Conservatives, Republicans and Trump supporters should start licking their chops in anticipation, because in the very near future the spectacle long waited for will finally materialize: Democrat moderates and progressives will form one of the most brutal and effective circular firing squads of all time.

The trigger for this on the left will be simple: after months of painstaking legislative sausage-making, Democratic efforts to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill plus a $3.5 trillion social spending and entitlement bill will collapse in a heap. The Squad’s effort to get funding for Israel’s “Iron Dome” stricken from a spending bill was a mere shot across the bow.

The bigger problem is that the least congressional progressives will accept, in terms of new federal funding of their pie-in-the-sky priorities, is far more than moderates, afraid of being swept away by a “red tide” in the 2022 midterm elections, will vote for. The more time that passes, moreover, and the lower President Biden’s approval numbers sink, the harder it becomes to corral leftists and centrists into voting for compromise legislation.

Ergo, the Democrats’ big bet on history-making social spending and entitlement expansion is about to come up empty.

The new dawn for the welfare state, for “climate justice” and for (integrity-less) “democracy” that Democrats and progressives predicted in January when they took the White House and slim margins in the House and Senate has instead become a nightmare. The left cannot accomplish any significant reforms at the federal level, but it can be held accountable for the policy mistakes of the Biden administration, and for the resurgence of COVID, inflation, illegal immigration, street crime and more.

All this, however, is just the appetizer. The main course will be the internecine fighting and backstabbing that this series of political setbacks will engender.

For one thing, consider that Biden won the 2020 election only because the media and social media conspired to suppress any negative stories about him and his family, no matter how accurate. Biden barely campaigned, and most ardent progressives, not to mention many young and minority voters, viewed him, and continue to view him, with disdain.

Nonetheless, as the anti-Trump in 2020, the entire left, and the entire Democratic Party coalition, supported Biden — as many independents because of the warped, carefully curated version of reality they were fed by a compliant press. All this, plus the widespread reinterpretation of election laws to ensure that even suspect mail-in ballots (for Biden) were counted, netted him a margin of victory in the three critical states of Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin of 10,457, 11,779, and 20,682 votes, respectively.

Thanks to his already-accumulating policy failures, however, the media’s love affair with Biden is waning. Coverage of the administration has become vastly more negative and critical, and journalists themselves have become more aggressive, accusatory and disrespectful.

How much worse, therefore, will the atmosphere in the White House Briefing Room become when Biden’s agenda in Congress goes down to defeat? At that point, it will be clear to progressives (and most elite journalists count themselves among them) that the grand bargain that the left made when it accepted Biden as its standard-bearer — that a familiar, if desiccated, white male face could ensure electoral victory and the passage of most of their wish-list items in Congress — was an exercise in futility.

Combine Biden’s impending legislative humiliation with his increasingly disastrous polling numbers (Rasmussen now has Trump defeating Biden by 10 points in a rematch), and the gloves will assuredly come off as progressives unload on the putative leader of their movement and their party.

And that’s not all. As the left loses faith in its “moderate” leadership, both in the White House and in Congress, questions will inevitably arise about Biden’s fitness to remain in office, as well as his medium- and long-term political viability. Some Democrats and progressives will promote Kamala Harris as a younger, female and more diverse alternative to Biden. Others will recoil at that prospect, given Harris’s obvious negatives, including her rhetorical stumbles and her rank unpopularity.

The truth, therefore, is that in political terms the Democrats and progressives really did bet the farm on Joe Biden in 2020. They have no viable Plan B, in case he should prove to be a dead end, at least not until the primary process begins in early 2024 and they can begin to choose a more suitable successor.

In the meantime, all that leftists can do is wallow in squalor and misery … and curse themselves for not choosing Pete Buttigieg, or Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar in 2020, when they had a tantalizing opportunity to “win it all” and usher in a new era of Big Government. Instead, they shackled themselves to a veritable corpse, and an unprepossessing corpse at that.

Conservatives, Republicans and Trumpers should rejoice. The recapture of the House, Senate and presidency may not be guaranteed, but the humbling of the left is about to begin in earnest.

(Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an associate professor of history at SUNY Alfred.)