Politics

Diagnosing Democrats’ Achilles Heel

The essential difference between Republicans and Democrats.

There are two critical battles being waged within the Democratic Party right now, and they intersect at the point where Joe Biden’s agenda will likely succeed or fail. The first is in the Senate as conservative Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema balk at Biden’s massive proposed spending to implement the largest social welfare program since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society reforms to combat poverty in the 1960s.

The second schism is in the form of a simmering resentment in the House between hard-left Justice Democrats led by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the more moderate progressive wing led by Speaker-in-waiting Hakeem Jeffries, who is widely expected to take up Nancy Pelosi’s gavel sometime shortly after the midterm elections (or the minority leadership if Democrats lose their majority).

The Senate fault line rests on how much money to spend enacting Biden’s ambitious expansion of the social safety net or what he calls “human infrastructure,” and which currently has a hefty $3.5 trillion price tag and subsidizes child and elder caregiving, health and dental care, education, programs to fight climate change, and affordable housing, among other things.

Sinema and Manchin are red and purple state Democrats, respectively, and they represent centrists who generally feel skeptical of both the massive government spending being proposed and the liberal wing that now dominates the party. These two are out in front providing cover for the many more Democrats who feel approximately the same way, but won’t publicize it for fear of angering the ascendant left-wing of the party.

The House conflict is an uglier and more elemental, personality-driven turf war between hard-left socialist Democrats who have come to loathe moderate business-friendly “establishment” Democrats, putting a target on their backs in primaries and acting as loudly disruptive political insurgents. That fight is encapsulated in the bubbling bad blood that exists between Chairman Hakeem Jeffries and the Justice Democrats caucus, and their PAC that has successfully worked to unseat moderates so as to replace them with hard-left activists.

There’s no love lost between progressive Democrats who feel the hard-left has gone too far, become too woke, and is far too radical to possess much, if any, national electability. These moderate Democrats might point out that Republicans trot out Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ilhan Omar as political boogeymen on Fox News, using their harsh, uncompromising rhetoric against Democrats and scaring middle Americans who might be willing to vote blue into voting red.

With Speaker Nancy Pelosi tying the fate of the bipartisan “roads, bridges, water” infrastructure bill in the Senate to the “human infrastructure” bill in the House, these dynamics will make or break Joe Biden’s agenda. With everyone trying to maximize their own power all the time, and with there existing the thinnest of voting margins, complete success or total failure may hinge on the way these delicate political relationships either work or break down.

Both of these fights reflect the latent self-destructive impulse that’s always lurking right beneath the surface in modern America’s liberal politics. Even as the Republican Party has turned into a haven for extremists and a neofascist cult of personality under Donald Trump, threatening to extinguish democracy itself, Democrats have been slow to cohere and organize themselves effectively in recognition of the immense stakes of being or appearing disorganized and weak at this critical juncture.

Republicans simply don’t suffer this same affliction, which is why they’re able to hold off popular Democratic priorities (and presidencies and Supreme Court justices) and dominate American politics so successfully year in and year out. Republicans generally stick together, keeping disarray out of sight of the public, and solving most of their disagreements in-house.

Moreover, Republicans are intrinsically ruthless.

They don’t tolerate dissent within their ranks, and their political messaging is almost always both superior and presented far better than whatever Democrats produce. This has the effect of marginalizing popular Democratic initiatives, like raising taxes on trillion-dollar corporations and keeping guns away from criminals and those with mental illness, and burying Democratic priorities under their own dead weight rather than because of any superior or even viable Republican policy alternative.

Republicans have perfected the art of maximizing power, frequently capitalizing on fractures among Democrats, widening fissures. Their heartless approach to politics is personified in Mitch McConnell’s ruthless reign atop the Senate.

Indeed, Mitch McConnell’s Republican Party understands politics to be a zero sum game of machiavellian power, whereas Democrats understand politics to be less a game and more of a process of repairing the damage Republicans perpetually inflict on the country while also trying to improve American lives, at least within the contours of whatever culture war distraction Republicans have concocted for that particular election cycle.

Theirs are two fundamentally different ways of understanding the nature of government, and how to wield power.

Republicans since Ronald Reagan have seen American government as itself the problem, rather than as a vehicle to fix problems. This is the philosophical underpinning of the dysfunction currently gripping American politics: one half of the political system sees government as an impediment to be defeated, subverted, and undone.

For all the Democratic Party’s apparently higher ideals about what elected government can and should do for all its citizens, their strategic vision about how to implement their goals often falls far short of success, lost to infighting and dying at the hands of sharper edged rhetorical swords wielded by a Republican Party with literally no limits and utterly zero shame.

Part of the problem is exactly that: the GOP will do anything in pursuit of power, even when it’s terrible for the country.

These last years watching every elected Republican either kowtow to Donald Trump or retire made that exceptionally clear. It isn’t as if they didn’t know Trump was inept and corrupt. Rather, they knew but they did not care, because Trumpism is a political winner, at least among conservatives.

Try to imagine Democrats continuing to support a president after he instigated a violent insurrection, and tried to overturn an election.

It’s impossible.

This is the Republican Party’s chief advantage over Democrats. When you have no ideals, all you’re left with is weaponizing a shallow ideology, and in asserting political advantage by any means available. When you don’t have to actually repair problems, you have the freedom to say and do anything that hurts your opponents, with the flexibility to shift with the wind.

Democrats can’t do this. They can’t rely on culture war marginalia to fix gun violence, say, or stop climate change through lies.

One party stands for something, and the other has become a place of nihilism and empty rhetoric, standing for nothing beyond its own power.

It isn’t hard to see.

Democrats are close to passing generational legislation that will reshape America, if they can somehow keep themselves in line and out of the circular firing squad that is liberal politics.

The radicals and the moderates are both trying to achieve something profound for Americans, and that is the crucial difference between virtually every elected Democrat and every elected Republican. America is on the verge of winning a more robust social safety net, if Democrats can keep themselves together, and remember how critical it is that they demonstrate to America that government can still function for the good of society. The petty politics of rivalry and partisan purity are meaningless compared to this.

There has never been a more important time in America’s history to show that democracies can still work than right now. As Republicans increasingly opt out of democracy, Democrats must prove they are up to the momentous task of governing effectively, and for all.

The window for error is now nonexistent, and the prospect of failure unthinkable.

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