Here is DH's column.
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With seven words Sunday—“This is a no on this legislation”— Sen. Joe Manchin sent Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer stumbling amid the ruins of Build Back Better. But it’s possible to argue that the Manchin refusal may be even bigger than that: What if Mr. Manchin’s “no” threatens the entire temple of progressivism?In a next-day interview with a West Virginia radio station, Mr. Manchin pointed American politics and indeed its culture toward the long-term lesson of his stand:
“They just never realized it, because they figured, ‘Surely, dear God, we can move one person—surely we can badger and beat one person up, surely we can get enough protesters to make that person uncomfortable enough [that] they’ll just say: “I’ll go for anything. Just quit.” ’ ”
Why did it occur to a senator from West Virginia to describe his experience in that way—the belief by his opposition that if they threw enough flak at him, he’d break and give them what they wanted?
The short answer is: Joe Manchin has been there, seen that. Like uncountable other Americans whose politics don’t run to the far left, he has seen for at least a decade that what the American left tried on him has become the their modus operandi for everything.
Their tactics—whether used against politicians or average people—include relentless moral condescension, the messianism of mass protests, physical intimidation, social ostracism and demands that you simply shut up and give in.
People wondered what the White House thought it gained by putting out a statement Sunday afternoon that Mr. Manchin’s words were “at odds” with what he told President Biden days earlier, essentially calling the senator a liar. Impolitic as it might strike anyone in normal politics (a space Mr. Biden once inhabited), this ad hominem hammer is the way the left does politics. It’s the only thing they know how to do.
Commenting on Sen. Manchin’s call to her after the decision, House Progressive Caucus Chairman Pramila Jayapal said his “lack of integrity was stunning.”
The left never sleeps. Recall how several months ago liberal Justice Stephen Breyer became the target of a campaign to abandon his seat, until he pointedly told an interviewer he wasn’t stepping down. They’re back. CNN reported this week that “multiple Senate Democrats” say Justice Breyer “seems to have let his ego overtake him.”
Recall, for that matter, the Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh. We may assume Sen. Manchin (the only Democrat who voted to confirm Justice Kavanaugh) absorbed how low that strategy stooped. It included his Senate colleague and Kavanaugh supporter Ted Cruz and his wife being driven from a restaurant by a group called Smash Racism DC, which said: “You are not safe. We will find you.” The Build Back Better factions found Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in a Phoenix bathroom stall.
That sounds like the lunatic fringe, until you realize the extent to which participating in the progressives’ cancel culture became just another day at the office for many mainstream U.S. institutions. In October, the Justice Department announced investigative “measures” after complaints about parents objecting to unilateral impositions of progressive school curriculums.
The current strategy of obliterating opponents began of course on the campuses, a smart place for a test run because so many university leaders blow with the wind or are themselves on board.
Thus in 2017 Charles Murray was run off a stage at Middlebury College. Banning speech worked, so they’ve never stopped. In September, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology disinvited University of Chicago scientist Dorian Abbott, citing his article, “The Diversity Problem on Campus.”
One of the most used words in the progressive lexicon is “dialogue,” which they say it’s always “important to have.” That’s a cover story. After endless “dialogue” with the Biden White House and the congressional left, Joe Manchin nailed this one: Their goal is to get you to “just quit.”
After George Floyd’s killing in May 2020, the activist group Black Lives Matter rose to seize the commanding heights of American politics and culture. What some thought was supposed to be a “dialogue” with their supporters about police practices was in fact a strategy to defund or disarm the police.
It worked. Cops quit or stepped away from making arrests. The nearly instant urban chaos this abrupt change created now has even San Francisco Mayor London Breed sounding like the second coming of a law-and-order hard hat, denouncing the “bull— that has destroyed our city.”
Earlier this week, the inevitable coda to the Manchin decision surfaced on Twitter. Bette Midler, the singer, tweeted that Joe Manchin wants “us all” to be like West Virginia—“poor, illiterate and strung out.”
It was inevitable that eventually a counterrevolution would start somewhere against progressivism’s brand of politics—its cancellations, silencings and unearned condescension of anyone who isn’t them or won’t join them. Whether or not he intended it, that counterrevolution may have begun when Joe Manchin of West Virginia simply said no.
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