It's all too easy to reduce politics to individuals, and hate on the ones we don't like. But as George Orwell reminds us in 1984, reducing your opponents to a single detested enemy is a sure way to blind yourself to the way politics really works.
So, yes, Senator Joe Manchin's torpedoing of the Democrats' climate agenda is a decision he made that will harm humanity, and it's just and fitting that he be blamed for it. But reducing the problem to his general badness (conservative, coal-supporting, coal-business-owning) distracts from the underlying problem: a system of government with so many choke points that a single representative of a small state can block a policy favored by a majority of the population.
It's easy to say, as many have, that Manchin "doesn't care" about climate change. But what does this mean?
He does not, of course, walk around Washington announcing that he doesn't give a damn about the prospect of losing many things Americans love — animals, plants, places, ways of life, institutions. He says, instead, that yes, climate change matters ("I want climate") but that he cares about other things more. These other things are bread-and-butter stuff, according to his spokeswoman: "Political headlines are of no value to the millions of Americans struggling to afford groceries and gas." He cares more, he says, about inflation.
Let's set aside the fact that government spending doesn't have much effect on inflation, and consider why this rhetoric is effective (or at least why Manchin's people think it is effective). It rests on the assumption that a crisis that is global, dispersed and hard to address is, by definition, "political." And that people's day-to-day struggles are "real."
This kind of statement flips the climate-related accusation of uncaring back around. It says, in effect, to care about this means you have comfort and leisure to worry about problems beyond the end of your nose. Which means you're doing better than us. And if you care about that political thing so much, you don't care about us. Thus, concern about climate change is made into a badge of elite indifference to regular folks.
That culture-war strategy is a reminder that the problem with our politics is not that people don't care. Almost everyone cares about something. The problem, rather, is that we don't care about the same things.
That's fine when the object of our concern is a traffic plan or the right brand of truck to buy for the Department of Public Works. You can have your opinion, I can have mine. But when the object of care is desperately, passionately at the center of your consciousness, how can you compromise with someone who is more concerned about something else?
I sometimes wonder if democracy depends on a certain indifference — a willingness to let things go, because you care about the political system itself more than any particular policy it enacts. In the fact of our current global problems, this tradition is looking tattered and fragile.