Kyrsten Sinema Is Hindenburg In A Halter Dress

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(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Democratic Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is 45, meaning that if she maintains healthy habits, she’ll be around several more decades, and I’m hoping all her marathon running and wine drinking carry her past the age of 100. That way, she can read all the unkind things historians will write about her as they chronicle American democracy’s replacement by fascism – and her central role in helping that happen.

I suspect accounts of her and 74-year-old partner in obstructionism Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), will read like present-day accounts of Paul von Hindenburg, the Weimar-era German president who also had the chance to preserve democracy and stop fascism, but chose instead to let the nightmare come true.

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To be clear, this is not to compare the US in 2021 to the Third Reich – that would be reductive and offensive – or even to the Weimar Republic. Even if you date American democracy only to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it still has decades’ more maturity than its 1933 German counterpart, and socioeconomic conditions today are nowhere near as dire.

But Sinema and Manchin’s deliberate kneecapping of efforts to stop America’s march toward fascism absolutely reserve them a place in the same port-a-potty of history as Hindenburg. The fall of American democracy and the rise of American authoritarianism are not yet inevitable, but the two senators are making it far more likely.

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The immediate threat to democracy comes from the Republican Party, which in state legislatures across the country has passed voter suppression laws disproportionately targeting Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans, along with provisions allowing subversion of election results and extreme gerrymandering to negate Democrats’ ability to win and allowing Republicans to rule as a minority party.

In tandem with those efforts is the radicalization of the Republican electorate, an ever-growing share of which embraces political violence, authoritarianism, white supremacy, antisemitism and Christian nationalism that constitute a 21st century American fascism.

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Numerous scholars and other experts have increasingly been sounding the alarms that the US is a backsliding democracy at risk of slipping into dictatorship or even civil war.

Luckily, there is legislation to address these problems. Two bills set for debate in the Senate on Tuesday would undo the assaults on voting rights, while the Build Back Better Act would provide real improvements to Americans’ lives and make extremism less appealing.

But while Sinema voted to suspend the filibuster – a Senate rule not in the Constitution and historically used to thwart civil rights – to raise the debt ceiling last month, she and Manchin refuse to do the same to protect people’s ability to cast a ballot, so at the time of this writing, the voting bills were headed for likely defeat.

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Historians will probably see Sinema’s cringeworthy speech in the Senate last Thursday defending the filibuster – which would kill the voting rights bills – as an important step in America’s transition to a fascist regime.

“[We must] address the disease itself – the disease of division – to protect our democracy,” said Sinema, conjuring a well of phony emotion that would impress Sen. Sheev Palpatine, R-Naboo. “And it cannot be achieved by one party alone; it cannot be achieved solely by the federal government. The response requires something greater, and yes, more difficult, than what the Senate is discussing today.”

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Expect historians to cast similar judgement on her and Manchin’s spending most of 2021 stringing the Biden administration and the American public along on Build Back Better, forcing the removal of one popular provision after another before Manchin finally dealt a death blow in an unannounced Fox News appearance.

It’s well-known that both senators have taken significant campaign dollars from wealthy donors with a vest interest in making it harder for a Democratic majority in the Senate to pass legislation that would increase taxes and wages, mandate paid time off or enable more people to vote. That’s part of America’s larger problem of formalized political corruption under the guise of “lobbying” and “campaign finance” that thwarts even the most basic improvements, like making tax filing easier or replacing $1 and $2 bills with coins, both of which most industrialized nations did years ago.

Feminist writer Amy Siskind has another explanation for Sinema in particular. In a Twitter thread Thursday following Sinema’s speech, Siskind cited an unnamed source close to Sinema who stated that the senator has such a massive ego that she’s convinced she’ll be president, despite having alienated most of her party and even many of her friends. Narcissism and lacking even the faintest wisp of a soul may explain why she routinely takes the Senate floor wearing improper yet attention-grabbing clothing like denim vests and halter dresses while ignoring her constituents and literally telling them to “fuck off” after voting down an increase to the minimum wage. It would also explain why she shamelessly tweeted Monday in tribute to Martin Luther King Jr., while working to destroy his legacy, inviting as of Tuesday night nearly 50,000 mostly scathing comments, including reminders that he himself condemned the filibuster.

Manchin’s objections appear rooted in simple corruption and ideology. After all, his supposed concern about Build Back Better’s cost — $3.5 trillion over 10 years, whittled down to $1.85 trillion — clearly doesn’t extend to defense bills exceeding $700 billion per annum. Private comments that Child Tax Credit recipients would spend the money on drugs further demonstrate how wedded he is to the Reaganomics notion that government spending should focus on defense and enriching the already wealthy while skimping on public goods and services and leaving the US with inequality and poor quality of life more resembling developing countries than developed ones.

Whatever Manchin and Sinema’s motives, the consequences of obstructing efforts to rescue democracy and smooth capitalism’s rough edges are predictable. We stand now at a terrifying precipice similar to when Franklin Delano Roosevelt said the following in a 1938 Fireside Chat:

“Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations – not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government. Finally, in desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.”

Then, as now, despair, anger and a sense that democratically elected government doesn’t work for people radicalized huge swaths of the public, feeding antidemocratic right-wing and left-wing political movements and inflaming bigotry.

Today, the Republican Party is piggybacking off that radicalization to launch a racist, authoritarian power grab that would establish de facto one-party rule, entrench the power of the wealthy and enforce policy through violence from police and paramilitary thugs against anyone who protests, especially minorities.

The American authoritarian regime would likely last for decades, employing white Christian nationalist propaganda and violence to keep challenges to its power at bay so the wealthy could loot the country without encumbrance. It would fall only when sufficient numbers of the right-wing white Christians who initially supported its rise saw their living conditions deteriorating beyond tolerability and discovered they could no longer scapegoat people of color, religious minorities, LGBT people, immigrants, liberals or foreign countries for their troubles.

Events around the world provide a taste of what’s in store if democracy fails and authoritarianism takes root.

In less than three months, a right-left coalition in Hungary’s parliament faces an uphill battle to unseat the Fidesz party and autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who will likely only cement his power further and seek to neutralize future challenges if he beats it. And around the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol that could very well be a prelude to a successful coup, Kazakhs rose up against a nearly three-decade dictatorship that had looted their country and left them poor.

A ruling party with a virtually insurmountable hold on power even when nearly everyone is sick of it; a once mighty nation reduced to mediocrity as its economy degenerates to a vulture-picked carcass and its best and brightest emigrate; and a regime finally ending in violence after decades of ruinous misrule: That’s the kind of future Americans can look forward to if the assault on democracy succeeds.

Such a nightmare is avoidable, and we have the legislation to avoid it. Unfortunately, like Paul von Hindenburg before them, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin would rather do the bidding of the wealthy and protect their own riches than ensure Americans live in a future of liberty and prosperity. But decades from now, as Sinema wishes she still had Manchin’s shoulder to cry on as she reads historians’ damning accounts of how she helped slay democracy, perhaps her tears will turn to smiles when they note that she looked positively slaying while she did it.

Alaric DeArment is a journalist in New York. Follow him on Twitter at @biotechvisigoth.

Topics

Alaric DeArment, Filibuster, Government, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, Voting Rights