We are in one of those moments where we are awash in debates over the failures of “the Democratic Party.” (I’ll explain the scare quotes in a moment.) It’s a conversation I enter with great ambivalence. Most of my commentary over the last twenty-odd years has been about trying to push Democrats to take more aggressive and forward-looking strategies for building political power, political coalitions and so forth. Indeed, I’ve been doing that for the last few months through my “Roe and Reform” crusade. But a huge amount of this debate is advanced by people who see the success of rightwing candidates as prima facie evidence of the failure of Democrats.

From one perspective, this is true. In a binary political system, for one side to win the other has to lose. But at a deeper level a lot of these people don’t want to accept or grapple with the fact that a lot of Americans really want rightist authoritarian government. It’s not just that Democrats didn’t run good enough candidates, or didn’t get behind Medicare for All or didn’t say clearly enough that they weren’t for Defund the Police. Disappointment with Democrats not being more progressive didn’t lead voters to embrace the right. A lot of people really want rightist authoritarian government.

We’ve spent a few weeks now piecing through various senators’ answer to the Roe and Reform question: will you vote for a Roe law and suspend the filibuster rules to allow it to get an up or down majority vote? We’ve seen or gotten answers for a number of senators — particularly ones whose positions seemed genuinely uncertain: Feinstein, Casey, et al. But now we’re at the point where we need to zero in on just who is where and specifically who is standing in the way of 48 senators all being on the record in support.