President Manchin

The conservative Democrat is the perfect symbol for a new age of cynicism

2021 has offered some slight relief for many Americans. People can wake up without seeing a Nazi re-tweeted by the president or with the feeling that white nationalists are living with a sense of empowerment. When news of the government is broadcast, it takes on a predictable and neutral term. The vague distance between political actors and the lives they affect has been restored. In a way, it feels we can go back to our lives without an extra weight on our shoulders.

Yet this surface level interpretation isn’t accurate. It obscures a much more bitter reality: that the US government is likely to be ground to a standstill in the last moments it may have to affect meaningful change.

And this moment truly is fragile. As I write this now, consultants and Republican state legislatures are meeting to draw new district lines based on the results of the 2020 census, a process overtly politicized by Trump. They look to gerrymander the congressional districts in the same ways they did following the census of 2010, a process which could establish minority rule in Congress for at least a decade. This would be in addition to the hundreds of voter suppression bills their also working to implement across the country.

Yet the only means of finding a way to counter this is thwarted by senator Manchin (and Sinema) who refuse to find a reasonable workaround the jim crow era relic known as the filibuster. Even if they’re willing to find some sort of compromise, refusing to remove it all together but willing to look for some way to make an exception for voting rights or other priorities, few everyday people believe such a compromise will ever actually be reached. Instead, the other part of a predictable government is here: stagnation.

While the COVID relief bill found a means to force itself through the slim Democratic majority, it was viewed as an absolute necessity. And even then, senator Manchin threatened to de-rail the process over some minute details that no average person could even distinguish. And when it came time to fight for a proposal actually supported by the vast majority of Democratic voters (and a majority of voters overall), the $15 minimum wage, it wasn’t even close. Kyrsten Sinema made a name for herself with her gleeful thumbs down at the proposal. Now she has another 4 years to spit in the face of the activists that brought her into office.

Or what of the next great test of “Democratic Unity”, Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill?

The Biden administration has proposed raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, up from the 21% it currently stands at. This is meant to help pay for 2 trillion dollars worth of infrastructure replacement, with an attempt to put some of that emphasis towards renewable energy and “green” infrastructure.

Despite the fact that the corporate tax rate stood at 35% during the Obama administration, despite the fact that corporate actors were lobbying for a 25% tax rate during the Trump administration and got more than what they asked for, Manchin has already said the corporate rate of 28% is too high. He stands in the way of a reform the doesn’t even restore the rate to its previous historic low, and for what? Are the people of West Virginia really clamoring to ensure the corporate tax rate stays low?

Then there’s the end-all issue of climate change. Every conceivable branch of environmental science is screaming at the top of its lungs that drastic reform must be made to avoid absolute catastrophe. CO2 levels are now at the highest they’ve been in 3.6 million years. Even now the American West is stuck within the worst drought the country’s seen in 1,200 years. California, which experienced its worst fire season on record in 2020, is entering 2021 with an even worse drought than last year.

Yet despite the country standing at the edge of the abyss, no great number of young people believe any meaningful reform is on the way. The banning of private luxury jets, the construction of a high-speed rail system, the mass adoption of electric vehicles, the construction of new renewable energy projects, increasing funding to the EPA, or even the implementation of a basic carbon tax are all painfully out of reach. Not because people don’t want them, but because centrist Democratic senators refuse to even humor them.

So people, especially younger people who spent the last 4 years fighting for systemic change, look at the situation with exhaustion and dread. A new cynicism, more subtle and insidious than in previous years, is creeping into the minds of many. And how can they honestly be dissuaded?

This doesn’t even touch on the endemic police violence and mass shootings that have swept back into focus with the ebbing of the pandemic. Yet again, thanks to obstruction within their own party, Democrats stand to do nothing meaningful to alleviate the horror. And again, young people in the US are forced to question if this is always how it will be. A ravaged biosphere as a backdrop to State violence and mass murder feels to many like an inevitability, despite all their work to try to achieve something different.

Turn to the news and you’ll see Manchin proudly declaring his “ideals”, sticking to his guns on Senate rules while passing down an increasingly ruined country to the next generation. His smug self-righteousness looks down on the people of his own State as well as the rest of the country.

So when it comes time to find volunteers and phone-bankers in 2022 and beyond, what can Democrats point to outside the COVID relief bill and the status of not being outspoken Nazis? The Republican party channels an ever intensifying white hatred, seeks to establish an authoritarian state of anti-democratic rule, and hopes to empower the wealthiest people of the country at the expense of everyone else. With no hope from the Democrats and no reasonable alternative to turn to, young people can only look on in dismay.

The alternative to the conservative hate sphere is nothing more than a state of stagnation. It’s an arrangement of affairs that can’t point to a hopeful alternative, but rather a quieter, less racial-superiority-based dystopia. Even the progressive wing of the Democratic party can’t point to any concrete wins, any legislative victories outside the mostly symbolic gestures spewing from Cable news onto clips for Youtube.

So when it comes to youthful resignation, to depression, to a sense of futility and a thrashing disgust with what appears to be a hopeless state of affairs, please, don’t feign any surprise. It is what it is, and the hope for something different, even with a surprisingly progressive Biden at the tip of the spear, is obviously beyond any realistic expectations for the future.

Welcome to the stagnant dystopia.