America’s Three Presidents

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

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

I started writing this article with the intent of calling it “America’s Two Presidents” – a reference to Joe Biden, who holds the formal title and powers of the U.S. Presidency due to his victory in the November 2020 election; and Donald Trump, who has not only mounted a continuing challenge to the election result that removed him from office but got a majority of his party’s members to believe it. From his redoubt at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, Trump has set up what amounts to a government in exile, effectively giving marching orders to Republicans still in political office and receiving them to “bend the knee” (the gesture of fealty in the medievalist fantasy Game of Thrones) and swear seemingly eternal loyalty to him.

But after I watched the film clips of President Biden’s Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery, it became clear that America right now does not have two Presidents, but three. One of them is named Donald Trump; the other two are both named Joe Biden. They inhabit the same 78-year-old body (ironically Biden, who in 1972 became the youngest person ever elected to the U.S. Senate, in 2020 became the oldest person ever elected U.S. President) but they’re clearly at war with each other. There’s Bipartisan Biden, who promised during his campaign to work with Republicans and come up with moderate solutions to America’s problems; and Progressive Biden, who is fed up with obstructionism not only from Republicans but Right-wing Democrats like Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) as he pushes a far-reaching agenda that would fundamentally reshape Americans’ relationship to their government.

Progressive Biden had his biggest moment in the sun on April 28, when he delivered something called an “Address to a Joint Session of Congress” but which was a state of the union speech in all but name. He proposed a nearly $2 trillion infrastructure bill, which he called the “American Jobs Plan.” It extended far beyond traditional definitions of “infrastructure” – roads, bridges, harbors – to encompass things like expanding broadband Internet access for Americans, countering human-caused climate change and addressing workers’ rights and environmental justice. He also offered an “American Families Plan” to expand opportunities for universal pre-school, paid parental leave, tax credits for families with children and overhauling America’s patchwork education system. And he proposed to pay for it all by reversing most of the giveaways to the rich and corporations in President Trump’s and his Republican Congress’s 2017 tax bill.

Once Progressive Biden had laid out his expansive agenda – a fundamental reshaping of Americans’ relationship to government and a bold statement that government can and will help ordinary Americans cope with economic, environmental and social uncertainty – he went into hibernation and Bipartisan Biden came out again. He launched two months of fruitless negotiations with Republicans like West Virginia Senator Shelly Moore Capito until he realized in early June that they weren’t going to accept anything near the scale of what Progressive Biden thinks the country needs. And he’s continued to hope for bipartisan legislation even after U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he will use all his considerable power to block everything Biden tries to do, and publicly said on June 5, “The era of bipartisanship is over.”

Both Progressive Biden and Bipartisan Biden are being held hostage not only by McConnell and a united phalanx of Republican Senators, but also by turncoats in their own ranks like Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Indeed, in a rare expression of belligerence towards the two, he called them out in his Memorial Day address and said “they vote more often with my Republican friends” than with the Senate Democratic caucus. That’s not true – both Manchin and Sinema voted for the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” to provide relief from the COVID-19 pandemic – but in a broader sense the positions taken by Manchin and Sinema have essentially made it impossible for Democrats to govern.

The Filibuster

First is the venerable Senate institution of the filibuster. As Jonathan Chait pointed out in a recent article on the New York magazine Web site (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/fake-history-senate-filibuster-sinema-founders-constitution.html), the filibuster – the power of a minority of Senators to block passage of a bill by essentially debating it to death and preventing it from being voted on at all – isn’t in the Constitution. Nor was it a Senate rules change that was meant to accomplish anything in particular. Quoting another writer, Sarah Binder, Chait wrote, “The filibuster emerged in the 19th century not by any design, but … due to an interpretation of Senate rules which held that they omitted any process for ending debate. The first filibuster did not happen until 1837, and it was the result of exploiting this confusing rules glitch.”

The most famous fictional portrayal of a filibuster is in Frank Capra’s and writer Sidney Buchman’s 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which neophyte Senator Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) holds the floor to block a piece of graft being pushed by his state’s other Senator and defend himself against charges of impropriety. But the heroic portrayal of the filibuster in this movie is in stark contrast to the way it was usually used in the 20th century, which was to block civil-rights legislation aimed at ending Southern Jim Crow segregation and protecting the rights of African-Americans. The longest filibuster in history was conducted by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina – who started his career as a Right-wing Democrat, then became an independent and ended as a Republican – in 1957 against a civil-rights bill. He won in the short term – the bill that finally passed was so weak Congress needed to do another one seven years later – but he lost in the long term when Americans got to hear the arguments for segregation … and realize how ridiculous they were.

