The Impending Doom of the Democratic Party

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I belong to no organized political party. I’m a Democrat.
– Will Rogers

I don’t care what he has to say,
It makes no difference anyway.
Whatever it is, we’re against it!
– Paraphrase of Harry Ruby’s song lyric for Groucho Marx from the movie Horse Feathers (1932)

This time, it was supposed to be different.

This time, the Democratic Party was supposed to have learned its lesson from 1993 and 2009, years in which they took the Presidency and both houses of Congress and then frittered away their majority pushing through a complicated piece of legislation that had to be compromised in advance to appease both “moderate” and “progressive” factions, while the Republicans circled around them like hungry sharks ready to devour them in the next election.

In 1993, the complicated piece of legislation was an attempt to overhaul America’s bizarre mess of a health-care system and get more people access to medical care. In 2009, after the failure of Hillary Clinton’s attempt to do that, it was another attempt to reform American health care – which actually went through Congress but proved, at least early on, to be so savagely unpopular American voters took control of Congress (one house, anyway) away from the Democrats that had loosed this bill upon them.

One of the reasons it was supposed to be different in 2021 was that the new Democratic President, Joe Biden, wasn’t an outsider like Bill Clinton who’d never held a higher office than governor of Arkansas. Nor was he someone like Barack Obama who had run for President while just halfway through his first term in the Senate. Biden was supposed to be an old, experienced legislative hand who’d served nearly 40 years in the Senate before he left it to become Obama’s Vice-President.

Biden was supposed to be the compromise candidate, acceptable to all wings of his party, sort-of progressive but not so progressive he’d scare off moderate voters. He was supposed to be a skilled negotiator who could reach across the aisle and win at least some Republican support for his proposals and thereby claim the magic mantle of “bipartisanship.” And most of all, he was supposed to be an old hand at getting government to work and actually do things – a sharp contrast to his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, who with the help of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell got through a huge tax cut for the wealthiest Americans and packed the federal judiciary with Right-wing ideologues but proved both unwilling and unable to do the nuts-and-bolts work of running America.

Only now it’s all happening again, only worse. This time the Democrats in both houses of Congress are battling over a bill – or, rather, two bills – given the vague title of “infrastructure.” One of them passed the U.S. Senate and even got some Republican support because it’s only about the traditional definition of “infrastructure” – building roads, bridges and other big capital projects to help Americans move themselves and their products across this country and elsewhere. The other is a social-democratic wish list being offered by a surprisingly progressive-sounding President that includes expanding Medicare, universal pre-school (an idea I once argued against on the ground that the kids of well-to-do parents don’t need it), free community college and increased pay for health-care workers, including in-home caregivers (which is how I’ve made my living since 1984).

The bill containing the social-democratic wish list also includes programs to fight human-caused climate change – perhaps the most significant issue there is right now, because if we don’t respond to it adequately enough Earth will become literally uninhabitable for humans in the next century or two (or maybe even sooner). It’s also one of the most controversial because at least one of America’s two major political parties outright denies its existence. Whether it’s because they’re economically dependent on energy industries and other capitalists who would suffer big-time under the economic and social readjustments this country, and every other one on earth, would have to do to tackle climate change, or whether they have personal psychological or religious problems with it (like the evangelical Christians who believe it’s blasphemous to claim that humans can render the Earth uninhabitable because only God can do that), there are millions of Americans who outright deny that current human activities, including fossil-fuel consumption, have or can have any effect on the planet’s ability to sustain us.

One of the strongest and longest-term opponents of addressing human-caused climate change in the Democratic Party is Joe Manchin of West Virginia, not coincidentally one of the two Democrats in the Senate who’s holding up the large so-called “budget reconciliation” bill to fund climate-change prevention, social-service programs and much of what’s come to be called “human infrastructure.” A recent review by Charles Kaiser of New Yorker writer Evan Osnos’s new book Wildland – an attempt to explain just how American politics became so vicious (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/19/wildland-review-evan-osnos-america-trump-republicans-billionaires) – includes a link to a TV commercial Manchin ran in his first campaign for U.S. Senate in 2010 in which he literally shoots a rifle at a bill to set up a cap-and-trade system, a so-called “market-based” attempt to address climate change.

