Playing the Long Game

One of the saddest election stories I’ve seen recently came out of France. The PBS Newshour aired an interview with a tall, attractive waitress, Mariama Sadio, at a sidewalk cafe [set the timer at 4:40]. She wasn’t going to vote for Emmanuel Macron, she said. In this Sunday’s two-candidate runoff for President of France, that implied she didn’t plan to vote at all.

What made the story sad was that Ms. Sadio is Black. Her failure to vote is, in effect, at least half a vote for Marine Le Pen, France’s female Donald Trump light. If Le Pen wins, Ms. Sadio and everyone else in France who is not white and Christian will suffer increased discrimination, decreased stature and loss of rights. French people who hate them just because of who they are will gain power and political legitimacy. It’s even possible that France—which played the midwife at our own nation’s birth—could fall to the right wing and make “liberté, égalité, fraternité” little more than an advertising slogan.

Whether in France or here at home, the battle for equal, progressive government is a long game. It never ends.

Black American leaders know this well. It was, after all, Jim Clyburn who raised Joe Biden’s primary campaign from the dead. Ultimately, he and Black voters helped give us an experienced, competent, decent president at a critical time in our history.

Black leaders know the long game because they and their ancestors have been at it for four centuries. With biblical patience, persistence and perseverance, they just got the first-ever Black female confirmed to the Supreme Court. It only took 403 years from their ancestors’ arrival as slaves on this continent.

So how can all of us progressives play the long game now? We can keep our eyes on the ball.

Many of us are wasting time wringing our hands, bemoaning the probable loss of the House in the upcoming midterm elections. Republicans are framing a midterm loss by the ruling party as an absolute Law of Nature. They are gloating long before the first vote is cast.

But the fat lady hasn’t sung yet. She won’t until November, over half a year away. And half a year is a lifetime in politics.

Even more important, there’s the Senate. For several reasons, Democrats have a good chance in this midterm election to gain a real working majority in the Senate. Not a hang-by-your-fingernails majority with Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote as VP. Not a precarious majority with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema acting on things like voting rights and climate change as if they were Republicans. This time, the Dems have a chance to gain a real, working majority of progressive or progressive-leaning senators.

So what’s the point, you say? Without the House, the Dems can’t pass any legislation. Our government will be dead in the water, even more than it’s been so far.

But there’s a long-sought prize that a truly Democratic Senate can give progressives. It can kill the filibuster stone cold dead. Once and for all.

That would be no minor prize. The filibuster appears nowhere in our Constitution. For centuries, it has been a tool of slaveholders, racists, segregationists, corporatists, monopolists, oligarchs, authoritarians and other bullies who benefit from minority rule, especially rule by the rich. Time and again, the bad guys have used the filibuster to stop a clear popular majority in its tracks.

The filibuster is an insidious creation of those who don’t really believe in democracy. In recent years, so-called “conservatives” have exploded its use by orders of magnitude, turning our Congress into little more than a political theater. Now, in less than a year, this cancer on our democracy can be gone.

If that’s not a good reason for voting in this spring’s primaries and again in the general elections in November, I don’t know what is. If you’ve any doubt about voting, or about the necessity for picking the lesser of two evils, just ask Stacey Abrams or Jim Clyburn. Hear them out, and then ask “Where and how do I register?”

The long game doesn’t end with excising the tumor on our legislature. The pendulum can swing back again. Our Founders themselves said so: they saw the House as the body most vulnerable to popular “passions” of the moment.

Republicans (and some misguided progressives) have been able to blame President Biden’s inability to complete his entire agenda on Democrats, conveniently ignoring the reality of Manchin’s and Sinema’s perfidy. But if the Republicans take the House this year and the Dems increase their majority in the Senate, there will be no doubt who will take the blame for the resulting inaction of Congress. Nothing will get done but performative politics, i.e., political theater, as moron-blowhards like Marjorie Taylor Greene and David Madison Cawthorn do their thing. (Why do some buffoons use three names: do they feel inadequate with only two?)

If the Dems and GOP split the House and Senate this year, we might as well relocate the Capitol Building to Broadway. Maybe then the NYPD under Mayor Eric Adams can protect it.

But in 2024, the pendulum just might swing back. The Dems will have a real chance to win because the finger for inaction would point straight at the GOP. The lie that Dems now have a true majority and are responsible for inaction would lose credibility. Dems could take Congress for real, keep the presidency, and install a government to make FDR proud.

All it would take is keeping the faith, keeping our eyes on the prize, never failing to pick the lesser of two evils and never, ever failing to vote. If we don’t do all of these things, the greater evil could prevail, risking the loss of our Republic, forever.

We should all watch Sunday to see whether something like that happens in France. Lafayette, we are holding our breath.


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