Dear America,
Mitch McConnell has rendered "bipartisanship" a dirty word...an obvious fantasy. With his open and public statement that "one hundred percent of my [McConnell's] focus is on stopping this new administration," McConnell demonstrated that bipartisanship is just a euphemism for despotism as opposed to democracy. Putting his comment into context, McConnell was talking about President Biden's current initiative and the policy it represents toward not just renewing our aging and failing infrastructure but toward facilitating the creation of new, well-paid jobs and the social programs that would free people to work and prosper in them. It was such a blatant admission of his intention to not just oppose, but to obstruct efforts of the opposition just because they are the efforts of the opposition, and not those of his party, as to demonstrate that he is unconcerned about being labeled with an at-any-cost anti-democrat--not just anti-Democrat--reputation. Between McConnell and Joe Manchin, a DINO (Democrat in name only), the other senator from Kentucky, that state has by itself advanced the death of democracy more than all the other states combined. By putting the power in the Senate into the hands of these two dogmatic politicos, for whom the practice of legislating is no more than a matter of rigidly implementing a set of arcane political rules to the effect of insuring that no legislation inspired by the will of the majority of the American people gets enacted unless they allow it, they have turned the democratic legislative process on its head. They don't seem to understand, or maybe they just don't care, that democracy means government by the people, not by a select class of powerful political insiders who designate themselves a ruling oligarchy.
To be fair, McConnell went on to qualify his remark as a statement of the principle that he opposes the conversion of our society to socialism, which is what he claims the Biden plans are. And in his defense, when you mention opposition to socialism, you are uttering a shibboleth that identifies a fairly large contingent within the American polity, so McConnell is effectively representing a segment of the nation's population. But it isn't the majority. Most Americans, according to current polls, approve of Biden's proposals for resurrecting our now uncompetitive infrastructure and socio-economic distribution of opportunity and resources. So McConnell's commitment to thwarting the adjustments to our current societal architecture accords with the will of some of the people, but not the majority's...by far. But the remaining question is, how united will the real majority be come 2022 in demonstrating how odious the rigid, conservative Republican obduracy toward the plight of so many of us is when we go to the polls, and that is the plight the nation as a whole has faced for decades. Republicans do not require righteousness from their leaders as they don't require it of themselves because they are aware that they sit in the minority of our society, thus ceding the power of a democratic government to the liberal opposition in virtual perpetuity...or at least until conservative Republicans see the light of what they declare to be their ethos every week at church, synagogue or mosque.
So, here we are with an open and, in my opinion egregiously partisan, admission that the Republican Party, or at least it's leadership, opposes what the majority of Americans want, and thus will deny it to them by punctilious and anti-democratic adherence to rules that the American people not only didn't devise, but probably for the most part don't even know exist. As I've said often, the origins of the notion that the electoral college and the Senate were intended to protect the nation from the will of the people, and that doing so by empowering what Spiro Agnew called "an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as [our salvation]" is as old as the Federalist Papers or older. Unfortunately, what is needed to repudiate that notion as a nation is a vastly shared epiphany. We must somehow make those who accept as legitimate the conservative Republican determination to dominate even though they are the minority understand that doing so is a disservice to the American working man and woman, and thus a disservice to themselves.
It's going to be an uphill struggle, and it may take a generation or more. That kind of change must be gradual if it is to prevail. It must gradually permeate this society the way that egalitarianism did. I just hope it doesn't require the same kind of upheaval that the end of slavery and Jim Crow necessitated.
Your friend,
Mike
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