The text of the ad, narrated by Manchin himself as he carries a rifle and wears a jacket with a National Rifle Association (NRA) patch on its shoulder, reads, “I’m Joe Manchin. I approve this ad because I’ll always defend West Virginia. As your Senator, I’ll protect your Second Amendment rights. That’s why the NRA endorsed me. I’ll take on Washington and this administration to get the federal government off of our backs and out of our pockets. I’ll cut federal spending and I’ll repeal the bad parts of Obamacare. I sued EPA [the Environmental Protection Agency], and I’ll take dead aim [fires shot] at the cap-and-trade bill, ’cause it’s bad for West Virginia.”

Even before that, when Manchin was governor of West Virginia in the late 2000’s, he publicly endorsed a study concocted by coal-mining companies operating in the state that supposedly “proved” that miners’ wages would go down if mine operators were forced to make their mines more safe. The study was funded by a foundation with money from Charles and David Koch, well-heeled contributors to Right-wing causes. David Koch originally ran for vice-president in 1972 with the Libertarian Party, which believes government’s only legitimate functions are to maintain a military, a police force and a justice system. It’s particularly opposed to Social Security, Medicare and all other programs to tax the rich to benefit the not-so-rich, and argues that these essentially turn rich people into slaves forced to support their inferiors.

Osnos’s book is largely an account of how the Kochs and other super-rich donors to Right-wing political causes – Lee Hanley, Robert Mercer and Richard Mellon Scaife (who in 1993 underwrote the so-called “Arkansas Project” to flood the state with money for anyone who could come up with derogatory information about Bill and/or Hillary Clinton, much of which was made up by Arkansans eager to get their hands on some of Scaife’s money – but just about every nasty thing you think you know about the Clintons came from this source) – have spent the last 50 years dramatically changing how millions of Americans think about themselves, their government and what it can do for – or to – them. “Above all,” Kaiser wrote of Osnos’ book, “this is a story of how mega-rich Americans have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to give themselves the power to pillage the earth, destroy the air and corrupt democracy in a thousand ways without ever being held to account.”

Democrats Box, Republicans Fight Wars

As of this writing (early October) the two major parties are locked in a struggle for the soul and the future of America disguised as a battle over legislation. The Republicans, led by master doublethinker Mitch McConnell in the Senate (“doublethink” was a form of organized and legitimized hypocrisy invented by the Inner Party, rulers of Oceania in George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984) and opportunist apparatchik Kevin McCarthy in the House of Representatives, announced from the get-go of Biden’s Presidency that they were going to be united in implacable opposition to anything he tried to do. Meanwhile, the Democrats have been fatally disunited, with their ongoing wars between “moderates” and “progressives” sandbagging any chance of getting legislation through that would even begin to satisfy either side.

In order to enact a legislative agenda, one or the other major party has to take advantage of controlling the Presidency and Congress by ending the Senate filibuster, that insane relic of the 1830’s that in its current form requires at least 60 Senators to vote to do practically anything. The only way around the filibuster is an arcane process called “budget reconciliation,” which allows the Senate to pass legislation with a simple majority as long as it somehow relates to the federal budget. The problem with “budget reconciliation” is that it can only be done once a year – though in 2021 the Senate Democrats got special dispensation to do it twice since no reconciliation bill had passed in 2020 – and they used their first crack at reconciliation to pass the big COVID-19 relief bill in March.

In a post on this blog on March 14 (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2021/03/bidens-unrepeatable-victory.html), I called the COVID bill “Biden’s Unrepeatable Victory” and predicted that the Democrats would be unable to enact any more major legislation in the face of implacable opposition not just from Republicans but moderate Democrats as well. I mentioned Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s dramatic vote against raising the federal minimum wage – closely copying the famous gesture of her Republican predecessor, John McCain, in supplying the decisive vote in 2017 to keep the Senate from repealing the Affordable Care Act – as an early warning signal to Democrats that they were acutely vulnerable to any Senator in their caucus who thought the party’s overall agenda was too liberal, too progressive and too expensive.