In 1975 two major changes were made in the filibuster. One was to reduce the number of Senators required for so-called “cloture” – the vote to end a filibuster and allow the Senate to vote on a bill – from two-thirds of the Senate to three-fifths. The other – which was intended as a progressive reform but has actually been one of the worst things American government has ever done to itself – was to create what I call the “virtual filibuster.” No longer would Senators who wanted to kill something with a filibuster actually have to debate it. All they would have to do was send a notice to the Senate’s staff saying that they intended to debate it. Thus Senate minorities got the power to block any bill they don’t like just by invoking the virtual filibuster and thereby requiring 60 Senators to agree to almost anything. It’s created exactly the kind of super-majority requirement Alexander Hamilton argued against in the Federalist Papers, in words that ring true today:

“To give a minority a negative upon the majority is in its tendency to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser number …The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been formed upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”

The only exception to the 60-vote threshold for legislation imposed by the virtual filibuster on the Senate is something called “budget reconciliation,” in which bills having to do with how the government spends money can pass with a simple 51-vote majority. But under normal rules such a bill can be passed only once a year – though the Biden administration and the bare Democratic majority in the Senate get a second bite of that apple since no budget reconciliation bill was passed in 2020 and therefore they get an extra one for 2021. Biden and the Senate Democrats already used one of their reconciliation bills to pass the COVID-19 relief passage against total Republican opposition in both the House and the Senate. Aside from that and one more potential slot, however, Biden and the Democrats will need the votes of 10 Republicans to get anything through the Senate and to Biden’s desk to sign. And, despite the forlorn wishes of both Biden and more moderate Democratic Senators that Republicans get serious about negotiating and cut some compromise deals to get things done, that ain’t gonna happen.

It ain’t gonna happen because not only is Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s agenda to do exactly what Alexander Hamilton feared – “to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority” – he’s actually proud of it. And what’s more, Senator Manchin – who is literally the swing vote in an evenly divided Senate – has announced that he’s not going to vote for the Democrats’ voting-rights laws, the infrastructure plan, or anything else unless it has some Republican support. This essentially means that the Democrats won’t be able to do anything substantive for the American people in the next two years – and the Republicans will be able to campaign in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 Presidential election and say, “They had their chance and they didn’t do anything. Time to put us back in charge.”

One possible “out” for the bind the virtual filibuster and the 60-vote threshold it imposes on legislative action by the Senate would be to repeal it and force would-be filibusterers actually to debate. Joe Manchin has actually hinted he might be in favor of such a change. In early March he told reporters on Fox News Sunday and NBC’s Meet the Press that “the filibuster should be painful, it really should be painful and we've made it more comfortable over the years. … “If you want to make it a little bit more painful, make him stand there and talk” (https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/07/joe-manchin-filibuster-senate-474197). More recently Manchin said at a private meeting he’d be open not only to eliminating the virtual filibuster but changing the rules so there would need to be 40 votes to continue a filibuster rather than the current requirement of 60 to end one.

Manchin apparently got this idea after the bill to create an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol sank in the Senate with 54 votes in favor and just 35 opposed, with the other Senators either being absent or not voting. He also attempted to negotiate a compromise on the Democrats’ “For the People Act” to restore voting rights – only to have it immediately shot down by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who made it clear that there will be no Republican Senate votes for any federal bill to protect or expand voting rights. McConnell and other leading Senate Republicans not only represent a party that has made voter suppression a key part of its political strategy, they are philosophically opposed to laws that limit the power of state legislators to control who may vote, for which offices and under what circumstances.

The U.S. Is Not a Democracy!

One of the lies we in the U.S.A. like to tell ourselves is that this country is a “democracy.” That is simply not true! America is not, never has been and, unless we scrap the current U.S. Constitution and radically revise the structure of our political system, never will be a democracy. The framers of the Constitution intended this country to be a republic, not a democracy. As James Madison, who probably understood the U.S. Constitution better than anyone else in our history (he was a major participant at the Constitutional Convention, he was its note-taker and he also chaired the Committee on Style, which actually drafted the document), wrote in Federalist #10 (https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/primary-source-documents/the-federalist-papers/federalist-papers-no-10/):

“The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended. The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.”

