The Rules of the Game

Following politics in the US as much as I do sometimes feels like an exercise is masochism. It's like watching a car wreck every day; disturbing but hard to look away. It's always been a messy business, but now it's become so dysfunctional that even the most popular legislation in a generation, the $1.9 trillion Covid rescue package, popular with Democrats and Republicans alike across the country according to polling, is having trouble in the Senate. The only reasonable explanation is that the government has ceased to represent the interests of voters, particularly in the Senate. We know that the Senate is not a democratic body. The state of California has a population of almost 40 million and is represented by two senators. Two senators also represent the state of Wyoming which has a population of 582,000. The Senate is a relic of another time. For example, in 1787 Virginia had roughly ten times the population of Rhode Island, whereas today California has roughly 70 times the population of Wyoming. But it's about more than the numbers. It's about how numbers translate into power and control, which for the Republicans, means that since they are defacto the party of the minority, they no longer see the need to campaign on policy, legislation, or any notion of good governance. Instead, they can be the party of special interest, and focus their efforts on tactical wins by anti-democratic means, like suppressing the vote, and promoting mistrust in elections. Ultimately, what this does over time is undermine the trust that the citizens have in their elected officials and its supporting institutions in general. This is not new. The US has been on a trajectory of political implosion for the last 30 years or so. I thought it might come to a head with the insurrection of January 6th. I thought (hoped) that in subsequent weeks Americans would come to their collectives senses about what happened. I was wrong. The Republican party has since doubled down as an anti-democratic cult of personality. There is only one conclusion one can come to: The rules of the game have changed about the way US politics is played, and the future of American constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.

It sounds like a big deal, I know. But here's a sample of how it plays out on a small scale. I had the pleasure of talking to a cousin the other day, an ardent Fox-watching trump supporter. While trump was in power I avoided any conversation with him about politics when we'd see each other infrequently as we did. But now that the Biden era has begun I let my guard down. Our conversation started in agreement. He griped to me about how 'screwed up' things were in America these days and how lucky we are to live in a 'sane' country like Canada. No argument there. The US is controlled by fascists, he said. Yes, I replied, there's great danger to American democracy right now I said, since the Republicans have wholly embraced the lie that the election was stolen and they refuse to denounce political violence, instead embracing and activating thousands upon thousands of white supremacist domestic terrorists like the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. 'What are you talking about' he says indignantly. 'It's the Democrats who threaten democracy, and the Black Lives Matter people who are the violent fascists because they want to cancel everything people think and say. Can you believe that they want to 'ban' Dr. Seuss now!' he says. Then he goes on to mention, that by the way, plenty of blacks are racist too, that white privilege doesn't really exist, and that blacks only represent about 13% of the population. I moved the conversation in a more congenial and non-political direction as quickly as I could.  

For the record, no one is 'banning' Dr. Seuss. That's the way it's being spun in right wing media, but what my cousin was talking about is that the Dr. Seuss Foundation responsible for publishing the books has decided to cease printing certain titles because they contain imagery that can be seen as racially insensitive or offensive. Frankly, I was disappointed by the decision because I loved reading those books to my kids and I think the decision is extreme and unwarranted. But, they own the books, and publishing them is entirely their decision, a commercial decision, so in my mind there's really not much to discuss. Anyone who chooses to make political hay out of an issue like this is obviously trying to distract from the really important issues at hand, like voter rights legislation, or legislation that will provide relief for millions of suffering people during the pandemic. Talking about Dr. Seuss is a form of political propaganda, mind-control.  

But my interaction with my cousin is illustrative of the state of American political discourse. One side wants to govern, while the other side wants to stop them from governing and would rather change the subject in a way that would fire up their political base with manufactured grievances. It's an appeal to the worst most racist fears of their supporters, the fear of threats by 'the other' (Muslims, Blacks, Socialists... fill in the blank). That's their game. But it's interesting to remember that at the outset of our conversation my cousin and I were both on exactly the same page, we were both concerned that democracy was being threatened by anti-democratic forces. Only in his view the insurrectionists who wanted to 'hang Mike Pence' and interrupt the peaceful transfer of power after an election to re-install trump as president, were fighting to protect democracy. My cousin just couldn't see how illogical and contradictory his position was. Once you've bought the election fraud lie hook, line and sinker, as he has, then using violence to upend the democratic transfer of power to 'save democracy' becomes justifiable. 

A lot of people in the media are talking about how more than 70 percent of Republicans don't believe that Biden is the fairly elected president. I'm not surprised. If you'd asked Democrats in 2017 whether they thought trump was the fairly elected POTUS I'm sure you would have gotten a similar number or maybe even higher. Of course in 2016 the sense in Democrats that the election had not been fair was because of Russian interference, which had credence, and led to the Mueller investigation. While in 2021 the Republican belief is fueled by lies about mail-in ballot fraud which has been disproved in court. But the point is that despite their feeling the Democrats stomached, and peacefully opposed trump for four years using democratic means, while Republicans seem to be prepared to take their efforts to oppose and delegitimize the Biden presidency beyond democratic means. That's a huge difference. The rules of the game have changed.