If the midterms are a preview for the 2024 election, we’re on the verge of seeing both parties self-immolate, in historic fashion, right before our very eyes. Infighting, litmus tests, and a twice-impeached president leading the Republican Party has the favorability of congressional Republicans underwater by 25 points. Fractures between progressives and moderates, frustrated with a lack of leadership from the White House, and ineffective messaging has left President Biden with a 41 percent approval rating and 51 percent of Democrats open to a different candidate replacing the President of the United States at the top of the ticket.
Can you really blame voters for having a higher opinion of a day at the DMV than the people entrusted to make our laws and protect our fragile Democracy? Not if you’ve been introduced to Marjorie Taylor Greene or had the pleasure of watching Kyrsten Sinema do her best impression of an unregistered lobbyist. The system is broken. The game is rigged. It’s one of the few things that came out of Donald Trump’s mouth with a shred of truth attached.
Don’t get it twisted: Democrats and Republicans don’t suffer from the same ailment. One party is unmoored and unprincipled, using culture wars combined with Soviet-style disinformation as the guiding strategy to regain power. Echo chambers in right-wing media readily misinform and indoctrinate their viewers with a mix of nationalism, racism, and the type of fear tactics that would make former Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater come back to life just to renounce his legacy all over again. Republicans haven’t just embraced Atwater's Southern strategy, they have injected it with steroids and turned it into gospel.
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Trump may be immoral, dishonest, and more dangerous than an angry ex-girlfriend with the passwords to your social media accounts, but like many in the Republican Party, he is completely in it for himself, so loyalty is a one-way street that has historically ended in embarrassing fashion. Donald Trump owns the Republican Party. After his 2016 win, Trump remade the party in his own image, casting dissenters or those who questioned his behavior as being disloyal, unpatriotic, and unworthy of holding office.
Take congresswoman Nancy Mace for example. Mace was outspoken on Jan. 6, criticizing President Trump for his part in the insurrection, while also validating Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. A year later, she embarrassingly stood outside of Trump Tower, praising the former president (who endangered her life on Jan. 6) in a social media video, practically begging for his support. What's the point of winning an election if it means sacrificing your honor and self respect?
Lindsey Graham famously said before the 2016 election, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it.” How prescient. Hours after insurrectionists stormed the Capitol and threatened the lives of elected officials, Graham said of Trump, “Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. I hate it being this way,” he said. “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”
But like a moth to a corrupt flame, Graham went to Mar-a-Lago groveling for the adoration of a man who nearly got him killed. That's like surviving the first two Friday the 13th movies only to knock on Jason Voorhees’ door, to make sure you’ll have a part in the third installment. It’s nonsensical, it’s revealing, and exactly the pathetic behavior all too familiar in Washington.
While not nearly as incorrigible as their Republican counterparts, Democrats have an equally devastating weakness that renders them unable to win consistently. Democrats aren’t just uniquely bad at messaging and inspiring likely voters with a message that resonates, Democrats are also held hostage by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two corporate Democrats who believe that they just say the phrase “bipartisan” enough, we won’t be able to see them act less like senators and more like soon-to-be hires at a well-paying K Street lobbying firm.
It’s not just Manchin and Sinema’s mercenary-for-hire behavior that shows how unprepared Democrats are for the bright lights. It’s the way Biden’s infrastructure plan was intentionally messaged as a $3 trillion bill. Who has ever tried to convince someone to buy something by starting out with a big price tag? Leading with the price tag, rather than how it will improve the lives of Americans made no sense. Every single surrogate should have had five short policies that were repeated ad nauseam. Instead, voters were unaware of what infrastructure or Build Back Better encompassed which made it easy for Republicans to tear apart and dominate the messaging.
Ultimately, Democrats were able to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, but only after progressives bent over backwards to appease moderates and decoupled the physical infrastructure bill from Build Back Better. How did moderates respond? By treating Build Back Better like a camp counselor in a horror movie and killing it in dramatic fashion.
Democrats like Sinema and Manchin openly profit off of their constituents, while Republicans buy and sell stock with little to no repercussions. Our political landscape betrays the dignity of the most powerful nation in the world. It doesn’t have to be this way. In a two-party system, it’s bad enough having one party that’s morally bankrupt, we can’t have a second party struggling to meet this moment in history.
If we have any hope of maintaining our democracy we need our politics to resemble The Pursuit of Happyness, not a horror movie where the Black guy dies first.
So where does that leave Democrats and Republicans less than a year away from the midterms? A complete and utter disaster. A dumpster fire of epic proportions. A horror movie where the group keeps making rookie errors like splitting up, or walking into creepy basements. I may make light of how unprepared our political parties are to meet the next crisis, but the election of 2020 should be a warning to all Americans. The system worked this time. But next time we probably won’t be as lucky.
If Republicans can’t end their cultish support of Trump, and Democrats can’t end their inability to frame a winning message, we’re headed towards more dark days, the type of conflict that the framers feared. This isn’t a horror movie; it’s real life. That’s the scariest part.
