisan office does not serve to determine the nominee of a political party or political group but serves only to narrow the number of candidates whose names will appear on the ballot at the general election for partisan office.” In effect, this would mean that the “primary” is no longer a partisan event but the first stage in a runoff system election process.

Which I’m pretty sure is what’s got the Democrats’ undies in a wad.

For both the socialist Left and corporatist Right, freedom of choice only counts if you pick the result they like, and if you don’t, they’d rather you have no choice at all.

Now, Sisolak and the other Nevada Democrats may indeed be the best choices we have available, but that’s not because they are ideal or even good. It means exactly that- they’re the best choice we have available because the selected alternative is so poor. That would be the case regardless of whether we had a ranked choice system now. For example, in the Nevada Governor’s race, the Republican primary includes Joe Lombardo, who will be retiring as Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff this year. That’s a non-partisan office. I think that by and large, Lombardo was a pretty good Sheriff and on paper would be a fair choice to be Governor. However he’s running as a Republican and feels obliged to go full Trump robot on all the political buzzwords and catchphrases, and playing ¿Quien es mas macho? with points like “Joe Lombardo is the only candidate in the race for Governor who has carried a gun every day for the past three decades“. So if he weren’t a Trumpnik, I might have voted for Lombardo, but as long as he and his party continue to believe in performative idiocy over governance, I have to go for Sisolak.

But that gets to the point I want to make: Most sheriffs are politically conservative or at least “law and order”, but their races are non-partisan. Nobody votes for sheriff on the question of whether they think George Soros wants to encourage abortion on demand so that trans people can adopt the abortions and then teach the abortions critical race theory.

Why is this craziness incentivized? Because of the political party system, specifically the modern primary system.

That is, if you’re aligned with a major party, you have to vote for their candidates if for no other purpose than to stop the other party from winning. And that means that your choices are really made for you in the primary round, so the people pushing certain candidates can just push the most partisan, “red meat” issues to display ideological loyalty, the most partisan, red meat voters are the ones who are more likely to show up for the primary (since it’s only that party voting on its own candidates), and they basically dictate the course for everybody in the general election. Even if you would have in the past voted for a non-Trumpnik, non-Q candidate in the general election, if you’re a Republican, you HAVE to vote for Ms. Jewish Space Lasers, cause what else are you going to do, let the DEMOCRAT win????

Why? Because those ideological fanatics in the Republican Party are the ones you can count on to show up and vote no matter what. And so the party has catered to them more and more over the years, and as they did so, the fanatics realized their pet issues (like abortion prohibition) were being given lip service by a party establishment that (correctly) assessed that those dreams were unpopular with the rest of the country. And so they started pushing more and more candidates who were taking positions that would have been rejected by earlier Republicans, and those candidates started winning primaries, and in “safe” districts, that means they won office. That’s why when Trump ran in 2016, all the establishment Republicans refused to really organize against him, because that would mean pissing off their “base”, since he was directly appealing to it. And once Trump did get nominated for president, every Republican had to go along with his idiocy, even the ones who knew better. And since he was the official candidate, all the stuff he said that would have gotten him laughed out of a Libertarian or Green convention as being too immoral or impractical suddenly became the respectable mainstream position.

And as a result, a major-party system that conservatives like William Buckley intended to be a screening mechanism to keep the Birchers, Randians and other crazies out of conservatism instead became the very mechanism by which the crazy became the governing majority, at least on that side.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is still capable of screening its ideologues to keep them from positions of real power (just ask Bernie Sanders), and while that is on balance a good thing it also means that the Democrats are, ironically, more conservative in the general sense than the Party of Trump, which say what you will, actually changed with its base. And that desire for control I think plays into Sisolak’s apparent fear of reform.

Perhaps with the Biden Administration’s other problems, the only way Democrats think they can win this year is to frame the election as a choice between the two parties. In other words, rather than objectively assess whether incumbent Democrats are doing good jobs, just point out that the Republicans would be so much worse.

I guess some of them still haven’t figured out that that didn’t work in 2016.

