Conservatives, Republicans, and Trump supporters should start licking their chops in anticipation, because in the very near future the spectacle we've long been waiting for will finally materialize: Democrats and “progressives” will form one of the most brutal and effective circular firing squads of all time!
The trigger for this bloodbath on the Left will be simple: after months of painstaking legislative sausage-making, Democratic efforts to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill plus a $3.5 trillion social spending and entitlement bill, will collapse in a heap. The Squad's recent success in getting funding for Israel's “Iron Dome” stricken from a spending bill was a mere shot across the bow. The bigger problem is that the least that Congressional progressives will accept, in terms of new federal funding of their pie-in-the-sky priorities, is far more than moderate Dems, afraid of being swept away by a “red tide” in the 2022 midterm elections, will vote for. The more time that passes, moreover, and the lower “President” Biden's approval numbers sink, the harder it becomes to corral leftists and centrists into voting for compromise legislation.
Ergo, the Dems' big bet on history-making social spending and entitlement expansion is about to come up empty. The new dawn for the welfare state, for “climate justice”, and for (integrity-less) “democracy” that Democrats and progressives predicted when they captured the White House, House, and Senate in January 2021, has instead become a nightmare in which the Left cannot accomplish any significant reforms at the federal level, but it can be held accountable for the policy mistakes of the Biden Administration, and for the resurgence of COVID, inflation, illegal immigration, street crime, and more.
It's enough to drive all your favorite liberals absolutely batty!
All this, however, is just the appetizer. The main course will be the internecine fighting and backstabbing that this series of political setbacks will engender.
For one thing, consider that Joe Biden “won” the 2020 election only because the media and social media conspired to suppress any negative stories about him and his family, no matter how accurate. Biden barely campaigned, and most ardent progressives, not to mention many young and minority voters, viewed him, and continue to view him, with disdain.
Nonetheless, as the anti-Trump in 2020, the entire Left, and the entire Democratic Party coalition, was prepared to support Biden – as were many independents, because of the warped, carefully curated version of reality they were fed by a compliant press. All this, plus the widespread violation of election laws to ensure that even suspect mail-in ballots (for Biden) were counted, netted “Sleepy Joe” a margin of victory in the three critical states of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin of 10,457, 11,779, and 20,682 votes, respectively.
Whew! That was a close one!
Thanks to his already-accumulating policy failures, however, the media's love affair with Joe Biden is already at an end. Coverage of the Biden Administration has become vastly more negative and critical, and journalists themselves have become more aggressive, accusatory, and disrespectful.
How much worse, therefore, will the atmosphere in the White House Briefing Room become when Biden's agenda in Congress goes down to epic defeat? At that point, it will be clear to progressives (and most elite journalists count themselves among them) that the grand bargain that the Left made when it accepted Joe Biden as its standard-bearer – that a familiar, if desiccated, white male face could ensure electoral victory and the passage of most of their wish-list items in Congress – was an exercise in futility.
Combine Biden's impending legislative humiliation with his increasingly disastrous polling numbers (Rasmussen now has Trump defeating Biden by ten points in a rematch), and the gloves will assuredly come off as progressives unload on the putative leader of their movement and their party. To say that the fur is about to fly would be an insult to catfights everywhere!
And that's not all. As the Left loses faith in its “moderate” leadership, both in the White House and in Congress, questions will inevitably arise about Biden's fitness to remain in office, as well as his medium- and long-term political viability. Some Democrats and progressives will promote Kamala Harris as a younger, female, and more diverse alternative to Biden. Others will recoil at that prospect, given Harris's obvious negatives, including her rhetorical stumbles and her rank unpopularity.
The truth, therefore, is that in political terms the Dems and progressives really did bet the farm on Joe Biden in 2020. They have no viable Plan B, in case he should prove to be a dead end, at least not until the primary process begins in early 2024 and they can begin to choose a more suitable successor.
In the meantime, all that leftists can do is wallow in squalor and misery...and curse themselves for not choosing Buttigieg, or Sanders, or Warren, or Klobuchar in 2020, when they had a tantalizing opportunity to “win it all” and usher in a new era of Big Government, and instead shackled themselves to a corpse, and an unprepossessing corpse at that.
Conservatives, Republicans, and Trumpers should rejoice, therefore! Our recapture of the House, Senate, and presidency may not be guaranteed, but the humbling of our enemies and tormentors is about to begin in earnest. To say that the months and years ahead will present us with “opportunities” would be the understatement of the century!
Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com. He appears on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480/106.9.