Opinion: Bipartisanship is Dead
Bipartisanship is dead and the GOP killed it. If Republican officials unabashedly treat the Democrats as the opposition, then they should not feign outrage when the other team starts playing hardball.
I don’t want to hear anything about bipartisanship after Wednesday’s act of terror. I don’t want to see any mediators coming to social media to call for a united front in the face of a domestic terror threat.
The time has long passed for any Democrat, moderate Republican or Independent to call for unity. Any attempt to do so now is a feign of civility. For over four years, Trump and his party divided this nation using agitprop and other harmful rhetoric. If we truly wanted unity, then we should have called for it long before Wednesday.
The Republican party is solely to blame for the terrorist siege on Capitol Hill. They’ll denounce the violence on Twitter but it’s for damage control. The President took to address the terrorists on Wednesday and asked them politely to go home. He said he loved them and understands them. The man who has called Mexicans rapists and animals, who has shown dissent for the BLM movement, who has implemented a Muslim ban and who has put children in cages at our southern border came out with the most sympathetic message of his presidency and it was for white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, wanna-be militia and others who seek to overturn a historic election.
For years, Trump has been radicalizing his base with the help of the Republican media apparatus. QANON has moved his base into action. Conspiracy theories cast doubt on sacred American processes. Fox News and OAN segments have dismantled the basic trust people had in the government and replaced it with fear and anger. Even as the riot broke out in its climax, right-wing news stations refused to cover it fairly, calling it a victory, patriotic or even suggesting Antifa infiltrated were at fault; a stark contrast to coverage of the BLM protests that took place over the summer.
The last four years have been a constant stream of defiant rhetoric coming straight from the President and trickling down to our neighbor’s daily media intake. The way our officials speak can inspire an ideology. The subtext, the unspoken messages, incite action. It is no longer enough for US leaders to promote behavior and drive turnout to polls for something they believe in. It is now their responsibility to denounce extremist behavior outright without any qualifiers.
The terrorists at Capitol Hill, however, were not solely to blame. Stop the Steal rallies were held throughout America on Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon. Whether it’s our nation’s capital or the main street in our towns, fervent MAGA diehards laid siege to democracy all the same.
Now that the election results have been certified, there is no room for concession going forward. Not only are the Democrats responsible for fixing the fallout of the incompetent Trump administration, but they are also tasked with pushing citizens into a just society through progressive legislation.
In this country, there is an extreme wealth rift in America. Public education is severely underfunded in favor of private and charter schools. Wages are stagnant while corporate CEOs have made billions in the era of COVID. Millions unemployed. Mass incarceration. Racial injustice with milquetoast solutions. An exploited working class. A government with increasing surveillance capabilities. A broken court system. A reeling police force.
If the Democrats don’t pass critical progressive legislation while they hold power over the Senate, the House and the Presidency for the sake of bipartisanship, then the working class truly has no future in this country.
The next couple of years are the most important in our nation’s history. Can we rebound from the MAGA era or do we fail to create a just society because we want to play nice with those that assault our nation’s integrity?
Even after Wednesday’s pitiful stain on our history, representatives took the floor in the House and Senate to object to the election process. Even after a woman was shot dead in the halls of Capitol Hill, the Trump train marches on. She was attending a rally for something she believed in at her core. To our leaders, she was merely a price to pay. This is the power of rhetoric. It can make believers skeptics and the uninformed dangerous.
Other Republican officials called to restore the soul of America. Some called for unity. It’s all a way to cut ties with Trump and avoid having to answer for the blood on their hands. From the civil unrest to the soon-to-be 300,000 dead due to COVID-19, these historic times aren’t by chance. We are here in these notoriously historic times because a party refuses to play fair.
