No Bark, No Bite
No Bark, No Bite
Look across the pond to see what happens when there are actual consequences
Welcome to a Wednesday evening edition of Progress Report.
It’s hard to look at the United States right now and see anything but chaos, convergent disasters dragging us all down a cliff with no footholds or ledges within reach. Even Debra Messing is experiencing great despair and hopelessness.
Here at Progress Report, we like to focus on specific issues and the potential solutions that are being pursued by activists and experts. We’re hard at work on a number of those kinds of stories, each of which will be published in the few weeks. But tonight, I want to look at the bigger picture, because dysfunction is a product of collective failures and there’s no issue that exists in isolation.
Don’t worry, it’s much more compelling than I just made it sound.
It’s exceedingly easy to get sucked into our dueling social and political death spirals, but if you have the mental bandwidth right now to keep up with international politics (or just happen to love a certain football club enough to follow European news outlets on Twitter), you’ll have noticed that things are pretty dire overseas right now, too. The neoliberal order is collapsing under the weight of inequality and outrage across Europe, with fissures in each nation forming along very parochial lines.
The past few days have been especially tumultuous in London, where Conservative members of British parliament have been resigning en masse in an effort to ouster Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Officially, the resignations are being made in protest of the PM’s handling of sexual assault allegations against a senior member of his cabinet, but it’s hardly that principled; in reality, the dimwitted Brexit champion has been on politically shaky ground since 2020, when he thoroughly screwed up the UK’s response to Covid and then got caught enjoying drinks with friends.
For nearly two years, the British media and Labour Party investigators have doggedly pursued details of a series of cocktail parties that Johnson was said to have hosted at his home during the national lockdown in 2020. There are no allegations that any sort of corruption or foul play transpired at the events; that the rumpled git would hold get-togethers with friends instead of adhering to the rules imposed on the rest of the nation was enough to merit intensive scrutiny and national outrage. For now, Johnson is refusing to resign, but it’s likely only a matter of time until he’s forced out.
The whole affair has been breathtaking to watch, especially as our own political disaster has unfolded. It’s easy to compare Johnson to Donald Trump — they’re each charlatan celebrities with awful haircuts who stumbled into leading major political realignments — but their respective downfalls are indicative of why the United States is a much deeper and more dangerous disarray.
Here, public officials and wealthy individuals no longer suffer any consequences for even the most pernicious offenses. Shame is dead, rules have been rewritten, and political power has been neutered, rendering public opinion almost irrelevant.
Republicans openly defied every Covid precaution at every turn, using raw political power and legal brinksmanship to sabotage even the most modest responses to a historic plague, killing more than half a million more Americans than would have died otherwise.
The mainstream media saw the mass deception and misinformation, and because it reports on politics as sport and drama instead of the engine that determines the health and safety of 300 million people, decided to move the story to the next phase of a dispassionate punditry-driven narrative.
Suddenly, protecting people became a political liability, and cruel strongmen like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott went from reckless demagogues to savvy politicians and strong presidential candidates, whose campaign strategies earn far more headlines than the blood on their hands.
In the UK, Boris Johnson was abandoned by his own party after sustained scrutiny from the press and outspoken condemnations from the opposition forced his one-time allies to jump ship.
In the US, nearly every Republican stood behind Donald Trump through the winter of 2020, many helped him in his efforts to overturn the election, and a full 18 months after the violent coup attempt that he very clearly instigated, most of them continue to stand by him.
Their solidarity has been made possible by Democrats’ decision to slow-walk the January 6th investigation, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal to take any action, and a media that spends as much time speculating on the electoral consequences of the coup as the historic sedition that has since been recast as heroic patriotism by conservative figures.
Lindsey Graham was subpoenaed by investigators in Georgia over his role in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election but has already said he’ll refuse to comply. What are they going to do about it? The court system makes any sort of relevant or painful comeuppance largely impossible to secure.