I would prefer an old-style, center-right party that reflects the practical, “common sense” attitude that I think most Americans prefer. I had thought that was the Republicans, but if they ever really did have a constructive approach to government, they threw it out long ago. I had thought it was the Libertarians, but right now they’ve decided to join the Republicans in COVID-land.

It might be better to just throw out political parties altogether and make all races, including federal races, nonpartisan in the way judges’ elections and most sheriffs’ races are. That’s not quite the same as banning political parties. You can’t stop freedom of association. We also cannot directly control people’s minds and get them to engage in what one party or the other considers to be goodthink. What we can do with government and specifically with elections is to create incentives and disincentives.

Specifically, we need to remove the incentives that make it so easy for ideological nutjobs to get into office by catering to a few while discouraging the participation of the general public. Right now the Republicans are the ones who are most consciously engaged in creating the political system they want because they are the ones who have both the desire to change a system they see as being against them, and the position to do something about it. Democrats are only just starting to realize that their status quo ante is not the best and perfect and permanent state of affairs and that the incentives they created are being turned against them.

With all the various roadblocks and complications that Republican-run states are putting in the way of voting, mainly to stop Democratic constituencies from mobilizing, it should be clear that Republicans are turning Democrats into a “third” party by doing to them what Democrats and Republicans have done to the Libertarians and Greens for years. And it’s testimony to the institutional bias of establishment Democrats that they won’t react appropriately or even acknowledge the issue. Now, some of them have, which is how you have ranked choice voting in other states (including Alaska and Maine, which are more Republican-friendly), and open primaries in California, which has hardly hurt Democrats’ dominance of the state.

We are reaching the terminal point in the duopoly’s downward spiral, and giving people more choices may be America’s only way out. Of course that would require Democrats to both acknowledge the problem and give up some of their control over the process. So we can’t be surprised that some in the party of “choice” want to put a stop to it.

Prior to last week, the month of February was notable for the continuing attempts of our once and future Viceroy, Donald Trump, to stay relevant, although some of those were actually more like embarrassing revelations. For one thing, in their attempts to recover presidential artifacts, the National Archives (allegedly) discovered that Trump was flushing government documents and plugging up the White House toilet. I’m pretty sure that Trump has been plugging up toilets for most of his life, but not for that reason. But then after weeks of military buildup, Trump’s Thunder Buddy For Life, Vladimir Putin, directly attacked Ukraine on February 24, allegedly to “de-Nazify” an anti-Russian country. “De-Nazification” of course, is code for liquidating a Jewish head of state and imposing a hard-right government that beats and kills ethnic minorities and homosexuals. Prior to this, most people other than the Biden Administration had assumed that all of Putin’s maneuvers, including the recognition of “independent” Russian republics inside Ukraine, were just a game of chicken. But that assumes that Putin had any cause to back off.

Be advised that one can only take a Hitler comparison so far. But: Hitler was born in Austria, a German-speaking country that had never been under the Berlin government. As a racist and pan-nationalist, Hitler believed that all Germans should be united under the same government. And he finally achieved that goal with Austria when he united it with Germany in 1938. And because this was actually fairly popular in Austria itself, this didn’t cause too much of a backlash. But then Hitler decided to go after the Sudetenland, border territory formerly run by the Austrians and now part of the Czech Republic, and the rest of the world realized that would be a much greater disruption of world peace, especially since the move was not universally popular in Czechoslovakia. Various attempts were made to pacify Hitler short of the Munich conference, and later various attempts were made to negotiate when he mobilized against Poland, but nothing worked because Hitler didn’t want peaceful relations. He wanted those German speaking territories and was willing to sacrifice any economic convenience and ultimately go to war.

Same here. I had mentioned that the Crimean peninsula always had a Russian population and was only shifted to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic under Soviet Russia’s internal bureaucracy, partially because there was no expectation that Ukraine would ever be independent of Moscow. So when that did happen, there were a whole bunch of people in the borders of Ukraine who were really more loyal to Mother Russia. So when Putin pulled his little fait accompli to seize Crimea during the second term of the Obama Administration, not only did America not do much about it, there might not have been much cause to do so. The move was fairly popular, at least in Russia itself. However Russian emigration during the Soviet period also meant a lot of Russians had settled the eastern provinces that always had been considered Ukraine proper, and thus Putin’s none-too-subtle sponsorship of “independence” movements in the Donetsk region was harder for Ukraine, and the West, to tolerate.

