An envoi from the worst Democratic senator

“Not especially long, but feels interminable” is also a good description of John Fetterman’s tenure in the Senate [gift lnk]:

Fetterman has been a U.S. senator now for nearly three years, but he doesn’t appear to like his job all that much. A number of articles have noted his dismal attendance record. In his memoir, Fetterman, who on Sunday was one of seven Democrats (along with Angus King, an independent) to break with the party to vote to end the government shutdown, mostly speaks of the Senate with disdain. “There is no sanctity left in the present U.S. Congress,” he writes, before adding that virtually the only issue enjoying bipartisan support was the push to enforce a dress code on the Senate floor that was “aimed at me.” (Fetterman, determined to wear his hoodie and shorts to work, says he stood in the doorway to give a thumbs up or down on a given vote before returning to his office.)

[…]

“Unfettered” includes surprisingly little about his political positions. The pages that do have him defending himself from progressives who have been startled by his eagerness to work with President Trump, whom he visited at Mar-a-Lago before the inauguration.

Fetterman, who says he wants “compassionate” immigration policy, was one of 12 Democratic senators who sided with Republicans in undermining due process for immigrants, and he was the only Democratic senator who voted to confirm Trump’s pick for attorney general. “It is not anti-immigrant to support a secure border,” he writes, though he does not say how he feels about what Trump’s version of a secure border has meant in practice — masked men pushing people into vans and immigrants being whisked away to countries they have no connection to. Fetterman’s wife, who was brought as a child to the United States from Brazil, was an undocumented immigrant. He doesn’t say anything in the book about that either.

He is similarly pat regarding his views on Israel, and his unconditional support for its war in Gaza. According to a letter by his former chief of staff that became a national story this spring, the senator “claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos.” In his memoir, he issues a pro forma line about grieving “the tragedy, the death and the misery,” but treats his position as a no-brainer. “There was no choice,” he writes.

The voice in this book is brooding but not particularly thoughtful. Fetterman offers generalized contempt instead of pointed arguments. He thinks one of the Democrats’ main problems is that they are perceived as “soft and gooey” because of their “policies against men.” While it’s true that Democrats have lost support among male voters, Fetterman never specifies which “policies” these are, but he insists they were decisive: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”

A preoccupation with tough-guy masculinity seems to be an underlying theme. A flashback to 2001 has Fetterman fondly recalling how he made his home in the basement of an abandoned church in Braddock: “The place has a ‘Fight Club’ feel to it that I like, big and dingy and sparse and conducive to men beating the hell out of one another without anyone else hearing it.” In 2013, Fetterman thought he heard gunshots outside of his home and then chased a nearby jogger, using a 20-gauge shotgun to detain him until the police arrived. The jogger was Black and unarmed. Fetterman maintains that his political opponents were being grossly unfair when they criticized him: “If I had stayed indoors, they would have called me a coward.”

His struggles with depression are sad and worthy of sympathy, but they don’t justify either his being buddy-buddy with Trump or his total lack of interest in doing his job.

One obvious lesson from the strange use of Fetterman by some members of the party to re-litigate the 2016 primaries for the umpteenth time is that slobby masculinist aesthetics are not, in fact, a useful proxy for progressive politics. Alas, some some to be already making the same mistake again.