Sinema and Joe Manchin of West Virginia have emerged as the principal obstructionists in the Senate against the overall agenda of Biden and most of his party. With the staggering power that comes from the even division of the Senate into 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, these two are essentially dictating the course of Democrats’ ability to legislate in the Senate. “I’m not a liberal,” Manchin recently boasted proudly, announcing that he would personally cap the wish-list progressive Democrats had packed into the second reconciliation bill to pay for programs ranging from universal pre-school and free community college to serious efforts to deal with climate change at $1.5 trillion. It had started out as $6 trillion and already been whittled down to $3.5 trillion, and both Manchin and Sinema have been maddeningly reluctant to tell other Democrats exactly what they want to remove from the bill to bring its cost down.

Part of the problem is the reconciliation process itself: since it can only be done once every fiscal year, both Republicans and Democrats have thrown just about everything they want done into reconciliation bills so it can’t be blocked by the 60-vote threshold. That’s why, instead of actually being able to discuss, debate on and vote the individual proposals in the reconciliation bill, Democrats had to advance them as an all-or-nothing package. The result is that what people are talking about when they discuss the legislation isn’t what it’s actually going to do, or why those things would be good or bad for the country, but that intimidating price tag. It also doesn’t help that since the 1970’s the Senate has shackled itself with what I call “the virtual filibuster,” in which, instead of actually debating a bill, the minority only has to file a piece of paper with the Senate clerk to invoke the 60-vote threshold and keep it from a vote.

Manchin – who’s been at least marginally more open and honest about what bothers him about the reconciliation bill than Sinema – has said he doesn’t mind if the process takes weeks to resolve. Unfortunately, the country doesn’t have weeks. The Democrats must pass some sort of budget reconciliation bill by mid-October because otherwise the U.S. faces fiscal Armageddon in the form of the “debt ceiling,” an arbitrary legislative limit on how much the country may borrow. Mitch McConnell has whipped the Senate Republican caucus into total and implacable opposition to raising the debt ceiling, even though the debt ceiling isn’t (as McConnell has portrayed it) an act of fiscal prudence that puts brakes on the government’s ability to borrow in the future. It’s simply a reaffirmation that the government will pay its credit cards for the money it has already borrowed – including the extra debt Republicans loaded onto the U.S. debt to finance their giant tax giveaway to wealthy individuals and corporations in 2017.

The controversy over the debt ceiling is just one more example of how savagely and unscrupulously Republicans are fighting to make sure that their vision of America – in which corporations are free of tax burdens or any obligation to protect the health and safety of workers and consumers, all laws and rules to protect the environment are either repealed or simply forgotten, women and people of color are once again second-class citizens, and the state is barred from protecting public health while it takes on a major role in regulating how people can have sex, with whom, and how they can deal with the consequences therefrom – is the one that will prevail. The Republicans have been able to maintain this unlikely coalition between economic Libertarians who want limited government when it comes to business and the economy, and highly interventionist government when it comes to sex, for over 40 years (at least since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980), and with the utter tone-deafness Republicans have built up to their own hypocrisy, they’ve been able to navigate these contradictions just fine.

A case in point: the “My Body, My Choice” signs Right-wingers have been carrying in demonstrations against vaccine and mask mandates to help prevent COVID-19. They’ve appropriated the pro-choice slogan used by defenders of abortion rights even as a radical-Right legislature in Texas passed the most radical bill to control women’s bodies and their lives since the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision – and the current Supreme Court, dominated by radical-Right justices, gave it an A-OK.

What’s more, the current Republican Party has been absolutely unscrupulous about their strategies and tactics. They have shrewdly used the anti-democratic features of the United States Constitution – the Electoral College, the equal representation of every state in the U.S. Senate regardless of its population, and the near-total control the Constitution gives state legislatures over who can vote, under what circumstances and how the votes will be counted. The Republicans are fighting against demographic changes that are shrinking the percentages of America’s population where they do best and growing the populations where they do worst – people of color, poor people, young people – not by modifying their ideology or their presentation to attract younger, darker people but by passing voter suppression laws to make it as hard as possible for people who don’t usually vote Republicans to vote at all.