Of course there’s the real reason any comparison between Hitler and a Russian leader can only go so far- Russia has nukes. No matter how much we protest, we’re not going to go to war with a fellow nuclear power. Period. Just like we didn’t when Putin’s heroes stomped on East Germany in 1953, when they stomped on Hungary in 1956 and when they stomped on Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, it doesn’t seem to have reached that point yet with Ukraine. That’s partially because on those occasions, Soviet troops were already in the borders as occupiers and here the Russians have to fight just to get in. It may be partially because Ukrainian defense forces are tougher than anyone (including the West) gave them credit for, or that Russian conventional forces are not as tough as most people (including Putin) thought they were. In any case, outside analysis indicates that Putin hasn’t concentrated all the force that he could have, even towards Kyiv, which is only a few dozen miles south of Putin’s ally Belarus. And that may because he’s bought into his own hype that the Ukrainian government is illegitimate and even non-Russian Ukrainians would greet him as a liberator. And that means he hasn’t contemplated exactly the level of force that would be needed to conquer territory, let alone hold it against resistance.

I also think there’s a psychological dimension here that isn’t being elaborated on. Russia, like America, has a certain romantic relationship with war. We used to say “we don’t start wars, we finish them.” Of course that was before the Bush Administration. But generally we believe it is neither moral nor practical to have wars of choice. Russia is marked by an extremely defensive posture. They were first invaded ages ago from Central Asia, then by Napoleon, and twice in one century by Germany. When the Nazis invaded Stalin’s Russia, they called it “the Great Patriotic War.” This is a war of choice. Putin can’t even justify it the way the Soviets could justify attacking their satellites, cause they were under occupation at the time. And if he wants Russians to think of Ukraine as part of the same country, he doesn’t seem to realize the effect it has on Russians to attack fellow Slavs in the same way that Hitler did.

Indeed, while America’s Dipshit Duce Donald Trump has always looked up to Putin in a “when I gwow up, I wanna be JUST WIKE YEW!” way, Putin had always seemed to be the rational adult in the relationship. Now, not so much. Trump’s defenders will frequently point out that Trump has never invaded anybody, unless you count Washington DC. Putin is the one who’s lashing out and being emotional. I think that’s also causing new feelings in the Russian domestic audience. “Wait, OUR guy isn’t the violent racist dumbfuck! He’s the guy who exploits violent racist dumbfucks! Right…?”

It got to the point where this weekend Putin announced he was putting his nuclear forces on alert. Which is kind of rhetorical in itself because strategic forces always have to be on call. But this is what happens when a tyrant or abuser doesn’t get his way all the time. The mask of civilization slips and he makes clear what he really is. Putin is quite literally trying to hold the world hostage to get Ukraine, cause apparently he wants the whole territory to be as radioactive as Chernobyl. And again, that just reveals the weakness of his position, because if this were the “golden days” of the Soviet empire, he would be winning by now. As it is, observers like Rachel Maddow have been pointing out that the Russian Federation doesn’t even have the domestic product of Italy, and if it wasn’t for his petro-chemical syndicate, he’d have no non-combat influence at all. And the best example of how things were going last week is that Russia, the biggest fuel exporter in Europe, is having stalled vehicles during the invasion cause they’ve run out of gas.

But the very fact that Putin went this far means that even if things work out for Ukraine, we have clearly come to the end of the post-Cold War era in which the great powers were no longer in an ideological death struggle. In fact that’s been the case for quite some time, it’s just now a lot more obvious.

Russia and China decided to abandon orthodox Marxism for capitalism (because you can’t rule a population when they’ve all starved to death) but that doesn’t mean they embraced nice Western liberal concepts of a world order. Having abandoned leftist internationalism, they embraced more primal and regressive ideas of human nature, rejecting concepts of universal human rights in favor of nationalism or a government with “Chinese characteristics.” Naturally, the Chinese model of totalitarianism is a little difficult to export to white Western countries, but the Russian model is another story.

