“I bear true and an existing witness to this barrel of monkeys.
A self proclaimed immoral success, Perfected by each whereof
Individually deadly and equally so
And spread about the surrendered troops,
For even thousands of miles will not tear apart their communication, or the lack thereof.
Vultures, liars, thieves, each proclaim their innocence
In no suggestion or rhyme, your weapon is contained in the wrecking of the keeping the desired effect.
The breaking of the spirit thwarts the whole being.
Your weapon is guilt, your weapon is guilt, your weapon is guilt.
Guilt.”
-Alice in Chains, “Sludge Factory”
It’s almost time for Congress to go into its annual August recess. If you need to ask why Washington must have a recess in August, you have obviously never visited Washington in August.
Before that can happen, there’s a couple of bits they have to get out of the way. Tuesday they finally started the “1-6” investigation in the House of Representatives, which in its first day gave us the surprising news that the people who attempted to kill black police officers while storming the Capitol were racist, giving MSNBC the opportunity to play the N-Word more times than an episode of The Dave Chappelle Show. The investigation started no thanks to House Republican “leader” Kevin McCarthy, who last week attempted to throw House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a curve by announcing his Party’s picks for the investigation panel would include Gentleman Gym Jordan (BR-Ohio) and a couple others who voted not to certify the 2020 Electoral College results, in effect endorsing the January 6 attack on the process. When Pelosi said she wouldn’t let the election-deniers on the panel, McCarthy said he was withdrawing all Republicans from consideration, including the ones who did vote to certify the election. Basically McCarthy’s posture was that if he can’t get his way and troll the committee with joke picks, then he’s going to take his ball and go home. The joke’s on him, cause he has no ball.
The Democrats, as the party in charge this Congress, offered a “9-11 style” bipartisan commission on January 6, but this was under the impression immediately after the event that Republicans, who were threatened by the attack too, would be willing to investigate it. They are not, for the same reason that Osama bin Laden would not have cooperated with the 9-11 commission, because he knew what they would find. The only threat McCarthy could make was to withdraw his party’s endorsement and thus the appearance of bipartisanship. But having already given up on bipartisanship, and conceding his Party’s identification with the rioters, McCarthy had only the pretense of legitimacy in the debate, and since everyone knew it was not sincere, he gained nothing by refusing to cooperate.
And in what is allegedly not a related event, Democrats in the Senate are having trouble passing a $600 billion dollar infrastructure bill, which apparently cannot be passed as a simple-majority budget bill because West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin (of course) wanted it done on a bipartisan basis. Which of course requires negotiating with Republicans, who since Bill Clinton have decided that giving Democrats any help doesn’t help them.
It also didn’t help that Donald Trump, He Be King Dick Who Got Biggest Of All Dicks, ordered his subordinate microdicks in what used to be a political party to not cooperate with the Democrats.
I am not so sure that this is a brilliant Machiavellian strategy so much as Trump’s usual reactive emotion when the grownups are doing something serious without him in the room: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA nobody’s payin’ ATTENTION t’ MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”
But as I keep saying, not like it really matters, cause even when the Crybaby Caudillo does the right thing – like getting the COVID vaccine and telling other people to do so – it’s with a lot less emphasis than when he tells people to do the wrong thing, cause he is at least as much follower as leader. Trump is the leader of the former Party of Lincoln because he is what they want. He personifies the attitude they already had even before he became a presidential candidate.
To a very limited extent, very far back in time, this intransigence was understandable. If you saw much of American history after FDR (after Wilson, really) as less “progress” and more an entropic slide towards more and more statism and unnecessary government controls, even compromise that gained some of your goals was a defeat in that the other side got further toward what they wanted, especially since victory by gradualism is an explicit strategy of democratic socialists.
But even if you favor socialism over evil “selfishness”, the real problem with the Right these days (including a lot of libertarianism, sadly) is that reliance on talk show hosts as intellectual role models has rotted their former reputation in philosophy. This was made that much worse by the fact that radio hosts and their descendants on basic cable were able to monetize politics, and that meant telling people what they wanted to hear, not the hard facts. They never put their ideas up for test and debate; rather Republicans used “safe” districts to maintain their place in national government, and since certain seats were safe, primaries were really a contest of the biggest whacko ideologue. This created a party where appraisal of facts was not only not a priority, it was actually unwelcome. This was BEFORE Trump. The Right got lazy, basically. So Trump is just the logical extension of that. He can tell the redcaps to hate science and hate eggheads and not cooperate with the Beltway establishment. That’s what they want to do. If he tried to push people towards vaccinating to stop the Delta virus, that wouldn’t be popular, and you can’t be a leader if you don’t follow the crowd.