The Republicans are taking aim at every unwritten custom they can find that has helped keep the U.S.’s experiment in (small-“r”) republican government together. They’ve weaponized the debt ceiling – threatening the total collapse of America’s and the world’s economy. They turned the normally ceremonial task of counting the electoral votes for President into an attempt at what Latin Americans call an autogolpe (“self-coup”) aimed at keeping Donald Trump in office past the 2020 election even though he lost both the popular and the electoral vote. They’ve mounted a bizarre propaganda onslaught against the whole idea of vaccination against COVID-19 and mask-wearing requirements to keep SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes it, from spreading.

They have not only passed laws making it insanely difficult for generally non-Republican constituencies to vote, they’ve included provisions that will allow state legislatures or partisan officials simply to set aside and reverse any election whose outcome doesn’t go the Republicans’ way. They’ve taken advantage of computer programs that facilitate gerrymandering – the practice of deliberately drawing legislative districts to maintain your own party in power – to a level of precision so great that in 2018, 65 percent of Wisconsin voters voted for Democrats to represent them in the legislature, but Democrats won only 45 percent of the legislative seats. And by continuing to question the legitimacy of every election Democrats win with false claims of “fraud,” the Republicans are deliberately and purposely undercutting Americans’ faith in voting itself.

And, when all else fails, Republicans resort to violence or the threat of violence to maintain power. They did that on January 6, 2021, when thousands of armed vigilantes descended on Washington, D.C. aimed at breaking into the U.S. Capitol and disrupting the electoral count by violence. Their aim was to block the counting of electors and throw the decision of who the next President would be to the House of Representatives, which under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution votes by states, with each state getting one vote. Since Republicans had majorities in 26 of the 50 state delegations, this would have meant Trump would have been re-elected. Republicans also threatened to assassinate the governor of Michigan over COVID-19 restrictions and are intimidating secretaries of state, local election officials and school board members to skew elections their way and ban anti-COVID mask mandates.

It’s clear that today’s Republican Party will literally stop at nothing to regain and keep power. The gap between the Republicans and the Democrats in this regard has been told in various metaphors – the Democrats bring a soup ladle to a gunfight, the Democrats are student council officials while the Republicans are stone-cold killers, or (my favorite) the Democrats are still trying to play politics by Marquis of Queensbury rules while the Republicans see politics as all-out war. It is clear that today’s Republicans see the Biden administration and the temporary razor-thin (but hapless, due to the Democrats’ inner divisions) Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress as mere hiccups on the road to what former George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove called “full-spectrum dominance” of American politics by the Republican Party.

The Republicans’ goal – ironically, given their ostensible stand against immigrants in general and Mexican immigrants in particular – is a situation very much like the one in Mexico in the last two-thirds of the 20th century. Americans are used to a situation in which multiple political parties exist but only two, the Republicans and the Democrats, really matter. What the Republicans are after is a political universe in which multiple parties exist but only one party really matters. They are bound and determined to use any means necessary to make the Democrats a permanent opposition party, tolerated but essentially powerless. And with the likelihood that they will regain both houses of Congress in 2022 – partly because the usual pattern in American politics is the President’s party loses seats in the midterms, partly because the Democrats’ majorities in both houses are so razor-thin Republicans can take them with only one more Senator and three more House members, and partly because the Republicans are thoroughly and industriously suppressing the votes of their opponents – they are well on their way to regaining the White House in 2024 and casting the Democrats into permanent political oblivion.