Not just here, but with the Le Pen family in France and Viktor Orban in Hungary (who has coined the term ‘illiberal democracy’) you have a whole bunch of people whose model of government not only smells of fascism in its reaction to social-democrat liberalism, it is a reaction to the classical liberalism of Jefferson, Monroe, Locke and Voltaire. This general movement is often called “the Dark Enlightenment” or is associated with Catholic integralism and other philosophies that hold that classical liberalism and its alienating pursuit of individual fulfillment is spiritually exhausted and therefore the solution is to hearken back to the traditional, collectivist, authority-based models that liberalism replaced because they were spiritually exhausted (not to mention, counterproductively bloody).

As Rod Dreher says, this is part of why Putin, having abandoned Leninism in ends if not means, publicly embraced the Russian Orthodox Church: “he knew that he needed some kind of legitimating authority, so he began to rehabilitate the Orthodox Church in public life. It was a wise thing for him to do, strictly speaking from a political perspective.” This veneer of Christianity creates a role model for other anti-liberals, at least those who actually care about philosophy or theology more than bashing liberals. Dreher thinks that while such a fusion of Church and State would work in Russia or a Catholic nation like France, the US is too Protestant for that, and “We are far more likely to get a nationalist-conservative government like Hungary’s, a Christian democracy that provides something that a majority can potentially affirm. That’s what I hope for, anyway”. Of course that assumes that Hungary is either a democracy or Christian, let alone whether years of jiggering the elections and legal system have resulted in a country where we can fairly confirm that the majority is on board with Orban. But apparently that’s what guys like Dreher hope for.

Hungary is also the role model of much more public figures like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who took his show to Hungary and spent some time there expounding on the virtues of Orban’s system over America’s. While America’s liberals were sleeping, thinking that each election would go like the one before, Republican thinking evolved. Well, changed at least. It went from Newt Gingrich to the Tea Party to Steve Bannon and now to guys like Carlson. The former disputes between the two ruling factions over taxes and the like degraded to what lots of people are referring to as a Cold Civil War, where the two parties cannot agree to co-exist and are ultimately trying to destroy each other, but cannot do so openly for practical reasons (namely, the risk of killing the gravy train they are each trying to control).

Even that was too much balance of power for a party that takes its emotional lead from Donald Trump and grievance media and its intellectual lead – to the extent that it has one – from outspoken anti-liberals like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, who make no secret of their distaste for liberal artifacts like “civilian control of the military” and who have also not been ashamed of their associations with Putin.

The problem, as always, is when the wishes of this crowd smack up against complex reality.

Even Dreher, who is a lot more sympathetic to Orban than I would be, pointed out in his Monday morning post that Orban, despite getting 80 percent of Hungary’s natural gas from Russia, is totally on board with European Union measures against Putin. (Maybe because of that little misunderstanding in 1956? That’s the other thing with reactionaries, they know how to hold a grudge.) But nevertheless, Orban’s willing protege and advocate in America, Tucker Carlson didn’t seem to get the memo that Putin is a bad guy and beating up on innocent countries is not cool. He said that Ukraine wasn’t really a democracy, which apparently justifies threats from a country even less democratic. He said, in his usual bad-faith, just-askin’-questions way, “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?” Is he turning our children into transsexuals who are going to have abortions and then raise the abortions as gay? No, but apparently Biden is.

But suddenly once Tuck heard that the invasion was actually happening, that it was unpopular, AND it was not going well, he suddenly opined: “Vladimir Putin started this war. He is to blame tonight for what we’re seeing tonight in the Ukraine.” Well yes. When you start a war of choice against another country that’s not attacking you, that’s your fault, not the fault of some politician you hate. This is what’s known as a logical chain of causality. A concept Tucker might not have been aware of.

And then of course there’s our own Mini-Vlad. Leading up to the shebang, Trump continued to praise Putin and even after the invasion started, said, “I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine… Putin declares it as independent,” Trump said. “Oh, that’s wonderful. …He continued of Putin: “Here’s a guy who’s very savvy. I know him very well. Very, very well.” Wednesday at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told an audience, “I mean, (Putin)’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.” This last quote was from a Daily Beast article headlined “Trump Pals Beg Him to Stop Kissing Putin’s Ass During Ukraine Invasion“.

