‘Will you stand for democracy?” Joe Biden asks. That has the grammatical form of a question, but it is not really a question. The real question is, “Will you stand for gross majoritarianism?” And the answer should be, for all Americans, “No.”
Not that the Democrats are even much interested in majorities right now. As Charles C. W. Cooke has documented at amusing length, Democrats such as Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders are consistently befuddled and irritated that 48 senators out of 100 do not make a majority and cannot do their will when 52 senators oppose them. “Why should two senators have so much power?” they demand, referring to moderate (or at least moderately sensible) Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. But it is not two senators who are blocking the worst of President Biden’s legislative fantasies — it is 52 senators, at least. It might be more in reality, if a few more moderate Democrats were really made to choose. And there almost certainly will be more than 52 senators opposing the worst excesses of the Democratic Party at this time next year, perhaps even including a few more sensible Democrats who have discovered that all of the crazy talk and hysteria of 2020 did not, in fact, shift the ground as far to the left as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez et al. might have hoped.
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