On this principle, the framers created a government with plenty of anti-democratic features – which today’s Republican Party has shrewdly and creatively exploited to maintain a position of political dominance out of all proportion to their numbers. The framers set up a system in which no individual citizen would vote for any office higher than that of their member of the House of Representatives. Under the original Constitution, Senators were elected by state legislators, not by the people (that didn’t change until the 17th Amendment was adopted in 1913). The President would be chosen by an Electoral College consisting of electors chosen by the states in whatever manner their legislatures decided, and state legislators would also have near-absolute power to determine who, how and on what their citizens could vote.

From 1892 to 1996 the U.S. enjoyed a run of 26 consecutive Presidential elections in which the winner of the popular vote for President also won the Electoral College and therefore became President. Since 2000, however, that’s only happened four times out of six. And since the modern two-party system emerged after the U.S. Civil War in 1865, in all four elections in which the President got elected without winning the popular vote (Rutherford Hayes over Samuel Tilden in 1876, Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland in 1888, George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 and Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016), it’s been the Democrat who won the popular vote and the Republican who won the Electoral College – never the other way around.

This is not an accident. It reflects the growing urbanization of America, the extent to which people have crowded into large cities in a handful of states, most of them located on either coast, while – thanks to another major anti-democratic feature of the original Constitution, the awarding of two Senators to each state regardless of population – smaller, more rural states continue to enjoy a disproportionate share of power. And this imbalance has only got worse as America’s population has become more consolidated into large-state cities. When the original Constitution was passed in 1787, the largest state, Virginia, had nine times as many people as the smallest state, Rhode Island. Today the largest state, California, has 250 times as many people as the smallest, Wyoming.

Small states have a disproportionate advantage in the Presidential election because the number of electors awarded to each state is their number of Senators plus their number of House members. They have a disproportionate advantage in Congress, too – not only in the Senate but in the House, since the Constitution grants each state at least one House member regardless of their population. That means that Wyoming’s single Congressmember has only one-fifth as many constituents as any one of California’s 53 members (which will shrink to 52 after the next redistricting based on the 2020 census). One report noted that while the current U.S. Senate is evenly split between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans,the 50 Democrats represent 40 million more people than the 50 Republicans because they tend to come from larger states.

The imbalance in America’s political system that gives small states more political power, relative to their size, than big states is just one of the built-in anti-democratic features the Republicans are exploiting to get and maintain power. Another is something I’ve referred to before in this article: the nearly complete authority the Constitution gives state legislatures to write election rules. The original Constitution gave states the power to decide who was eligible to vote and the rules under which elections would be held. The great amendments that expanded the franchise – the 15th, which at least in theory guaranteed the right to vote to people of color; the 19th, which guaranteed it to women; the 24th, which abolished the poll tax; and the 27th, which set the nationwide voting age at 18 – were all framed as specific exceptions to the otherwise absolute power of state legislatures over elections.

Most Americans think they have a guaranteed right to vote for President – or at least to vote for the electors that actually choose the President. They have neither. The current spate of voter suppression laws being pushed in virtually every state government that Republicans control not only limit voting hours, drastically cut back people’s ability to vote by mail, and allow partisan “poll watchers” new powers to intimidate voters, they also allow state legislatures and judges sweeping powers to nullify the election altogether and install whomever they want as winners. The Constitution gives the power to pick Presidential electors to state governments, and while as of 2020 all 50 states had assigned that power to voters, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says they have to. A state legislature can decide they don’t like the way the election turned out, and can assign their own electors regardless of the ones the people in their states voted – and there’s not a damned thing voters can do about it.

Indeed, that’s precisely what Republicans all over the country are preparing to do in 2024. Let’s assume for the moment that the 2024 Presidential election becomes a rematch of 2020 – Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump. Under the laws being pushed through at warp speed in places like Georgia, Florida and Texas, state legislators can reject the election results and decide for themselves who their state’s electors will be – and, therefore, who the President will be. These new voter suppression laws are being designed at least partly so Republican legislators and partisan “poll watchers” and “auditors” can reverse outcomes they don’t like and, in particular, to assure that Donald Trump can regain the presidency in 2024 if he wants to. (Indeed, had these laws been in effect in 2020 Trump would still be President.)