I mean really, if Trump doesn’t stop sucking up to Putin, his handlers are gonna have to move him from Fox News Channel to Pornhub.

But this weekend they were having the CPAP convention, even as the cool kids of the Republican Party seemed to be going elsewhere. And of course the man of the hour Saturday was Trump. He basically said that none of this would have happened if his election hadn’t been “stolen.” One suspects that if Trump ever went to church, he’d tell the congregation that Jesus wouldn’t have been crucified if the Democrats hadn’t cheated in 2020. But he also praised the Ukrainian people for their bravery, including President Zelenskyy. You know, the guy he tried to blackmail in hopes of conjuring dirt on Joe Biden.

Which just goes to show that Trump has always been a little kiss-up yes-man. What Ayn Rand would call a “second hander.” Or as Bob Dylan would say, “you just want to be on the side that’s winning.”

And maybe even Trump is starting to grasp that his personal role model is no longer winning, or at least is not invincible. I had said a while back that if the Trump Organization had been running Nazi Germany in 1939, and they had invaded Poland on September 1, the Polish Army would be reaching Berlin by September 4. Well, now you’ve got the Soviet Union’s successor state under Putin trying to invade a former satellite, and clearly it’s not THAT bad, but it ain’t good.

It’s still too early to tell, especially with all the other things that could go wrong, but this might be a turning point. If nothing else, the “conservatives” who pretend to intellect might realize that Putin is just as emotional and irrational as Trump, maybe even more so, just with less opposition. And maybe the rest of this country might start to snap out of it. Not the Party of Trump of course, which is more clearly than ever the Party of Putin. After all, at that CPAC con, he still got an overwhelming preference in the people polled for the next Republican presidential nominee. It doesn’t matter if Mitt Romney looks at Trump and calls his actions “borderline treasonous” or says that Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene are “morons.” After all, Mitt is a Mormon, and Mormons are heretics. As in, they think that Jesus Christ is someone other than Donald Trump.

But this country was already run by these guys for four years and as long as some people thought the economy was good, they didn’t care what Trump was doing to certain demographics or to the law. But then Trump Virus hit, largely because the Leader, like Putin, was a thin-skinned little tyrant who didn’t want to hear anything that made him look bad or feel bad. And a clear (though not big enough) majority of the country decided that whatever benefits they were getting out of the Trump Administration having our government in its financial portfolio, they weren’t going to matter if you were intubated. Nevertheless, these guys have been winning the culture war after Trump’s de-thronement, since it’s always easier to bitch about something than to do things yourself. Now that the international Party of Putin is exposed in its moral rot, people might quit taking their cues, if only because their aggression against the innocent and actual attacks on freedom might cause people to grow a sense of perspective. Or as one internet post this weekend put it, “As I’m watching husbands and fathers say goodbye to their loved ones, their children, not knowing if they will ever see them again, I just cannot believe that for two years we’ve been watching people cry and protest over having to wear a fucking mask.”

Cause just as people these days can’t seem to remember the politics of the Cold War, they also wouldn’t know that this is not America’s first experience with fascist sympathizers. It may not even be our worst one. Back in the 1920’s and 30’s, it seemed like fascism was the “new way.” They said “Mussolini made the trains run on time.” Winston Churchill said, “If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism. But in England we have not yet had to face this danger in the same deadly form.’ As for the Nazis, they were obviously a big inspiration to a lot of people in the US, where institutional racism was still fashionable.

Aviation hero Charles Lindbergh pursued closer ties with Nazi Germany, at first because of their aviation research, but he still refused to return a medal the Nazis had given him after Kristallnacht. He ended up being one of the founders of the isolationist “America First” Committee. This movement culminated in a German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden, February 1939, where the head of the organization went on about “Frank D. Rosenfeld” and his “Jew Deal.”

What changed? Well, after Pearl Harbor, Japan was allied with Nazi Germany, so it’s not like we had a choice to be on the sidelines anymore. But even before that, the increasing aggression of the people who claimed to be fighting against liberalism and Bolshevism included the peoples of France and Britain, countries we actually like. By 1941, it was clear that there was a global conflict with a moral dimension, no matter how much we wished to avoid it, and that if it were forced on us, that would be no fault of ours. As with World War I, Germany’s submarine warfare in the Atlantic was affecting American ships. Roosevelt got to pass the Lend Lease programs and by late 1941 72% of Americans agreed that “the biggest job facing this country today is to help defeat the Nazi Government”.