The United States is largely a service and consumer economy now; all the factories are gone, save for the institutions that manufacture consent. Corporations to run rampant, conservatives have hijacked the judiciary, and Democratic leaders — who were in office when back when business interests conquered government — have preemptively surrendered both the legal power and popular pressure that could restore some equilibrium.
The Biden administration and congressional leadership unilaterally disarmed from the jump. They wrote off any talk about expanding the Supreme Court, coddled Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, made appointments based on optics instead of competence, and embraced police with open arms at the behest of bad consultants and cynical conservative House members.
The pathological refusal to enforce rules or use power to lay out consequences and create accountability is destroying whatever remains of the “normalcy” that this crew so allegedly values.
There is no issue that this failure does not touch. The ongoing air travel disaster is a result of airlines flagrantly violating the conditions that came with the $54 billion in bailout money that they took from the federal government in 2020. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a product of the McKinsey academy, has the power to levy huge fines against airlines for continuing to cancel flights at the last minute or refusing to provide timely refunds, but he’s resisted doing so for no reason that should be regarded as in the public interest.
As CNN confirmed this week, the Biden White House was so disinterested in taking strong, decisive action to protect abortion rights that it didn’t bother to put together a game plan even after the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked in early May. Even I pre-wrote much of my post and had our abortion fund donation page updated ahead of the decision’s release.
Simply asking them to be ready for the devastating Dobbs decision is going too easy on them. The White House and Democratic leaders have worked hard to paint themselves as powerless to stop the Supreme Court, as if is run by algorithm and not humans that are well attuned to politics and must at least occasionally leave their bubbles to visit the world that they shape.
As Elie Mystal put it today, the politics of appeasement, of refusing to even suggest that there might be consequences, has invited chaos and subjugation.
If Biden had been making a full court press for court reform over the course of his presidency, would that have made alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, a weak man who appears susceptible to peer pressure, join Chief Justice John Roberts in a more limited restriction of abortion rights, thereby preventing Roe from being overturned outright? We’ll never know, in part because Biden never said anything to make the court sweat.
I spend a lot of time getting yelled at on Twitter by people who insist that there is nothing that Biden or Democrats can do so long as the filibuster continues to stand in their way. This is called learned helplessness. There is no guarantee that Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema could ever be moved on that procedural maneuver, but there has been little attempt at convincing them over the past 18 months.
Sinema is likely to get a primary challenger in 2024, and Democratic leadership has shown no hesitancy to jump into primary fights. Even if they did not want to officially run any pressure ads or sign off on spending, they could offer big outside spenders the same wink and nod that they use to authorize millions in attack ads from conservative groups like AIPAC and DFMI to attack progressive candidates.
That Biden stepped in to endorse Rep. Kurt Schrader, the only House Democrat to vote against all of his agenda, including even the American Rescue Plan, underscores just how few consequences there are for bad actors. Even when the White House does try to act tough, it comes off mildly pathetic because no consequences are ever even implied in its rhetoric on inflation or letters to price-gouging oil companies.
In my day job, I speak with workers who have been illegally fired, injured on the job, or sent through a Kafkaesque system of benefit claims that grinds them down until they stop bothering with trying to assert their rights. The NLRB is working on alleviating some of the issues here, but that justice is necessarily slow and its decisions could be reversed by a Republican administration. Simply creating consequences for bad employers through legislation would be revolutionary in so many ways, but the PRO Act was dead on arrival the moment that Democrats took back power.
The mass shootings, the ten-year-old rape victims who can’t get abortions, the total rigging of the 2022 elections through gerrymandering — there has been no powerful response, only flailing and lamenting. Beating one’s chest won’t solve every — or even many — problems, but it can make people think twice about skirting the law again. Consequences exist in part to prevent such flagrant violations. Pursuing them also keeps the media and public’s focus on the wrongdoing, which so often leads to further revelations or at least broader mistrust.
When Boris Johnson is finally ousted, he will be politically and professionally isolated. There will be no base of die-hard supporters there to buy into any deranged conspiracy theories, no group of suckers to fill his coffers. He will have suffered consequences. Imagine that.
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