Manchin and Sinema are Democrats in Name Only (DINOS)

“Close to heaven, West Virginia” sang John Denver. The state has abundant natural beauty by virtue of being in the Appalachians. But, with its toxic streams, ravaged landscapes, right-wing politics, deaths of despair, black lungs, an economy controlled by corporations based outside the state with no interest in paying taxes for the sake of the people’s wellbeing, it comes closer to the kind of hellhole Donald Trump imagined being inhabited by brown and black Third World people.

In West Virginia, the Republican governor is the richest man in the state and Senator Joe Manchin, the sole Democratic office holder is rich too. Most people are poor or scraping by uncomfortably close to the poverty line.

The irony is that Manchin, who says he fears that increased federal spending for human needs will create a “mentality of entitlement,” represents the state of entitlement par excellence. According to a 2021 report from SUNY’s Rockefeller Institute of Government, in fiscal year 2019, West Virginia received $2.15 in federal spending for every dollar of federal taxes it paid into the Treasury. That reflects how much West Virginia needs Build Back Better money from rich states to elevate its people.

West Virginia lives on the dole and needs more. So, what makes Joe Manchin so determined to cut close to the bone the Democrats’ program for helping Americans in the middle and the bottom like his constituents? Cynicism, political opportunism, masochism, hypocrisy?

Unlike the enigmatic Senator Kyrsten Sinema, his partner in mischief and obstructionism from Arizona, who used to be a blonde Ocasio Cortez and now thinks like a Paul Ryan, Manchin has been clear about his purpose. Give the devil his due. That’s his story and he is sticking to it.

Manchin says he wants to prevent Democrats from going on a wild spending spree that would swell the deficit. Republicans never worried about deficits when Trump was racking up unprecedented levels of red ink through huge tax cuts for the very rich and gargantuan military spending. Manchin and Sinema didn’t worry either.

The real story is not about deficits and money at all. It is about ideology and psychology. Manchin wants to block the Dems from rebuilding and expanding the porous social safety net built by FDR and LBJ that the GOP has spent a generation shredding.

My God, Americans might realize that living in a welfare state rather than under hyper-capitalism allows them to live a fuller, healthier, less anxious, longer, and more human existence, as the Europeans have realized. They might like it. What a disaster that would be.

Joe Manchin is no moderate Democrat as the mainstream media (MSM) brainlessly describes him.  What is moderate about wanting to deny people a modicum of security and comfort for the sake of profits and a puritanical workaholism? I call it reactionary.

The word is not, as many Americans in their political illiteracy seem to think, the antonym of proactive. The dictionary definition is “of a person or a set of views opposing political or social liberalization or reform.” The mass media should learn this word and use it instead of meaningless ones like “moderates” and “conservative.”

Manchin is a Dino (Democrat in name only), a dinosaur. He harkens back to the pre-civil rights era when Democrats dominated Southern politics by backing the racial status quo.

Is Manchin a racist? That is a heavy accusation, and there is no way to see into another person’s heart. But I can say this. The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote: “I am myself and my circumstances.”  Manchin represents a state so racist that a brazen bigot like Trump has won with huge margins there in the last two elections. Manchin has signaled he shares racist assumptions about black shiftlessness when he talks about an “entitlement mentality.” That’s white-speak for Blacks who want to live off welfare rather than work. Walk like a duck, quack like a duck, what are you?

The fact is that Blacks have provided this country so much labor gratis, forced enslaved labor mostly, that fair reparations really would explode the deficit and send white America into a frenzy. Manchin is so off the mark historically and ethically and his insinuations are so insulting they make my blood boil.

From now on, the MSM should call things by their name and question the received, cozy categories. Stop calling Manchin a moderate. Open your eyes and see that today we don’t have two political parties but at least three.

There are the radical right-wing Republicans who lead congressional Republicans and who claim the January 6 insurrection was a picnic and Biden stole the election. They bow at the feet of Donald Trump. Nauseating.

There are the not-so-radical Republicans who include Liz Cheney, Joe Manchin and Cristine Sinema. They represent a miniscule minority in their own parties and want to square the circle. Hopeless.

Then there are the mainstream Democrats, with a progressive and centrist wing, all together 96 percent of the party, who unanimously support the Biden agenda and who have accepted paring down the Build Back Better for the sake of the American people. These are the only democrats.

Joe Manchin has leveled at the Democrats the shockingly damning accusation that they want to change the fabric of American society and convert us into a culture of entitlement. Entitlement. What does it mean beyond a racist dog whistle? Every human being is entitled, for example, to benefit from the best medicine, not the medicine they can afford, that hundreds of years of collaborative scientific and clinical endeavor have created as a social good and not a commodity. No one is entitled to poison the planet by producing more and more fossil fuels, not even Joe Manchin’s friends in the energy industry.

Manchin just wants to perpetuate a status quo that has been revealed as destructive and unsustainable. I agree with Washington Post editorial writer Greg Sargent that “what’s so frustrating here is that a unique confluence of circumstances — the increasing urgency of the climate crisis and covid-19’s unmasking of deep injustices in our economy — had seemed to create a new consensus grounded in a more realistic assessment of our national moment.”

It did create new consensus. It finally dawned on Americans that life is more important than work or profit. Manchin, Sinema, and the GOP want to prevent that insight to come to fruition in policy. They all pretend that a meaningless spending limit is more important than preserving the planet. Of course, that is not the real reason Manchin wants to cut Biden’s program off at the knees. If he can’t see the light now, he is an irredeemable reactionary. As Adam Tooze, quoted by Sargent, has written, “After the shock of 2020, how much more evidence do we need?”