And the average American decided that however much they hated FDR’s heavy-handed, top-down socialism, they hated lickspittles and bullies even more. And largely as a result, Republicans didn’t have the White House for a full 20 years.

And it’s on the verge of happening all over again.

I am not sure Trump realizes this, except maybe in the sense that a dim shock comic realizes he’s losing his audience. But I’m pretty sure Mitch McConnell does.

It is testimony to how disingenuous and cowardly the Right is that they continue to proffer their snickering meme “Let’s Go Brandon” as though it were not a candy-ass censorship of “Fuck Joe Biden” while simultaneously continuing to use it in the hopes it will make liberals cry. Your typical leftist response to “Brandon” is, “Dude, grow up. You can go ahead and say ‘fuck Joe Biden’. We’ve been saying it a lot longer than you have.”

As the Biden Administration passed its first year in the White House (News Flash to Republicans: Joe Biden is president), it suffered multiple setbacks last week. Foremost, the Democrats failed yet again in their attempts to pass a bill through the Senate, allegedly because Joe Manchin (D.-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D.-Arizona) wouldn’t accede to a waiver of the filibuster to pass by simple majority. But for all the talk about how the filibuster is a “sacred tradition” and all the leftist talk about how the filibuster is obstruction, the filibuster is ultimately beside the point. As many liberals pointed out last week, Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans were perfectly willing to waive the filibuster during the Trump period for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and (along with Manchin and Sinema) to raise the debt ceiling this year, even though Manchin had previously said he wouldn’t support lifting the filibuster for the debt ceiling. Allegedly the difference is that “(a) Senate Democratic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, emphasized that the debate to lift the filibuster for the debt ceiling was a one-time, limited option that Republicans were happy to go along with. By contrast, lifting the filibuster on voting rights would be a lasting change to how the Senate works, and the decision rests entirely on Senate Democrats.” Uh-huh. This is the Senate. When are they NOT going to vote to raise the debt ceiling? When Republicans hold on to that it only gets them fried in the court of public opinion, which is why they let go this time. Why is a debt-ceiling exception more of a one-time exception than a vote on the voting rights bill? Simply put, the debt ceiling was a priority for everybody (even though Republicans did not vote to raise it, they just let the Democrats pass by simple majority), and the voting rights bill was not a priority for 52 of 100 Senators, including Manchin and Sinema. Thus, the filibuster is not the issue. The issue is not that Democrats can’t get 10 people in the Party of Trump to go along with their ideas. The issue is that they can’t get 50 Democrats to go along with their ideas.

As I’ve said more times than I can count, real polarization in this duopoly does not only mean that the Democratic Party only goes Left, though leftism has gotten a lot more popular in that party as the Right moves further from the mainstream and they brand even moderate positions as “socialist”. Rather, the dynamic is that the Republican Party goes that much further away from the center and then the Democrats take in everybody who’s been purged by the Republican Party, including people who don’t really belong on the Left. Like, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Manchin is an old-style Southern pol, socially conservative and fiscally liberal, who favors some public spending, which is more than Republicans who wouldn’t want any at all. Sinema is a former Green who has since become a lot more business-friendly now that she’s in a party that wins elections. In many ways she’s a lot more pro-business than Manchin. But she’s also a bisexual of no declared religion, and she would not fit in a Republican Party which is now basically a fundamentalist Christian concern whose main debate is whether Trump is Christ. Really, Sinema ought to just declare herself a Libertarian. I’d have more respect for her if she did.

I would prefer to be in the Libertarian Party rather than choose one faction of this dysfunctional duopoly, but I don’t have that luxury. Since I don’t, I would prefer to be in the party of Manchin and Sinema versus the party of AOC and Sanders. But I don’t have that luxury either. We are all stuck with the choice of The Church of Trump vs. Everybody Else, and Everybody Else needs a policy and a leader, and right now that leader is Joe Biden. I do not have the luxury of being in the party of Manchin and Sinema, and neither do Manchin and Sinema.