It Didn’t Start with Trump

The point Evan Osnos is making in Wildland is that Donald Trump, his presidency, his continuing hold on the Republican Party and the ever-growing odds that he may return to the White House in 2024, were not the beginning of the super-rich radical Right’s campaign to reshape American politics. Rather, his election was its culmination and the ultimate badge of its success. According to Osnos, in the last 50 years rich Right-wing Americans have “launched a set of financial philanthropic and political projects that changed American ideas about government, taxes and the legitimacy of the liberal state. … In every element of his commercial and political persona, Trump was a consummation of that project. … Most of all, of course, he stood for a belief in unbridled self-enrichment, and on that basis some of his most genteel supporters were willing to overlook” the tawdrier aspects of Trump’s character and career: his vulgarity, his racism, his open demeaning of women, his lumpen-bourgeois origins and his lousy business record.

Indeed, for most of its history the U.S. has been a center-Right country, exalting wealth and success in a way that goes back to the original Puritans’ concept that material success in this world was God’s way of showing who were the “elect” destined for salvation in the next. There have been brief periods when more progressive forces have gained ascendancy – notably between 1932 and 1964, when the successive crises of the Great Depression and World War II made Americans more sympathetic to progressive ideals (and when at least some rich people saw the threats from Communism on the Left and fascism on the Right as indications that they needed to make some compromises instead of grabbing most of America’s wealth and income for themselves) – but for the most part America has been a capitalist nation whose people, as much as they might rail against certain aspects of how it operates, support it overall and regard attempts to alter it as dangerous.

The relatively liberal era that began with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and ended with Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964 unraveled for several reasons. First, the major parties switched their historic positions on civil rights and racial equality in the 1960’s. The Democrats, who had been the party of slavery, secession and segregation, pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This left a whole lot of racists, not only Southerners but white working-class Northerners as well, who no longer felt at home in the Democratic Party. The Republicans rushed in to fill the gap and build a national majority on racism and opposition to the counter-culture – which in the 1960’s meant hippies, but later meant “liberated” women and Queers.

Over the last 50 years, ever since Richard Nixon and Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina) concocted the so-called “Southern strategy” that turned theirs from the “Party of Lincoln” to the party of American racism, the Right has essentially dominated American politics. Backed by super-rich donors’ money and a whole network of organizations created with it – from “dark money” political action committees to think tanks and national organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which writes Right-wing bills and offers them to elected legislators at all levels of government; and the Federalist Society, which recruits Right-wing law students to rise through the legal profession and ultimately become judges – the Right has become the dominant force in American politics.

Since 1968 the Republicans have won nine Presidential elections to the Democrats’ six. Since 1994, when they broke the Democrats’ 40-year majority hold on Congress, they have controlled either or both houses for all but five years (the first two years of Clinton’s Presidency, the first two years of Obama’s and the first year, so far, of Biden’s). Even more destructively, the Republicans, their corporate funders and their handmaidens in the media have created an entire Right-wing media ecosystem consisting of Right-wing talk radio, Fox News, Web sites like Newsmax and One America News (for people who think even Fox is too liberal for them) and an entire social-media infrastructure. Its purpose is to keep Right-wing voters in line by making sure either they are never exposed to any information other than Right-wing propaganda; or, if they are, they are trained to dismiss it as “fake news.”

When They Go Low, We Need to Go Lower

Political scientists who studied American elections in the 1950’s and 1960’s – after there was enough scientific polling data to discern American voting patterns and enough computers to crunch all those numbers – classified American Presidential elections into four groups, “maintaining,” “deviating,” “reinstating” and “realigning.” The theory was that one of the two major political parties that have dominated the U.S. through its history as an independent nation would have the larger base of support among the American electorate, and their ideas would be the principal drivers of U.S. politics and decision-making. As American political scientist Samuel Lubell put it in 1951, one would be the “sun party” and the other the “moon party.”

A “maintaining election” was one in which the dominant “sun party” kept the Presidency and, most often, a majority in Congress as well. A “deviating election” would be one in which the less dominant party would win, but for reasons that didn’t change the overall alignment. A “reinstating election” would bring the dominant party back into power after a deviating election. A “realigning election” would be one in which one party accumulated so overwhelming a majority of voters and officeholders that it would become the dominant “sun party.”

