At the Crossroads

An ancient Chinese legend says that when the teacher Mo Di arrived at a crossroads he wept aloud, because a single misstep could result in an error of 10,000 miles. Mo Di's dilemma resembles the existential situation of American leaders right now, particularly that of President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Two basic strategies present themselves moving forward, and the wrong choice could be disastrous.

With the passage of the CARES act, one of the most robust and progressive pieces of fiscal legislation in the nation's history, Democrats have staked a claim to major achievements that they can run on in the election of 2022 and beyond. If (as seems likely) that landmark piece of legislation will be followed by a major infrastructure bill passed by process of reconciliation, the Democrats will be able to take credit for using the mandate that voters gave them in 2020 to take bold action. The question that Democratic leaders must confront is whether those two pieces of legislation, in combination with executive actions such as a renewed commitment to the Paris Climate Accords and the WHO, will be enough. 

Why are the choices so stark and the stakes so high? On the one hand, the opportunities to overcome Republican obstruction absent more aggressive action will quickly expire. If and when an infrastructure bill passes, it will be the last piece of significant legislation that Joe Biden will have the opportunity to sign into law unless the Democrats move to eliminate the filibuster. Action on health care, the minimum wage, immigration, voting rights, law enforcement reform, penal reform, and a host of other urgent priorities will be roadblocked until either the filibuster is curtailed, the Democrats win sixty senate seats, or the Republicans become willing to reach a negotiated settlement on these issues of national importance (i.e. when hell freezes over). 

On the other hand, it is clear that the outcome of the next two electoral cycles will not merely decide the direction of foreign and domestic policy, but the fate of American democracy itself. The majority of Republican office holders have embraced the malignantly fallacious narrative surrounding the terrorist attack on the Capitol that transpired on January 6. If the GOP remains committed to the lie that the 2020 election was illegitimate or "stolen" and the terrorists of January 6 were "patriots," then their own rhetoric will compel them to dismantle the machinery of pluralistic democracy once they achieve consolidated control of Congress and the White House in 2024. Over the last five years the GOP has effectively become a party committed to the establishment of white supremacist oligarchy, and they will complete the process of transforming the US into such a polity if, given their current configuration, they receive any kind of mandate to rule, no matter how narrowly technical or demographically anti-majoritarian. 

The Democrats thus must beat the Republicans in 2024, not simply to save the economy or the environment, but to save democracy itself. Which of the roads before them leads to that end? The choice is enormously consequential.

The Democrats could stop at the passage of the CARES act and an infrastructure bill and run on those achievements through 2024. This strategy has the advantage of providing voters with robust and tangible improvements to their quality of life without giving the Republicans much purchase for stirring up partisan division and anger. Fiscal legislation like the CARES act provides the political opposition with only limited opportunity for negative attacks: Republicans can only argue for the harm of specific provisions of the bill. A move to eliminate the filibuster, by contrast, would give GOP leaders a kind of rhetorical "blank check," empowering them to spin nightmare scenarios about what "radical Democrats" plan to do with the power that they "grabbed."

If Democrats opt for a cautious strategy they might well elect to avoid the rhetorical trap that a move against the filibuster would establish. Historically the party in power can be counted on to lose seats in the midterm election, and since Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress are razor-thin, the loss of at least one chamber to the GOP may be a foregone conclusion. Since there is little to gain from further action electorally, it might be deemed wise to avoid taking on unnecessary liabilities.

Two considerations argue against such caution. The first is that some minimum degree of legislative action is necessary to secure the integrity of the electoral process itself. Republican-controlled legislatures in twenty-eight states are moving to enact laws that will restrict voting rights, especially to low-income and minority constituencies that disproportionately vote Democratic. Unless Congress passes H.R. 1 (the "For the People" Act)  to curtail these voter-suppression  drives, the GOP may be able to rig the system so thoroughly as to engineer an inevitable Republican victory in both 2022 and 2024. Such an outcome would not only deprive millions of Democratic voters of their franchise, but amplify the most malignant and anti-democratic tendencies within the GOP itself.

A second principle that must factor into Democratic strategy is the future trajectory of the two-party system itself. The United States cannot survive in the long term if one of its two major political parties is committed to a fascist agenda. There are leaders in the GOP whose commitment to (small-d) democratic principles remains firm, but they are a minority who lack the power to set the course for the party as a whole. In order for Republicans like Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and Larry Hogan to pilot their party away from the path of white supremacist oligarchy, a general restructuring must be effected in our electoral politics. For that to happen, the GOP must be drubbed in at least one future electoral contest much more thoroughly than occurred in 2020 or even in 2018.

Republican leaders like Ron Johnson, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz, in endorsing the Big Lie about the January 6th terrorist attack, are effectively spreading the message that American democracy no longer works, and thus it must be replaced by a white supremacist oligarchy. In order to effectively counter that message, Democrats must enact policies that persuade voters of its opposite: democracy can and does work, and is thus worth preserving. Will the CARES Act and an infrastructure bill be enough to instill that confidence in a broad enough swath of the electorate to produce truly transformative electoral wins? 

 

Perhaps. But an alternative view would suggest that the Democrats have little to lose and everything to gain by "swinging for the fences." Moving to eliminate (or weaken) the filibuster will provide the Republicans with powerful short-term political ammunition, but it is the only way to clear the path toward meaningful change and robust action on urgent priorities. Moreover, though conventional wisdom might lead Democrats to give up the 2022 contest as "lost," the emergency of the moment calls for bold strategy. If Democrats retained or actually expanded their majorities in both chambers of Congress, such an outcome would be so unprecedented and alarming as to finally shock the Republican Party into a substantive change of course. Caution and conservatism rarely yields dividends in midterm elections. If the Democrats want to drive up turnouts and potentially reap big wins, it would behoove them to court controversy and generate buzz through audacious action

I do not envy Democratic leaders as they plot a political course over the next weeks and months. Under the best of circumstances the political stakes are nerve-wrackingly high in the early months of a new administration. But since the outcome of the next two electoral cycles will ultimately decide the survival or extinction of American democracy, the pressures of the moment are excruciatingly intense. At such moments it is tempting for citizens to sit back and rely on the strategic wisdom of those in power. By piloting the CARES Act to implementation Joe Biden and his Democratic allies have earned a degree of confidence from voters. But given how high the stakes are, we should all remain politically engaged, since any path forward will require the active participation of an informed and conscientious citizenry to yield positive results.