If one were to imagine an alternate timeline in which Kamala Harris won the 2024 election—persuading voters for whom pessimism about the economy was often the dominant issue—perhaps the decisive episode to revisit would be the death of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislative package. This, as much as any, may have been the moment when reality forked. Under the plan an estimated 3.4 million Americans would have gained health insurance, families would have saved thousands each year on childcare, and 35 million households would have been able to rely on monthly payments from an enhanced child tax credit, among many other provisions to make life more affordable. Its collapse helped convince voters who wanted solutions to the insecurity created by inflation and the long-simmering crisis of inequality that Democrats lacked the necessary fighting spirit. The legislation passed the House and had support from every Democrat in the Senate—except one.
Joe Manchin opens his memoir, Dead Center,with a meeting in the White House. In stilted reconstructed dialogue, the now retired Democratic senator from West Virginia—who declared himself an independent shortly before the end of his last term—dramatizes his conversation with Biden in the Oval Office on December 14, 2021. The president, calling Build Back Better “my hallmark legislation,” is asking for his vote. Manchin responds that passing the bill would “forever change the psyche of this country to be ‘what more can my country do for me.’” He recounts how, after the meeting, he went on Fox News and announced that he would vote no. “I had just killed Joe Biden’s ‘hallmark legislation,’” Manchin writes, with evident glee.
The tone of this passage is typical of a book that—somewhat incredibly, given the political moment in which it was published—reads like a valedictory address. “The greatest conundrum in politics today is the relentless pressure to align fully with one side or the other,” Manchin writes. The other problems that consume him include the size of the national debt, the possible desecration of the filibuster, and the price tags of various pieces of legislation. It feels as if he’s speaking from an alternate universe, one where the structures of our political system aren’t being torn down and our neighbors aren’t being terrorized before our eyes by authoritarian violence. His book may have nothing to say about the very real dangers we face, but it is starkly revealing of the worldview that got us here.
Joe Manchin was born in 1947 in Farmington, West Virginia, a small coal mining town. He was a local football star and attended West Virginia University—where he met his wife, Gayle—on a scholarship before suffering an injury that sent him back home to run his father’s furniture store. Sixteen years later, in 1982, he decided to run for the state house. Impressed by the Republican congressman Arch Moore’s decision to help his Democratic father secure a small business loan, he announced, to his father’s chagrin, that he would enter politics. He wanted to serve his constituents, he says, though he doesn’t explain what he wanted to accomplish for them; he reasoned that he “was raised right,” with “good values,” and was “a talker” who would like the work of campaigning.
What are these “good values”? Manchin rarely specifies. “My journey in public service has been defined by standing firm when I must, finding a compromise where it’s possible, and always putting my state and my country above politics,” he explains. He writes more about legislation that he killed—ranging from abortion rights to cap and trade—than about bills he championed, although he does discuss supporting a gun background check bill after the Sandy Hook shooting, introducing bills to address the opioid crisis that ravaged West Virginia, and helping to write the Inflation Reduction Act under Biden. He seems to care most about what he views as fiscal responsibility, constantly seeking to rein in “reckless spending and unchecked government overreach,” and always finding compromise, no matter what the issue is. Manchin is widely understood to be captured by corporate interests—he repeatedly shielded his family’s coal business from regulation, to the detriment of action on climate change—though he understandably fails to address this on his own.
One thing he does make clear: work is, for him, paramount. Growing up he learned that a job “was more than just a means to an end. It was the key to self-reliance, self-confidence, and self-respect.” Manchin often says that government help should be “a last resort, not a way of life”; he bemoans “dependency” and an “entitlement mentality.” His disdain for government assistance is so deep that he can’t see how someone might fall on hard times—or struggle to find work that pays a livable wage—such that they’d need food stamps or rent vouchers to survive. He opposed the expanded child tax credit, he claims, because the benefit would have gone to families without any earnings—the poorest of the poor, but those who haven’t met a “work requirement” to prove their worthiness.
These beliefs persist despite his own brushes with the kind of unexpected crisis that makes work impossible. As a young man, he saw football as a way to escape his controlling father, who insisted that he take over the family business. But during his freshman year of college he blew out his knee, ending his football career. It was a “humbling experience,” he writes. “One moment I was chasing the dream, imagining the bright future ahead. Then, just like that, it was gone.”
Then there’s Manchin’s father-in-law, who suffered a heart attack and a stroke and, in an instant, could no longer run his truck business. Or there’s the family furniture store, which went up in literal smoke, consumed in a devastating fire that killed four people, when Manchin was a newlywed, shortly after his father-in-law’s stroke. “We had nothing left,” Manchin writes, and they emerged nearly a million dollars in debt. His own setbacks seem if anything to have deepened his conviction that everyone should be made to work, with little allowance for misfortunes or missed chances. “The tragedies we endured,” he writes, “were character builders.”
Manchin paints himself as a man of the people, a prophet of what the real working class wants. But his is a stereotypical and often infantilizing depiction. The working class is “the people who wave the flag on the Fourth of July, not because someone told them to, but because they genuinely believe in the promise of this country.” For them, “their roots are as valuable as any paycheck or position of power.” Democrats, he argues, approach the working class’s needs by “throw[ing] money at the problem, as if a check could replace the values and way of life that have sustained families for generations.” Never mind the evidence—from both academic research and the pandemic-era federal aid that Manchin himself supported—that money really does help stabilize and support people; sometimes a check to cover things like gas, food, and childcare is exactly what people need in order to survive and, yes, get to work.