Because here’s the deal, as Joe would say. We’re having a congressional mid-term this year. At the end of it, Sinema and Manchin will have to deal with one of three possibilities: One, Democrats lose the Senate, or both chambers, and Manchin and Sinema will either be voting with a Democratic minority (and be useless) or with the Republican majority (and be surplus, thus also useless). Two, Democrats could lose the House but expand their Senate majority or keep the 50 seats they have. Being the Senate majority doesn’t count for as much if Democrats aren’t going to get bills from their party in the House. Three, Democrats could actually expand their lead in both the House and the Senate, and Biden will be able to negotiate with other Senators, presumably more agreeable ones, to get his fifty plus one. The bet right now is that Democrats lose seats, but any which way, Manchin and Sinema will no longer be in the catbird seat after this year.

Now in that circumstance you could try to build your reputation within your party or you could work to tear it down. As I’d already mentioned, the “progressives” had already conceded to Manchin in that they dropped their demand to tie the 2021 entitlement bill to the infrastructure bill, a demand they had held to precisely because they knew Manchin and others weren’t going to support the first bill, and lo and behold, they did not once the pressure was lifted. Are Manchin and Sinema seriously expecting to get everything they want while the progressive wing gets nothing? (I mean, Chuck Schumer is the Majority Leader, so that’s a real question.) It might be that Manchin doesn’t have to care either way because his West Virginia constituents are that much more conservative than he is, but Sinema’s Arizona is if anything going the other way. A recent poll placed her favorability with Arizonans at 8 percent. Not a typo.

Which is why whatever my preferences, I don’t like what Manchin and Sinema are doing to a party they claim to be members of, because their obstruction has less to do with principles than whatever games they want to play for their impenetrable purposes. And if you’re a Libertarian, you should either be trying to make money (which you could do better in the private sector rather than living on the government tit), or trying to serve in government, and you can’t serve very long if you keep pissing off your own constituents.

It works both ways, of course. Moderates and Biden critics would say that the “progressives” haven’t been accommodating enough to people like Manchin. But we currently have a situation where the Democrats very technically have a majority in both houses of Congress, yet they still don’t have a real majority in the Senate. And that’s because again, the Democrats aren’t a united party. To judge from 2020 election results, if being a Democrat simply means not being in the Church of Trump, then Democrats are a clear, if slim, majority of the country. But if “Democrat” means “I agree most of the time with AOC and Sanders” then the Senate is consistently demonstrating that Democrats are not the majority of the country. That’s what certain people want to impress upon Joe Biden and the “progressives.” Of course what they leave out is that if “Democrat” means “I agree most of the time with Manchin and Sinema” then even less people are in that group. I mean, in theory most of the country is centrist, but in practice anybody who’s not with the Democrats is with the Trumpniks, because it’s not like they care about fiscal conservatism and they sure as hell don’t care about inviolate Senate traditions and decorum.

And that’s what Sinema, and Manchin, and their apologists, don’t seem to get, or if they do, don’t want to admit.

Now supposedly people in Washington are trying to proceed on the basis of taking some of the individual ideas in Joe’s “Build Back Better” and try to get them passed because they’re more appealing to Manchin than the whole package. That at least would address the centrist concern that the Biden Administration didn’t acknowledge their starting position with a Congress that had the slimmest of majorities and therefore could not afford to be too ambitious or “progressive.” But the Congress is not something the president can directly control, no matter how much it seems otherwise. The other issues with Biden concern the stuff he can directly control. For instance, his own mouth.

