The Compromise of 2021?

The Senate is deadlocked, with two Democratic Senators preventing the passage of the moderate progressive agenda of the Democratic leadership. My amber scrying ball is cloudy. But I do have a historical parallel to put forward: the Compromise of 1877.

In 1877, a deeply corrupt election threw the Presidential election into Congress. The Republican leadership, lacking a strong figure like Lincoln as leader, chose to seat their President by throwing away all their ideals. As part of the compromise, white supremacism was allowed to operate unchecked in the South. In addition, the white Southerners got huge subsidies– a railroad line, and their harbors rebuilt. This led, as we all know, to Jim Crow and the system of segregation. Less obviously, it led to the continuing economic failure of the South. In the end, racism turned out to be more powerful than capitalism, and the South remained impoverished. The slave economy, then and now, was a money-losing thing, and easily out-competed by industrial capitalism. And in 1877, how did the Democrats, then the party of racism and slavery, react to losing the Presidency but winning everything else? In Trumpian fashion! Name-calling! Unsubstantiated claims of fraud! Claims of corruption! Then as now, white supremacists are sore winners.

In the north, the power of wealth which Lincoln had inveighed against reigned unchecked. The satirists Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner co-wrote a novel entitled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today and the title gave us the historical name of the period, the Gilded Age.

Turning to our time, what might be the elements of a Compromise of 2021?

First, the abandonment of a meaningful right to vote in multiple states. Unless some electoral reform bill makes it through Congress, which Senator Manchin so far refuses to allow, both access to the ballot box and the honest count of votes will be a thing of the past in Republican-dominated states.

Second, the continued predominance of wealthy industries and individuals in national policy, regardless of how harmful that policy is. We have Senators Sinema and Manchin defending the pharmaceutical industry’s outrageous price-gouging, and Manchin blocking even modest carbon-reduction efforts. The filibuster will be kept in place to protect many bad actors from any regulation and keep the taxes of the rich down.

And the consequences? I have a long list of nightmares, but I am not at all sure they will come true. The consequences of the Compromise of 1877 were dire, but they were also unpredictable. The same is likely to be true of the (not yet made) Compromise of 2021. Better to avoid it entirely, if this is possible.