Republican Full-Spectrum Dominance

But the Republicans’ desire for voter suppression long predates Trump, and they would be pursuing this strategy even if the Orangeman had never descended his gold-plated escalator at Trump Tower to claim the country. In the early days of Barack Obama’s Presidency, Democrats liked to use the phrase, “Demography is destiny.” It meant that, since the parts of the electorate that mostly voted Denocratic – young people, poor people, people of color – were growing, while the parts that mostly voted Republican – old people, rich people, white people (especially white men) – were shrinking, these population shifts would usher in a new age of Democratic control and consign Republicans to political oblivion. A few Republicans actually took this idea seriously and held so-called “post-mortems” after the 2008 and 2012 elections saying the Republican Party needed to adjust its message and work to attract the votes of the growing demographics instead of relying on a shrinking base of whites.

Instead, the Republican Party decided to take a different path. Rather than moderating their message or trying to reframe it, they decided to double down on the messages of hate and fear that had sustained it since Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond created the “Southern strategy” in 1968 and thereby made Republicans the party of racism and cultural bigotry. Instead of reaching out to new Americans, the Republicans pursued a ferociously anti-immigrant stand and picked Donald Trump largely because he was meaner on immigration than his opponents for the 2016 Republican nomination. And instead of expanding their voter base, Republicans decided to respond to America’s changing demographics by rewriting elections laws so that people who weren’t likely to vote Republican wouldn’t be able to vote at all. As Democrats celebrated their statewide victories in Georgia – not only carrying the state for Biden but electing two Democratic Senators (one of them African-American and the minister at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s old church) – Republicans in that state thought, “This is a mistake that we will fix.”

The Republicans have been proclaiming their attempt to drive the Democratic Party into political oblivion for some time. In 1995, talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said the victorious Republicans would allow some liberals to survive as “living fossils.” During George W. Bush’s Presidency, his political advisor, Karl Rove, boasted of giving the Republicans “full-spectrum dominance” of American politics – a phrase he appropriated from the vocabulary of the generals fighting Bush’s war in Iraq. In 2009, as Obama prepared to take office, Limbaugh responded with just four words: “I hope he fails.” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said his goal would be to make Obama a one-term President, and though he failed he managed to keep Obama from passing any major policies after Republicans regained the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. When Trump won in 2016 one Republican boasted that they were going to do such a good job undoing Obama’s legacy that “it will be as if he had never lived.” And more recently Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota) has boasted that if the Republicans regain either house of Congress in 2022, they will make Biden not just a one-term President but a “half-term President,” unable to accomplish anything in his last two years in office.

Today’s Republicans are often accused of “standing for nothing,” of not having any set of goals or policy objectives to make America a better place. In fact the Republicans have a long-standing ideological project that’s important enough to them that even Republicans who were initially opposed to or skeptical of Donald Trump went along with him because they saw him as a useful tool to achieving it. Economically, Republicans want to enact a libertarian agenda that will eliminate government as a brake on the powers of private businesses and get rid of virtually all taxes on wealthy individuals or corporations. The essence of libertarianism is that it is rich people who build a country’s economy and civilization – not the workers who actually create the value that makes rich people rich – and therefore they are entitled to virtually all the wealth of society.

Libertarians believe it is not only bad social policy but actually immoral to tax rich people in order to help not-so-rich people. They are committed to destroying America’s already meager social-welfare state, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. One reason they were so opposed to Obama’s Affordable Care Act was that by financing vast increases in government funding for health insurance and extending coverage to more people, it was expanding America’s social welfare state at a time when Republicans were determined not only to shrink it but someday to eliminate it completely. Republicans reject any laws to protect workers, consumers or the environment. Their ideal America – the time Trump was referring to when he said, “Make America great again” – was the 1880’s, in which rich people openly bought political office, workers who tried to organize unions and call strikes were met with judicial injunctions and both official militaries and private armies, and the super-rich of the time flaunted their wealth in what economist Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption.” In the 1880’s Diamond Jim Brady gave his mistress, entertainer Lillian Russell, a diamond-encrusted bicycle; today the world’s richest man, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, plans to build his own rocket and send himself off into space.

At the same time that Republicans are planning drastically to shrink the size of government in the economic sphere – including passing bills like their 2017 tax cut, designed not only to reward their super-rich supporters with huge tax breaks but to jack up the national debt and thereby make it impossible for the U.S. to keep funding a social welfare state – thanks to the evangelical Christians Ronald Reagan brought in to the Republican coalition, they favor a big government when it comes to people’s private lives. The Republicans want to micro-manage Americans’ sex lives and control whom people can have sex with, under what conditions, whom they can marry or form relationships with, and how they can deal with the consequences – positive and negative – of their sexual activities. Anti-abortion activists in particular pretend to be “pro-life,” but they show their true colors when asked what women should do about unwanted pregnancies: “If you don’t want to get pregnant, don’t have sex.”

