Dark Days Ahead?

Under pressure to accomplish something, the Progressive Caucus gave Biden his win on the infrastructure bill with the vote on Build Back Better now delayed. Proposed at $6 trillion and most commonly listed at $3.5 trillion, BBB has already been whittled down to $1.75 trillion and still might not get past a nominally Democratic controlled Senate.

Of course, pragmatists are fine with this--"half a loaf" and all that (more like one-seventh?). Democrats hope infrastructure alone can be a winning issue. Meanwhile, the few Republicans who dared to vote for a non-controversial bill are receiving death threats. Brian Karem is hopeful for a return to sanity in the "bipartisan" effort even as he quotes Joe Walsh:

If you are pro-vaccine, anti-insurrection, and you state the truth that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square, you have no future as a Republican. Just think about that.

Andrew O'Hehir's hope is a little more nuanced.

A whole lot of Democrats are hopelessly pinioned between the corporate donor class they have lovingly cultivated and the increasingly restless "progressive base," and must also reckon with the fact that in our deeply undemocratic system their fragile majority literally rides on a few thousand randos in exurban "swing districts" and "purple states," who are entirely likely to vote based on the price of gas or whether the Amazon guy was a dick or some half-processed fragment of COVID misinformation.

Historic patterns are against us next year (not to mention deliberate undermining) and a Restoration is not out of the question for 2024.

Yeah, that could definitely happen, and it would be bad news. Will it mean the end of democracy forever? No, of course not. Will it suck? Yes. ... But to pretend that the deeply offensive and moronic (and evil) prospect of a [Fuckface] 2.0 regime will mean the end of history and the end of politics ... is insulting and untrue. Why do we think we're special? In almost every European nation, not to mention the nations of the developing world, there are living people who have survived periods of fascistic or autocratic rule and come out the other side. Millions of people live under such regimes right now. It might just be our time to get schooled by history.

O'Hehir argues it's time to rebuild a party from the ground up while searching for answers--but perhaps only after "a period of real danger and possible violence and almost certain trauma, which will require courage and patience and sacrifice, and whose ending is uncertain". So, good thing there's no civilization-threatening catastrophes in the making.

Update (November 19):  The House of Representatives passed a watered down version of Build Back Better on a party line vote.