I decided to open with the Dad Joke Of The Week that went over really well with my team today:
Q: What does the auctioneer at a shoe auction say?
A: Going once, going twice, SOLED!
The Revolutions podcast from last Monday about the Kornilov affair totally reminded me of some of the stuff that went down during the Trump years. Basically, it was “rich businessman grifter who thinks he has political access gets delusions of grandeur and in over his head”. I don’t think I need to mention Mike Lindell’s name for you to know who I’m talking about.
Some thoughts that are sadly obsolete from my birthday weekend when the media had a full mental breakdown about Pelosi’s delayed votes:
The critical failure here isn’t all the brinksmanship that’s happening now that there’s no trust among Democrats. It’s that we never just passed the bipartisan bill right off the bat.
Look, this failure squarely lands on progressives’ ledger. They held to this dumb strategy. They started the cycle of distrust by declaring that they didn’t trust Joe Manchin enough to pass the followup bill they wanted. I try not to spend all my time assigning blame, let alone ascribing it to entire philosophies. Personally, I think this debacle is all downstream of the filibuster, not progressivism1. But progressives are clearly the actors who fucked up this time. And that idiot theory of “leverage” is the oversized dildo that they looped back to fuck themselves with. The act of insisting on not “losing leverage” over Manchin for a later reconciliation bill is what ended up giving him more leverage over this entire negotiation2.
The underlying lesson here is that when you decide to take hostages, you make yourself a hostage to that very decision. Sure, being the hostage-taker always looks exciting when someone else is doing it, but in reality, that person is more agitated than excited, and they’re agitated because it’s really their own ass on the line now, not the hostage’s. The hostage was always just a tool to get attention; the hostage-taker has made their own exit nigh-impossible as soon as they’ve taken the first hostage.
Thus, the commonality between hostage-taking and this dumb “leverage” theory is the lack of an escape. When you take hostages in a bank robbery, unless you’re out before the cops arrive, you’re not getting out of there in anything but cuffs, a bodybag, or some secret tunnel that only exists in movies. Likewise, in Congress, the people you took hostages against… know who you are! You can’t escape them! What did progressives think they were going to do after making Joe Manchin their bitch? Did they expect him to just roll over? Or did they just not care/not trust him in the first place? My reckoning of available reports is the latter, with perhaps a unicorn-dust sprinkling of the former. These people just don’t understand what drives Manchin, why he’s happy to fight them.
At the end of the day, I can’t prove that immediately passing the BIF was the right call. But I can prove that not doing so was the wrong call.
Now, some are tempted to point out that the moderates’ own hostage taking worked for them on the BIF earlier in the process. Yes, it did! But this is like hearing the idiot kid who punches their bully in front of the teacher complaining that “it’s not fair, HE did it TOO!”. I think the difference here is what I’m going to crudely dub “The Girlfriend Test”. Let’s say you decide to have a fight with your girlfriend. And boy, does it go bad. At some point, you basically let it be known that you don’t want either of you to leave your house before you hash it all out. Now, the “test” is this: Did you put a gun to her head, or not? In other words, did you turn this into a hostage situation where eventually the police will get called on you or you end up with a restraining order, or was this all just you making a stand to make a point, and you would have just shrugged and been pissed off if she’d actually left?
Right now, progressives are doing the former. They’ve pulled out the gun and waved it around for the past two weeks. Centrists never really pulled a gun out earlier, they just kept throwing melodramatic hissy fits until they got their way. Perhaps the only real ideologically-driven difference we can point out here is that progressives, as relatively extremists in America, are generally more willing to pull out the gun. But that’s not an indictment of progressivism, which is a sane and good philosophy, but rather our whole zero sum system. A sane multiparty system would have all the guns locked away.
Look, even if progressives haven’t screwed up the entire Biden presidency and doomed us all to a Republican Authoritarian Apocalypse, they screwed up this round from a basic theoretical standpoint. As a con-prog who desperately wishes he could vote for a sane progressive party, this is not encouraging. It’s really only down to the fact that I despise the GOP and everything their authoritarian base stands for.
All that said, even if all this turns out to be much ado about nothing, I do remain concerned that it will all end up like Obamacare: stretching into the new year and so close to the midterm that the rote backlash to its passage significantly impacts Democrats’ results.
We wouldn’t be having any of this problem without the wierdness that reconciliation imposes on the process of legislating.
After all, he’s happy. He gets to tell his constituents that he’s fighting fringe progressive insanity. Progressives get… “leverage”.