The Democrats Are Trying to Lose
Democrats are going beyond refusing to give Americans an affirmative reason to vote for them: in sabotaging their own purported agenda around Biden’s Build Back Better bill, they seem to be trying to lose to the authoritarians in the GOP they claim to oppose.
President Joe Biden speaks to reporters as he walks to Marine One on the south lawn of the White House, December 15, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
Cognitive dissonance is one of the defining traits of American politics, but with this weekend’s blow against the Build Back Better bill, we’ve now reached an inflection point: Americans are being simultaneously asked to believe that Democrats are mounting a valiant last-ditch defense of democracy against insurrectionists and election deniers, and yet we’re also watching Democrats proudly surrender the midterm elections to those same fascists, knowingly creating Weimar-esque conditions for an authoritarian takeover.
Taken together, this is far more than hypocrisy: in JFK lingo, this is an admission that the ruling party wants the bear-any-burden brand of democracy defenders, but without the pay-any-price actions that might assure the survival and success of liberty.
In the last week, the contradictions have been too blatant to miss, even if corporate news outlets continue doing their best to ignore, omit, downplay, and distract from them.
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