Examples of realigning elections included 1860, in which the looming crisis over slavery and secession brought the Republican Party to power in only the second election in which it fielded a Presidential candidate; and 1932, in which the economic collapse of the Great Depression brought the Democratic Party to overwhelming power. I would argue that 1968 was also a realigning election that definitively voted the Democrats’ “New Deal Coalition” out of power and put together a new one. A lot of people were fooled by the narrow margin (less than 1 percent of the popular vote) by which Republican Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey and his failure to win a majority in either the House or the Senate. But the combined vote total of Nixon and arch-Right-wing racist George Wallace was 57 percent to Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent – an indication that the American electorate had overwhelmingly rejected the Democrats’ liberalism.

Not that the voters who cast Right-wing ballots for either Nixon or Wallace in 1968 – or the 61 percent who voted to re-elect Nixon in 1972, the most overwhelming Presidential landslide to that point – were all that clear on what they wanted to replace Democratic liberalism. That wouldn’t happen until 1980, when Ronald Reagan won what was more than just a reinstating election; it was a capstone that completed the realignment 1968 had begun. The 1980 election cemented the alliance between economically conservative Libertarians and the radical Christian Right that has essentially dominated American politics ever since. It has given the Republican Party an oddly schizold and self-contradictory internal politics – for “limited government” when it comes to workers’ and consumers’ health and safety, protecting women and people of color against discrimination, and weakening (and ultiamtely eliminating) the social safety net; for highly interventionist “big government” when it comes to dictating people’s private lives, especially their sex lives.

It’s true that some political writers, notably David Brooks and Jonah Goldberg, have questioned whether Lubell’s “sun party/moon party” analysis really applies to today’s American political alignment. Goldberg published an article in the December 25, 2019 issues of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times (https://triblive.com/opinion/jonah-goldberg-we-have-2-moon-parties-no-sun-party/) claiming that Democrats and Republicans had both become “moon parties” because neither one is willing to make the compromises between its members to govern effectively as a “sun party.” As Goldberg wrote:

“[T]he most committed members of each party have a decidedly lunar mindset. Progressives and conservatives alike are convinced they are victims of the Powers That Be. One of the main arguments that propelled Trump to the White House and sustains his GOP support today is the feeling that the Right has lost every important battle of the last 40 years.

“As political consultant Luke Thompson notes, minority parties tend to obsess about unity because without it they are even more powerless. This makes ideological purity a vital source of cohesion. Majority parties have both the luxury and the burden of power. To govern is to make policy choices, and choosing A over B will always disappoint the backers of B.”

The modern-day Democrats are indulging in the luxury of disunity – and putting themselves on the verge of collapse from it – because they don’t have the luxury of defections. Biden came into office with razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress, yet he’s trying to push through a sweeping agenda similar to those Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930’s and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960’s – only without the overwhelming Democratic Congressional majorities they had. Meanwhile, the modern-day Republicans have played a far longer game, trusting in their ability to exploit the anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic features of U.S. politics to force their will on the American people and become a permanent dominant party. As historian Leonard Schapiro wrote about the Russian Bolsheviks, who seized power in 1917 and held it for 72 years, the modern-day Republicans are “a minority determined to rule alone.”

Though many Republican voters may think, as Goldberg claimed, that “the Right has lost every important battle of the last 40 years,” they really haven’t. They’ve lost a few of them, some in the economic sphere (like the passage of the Affordable Care Act, a major expansion of the social safety net which ideological Republicans had wanted to shrink and ultimately eliminate, even though many of their voters are dependent on Social Security and Medicare) and more in the cultural sphere. But for the most part, Republicans have won most of the ideological battles over the last 40 years, confining Democratic Presidents to what Bill Clinton called “small ball” and radically restructuring the nation’s tax system to make social programs and government spending in general unsustainable. After hard-core Libertarian Paul Ryan pushed through the Trump tax cuts in late 2017, he announced his retirement from Congress and said, “My work is done” – meaning that those cuts had destroyed the ability of future Democratic Presidents and Congresses to fund even already existing government programs, let alone expansions of them.