The stubbornness of the NotDemocrats is not a Randian refusal to compromise with evil. It is a five-year-old who refuses to have peas for dinner. (And yes, liberals, there IS a difference, not that Republicans care to acknowledge it.)
Regarding the infrastructure bill, Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine, “As it turns out, the (bill’s) sheer size creates a kind of protection by reducing Biden’s agenda to a single vote. Some moderate Democrats from conservative states or districts might wish to position themselves to the administration’s right, but none of them can afford to let Biden’s presidency come crashing down in Congress. Perhaps the most important clue to the president’s fate came from Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in Congress, who said in January, “We’re going to make Joe Biden successful.” The worst possible outcome for any Democrat — the opening that will let the Republican Party back into power — would be for their party to be seen as having failed at governing. They can and will negotiate the parameters, but the only leverage they hold is mutually assured destruction.”
Which is of course the same reason Republicans have to stick together: to make Joe Biden unsuccessful. Which is basically the same motive as making Barack Obama unsuccessful. Blame the other party for not being able to keep its promises (eliding the role you had in that result) and say that you’ll do a better job if you get elected to Congress. The problem of course is that they did that with Obama, it didn’t work, they tried it again and that time it did work (cause Obama’s successor was Hillary Clinton) but then Republicans had to spend the next four years proving they would do a better job than Obama Democrats, and absolutely failed. Not that Trump’s (sorta) fiscal conservative policy didn’t have real benefits for the economy, which was the main reason he had as much popularity with serious people as he did, but the crash in face-to-face business thanks to Trump Virus (TM) followed by the rapid recovery of the Wall Street sector made it clear to a lot of people that Wall Street is not the entire economy and should not be treated as such. This also means that middle class Americans are becoming less sympathetic to the idea that whatever is good for Big Business is automatically good for them and should be promoted at their expense.
What is happening is that each party is doing what makes sense for them, and many Democrats (namely Joe Manchin) can’t understand that what makes sense for Republicans is not what Democrats think makes sense for the country, and they ought to give up assuming good faith from them, since Republicans have already decided to assume the worst about Democrats. The two ruling factions have been a state of cold war (not competition) for a while, and Democrats are finally starting to realize it.
The architects of duopoly are now becoming victims of the system they sought to create. Democrats have painted themselves in a corner with duopoly – however much they claim they need two parties to have a political debate, it’s not something they really seem to believe. Well, now they’ve gotten their wish because now all of the centrist non-progressives are basically on their side, but that means, as with the Affordable Care Act, that all political debate is within the Democratic Party, because Republicans refuse to offer any ideas. And that means that despite their technical majority in numbers, Democrats can’t get anything done because they aren’t one movement, they’re just a coalition of NotRepublicans. The altruist-socialist Left that claims to be the real Democratic Party has never really been a majority of public opinion, and if I do find myself voting with the “progressives” more, that’s only because the last two years of Trump Virus (TM) has made it clear that this country’s lack of support systems is an outright national security issue that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. (And if those leftists sneer that the virus proves people can’t be trusted to do the right thing without being forced, it also proves that government can’t make them do the right thing, either.)
Meanwhile, if it seems odd that Republicans are only enacting the Trump agenda of voter suppression and vote nullification after he lost (as opposed to succumbing to his demands in the moment, like he wanted) it’s because the aftermath of January 6 has made two things clear: However much the sensible Republicans wished Trump would go away after Biden’s inauguration, the “base” will not give up Trump no matter what, and the factors that caused Republicans to lose the suburbs and critical Electoral College battles will only get worse as sane people realize that electing Republicans would mean electing Trump and electing Trump would mean January 6 every damn day. It was all the Party could do to get swing states with white people and Hispanics and now they have to worry that not even a majority of white people are on board anymore.