The day before the one-year anniversary of Biden’s inaugural, he held a press conference for the better part of two hours, which in itself ought to dispel Trumpnik jokes about “Sleepy Joe” having no “stamina.” That didn’t mean he acquitted himself perfectly. Or even that well. Mostly the event was noted for President Biden saying that he would “guess” that Russia would invade Ukraine, and that “a minor incursion” might not merit a serious international response. Which was a terrible thing to say. That is, it was terrible to even admit that we wouldn’t respond to an attack on Ukraine’s borders. Far better to do what Obama did when he just let Putin walk in to Crimea and acted like it never happened.
This was the sort of thing that made people think of Chamberlain at Munich, or later in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland and the West didn’t do much of anything until they got invaded themselves. Not to compare Vladimir Putin to Hitler. Hitler had cool sidekicks like Mussolini and Tojo. Putin has Trump. And not like Putin doesn’t have reason to feel that the Western powers are crowding him in, which is why he’s so obsessed with making sure Ukraine can’t get into NATO. But hey, it’s not like our reputation for living standards and human rights is that high any more, and if Ukraine and the Baltic States would still rather deal with us than Putin, maybe he ought to ask himself why.

Thus Biden is in the fix of having to pretend that we are going to seriously react to Putin’s attack on Ukraine (which on the downlow has actually been happening through deniable assets for at least a year) when there are various reasons it’s not going to happen. Biden is reminding people of his withdrawal from Afghanistan, which I thought was a great example of knowing when to cut bait, but which critics are in retrospect seeing as the start of his decline, especially as that country becomes more of a clusterfuck as days go by. The “international community” may be as much of an oxymoron as “gaming industry ethics” or “the conscience of a conservative” but it seems they still demand a position of strength. And that is what Biden is not giving them.

And did you catch where he said he didn’t think that the Republicans would be this obstructionist? After eight years of working in the Obama Administration? What, did Joe think that Mitch and the others would work better with him cause he’s an old, white Senatorial veteran like they are? If anything, the Republicans are treating him with MORE contempt than they did Obama. At least they acknowledged Obama was president.

Biden did say one true thing, though. When set upon by an unusually large number of reporters from the right-wing grievance media, Biden said, “What is their (Republican) agenda? They had an agenda back in the administration when — the eight years we were president and vice president, but I don’t know what their agenda is now. What is it? The American public is outraged about the tax structure we have in America. What are they proposing to do about it? Anything? Have you heard anything? I mean, anything? I haven’t heard anything.”

But that’s been the case for quite some time. Again, when Trump got elected, he told Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell that after so many years of them voting against the Affordable Care Act, that when he was inaugurated, he expected a ‘repeal and replace’ national health care plan on his desk, Day One. And he never got it. Republicans don’t have anything to offer because that’s not their business. They exploit discontent with the Democrat establishment, use that to get power and then when they have power loot the candy store until they get voted out in turn. They attack the establishment without offering an alternative cause it doesn’t matter. They do it cause they know it works, and the fact that this dynamic worked against them so clearly in 2020 doesn’t matter, cause they’re trying to make sure they never have to lose an election again, which is what that voting rights bill was about. But that’s also what happens when you have no philosophy beyond what serves you in the moment and Tuesday you’ve always been at war with Eastasia and Wednesday you’ve always been at war with Eurasia and at peace with Eastasia.

The stakes for this year’s congressional elections are such that Democrats can’t really afford to lose even one chamber to Republicans (among other things, that means the House investigation into the January 6 attack would be shut down by Kevin McCarthy and the other cultists), but discontent with the president’s party is almost a universal, which is why the Democrats are predicted to lose seats, just like the president’s party is predicted to lose seats every midterm. The utter nihility of the Republican Party, not even considering Trump worship, is one reason Republicans might not do that well. But as I had said in reaction to last November’s odd-year elections, “Americans can understand, full well in advance, just how criminal and irresponsible Donald Trump and his party of enablers are, and Democrats can STILL lose an election to them because simply being NotDonaldTrump is not the same as being good for anything.” It ultimately doesn’t matter that Republicans are worse than useless, because people are only looking at who’s in charge now, and Democrats are not really making a good impression for themselves.

Because when Biden first announced his run for president, I concluded, “The strength of Joe Biden as a candidate is the implicit promise that once he’s elected president, things will get back to where they were before. But that is also his real weakness. ”

There is no getting back to the way things were, partially due to everything else happening, but also because, to the extent that we have been getting back to business as usual, it just confirms that business as usual wasn’t working and that things had to change.

So “conservatives”, it doesn’t even matter if you say ‘fuck Joe Biden.’ He and his own party are doing a better job of that than you did in 2020.