What comes after McConnellism?
The worst political leaders have a way of unifying their opposition. George W. Bush, with utter lack of self-awareness, campaigned on the delusion he could be “a uniter, not a divider.” By the end of his presidency, the nation was united in the judgment that his two terms had been a divisive and bloody mess of war and financial calamity. When Trump’s corruption and incompetence eventually drag the economy down, he’ll face the same reckoning.
But there’s another leader who has great unifying potential. At times he seems capable of the impossible: bringing America’s centrists, liberals, and leftists into a sincere if tenuous alliance. Yes, we stand together in our mutual contempt for the loathsome, unctuous, chinless invertebrate known as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. We despised him when he made it the defining cause of his career to fend off any kind of campaign finance reform and to protect the power of the wealthy to buy whatever politicians and policies they saw fit. We despised him when he made up a new rule that prevented a twice-elected president from choosing a Supreme Court justice in his final year. We despised him as recently as last week, when he stated that a package of anti-corruption and election-reform legislation that passed the House will not get a hearing in the Senate “because I get to decide what we vote on.”
The cynicism that oozes from McConnell was never more apparent than in the early weeks of this year when, after repeatedly warning Trump against declaring a national emergency to fund a border wall, he then announced he would support the rogue president’s craven power grab. The emergency declaration, he said, “is the predictable and understandable consequence of Democrats’ decision to put partisan obstruction ahead of national interest.” That’s a sentence-wide glimpse into what makes McConnell so detestable. When called to defend his views in public, he reveals himself not as the stately Bluegrass compromiser found in his own imagination, but as the unscrupulous lackey of a brazen and unstable president.
A while ago, when I confessed my splenetic feelings about McConnell to a friend who is a veteran Washington journalist, he reacted with a verbal shrug: “He’s just a pure partisan.” Or is he something worse? After McConnell caved to Trump on the national emergency, former Democratic speechwriter Michael A. Cohen assailed the Senate leader as a “Republican nihilist” in the New York Review of Books. “He is a remorselessly political creature, devoid of principle, who, more than any figure in modern political history has damaged the fabric of American democracy,” Cohen wrote. “That will be his epitaph.”
Cohen cited a previous NYRB consideration, by historian Christopher R. Browning, that likened McConnell to Paul von Hindenburg, the German president who aided Hitler’s rise to power. “If the U.S. has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell,” Browning wrote. “He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could.”
Centrists such as Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute have seen McConnell as a key figure in accommodating the extremism of the Republican Party and of its destruction of long-prevailing rules and norms. For his obstructionist role in the Obama era, Ornstein wrote last year, McConnell “will go down in history as a villain.” More pointedly, perhaps, writers on the left have also indicted McConnell. Our own Baffler contributor Maximillian Alvarez wrote in this space almost two years ago of his “unhealthy obsession” with McConnell’s odiousness. “Everyone knows McConnell is a slimy hypocrite,” Alvarez wrote. “He is the soulless corpse that’s left when every fantasy about how politics is supposed to be is stripped away.”
Everyone also knows that eventually his time will pass (the man turned 77 last month) and so we speculate about what his lasting legacy will be. Political scientist David Faris, in last year’s It’s Time to Fight Dirty, called McConnell “Kentucky’s dollar-store Machiavelli” and speculated that “future historians . . . will almost certainly write about Mitch McConnell the way today’s scholars write about Joseph McCarthy or Andrew Johnson—as dangerous scoundrels whose machinations imperiled both the American democratic experiment as well as vital civil rights for millions of people.”
The worst political leaders have a way of unifying their opposition. George W. Bush, with utter lack of self-awareness, campaigned on the delusion he could be “a uniter, not a divider.” By the end of his presidency, the nation was united in the judgment that his two terms had been a divisive and bloody mess of war and financial calamity. When Trump’s corruption and incompetence eventually drag the economy down, he’ll face the same reckoning.
But there’s another leader who has great unifying potential. At times he seems capable of the impossible: bringing America’s centrists, liberals, and leftists into a sincere if tenuous alliance. Yes, we stand together in our mutual contempt for the loathsome, unctuous, chinless invertebrate known as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. We despised him when he made it the defining cause of his career to fend off any kind of campaign finance reform and to protect the power of the wealthy to buy whatever politicians and policies they saw fit. We despised him when he made up a new rule that prevented a twice-elected president from choosing a Supreme Court justice in his final year. We despised him as recently as last week, when he stated that a package of anti-corruption and election-reform legislation that passed the House will not get a hearing in the Senate “because I get to decide what we vote on.”
The cynicism that oozes from McConnell was never more apparent than in the early weeks of this year when, after repeatedly warning Trump against declaring a national emergency to fund a border wall, he then announced he would support the rogue president’s craven power grab. The emergency declaration, he said, “is the predictable and understandable consequence of Democrats’ decision to put partisan obstruction ahead of national interest.” That’s a sentence-wide glimpse into what makes McConnell so detestable. When called to defend his views in public, he reveals himself not as the stately Bluegrass compromiser found in his own imagination, but as the unscrupulous lackey of a brazen and unstable president.A while ago, when I confessed my splenetic feelings about McConnell to a friend who is a veteran Washington journalist, he reacted with a verbal shrug: “He’s just a pure partisan.” Or is he something worse? After McConnell caved to Trump on the national emergency, former Democratic speechwriter Michael A. Cohen assailed the Senate leader as a “Republican nihilist” in the New York Review of Books. “He is a remorselessly political creature, devoid of principle, who, more than any figure in modern political history has damaged the fabric of American democracy,” Cohen wrote. “That will be his epitaph.”
Cohen cited a previous NYRB consideration, by historian Christopher R. Browning, that likened McConnell to Paul von Hindenburg, the German president who aided Hitler’s rise to power. “If the U.S. has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell,” Browning wrote. “He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could.”
Centrists such as Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute have seen McConnell as a key figure in accommodating the extremism of the Republican Party and of its destruction of long-prevailing rules and norms. For his obstructionist role in the Obama era, Ornstein wrote last year, McConnell “will go down in history as a villain.” More pointedly, perhaps, writers on the left have also indicted McConnell. Our own Baffler contributor Maximillian Alvarez wrote in this space almost two years ago of his “unhealthy obsession” with McConnell’s odiousness. “Everyone knows McConnell is a slimy hypocrite,” Alvarez wrote. “He is the soulless corpse that’s left when every fantasy about how politics is supposed to be is stripped away.”
Everyone also knows that eventually his time will pass (the man turned 77 last month) and so we speculate about what his lasting legacy will be. Political scientist David Faris, in last year’s It’s Time to Fight Dirty, called McConnell “Kentucky’s dollar-store Machiavelli” and speculated that “future historians . . . will almost certainly write about Mitch McConnell the way today’s scholars write about Joseph McCarthy or Andrew Johnson—as dangerous scoundrels whose machinations imperiled both the American democratic experiment as well as vital civil rights for millions of people.”
by Dave Densison, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Yup. Worst of the worst. Trump is the symptom, McConnell is the disease.]
