Cruising down the Maine Turnpike a few weeks ago, I was passed by a huge, aggressive-looking pickup truck clocking well over the posted speed limit. Its back window bore the edifying inscription “Keep on Hatin’.” That sentiment, whoever it was directed at, somehow seems an apt one for our national mood and aspirations in the summer of 2022.
Americans are anxious to get back to “normal,” whatever that is, and assuming we can ever get there. Normal in the post-pandemic world seems to encompass making believe COVID never happened, or if it did, we’re done with it and moving on to a better place. As the saying goes, we’re through with COVID, even if it’s not through with us. Masks are off everywhere. Vaccinations and social distancing are for the libs, the fearful, or the old — the people Donald Trump said were practically dead anyway.
Not afraid of COVID? Maybe you’re concerned about climate change, although judging by appearances, few people are. Climatewise, we’re in total denial. In my neck of the woods, regular 85°-90° summer days accompanied by oppressive humidity, which we’ve rarely experienced historically, are being normalized; the local weather prognosticator, a refugee from out of state, calls our suddenly New Jerseyfied climate “classic Maine” summer weather. Air conditioners, seldom seen when I moved downeast some years back, are now everywhere. Rather than addressing the basic problem (global warming), Americans are content to do what comes easiest and most natural: seeking technological solutions.
At least in Maine, no one is shooting at us — not yet, anyway. No thanks to the Supreme Court, Washington’s ship of fools, which has legitimized unregulated carrying of firearms in public nationwide. This edict applies even to places like metropolitan New York with its teeming millions. What could possibly go wrong? Probably the worst collection of justices ever (their only serious competition: the Hughes Court that tried to destroy the New Deal in the 1930s), the current robed buffoons have begun their assault on public safety by willfully misinterpreting the Second Amendment, which guarantees arms to “well regulated” militias (that is, the National Guard), not to every latter-day, adrenaline-stoked John Wick wannabe. Judicially speaking, the future looks grim.
Although guns and abortion dominate news of the high court’s lowest rulings, nothing has more dire long-run consequences than its heedless undermining of the government’s right and responsibility to address the encroaching calamity of climate change. The expressed view of the Court, led in this instance by Messrs. Roberts (author of the majority opinion in West Virginia v. EPA), Gorsuch and Alito, is that protecting air quality takes a back seat to making money — in this case by a polluting energy industry.
Chief Justice Roberts, usually considered the least mentally deficient of the Court primitives, pointedly ignored climate concerns and spun out of whole cloth a bizarre rationale to rival that old right-wing judicial standby, the theory of Originalism. The control of harmful power-plant carbon emissions by federal environmental regulators, he proclaimed (backed by the myopic concurring opinions of Gorsuch and Alito), violated something called the “major questions doctrine.” The violation apparently concerned the spectacle of a regulatory agency working too energetically at doing its job and failing to jump through a sufficient number of contrived legal hoops. The final transmission from Court to Earth can be succinctly summarized as “Burn, baby. Burn.”
But enough of the Court’s gobbledegook. What about official political Washington, namely, the Congress and the president? In the red corner, we have the unsupervised outpatients known as the Republican House and Senate caucuses, the onetime Party of No, seamlessly repackaged as the Party of Crazy. Its only purpose in life: massaging the fevered psyches of the Republican base. In the blue corner, there’s the Biden administration and its allies, whose sole directive is working out bipartisan deals with an opposition constitutionally incapable of compromising on anything.
But the centrist Democrats keep on trying; they really have no choice given their leadership. The conundrum could be called the Sleepy Joe problem. As hard as it is for Democrats to accept, the moniker (courtesy Donald Trump) fits. Joe Biden comes across as someone sleepwalking through history with no sense of urgency, someone unwilling to undertake needed fundamental institutional changes. The Biden vibe is as follows: Take it easy, don’t get excited, things will eventually work out. Assume the best of the opposition, no matter how repulsively they act. Don’t antagonize them; rather, bend over backwards to mollify them. And remember to hug Mitch McConnell.
Tactically, on a day-to-day basis, this means searching endlessly for that elusive deal. There’s got to be a deal; there’s always a deal. And no matter how bad it is, take it. That’s how the president operated in the Senate for decades. The incrementalist bipartisan gun legislation is a case in point. So is the equally tepid Inflation Reduction Act, which the White House will also gratefully accept. It’s a fraction (about one-fifth) of the original Build Back Better Act, but it’s something. (Just think: a 15% minimum corporate tax. Oh, wow!) So take it and claim it’s something it’s not. That’s the Biden way.
The Biden way applies equally to his own party. Joe Manchin is a carnival barker cum-con man and Kyrsten Sinema is a fruitcake of the first order, but the White House will coddle and cultivate them to the end of time. They should rightfully be read out of the Democratic Party, but never mind. It’s the deal, always the deal.
More concerning, the president has become reactively slow; in athletic terms, he’s lost a step — or two. It’s not that he’s 79; it’s that he’s an old 79. Party critic Robert Reich, writing in The Guardian, suggests Biden should rule out 2024 and step aside. Three-quarters of registered Democrats agree, but politicians rarely surrender power voluntarily. Party centrists appear ready to stick it out with their guy all the way regardless of the outcome; they’ve placed their chips and made their bets.
It’s apt to be a tough slog. But maybe public anger and disgust with neofascist Republicans will finally jell and turn the Biden drift into a progressive renewal. Of course, there’s always the new Forward Party of Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman. (“Not Left, Not Right. Forward.”). Just what’s needed: incoherent radical centrism. God help us.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2022
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