The big news ending last week was that the big vote that Speaker Nancy Pelosi set up in the House for Democrats’ reconciliation bill had to be postponed because the left wing of the party balked at the current state of negotiations. Basically there was a “bipartisan” bill, so called because even Republicans said they would agree with it on paper, for $1.2 trillion to cover infrastructure, versus the bill that both President Biden and Democratic “progressives” want, which was over $3.5 trillion dollars for a whole bunch of “progressive” stuff that that wing of the party wants and thinks they can load on while we’re spending over a trillion dollars regardless. And as with a lot of these bills that absolutely have to be passed to avoid the collapse of Western Civilization, the current ruling faction wants to sneak in a lot of stuff without analysis.
For example, I am not as much a fan of the Libertarian Party as I used to be, but I caught one post on their Facebook page where they discussed a “mileage tax” buried in the bill. If you take a deeper dive, you will find articles clarifying that it is officially a “National motor vehicle per-mile user fee pilot”, and it is not a tax. What it is, however, is a proposal to fund a study on how to implement a per-mile fee on vehicles in this country, supposedly as a replacement for gas taxes. So on that score, I’d agree with the LP’s rebuttal: “If they support a program to study a tax, they 100% support that tax. And 19 Senate Republicans already voted yes on it.” Before that, they said: “Imagine supporting that and still looking poor people in the eye and say that you want the rich to pay their fair share.”
The fact of the matter is, we have the government revenue system that we do because the politicians who are already in charge have already decided they’re not going to “make the rich pay their fair share” and even if they did, government is going to spend as much money as it wants regardless of how much it makes. I said this earlier: It doesn’t matter whether Jeff Bezos pays his “fair share”, you would need to multiply Jeff Bezos’ total assets by a factor over almost 25 to get this government’s budget for 2020. And if we all agree it’s unfair that the rest of us have to pay taxes when Jeff Bezos effectively pays none at all, that’s the decision of the people who are actually running the government. After all they only deal with voters once every two years at most and they deal with their contributors almost every day.
In similar terms, liberal Judd Legum posted on Facebook: “This isn’t tough. Let’s say you are paying $1000 a month for health insurance. Then America shifts to Medicare for All and you are paying nothing but your taxes go up by $750. Calling that a ‘tax increase’ is a dishonest Republican talking point.” Yes, except: it’s dishonest to say that’s NOT a tax. It IS a net decrease in the amount of money you need to pay out, and that’s what liberals ought to be emphasizing. But the end result is accomplished VIA a tax. And this is why liberals are losing the public debate, because their best advocates are on Facebook, Twitter and MSDNC, and they’re being disingenuous about how their agenda really works, and even in that disingenuousness they’re still more articulate and effective than the Biden Administration or most Democrats in government.
Remember in the early 20th Century, they told the public that when they changed the Constitution to allow for a direct income tax, it was only 1 percent for income of up to $20,000 a year (which back then was real money). And now look. This is why Republicans can get away with opposing all taxes no matter what, cause the average person doesn’t care if Jeff Bezos gets soaked, he cares that some guy named FICA is taking over one-sixth of his paycheck.
So maybe that’s why not everyone in this country or even everyone in Congress is as exercised about this negotiation as the Left and the Mainstream Media are. Or maybe it’s something else. Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema held a Capitol Hill wine fundraiser on September 28, during budget negotiations. Or as I say, “Priorities.”
And the other Democratic Senator who usually gets blamed for Congress not getting anything done, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, told reporters who questioned his position on his Party’s bills, “I’ve never been a liberal in any way, shape or form. There’s no one that’s ever thought I was.”
Well, thanks for saying it, Joe. Even if you ARE a Democrat, that doesn’t make you a liberal even if that’s where binary American political logic is these days. I’M not a liberal. And it seems to amaze “progressives”, but just because the nominally progressive (or at least not regressive) party they belong to is technically in control of the government, that doesn’t mean they are a majority in this country, just as they aren’t really in control of the government.
If the duopoly system deceives Republicans into thinking their theocrat-corporatist dogma is a lot more popular than it actually is, “progressives” have deceived themselves into thinking their agenda is more popular than it is just because they’re the movers and shakers in one of the two parties that Americans have deceived themselves into thinking are the only ones we can vote for.
That setup ultimately hurts Republicans in a lot of ways, which is why they’re now trying to compensate with their state laws for “election integrity” because they’re losing even some of the people who have voted for them. But in the meantime, duopoly and binary thinking hurt Democrats and “progressives” more because for one thing, they’re actually trying to get stuff done against the premises of a system that has all kinds of safeguards against swift and radical change, and all the Republicans need to do is game that system.
But it also hurts the Left because the need to glop everyone together in two broad coalitions means that their focus is diluted. Many times, I have gone over how America’s alleged polarization is really a case of one party polarizing itself to purge everyone but the True Believers and the other party taking everyone else by default. What calls itself conservatism today basically sums up as “We hate abortion and gays.” Not that previous conservatives didn’t oppose abortion and homosexuality, but they had a little more philosophical grounding. So on just those two subjects, which are both more complex than blanket approval or opposition, anybody who acknowledges that complexity is necessarily outside the party of “We hate abortion and gays.” But that means that the Democratic Party has to include a whole bunch of people who support abortion rights and queer rights, and also a bunch of people whose opinion is more like “I oppose abortion, but I don’t think it should be prevented in cases of rape or incest” or “I don’t like gays and trans people, but I don’t think they should be sent into camps.”
