Sick Of The Doomers

 Josh Marshall takes on Alex Pareene, who argues the apparent bipartisan win on infrastructure is in fact a loss, because it didn't apply the appropriate lessons from 2009-10. What is frustrating about all of this is Pareene is a very good commentator. Yet, as Marshall points out, there simply aren't the votes in the Senate to pass voting rights, immigration reform or labor reform. Critics of "Democrats" simply wave their hands at the very annoying reality that Democrats lost winnable Senate races in North Carolina, Maine and possibly Iowa and Kansas. If they had won those seats, any number of different courses of action would be open.

But they didn't!

Everyone who laments that Biden isn't LBJ or FDR steamrolling his way through Congress neglects that fact that both men had supermajorities to work with. Biden does not.

What he has done is get important emergency spending done quickly, allowed Manchin and Sinema their bullshit moment of attention and passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill, AND set the stage for a second, larger bill passed via reconciliation. (That bill is still going to have to pass fucking Sinema's bullshit reflexive "moderation.")

Before I got sick, I began a Twitter argument (FUN!) over whether we were Germany in 1930. I said that was absurd, and I remain convinced of that. The simple reason is that we have many, many moments in American history where terrible wrongs were committed in defense of White rule. It's "funny" how everyone is focused on the "lost history" of the Greenwood/Tulsa massacre, but they are also ignorant of Rosewood, Colfax, Memphis, New Orleans and countless other incidents of White supremacist violence. People who scream "If you aren't teaching Tulsa, you are whitewashing history!" are missing the point. 

It was never just Tulsa.

That the GQP has abandoned multiracial democracy is not a new development in American history. Precisely when did the White South - and its cultural cousins in other parts of the nation - accept multiracial democracy willingly? They tolerated it when they could still win majorities from 1968-1992, but every year makes that harder, so their resistance ramps up.

This is not new, and we have beaten them before, and we will beat them again.

But not if we retreat into an Eeyore shell of despondency and despair.