The thrill of victory

Joe Biden won a historic victory this week when Congress passed the most ambitious piece of progressive legislation in a generation. Not since FDR and the Great Depression have Democrats accomplished something this big. LBJ’s Great Society and Obamacare were the last two major progressive advances but this one will be the most significant of the three.

Riding a wave of popular support for the new law and for his presidency, Biden, after trying to garner some Republican support for the Covid relief bill, gave up and went at it alone. He pushed through the law without a single Republican vote.

That is a good thing in itself as it shows a new unity and determination in a party stricken with timidity for a generation. It is also satisfying for few things feel as good as pushing around a habitual bully. It serves a didactic purpose too. Surrender is what the Republicans mean by compromise, and it is important for Biden, Harris, and the Democrats to send the GOP the message loud and clear: this time there will be no surrender.

We would rather have walked hand in hand with you to get out of the mess your president created. But, if out of obedience to party and dogma, you try to block the exit amid a fire, we will walk all over you unapologetically.

You did and we have. Your lockstep, zombie-like resistance to helping American individuals, families, businesses, states and cities in this unprecedented crisis is the best demonstration of your intransigence. Three quarters of the American people and even six in ten Republicans support the relief bill. Are you as a party not only intransigent but also suicidal, so addicted you would drink your own Kool Aid? Don’t expect Democrats to follow you there.

Instead, the Democrats should make the Coronavirus disaster and the refusal to help fix what Trump broke the face of the Republican Party in 2022 and 2024.

Two items should be front and center in a bare-knuckles Democratic attack on the GOP.

One: Republicans no longer think for themselves; they won’t break rank even for the sake of common sense, or to rescue Americans in an emergency, or to defend democracy in the face of attack. Not even political survival: how is it possible that not a single Republican Senator voted for Covid relief when 76 percent of voters favor the legislation? This is the kind of martial discipline seen only among the most fanatical forces in authoritarian regimes, like the kamikaze pilots of World War II or the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, an elite within the SS elite charged with committing the most gruesome crimes and who yet followed orders faithfully.

I am not equating Republicans with Nazis, but I am asserting there are substantial parallels—the acceptance of heinous policies like family separation; the prevalence of white supremacy in practice, ideology, and membership; the resort to lies and violence to negate defeat; the cult-like adoration for a strongman leader endowed with a perverse form of charisma, the charisma of hate which is the antithesis of the charisma of grace. And, I am saying that the procession of lemmings that followed Donald Trump over the cliff is still marching in single file.

Two: Democrats should hammer on the fact Republicans have an unfair double standard in favor of donors, for those who butter their political bread. Any government aid is always too big when it goes to the middle class and the poor but never too big when billionaires are the beneficiaries as in the Trump tax cut. This systematic GOP preferential option for the wealthy goes so far that in the matter of Covid vaccine distribution, which is supposed to be covered by ethical and public health rules, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis tore up the rule book to give preferential access to rich Republicans living in high-end zip codes.

Similar examples abound; indeed, the GOP preferential option for the rich is pervasive and systemic. Compare the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts with Biden’s Covid relief act and see that fact in stark relief. GOP economic policy is all for the rich. The Biden relief bill spreads the money among a wide swath of the middle class and the poor.

Democrats should hammer each and every example of GOP injustice and bias toward the well-heeled. One thing is clear. They will never run out of examples.

Let me confess that Joe Biden was not my preferred candidate. I like Sanders and Warren better. But Harris was my favorite, progressive enough and more than tough enough to knock Donald Trump on his ass in any debate.

But Biden has surprised me, and very pleasantly. Biden has been giving a grand master class in political chess, moving the pieces like a Gary Kasparov or a Jose Raul Capablanca. He has been fulfilling his campaign promises, a miracle for a politician. This has included most recently protection from deportation for Venezuelans, the group of Latinos that most fervently opposed him in 2020.

If this does not show that, for Biden, unlike Trump, vindictiveness is not in the DNA, nothing can. That fulfilled a campaign promise too, plus belied the right-wing smear campaign against Biden and the Democrats that portrayed them as closet communists. Compassion, consistency and fairness can be both good policy and good politics.

The Republicans for decades have been carrying out an economic, racial and cultural counterrevolution against the changes and the spirit of the 1960s. The Biden election, the Covid relief bill, the overreach by Republicans on January 6th, the accounting of GOP responsibility for Covid-19 when all the bodies are counted, and the disarray and division in the party all provide an ideal opportunity for progressives. This is the time to stop the Republican counterrevolution dead in its tracks and push back hard. The Covid relief bill, which will fight child poverty, bolster Obamacare, give the fight against Covid a big boost, and help the unemployed and small businesses is a big step in that direction.

The Democrats recently have handed Republicans one defeat after another. The dual coup attempt—legislative and violent, suits and thugs ostensibly working separately but for the same objective, stealing a democratic election—was ultimately an operational and moral defeat.

Let us work with this clear objective in mind: making the Republicans feel, time after time, the agony of defeat.