Often what’s most telling in this book are the contradictions, especially in Manchin’s discussions of political power. One of his motivating values, he says, is the preservation of democracy. When he and the former Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema blocked efforts to get rid of the filibuster, they were “defending the very foundations of our democracy,” he writes. But their actions thwarted, among other things, an expansion of voting rights. When Democrats attempted a maneuver around Senate rules to pass a higher minimum wage, Manchin blocked that, too, single-handedly. And yet he never acknowledges how his actions paved the way for Donald Trump and the Republicans to erode our democracy so significantly.
The devotee of compromise—“America was built on the art of compromise,” he declares—never feels it is required of him. And it is Democrats whom Manchin blames for the death of compromise in American politics. He accurately traces the increase in polarization to the “seismic realignment” that occurred under Barack Obama. But what he sees as the beginning of his former party selling out to leftist activists is instead the beginning of Republicans’ extreme shift to the right. The Republican senator Mitch McConnell, for whom Manchin says he has “so much respect,” declared early on that the “single most important thing” for his party to do was to torpedo Obama’s entire presidency. The use of the filibuster to stymie legislative action skyrocketed under McConnell—a strategy that never gets mentioned in Dead Center. A racist backlash that began with the Tea Party and Trump’s birtherism led directly to Trump’s two presidential terms, and to the Republican Party’s acceptance of Trump’s authoritarianism and blatant racism and sexism. About this rising extremism, Manchin notes just once toward the end of the book that Republicans have “embraced a brand of politics that seems driven more by power and control than by principle and values,” and that they use “tactics that stoke division, fear, and anger.” But he follows that by saying he has “witnessed both parties become beholden to their extremes.”
One could be forgiven for thinking that Manchin isn’t actually upset by Trump’s return to power. Manchin lauds Trump for promising to save coal jobs, which Trump didn’t do; their decline continued in his first term, falling by 13,000. The only photograph in the book of Manchin with a president shows him visiting Trump in the Oval Office. He describes his “good relationship” with Trump, whom he liked for his “willingness to engage.”
Manchin also proudly describes his refusal to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024 and says he was rooting for Republicans to take the Senate because he saw it as “the only hope for preserving the Senate as an institution.” Worse, he reveals that he seriously considered a run for president as an independent that year, a move that would have sunk Harris’s prospects even further. He unveils this in a book that was published in 2025, after a campaign in which Trump repeatedly cast doubt on the 2020 election results and promised a presidency of mass deportations and extreme attacks on government.
The book does get a couple of things right: Manchin calls for term limits in Congress and also for campaign finance reform. But when it comes to his own record, he says that he has few regrets. In a chapter simply titled “I Got It Wrong,” he admits to mistakes on two out of six topics; the others are things that, he insists, everyone else got wrong. The latter category includes his support for Brett Kavanaugh, a Supreme Court justice who has since helped Trump secure near-complete power by granting him immunity and green-lighting most of his unlawful actions. By providing the sole Democratic vote for Kavanaugh, Manchin claims he was refusing to sink to the level of the Republicans who stonewalled Merrick Garland until Trump could pick Neil Gorsuch. “I vowed that if I were ever in a position to weigh a Supreme Court nominee, I would judge them based on their qualifications, not on which party was in the White House,” he writes. It’s hard to say whether this is stupidity or insincerity: voting against a Republican Supreme Court nominee accused of sexual assault is not equivalent to blocking a Democratic one from consideration. Whatever the reason, having watched McConnell flex his might to benefit his party, Manchin refused to use his own power to advance Democrats’ aims.
Indeed, despite growing up in a politically connected family, Manchin sees power as something to be used as a last resort, if at all. He devotes an entire chapter to the filibuster, which he believes is important because it constrains the majority party. Of the effort to pass Build Back Better, he writes, “Because Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House, they believed that they should be able to force through their agenda without compromise.” This, to him, is somehow unthinkable—that a party elected on commitments to increase the minimum wage and send out stimulus checks would use the authority voters had handed it to actually do those things.
What would another approach look like? Consider the Democrats in Minnesota, who secured a trifecta in state government in 2022. As Melissa Hortman, the speaker of the Minnesota house, told the journalist Stephen Rodrick, “People don’t elect us to go to the Capitol and twiddle our fingers.” The following year, the legislature passed thirty new policies, including universal free school meals, paid family leave, and an expanded child tax credit, plus a public option in health care and free higher education. In 2024, as the American electorate swung right, Minnesota Democrats retained the governorship and a majority in the state senate while keeping divided control of the state house. Last year Hortman was assassinated by an evangelical white man who had attended Trump rallies.
In the final paragraph of his book, Manchin writes, “We are approaching 250 years as a democracy”—a moment that we have now reached. “The American experiment has always been tested, but it has never been broken.” Manchin of all people shouldn’t take this for granted. He did little to ensure our democracy’s future while in office, and after helping to usher in a second Trump administration, he cannot now wash his hands of the assault on it.