Now, thanks to a laser-like focus on “packing” not only the U.S. Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary with Right-wing Republican judges, almost all from the Federalist Society (an organization formed in 1982 specifically to identify young law students with Right-wing politics and mentor them as they rose through the legal profession and eventually became judges), the Republicans are poised to win their biggest and longest-term victory in the culture wars: an end to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision and an ability for state governments to take control of women’s bodies by denying them the right to abortion. The Supreme Court has lost its liberal members through attrition and its thoughtful conservatives (people like Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter) have been replaced by Right-wing ideologues. Every Republican President since Ronald Reagan (who, ironically, signed into law the U.S.’s first abortion-rights bill in 1967, when he was governor of California) has pledged to appoint only Supreme Court justices who would overrule Roe v. Wade – and they now have a majority of justices committed to doing just that.

As the battle stands at this writing (October 5, 2021), the Democrats are locked into a mini-war between progressives tired of being “rolled” in big pieces of legislation – as they were in 2009, when they were forced to support the Affordable Care Act even though it locked the U.S. even tighter into its system of private, profit-driven health insurance progressive Democrats have long wanted to eliminate – and moderates who hold the balance of power, largely because progressives have simply not been able to elect enough people to outvote them. “You want more liberal outcomes? Elect more liberals,” Joe Manchin rather snippily – but accurately – said, reflecting that the 2020 election was hardly a walk for the Democratic party. Republicans kept control of most state governments and slashed the Democratic House majority from 40 seats to four, indicating that this remains a center-Right country and many Biden voters were repudiating Trump but remaining basically Republicans.

Joe Manchin’s latest break with his party’s nominal leadership was an announcement he made October 4 (https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/politics/manchin-debt-ceiling-biden-economic-package/index.html) that he would no longer join his fellow Democrats in resisting an immediate vote on the reconciliation bill. With Republicans blocking any extension of the nation’s debt ceiling except through reconciliation, Manchin and Sinema can either trigger a “vote-o-rama” session in which they can join the 50 Republicans to strip out most of the Democrats’ social-spending wish list from the bill, or – even worse – force the Democrats to pass a reconciliation bill just to keep the nation from defaulting, meaning any big reconciliation package can’t be taken up again for nearly another year. He’s also said that he won’t support a reconciliation package that doesn’t continue the ban on federal funding for women seeking abortions – while House Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal says she won’t support a bill with the ban.

No doubt the Democrats will realize that their already slim chances of keeping Congress in 2022 will be annihilated completely if they don’t pass some part of the Biden infrastructure agenda – both the $1.25 trillion bipartisan “hard” infrastructure bill that’s already cleared the Senate and at least some shell of the reconciliation package – and if they allow the U.S. government to default on its debts for the first time in its history. They will take whatever they can get and call it a victory, and limp along through the rest of Biden’s presidency as they face a Republican Congress that, as Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota) has promised, will turn Biden into a “half-term President,” unable to get anything more done before the 2024 election. The “progressive” Democrats who have held up the “hard” infrastructure bill in the House will have to give up their resistance – as, 12 years ago, they gave up their resistance to the Affordable Care Act and sullenly voted for it – and let it go through because the consequence of doing so will mean that neither bill succeeds and the Democrats in general will look like incompetent fools.

If that happens – if this unwitting coalition of implacable Republicans, irresponsible “moderate” Democrats and obdurate “progressive” Democrats blocks either infrastructure bill from passing and makes Biden look as hapless in the White House as Jimmy Carter – Donald Trump will sweep back into the Presidency in 2024 and run as an avenging angel. He will use the power of the Presidency to destroy all his real or perceived opponents and complete the task of ending American democracy he and the Republican Party have been engaged in for many years. And, since one of the big priorities of the modern-day Republican Party is to block any programs to slow down human-caused climate change, and also to do virtually nothing of substance to slow down or stop pandemic diseases, Mother Nature, which always bats last, will render the Earth no longer inhabitable by humans in the next 100 years or so.