The Ship Has Sailed
The bipartisan ship, that is
Alerts for Alert Readers:
A huge “rescue plan” for the American economy, with a lot of targeted aid for people who have sunk into poverty during this pandemic year, was passed by Congress this week. President Biden signed it into law on Thursday. Not a single Republican voted for it in the House or in the Senate. Not Mitt Romney, not Susan Collins. Not a one of them.
So Joe Biden is failing, right? He said he wanted to restore unity and bipartisanship to Washington politics.
That was the feel-good fantasy of the recent presidential campaign. In fact, it was kind of a warmed-over theme from Barack Obama’s campaigns, too. And when Senator John McCain ran against Obama, the idea of bipartisan comity was one of McCain’s calling cards. It’s one of those perennial appeals politicians make because so many people apparently think it would be really nice to see Republicans and Democrats getting along and compromising for the general good of the American people, etc. etc.
For me, the idea that Democrats should be pursuing bipartisanship isn’t just silly—it’s dangerous. You can only believe in it if you refuse to admit what has happened to the Republican Party in the last few decades. This is now a party of rigid extremists. They have no interest in moderating and they have no interest in compromising. Maybe there were moments in the 1970s and 1980s when it was realistic to hope for bipartisan agreements. But that ship has sailed.
It angers me no end that the pursuit of “unity” is now somehow understood to be a responsibility of the Democratic Party. Did Republicans seek unity when they were obstructing the Obama administration for eight years? Did Mitch McConnell care about unity when he was ramming through (with only 52 Senate votes) another Republican judge onto the Supreme Court right before the election?
Well, Mitch McConnell is somewhat neutralized now that Democrats have 50 votes in the Senate, with Vice President Harris giving them 51. And yet it’s nerve-wracking to watch the two most unreliable Democrats in that slim majority acting as if they are somehow embarrassed to be called partisans. I’m thinking here of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema. Fortunately, they both voted for the American Rescue Plan this week. But they also made a show of being “independent” and bipartisan-minded, as Manchin pushed to cut back on unemployment benefits and Sinema took a stand against raising the federal minimum wage.
In my latest ‘Civilifications’ column for The Baffler, I made an argument that Manchin and Sinema seem to be kind of dumb about the question of partisanship. And, because they both are holding strong in defense of the Senate filibuster, kind of dangerous. You can read that column here. Content warning: there is a paraphrase of an off-color comment once made by Lyndon Johnson.
Or, there is the abbreviated five-tweet version on Twitter:
You can’t be neutral. Greg Sargent in the Washington Post does an excellent job of exploding the view that you can discuss bipartisanship from some kind of high-minded neutral position. If you maintain that getting zero Republican votes was a failure of the Democrats, you need to consider:
But the only thing Democrats could have done to win such bipartisan cooperation was to dramatically scale down their package. And so, those who suggested that winning bipartisan cooperation would have been an inherent good were necessarily offering an opinion on policy: They were saying a much smaller package would have been a better outcome than what did happen, because it was bipartisan.
He also clarifies why Senator Susan Collins of Maine is a drip.
A song for Amazon workers in Alabama. While I was thinking about all this last week, I returned once again to the truly beautiful version of “Which Side Are You On?” by Natalie Merchant. Of course it became famous as a Pete Seeger standard (written by Florence Reece in 1931), but I love the passion NM brings to it.
New stuff. I would say that song would make a pretty good soundtrack to a story we just published in the new Baffler by my old friend Barry Yeoman. Barry spent a lot of time in Graham, N.C., and the report he delivered says so much about where we are as a country seeking “unity” these days. It’s worth your time. Hit this link!
Also highly recommended: This new issue also contains a piece by Aaron Timms that is what we could call “classic Baffler.” It’s so sharp, and funny, and full of vinegar. All these Silicon Valley tech guys who are so impressed with themselves! Aaron suggests maybe you could become a Silicon Valley intellectual, too.
It’s all right here. As usual, you don’t have to get The Baffler in the mail, although many happy subscribers do. The contents are online and the table of those contents is here.
Where the pins fall. Several attentive friends called my attention to the drone video that explores what looks to be a charming little eight-lane bowling alley in Minnesota. In fact, the video went viral even before the NYT picked up on it. At one point, the drone goes back behind the pinsetting machines. That part made me feel kind of nervous, actually. Tight space. But it reminded me of the day John the Lane Man allowed me to accompany him and a Boston Globe photographer in that seldom-seen space behind the pinsetting bays, in the Final Days of Lanes and Games. I was looking at equipment that still had a manufacturer’s label on it, dated 3-10-1953. I would say to the patrons of Bryant Lake Bowl & Theater in Minneapolis: appreciate what you’ve got here. Developers are always willing to come along to pave paradise and put up a parking lot—or luxury condos. A few months after Lanes and Games closed, I took this photo on the site where I had a lot of good times with good friends. We met on most Sunday mornings and pursued our never-ending quest to become Above Average Bowlers. Then came the wrecking ball.