In other words, because some of us are in the Democratic Party simply because we don’t want this government to be returned to the business portfolio of the Trump Organization, doesn’t mean we’re equally enthusiastic about all aspects of the “progressive” agenda. And that group includes the Democrats in Congress.
Assuming of course that Manchin and Sinema are the only two holdouts against the reconciliation bill.
As for the president, Joe Biden is a leftist only in the minds of “conservatives” who think that anybody to the left of Mitt Romney is a leftist. And given that Biden is the one pushing the $3.5 trillion bill (at least I think he is), the question of whether you are or are not a progressive isn’t the issue in getting a bill passed. If it was, you could negotiate. It shouldn’t be too much to say that the “progressive” figure is too high and spends too much money when we don’t know where it’s going, and it shouldn’t be unthinkable to haggle it down. The main reason I’d agree to even $1.2 trillion is because our country’s infrastructure, including medical infrastructure, has been neglected for so long that America threatens to be a Third World banana republic with nuclear weapons. (Much like Russia, which is another goal that Vladimir Putin and the Republicans have in common.) It is something else to deliberately hold up any progress just for the sake of doing so, because that’s what your donors want, or just because your party’s hair-thin majority means you get to make everybody dance for you.
I mean, this is where Republicans want the Democrats. They know that if they just hang together as a party and not agree to a single thing the governing party wants then the Democrats will have to conduct all bill negotiations amongst themselves. And that will end up having “progressive” bills watered down or even stopped. This is what happened with the Affordable Care Act. And the public disappointment from that made it that much easier for Republicans to retake Congress in 2010. And that undermined everything President Obama wanted to do from then on, even though he got re-elected. And that was BEFORE Trump. And Democrats know all of this too, they know this is the Republican strategy, and yet they keep playing into it.
Right now, the Democratic Party reminds me of that recurring gag in Peanuts with Charlie, Lucy and the football, except that Charlie Brown is the one yanking the football away from himself.
And that is because the Republicans are thinking strategically and the Democrats aren’t.
And that is because paradoxically, the party of altruism, collectivism and (democratic) socialism is incapable of getting everyone united on the same goal, whereas the party (that claims to be) of selfishness, individualism and capitalism can get all of its members to subordinate their personal consciences to the will of one leader, whether that leader is a paragon of Machiavellian cunning like Mitch McConnell or a pumpkin-colored inbred who is so lazy he thinks Manual Labor is the President of Mexico.
And THAT is because the party of selfishness and individualism has everyone pretty much on the same page. However much they may talk about the virtues of hard work and the free market, they know they’ve got it made as members of Congress, they have benefits that they would not get even in the private sector (if you’re already rich, like Mitt Romney, so much the better) and the best way to maintain what are effectively lifelong privileges is to cater to the donor class and run the country for their benefit.
Whereas with the Democrats, you can’t get “progressives” and centrists to agree, but while some progressives realize the consequences of letting Republicans win (namely, that the January 6 mentality takes over government), centrists don’t seem to think that’s such a big deal. Cause in the end, the main thing they have in common with the Republicans is that they want to keep their lifelong privileges and do to that, they have to do what the donors want. The fact that America might become a fascist state without the intellectual depth isn’t something that concerns either the donors or them.
That being the case, the old Washington system of negotiating with senators for quid pro quo isn’t going to work on the likes of Kyrsten Sinema, cause her donors are clearly giving her more than Joe Biden can.
So assuming he hasn’t already done so, I would counsel Joe Biden to be a bit less Barack Obama and a little more LBJ. If I was Biden, this is what I would be telling Sinema, Manchin, and anybody else who needs it:
“You’re representing your states and your country, even if your donors think that you’re just running the government for their benefit. Cause they don’t care if America becomes a Third World banana republic.”
(And they really should. As former Senator Al Franken said recently, ‘if your local bridge collapses when you’re trying to cross, your Mercedes will sink in the river just as fast as a Hyundai.’)
“So here’s the deal. This is the budget bill I agreed to. In Washington terms that means the Party agreed to it. That means YOU agree to it. If you expect to have the benefits of Democratic Party affiliation you need to work with the Party. If you work against it, you’re not getting one red cent for your re-election campaigns. You’re not getting any other Democrat to endorse you and if you get primaried, I’m endorsing that person.
“If that seems all or nothing, you’re the ones giving me nothing. Give me something to negotiate with. If you won’t, you kill my Party’s agenda and my chances of getting re-elected and that doesn’t seem to bug you, but you can’t screw with me and expect me to just smile.
“Your other choice is to do what you’re doing indirectly and do it out in the open and join the Republican Party. Because in this system we’ve created, if you’re not on my side, you’re on theirs. After all what’s the point in saying we have a majority if we’re not going to act like it? I know that’s a big bluff on my part, but hey, if you call it, I’m sure Mitch and the Republicans will treat you just as generously as you’ve treated us.
“Look at it another way. Do you know Roman history? Well- imagine I’m Caesar. So you can stab me in the back, just remember how that worked out for Brutus.”