Gerrymandering: The Republican Route to Permanent Power

Throughout most of American history, a major political party that pursued an unpopular agenda and either wittingly or unwittingly ignored public opposition got punished. They started losing elections, and ultimately realized they would have to change their appeal to remain competitive. But today’s Republicans have raised rigging elections to both an art and a science, and they’ve had a handmaiden in the current U.S. Supreme Court. On June 5, the Los Angeles Times published an analysis by David Savage (https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-06-04/how-supreme-court-tilted-election-law-favor-gop) showing all the ways in which the current Court has biased the election system to favor Republicans.

“Under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the Supreme Court threw out the part of the Voting Rights Act requiring states with histories of discriminating against Black voters to clear election rule changes with the U.S. Justice Department,” Savage wrote. “Writing for a 5-4 majority in 2013, Roberts called the section outdated and said it did not fit with ‘current conditions.’ The Constitution, in the view of the Roberts court, also allows lawmakers to draw gerrymandered districts to keep themselves in power, forbids limits on how much wealthy donors and incorporated groups can spend on campaigns, and may even permit state lawmakers, not the voters, to decide who will be the president.”

Gerrymandering is one of those social evils, like bullying and identity theft, that predated the computer era – the term actually comes from 18th century New York Governor Elbridge Gerry, who in his zeal to keep his party in power drew skewed legislative districts, including one his political opponents described as looking like a salamander (hence, “gerrymander”) – but computers have made it considerably easier and more devastating. Republican information technology specialists have distributed software that can salami-slice voters precinct by precinct to create legislative maps that will make it virtually impossible for Democrats ever to regain control of state legislatures or keep the House of Representatives after the 2021 redistricting.

As Savage pointed out in his article, in 2018 Republicans kept 63 of the 99 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly even though Democrats won the governorship and Biden carried the state. They also designed a congressional map for North Carolina that ensured Republicans would win 10 of the state’s 13 Congressional districts no matter how the major parties split the statewide vote. Democrats in both Wisconsin and North Carolina sued to have those maps thrown out, but lost at the Supreme Court. “To hold that legislators cannot take partisan interests into account when drawing district lines would essentially countermand the Framers’ decision to entrust districting to political entities,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Court in the North Carolina case.

The Court’s approval of partisan gerrymandering and its elimination of virtually any restrictions on the power of wealthy individuals and corporations to buy their desired political outcomes with campaign contributions has not only helped the Republican Party as a whole, it’s helped the most radical-Right voices within it. With their districts safely gerrymandered against competition from Democrats, Republican legislators don’t have to worry about losing their seats in a general election. What they do have to worry about is losing them in a primary to a more extreme, more strident Republican. This turns Republican primaries into bizarre ideological contests like the one in 2020 between Republicans Darrell Issa and Carl DeMaio for the San Diego East County seat formerly held by convicted (but pardoned by Trump) corrupt Congressmember Duncan D. Hunter. The ads for both Issa and DeMaio loudly proclaimed their own loyalty to President Trump, and each candidate attacked the other for not being sufficiently pro-Trump. Issa won the primary and easily crushed his Democratic opponent in November.

What’s the Recourse?

The Republicans are mounting a ferocious, intense drive not only to reverse the results of the 2020 election and to regain Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, they’re committed to a strategy that will make it impossible for them ever to lose again. And the Democrats have precious little recourse to stop them. The Democrats in the House of Representatives have passed two bills to protect voting rights – one an attempt to rewrite the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court largely invalidated, and one, the “For the People Act,” a sweeping attempt to ban gerrymandering and “dark money” contributions from wealthy individuals and corporations, and also set federal standards on how elections are conducted, including guarantees of early voting and voting by mail.

But it would take at least 10 Senate Republicans to pass either of those bills – and even if by some miracle they made it through the Senate and Biden signed them into law, the current Supreme Court would almost certainly declare them unconstitutional. In a few of the states that have passed the kinds of sweeping voter-suppression laws the Republicans are pushing nationwide (and which the “For the People Act” seeks to nullify), Democrats and people in the communities that would be affected by them – particularly people of color – have mounted guerrilla actions against them, including the walkout of Democratic state senators in Texas to deny the Republicans the legislative quorum they needed to pass them. But it’s hard to see how these campaigns can be sustained in the long run as long as Republicans retain the allegiance of their base and can continue to rig and gerrymander the political system to keep themselves in perpetual power.

