She describes the challenge of backing the US away from Republican authoritarianism as encompassing two closely related accomplishments. On the one hand, both should seem obvious. But with our corporate media so addicted to horse-race reporting on politics and a bizarre commitment to an abstract form of centrism that endless assumes Both Sides Do it, it won't be so obvious to a lot of people.
One is that Biden-Harris Administration have to not address the COVID-19 pandemic and the closely related economic effects with substantive policies but that they must be perceived by the public as having meaningfully addressed them:
[I]n the middle of a pandemic and a time of escalating inequality, [Biden-Harris will have] to prove that democracy can still provide tangible benefits to Americans. That will require that President Biden not only choose to pursue policies to address the malaise that made Trump possible, but that he’ll succeed in implementing such policies.I stress the perception part of that because the Republican Party's strategy of fundamental opposition against Obama-Biden was not only successful in limiting what he they could accomplish in the face of a recession that had begun under Bush-Cheney but whose worst phase hit after Obama became President. They were also able to create an impression among many voters that the Obama-Biden Administration was detached from their problems and blur credit for even popular accomplishments.
Biden and Harris will face a very similar problem. Only the Republican Party is far more radicalized than it was in 2009. And it has a full-blown obstruction strategy - and worse - also well under way.
The second aspect she stresses is closely related to the first. Somehow the Democrats have to find a way to deradicalize at least part of the Republican Party:
With limited exceptions, [getting substantive legislative accomplishments] will first require convincing a sufficient number of Republicans to act to benefit the US rather than just the party, or at the very least, to understand benefit to the GOP to be something other than lockstep loyalty to Trump. It requires doing so at a time when much of the GOP believes (Trump’s underperformance compared to down ballot races notwithstanding) that they need Trump’s support to get reelected in 2022...Neither timid legislative initiatives nor rhetorical "bipartisanship" are at all likely to achieve those two goals.
The asymmetric partisan polarization that is a central fact of American politics is something that the mainstream press consistently refuses to acknowledge.
But the Democratic leadership also refuses to take it seriously. Or at least not seriously enough to address it effectively enough. They are stuck in a strategy that they wholeheartedly embraced in the Clinton-Gore era under which they embrace a neoliberal economic and social approach that tries to embrace conservative Republican framing of issues while putting a more friendly face on the policies. The steadily increasing importance of large donors also Obviously had a huge influence on this development.
It's also a strategy that still bears heavy traces of the days when left-right ideological divisions really did cut across Democratic and Republican Party lines. That was still very much the case in 1973, when Joe Biden first became a Senator from Delaware.
That cross-party ideological phenomenon also had a geographic aspect. The Southern states were often represented by conservative Democrats even after the end of the segregation era. And until 1992, California with its huge number of Electoral College votes was considered a Republican-leaning state in Presidential elections. So it was considered necessary for a Democratic national ticket to be competitive in the South. The ticket in 1992 of Bill Clinton from Arkansas and Al Gore from Tennessee was an expression of that political assumption.
But in 2021, we have situation in which Republicans can to a large extent successfully block distinctly Democratic programs while Democrats are not only unable to block destructive Republican proposals but too often don't try particularly hard to do so.
Unless the Democrats can find a way to effectively reverse this trend, the Republican drive against democracy and the rule of law will continue. There is just no significant countervailing force inside the Republican Party itself. There are no Jacob Javitses or Mark Hatfields left in tot party of Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump.
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