Joe Manchin sure dumped a huge lump of West Virginia coal in our stockings this Christmas didn’t he? It figures that after all the sturm und drang over the past 8 months he finally ended up going on Fox News just before the holiday to announce he was tanking the Democratic agenda. What a guy.
It’s depressing, to be sure, but what else is new? For some reason the fates have determined that we should get hit with a virulent new COVID variant just as people were planning to visit their families for the holidays. What an awesome end to 2021.
Half the country is reeling from all this but the other half is happy. In fact, they are ecstatic. Every bit of terrible news takes them one step closer to regaining power in Washington and restoring their once and future Dear Leader to the White House. And they are willing to sacrifice their lives to make that happen.
And it isn’t that hard to figure out why. As someone remarked to me recently, recall that hundreds of thousands of confederates sacrificed their lives in the 1860s in order to protect their “way of life” by which they meant slavery. Their heirs, having been convinced that their “way of life” is similarly under threat are doing the same thing. It’s not unprecedented. In fact, it’s an American tradition.
There’s a lot of talk about tribalism these days, which isn’t exactly new. I’ve been writing about this since the early days of this old blog because it’s one of the most interesting ways of looking at why we are where are. There have always been two tribes in this country and they’ve changed parties and stances over the years as politics required. But as this famous map shows, they haven’t changed much for a most of our history:
Here’s 2020:
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose … amirite?
There used to be members of both tribes in both parties which made progress possible at least in certain moments. Due to the rube goldberg federalist system we have, that always favors rural America, unfortunately, but it did work from time to time. But now we are in a period of extreme polarization in which the two tribes have divided almost perfectly along party lines. That situation makes it even more difficult to enact progressive legislation as we can see with our deep red state senator Joe Manchin basically vetoing the Democratic agenda (with a little help from his delusional friend Kyrsten Sinema) and the Republicans voting in lock step against it.
My point is that this has been a feature of American politics forever and it always disadvantages progress. In times of crisis or some run of good luck, the progressive tribe manages to get something through. Think about Obamacare, which was pulling teeth for months — and the Democrats had 60 votes through most of it, 59 when it barely passed through reconciliation. It is very difficult, no matter what and it doesn’t pay for us to be silly and assume it’s always a matter of bad political strategy and terrible corrupt politicians. It’s our system. And, yes, it sucks.
Anyway, all this is to say that we are going to have a rough few months ahead of us as they try to piece back some kind of agenda in advance of 2022 and hopefully avoid the kind of circular firing squad that kills majorities. I don’t think the stakes have ever been higher and I mean that. When you look at that 1860 map up there you can see that we’re back to square one. And we are dealing with much the same mentality that led to that horrifying clash — the same underlying issues are driving the divide today: race and grievance.
And the threat of political violence is in the ether. After January 6th can we doubt it?
Tom Sullivan, Dennis Hartley, tristero, spocko, batocchio and I will be here every day tracking it and trying to keep some perspective on events so that we don’t lose our minds. (By that I mean our own minds as much as yours…)
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Happy Hollandaise everyone!