For Democrats, politics has become showtime.
On Tuesday, 17 House Democrats—including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib—staged a made-for-Instagram arrest outside the Supreme Court. Then the committee investigating the invasion of the Capitol by Trump supporters went prime time Thursday evening. The committee has created its own logo—“January 6th”—which looms on a gray screen above the committee.
Let no one doubt it: Jan. 6, 2021, was an event whose notoriety makes political ramifications inevitable. Most likely the committee’s hearings will force rethinking by the Republican Party and the broader voting public about
Donald Trump’s future.
But sitting in not-so-distant memory is an event of similar political consequence: the summer of 2020, with the past few weeks showing how that remarkable time has transformed the politics of the Democratic Party.
After George Floyd’s death that May in Minneapolis—for which Derek Chauvin
was later convicted of murder—protests broke out in hundreds of U.S. cities, some accompanied by violence and store lootings.
The Floyd protests appear to have permanently altered the Democratic Party’s basic political model, moving it away from traditional legislative politics and toward the uncompromising, often theatrical, strategies of activists in the streets.
The news has been dominated lately by Democrats raging about the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on abortion and Sen.
Joe Manchin’s opposition to their climate-control agenda. Many are disgusted that President Biden, whom they lump with traditionalist politicians, won’t “fight” for them and “do something” to reverse Dobbs and save the planet.
One unavoidable detail must be mentioned about American politics from the aftermath of 2020. Aside from Mr. Trump’s complaints about a stolen election, something of real consequence occurred: the Jan. 5, 2021, runoff elections for two Georgia seats in the U.S. Senate. Amid Mr. Trump’s denunciations of the state’s Republican leadership, Democrats won both seats, producing a 50-50 Senate. That standoff is the result of millions of votes cast by Americans. Time was that such a democratic voter verdict, however frustrating, would get bipartisan respect. But not in what progressives call “our democracy.”
The central preoccupation of American politics for the succeeding 18 months has been Mr. Manchin’s denial of the vote Democrats need to enact their spending and climate policies. Arizona Democratic Sen.
Kyrsten Sinema also has opposed much of the party’s agenda. But Mr. Manchin has inspired the melodrama and party rage.
In what political galaxy would anyone expect a senator from West Virginia, a state synonymous with coal mining, to vote for his party’s intention to terminate fossil-fuel production? Yet last week the party and its climate allies went berserk when Mr. Manchin sank their agenda for the umpteenth time.
My intention is not to describe paint drying in the Senate but to draw attention to a party that since May 2020 has gradually disconnected from normal political processes.
After Mr. Manchin withdrew his support for the climate legislation, citing opposition to new taxes and inflation, former Obama White House counselor
John Podesta wrote the senator had “doomed humanity.” Rhode Island’s Democratic Sen.Sheldon Whitehouse
took to—where else?—Twitter to liberate himself from Congress: “Free at last. Let’s roll. Do it all and start it now,’’ Mr. Whitehouse tweeted. “With legislative climate options now closed, it’s now time for executive Beast Mode.’’
Under a new unchecked and unbalanced constitutional system called executive Beast Mode, Mr. Biden would declare “national emergencies” on both abortion and climate, presumably leading to an array of sweeping presidential enactments accomplished by Mr. Biden repeatedly producing his signature.
The post-2020 Democratic Party’s theory of politics appears to be: The system no longer works, so blow up the system by issuing presidential executive orders on climate, education, guns and abortion; ending the legislative filibuster; packing the Supreme Court; suppressing dissent as “misinformation”; and if necessary, redefining reality, such as the “1619 Project,” which rewrote the country’s history.
Clichés in politics exist because they’re true. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver. Politics is the art of the possible.
Chuck Schumer
knew these realities before he was out of sixth grade in Brooklyn. The progressive coterie to which the Senate majority leader pays obeisance now doesn’t know any of this because teachers from grade school through university have tutored them in the nonnegotiable demand.
These tactics do produce publicity—such as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s faux handcuffed pose Tuesday—but a problem remains: It isn’t sustainable. An article in the Washington Post this week reports that college-age Democrats are pushing away from politics, including this November’s elections, done in by the endless, insistent activist wheel-spinning.
That is the familiar result of displacing the unavoidably incremental progress of real politics with an antipolitics—street demos, constant moral denunciations, or threats of ostracism from the group for imagined offenses. Whatever else, keeping the apocalypse going is exhausting.
People are reordering their post-pandemic lives. Losing one’s mind every day over Jan. 6, abortion or Joe Manchin may be what professional Democrats do for a living now. The rest of the country is still looking for that promised, but undelivered, return to normal.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
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