Ultimately the Republicans’ aim in all of this is not only active voter suppression but what I call passive voter suppression, in which people simply give up on the political process, voluntarily don’t vote and abandon any idea that political activity could make their lives better. After white Southern Democrats used their power between 1877 and 1896 to block Blacks from voting – often resorting to intimidation, terror and outright murder to accomplish their goals – for decades afterwards most Southern African-Americans simply abandoned any attempt to participate in the political system. The few who stuck their necks out and tried got fired from their jobs and nighttime visits from the local Ku Klux Klan. What modern-day Republicans are hoping for is the same thing: people will just give up on political participation, election turnouts will fall drastically and the Republicans will be allowed to run the country any way they damned well please – which, as in the 1880’s and the 2010’s, will include outright plundering of the public treasury for their own and their friends’ private gain.

Historian Leonard Schapiro called the Russian Bolsheviks, who took over their country in 1917 and set up the Soviet Union and the Communist Party dictatorship that ran it, “a minority determined to rule alone.” Like the Bolsheviks, today’s Republicans are a minority determined to rule alone – and the real reason for their no-holds-barred opposition to everything on President Biden’s agenda is to create fear and hopelessness among non-Republican Americans. Biden won the 2020 election largely due to heroic actions on the part of community organizers, especially in the communities of color, who moved heaven and earth to help voters navigate the increasingly cumbersome process of casting their ballots, made harder by all the creative ways Republicans in state governments have figured out to make it so.

But how long can community organizers and leaders continue to convince their people to vote when not only does the process of voting become ever more difficult, but even when they win elections they don’t get the policy outcomes they want? With a Republican Party united behind an agenda that couldn’t get a majority vote if they were honest about it, decades of expertise in using racial and cultural appeals to get millions of Americans to vote against their economic self-interest, and increasingly creative ways to use the anti-democratic features of U.S. government to frustrate the Democrats’ ability to get anything done, America’s most likely outcome is a return to Republican Congressional majorities in 2022, a Republican President in 2024, and the increasing disillusionment of millions of Americans who realize, even in a so-called “democracy,” how little actual control they have over the way they are governed and how Republicans have stacked the decks so America gets Republican policies and priorities whether they want them or not.

There are things the Democrats and their supporters in the population could be doing to avert this apocalypse. Number one is to eliminate the Senate filibuster – or, failing that, at least to eliminate the virtual filibuster and force Senate Republicans to go on record as explaining why it’s such a do-or-die priority to block everything President Biden and the Democrats want to do. Number two is going to have to come from the grass roots: a full-blown campaign of street activism to challenge the authority of Republicans and turncoat “Democrats” to block the massive public investments President Biden – or at least Progressive Biden – has called for not only to get America out of the pandemic-induced slough but to make our country one that can meet the challenges of the 21st century and serve as an example of republican self-government for the rest of the world.

As I was finishing this article I happened to look up President Franklin Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address from March 4, 1933 (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5057/). He’s most famous for having started that speech with the line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but few people quote the rest of that line in which Roosevelt described that fear: “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Roosevelt also said these words, which stand as a vivid counter-argument to the libertarian philosophy of Republicans in 1933 or 2021:

“Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”

On April 28, 2021, Progressive Biden outlined a program of massive government spending to create a U.S. economy that can be internationally competitive in the 21st century and can sustain the environment so the earth remains fit for human habitation. Then the Republican Party swooped in to say, in the spirit of another American voice from the early 1930’s, Groucho Marx, “I don’t care what he has to say/It makes no difference anyway/Whatever it is, we’re against it.” Now Bipartisan Biden has let Progressive Biden’s agenda get bogged down in a U.S. Senate that gives the minority an effective veto over the majority (exactly what Alexander Hamilton warned against in the Federalist papers), while Donald Trump waits at Mar-a-Lago to be called back from exile to take back the government as early as this August (one of his more loony-tunes vision). It’s not altogether sure what we should – or even can – do to move Progressive Biden’s agenda and save this country from domination by a sclerotic and increasingly out-of-touch elite of wealth and power, but damnit, we have to do something.