Republicans have basically painted themselves in a corner with duopoly: they survived mainly by suppressing any competition for the not-Democrat vote, just as Democrats suppress any competition for the not-Republican vote. And just as Democrats scare their people into voting for them on the premise that if they don’t, America is going to become a fascist hellhole, Republicans scare their people into thinking if Democrats win, America will become a socialist hellhole. But Republicans were starting to gain the advantage in that, one, Republican presidencies may have been disagreeable to liberals but were not Hell on Earth to the rest of us, and two, the Democrats’ main constituencies were sick of waiting for that party to keep their promises, and despite outnumbering Republicans on paper, didn’t vote in enough numbers to throw Republican governments out. Meanwhile Republicans did have voter loyalty because their main constituencies were convinced that the evil Demonrats were going to have all the white babies aborted and then turn them gay. The difference is that Democrats are starting to listen to people outside their inner circle and are trying to get a majority of votes, and however haphazardly, are starting to do so. Republicans however are only listening to their biggest fanatics, which is how we got Trump, who may not have believed in all the birther-Tea Party-Q nonsense at first, but told the suckers what they wanted to hear, to such an extent that he bought into it. Basically, Trump is to lying what Al Pacino in Scarface was to cocaine: He used to just be a dealer then he became his own biggest customer.
And just as Trump single-handedly killed Atlantic City by putting his casinos in competition with each other so that they cannibalized each others’ business, he eventually created a situation where his continued lying and incompetence meant that his fortunes as president were at odds with his Party’s generally strong performance in the 2020 elections. The short term results of that became clear as Trump sabotaged his own Party in the Georgia US Senate runoffs by saying that his loss could only happen cause the system was rigged, therefore the whole thing was rigged, by implication meaning the same system by which other Republicans won. In that runoff, the dynamic started to reverse: Now that people besides leftists saw America as turning into a fascist hellhole, it was the Democrats who were turning out to vote no matter what, and it was Republican constituencies who stayed home cause they felt like they were being lied to. And then the day after Kelly Loeffler lost her Georgia Senate seat, the Congress had to certify the Electoral College result, so Trump, his family and his stooges came out to the mob of thugs who’d been organizing for weeks and implied that it sure would be a shame if Mike Pence and the other Republicans didn’t throw out that whole “Electoral College” thing and declare God-Emperor Trump our immortal Lord and Savior. And for some reason the guys who had been bitching about the election online for two months, coordinated over social media, and came to DC with zip ties, riot gear and scaffolding for a hanging suddenly decided to get violent.
And as amazing as Democrats find it that the senior Republicans haven’t run Trump out of their Party by now, if not voting with them on impeachment (given that he tried to KILL them and all), you have to look at it from their side. I’m sure Mitch McConnell would want to make sure Trump can’t run for President again, even if he wasn’t going to let his perfect little boy get convicted on impeachment, but Mitch knows that if the Party did what it should have done a while ago – kicked out Trump and any other politician who supports his lies – then all the registered Republicans who believe those lies will quit voting Republican and either stay home or vote for whatever clown car of a political organization Trump wants to put together. At that point, Republicans might still have a few places where they could win, but most of the places where their seats are safe are only safe because of Trumpniks. Kicking out Trump would mean the end of the Republicans as a competitive national party, and if Republicans won’t openly admit this, Democrats are too polite to bring it up. In any case, Republicans are clearly less afraid of a permanent dictatorship of Trumpism than a permanent dictatorship of the Democratic Party, because in effect, that is what abandoning Trump would accomplish.
However much I might not want a one-party state, even under the Democrats, I still have to ask Republicans: whose fault is that? Your whole attitude is “You HAVE to vote for us, no matter how horrible we are, cause you don’t want those OTHER people taking over, do you??” Dudes, ask yourselves: How well did that work for Hillary Clinton?
Because going into the 2022 elections, the question is not whether Republican strategy makes sense for their priorities but whether their priorities are good strategy. In his orders to the troops, Trump said, “Don’t do the infrastructure deal, wait until after we get proper election results in 2022 or otherwise (Hmm?), and regain a strong negotiating stance”. Now, given the strength of Republican performance in November 2020, and the usual weakness of the president’s party in a midterm elections, Republicans would have reason to believe that they can just hold out and be “strong” and end up getting what they want if they just wait out the election cycle. It’s what they’re inclined to do anyway. But then again there was every reason to believe the incumbent US Senators of Georgia would win their runoffs and keep Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader. And then somebody had to open his mouth and cause problems. And THEN January 6 happened.
To say that this “conservative” movement is evil would be true, but it avoids the point. Because whether you want to admit this or not, Americans like evil. We like Nazis. We like Confederates. We like rooting for the Empire in Star Wars and the Klingons in Star Trek.
But to paraphrase General Patton, one thing Americans absolutely will not tolerate is a loser.
And while real Christians might have been waiting over 2000 years for Christ to come back to life and regain dominion over the universe, I don’t think even Republicans can afford to give Cheeto Jesus that much benefit of the doubt.