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If past is prologue, and news reporting is correct [ [link removed] ], Senate Democrats will (for the third time in one year) help Republicans pass enabling legislation for Donald Trump’s government. Then, in short order, Trump’s abuses of power will deepen, and Democratic elites will resume puzzling over why the party’s approval rating gets worse and worse.
They’ll forget that half of all voters have been trained to despise them, because only one party (the GOP) works concertedly, and at great financial expense, to define its opposition as as degenerate.
They won’t pause to consider whether they should do anything about that information imbalance.
They’ll fail to grasp that it’s very hard, if not impossible, for a toxically unpopular party to appeal to independents and swing voters. They’ll wonder why the success they’ve had scaring most of their members away from picking fights over immigration policy hasn’t allowed them to capture the center.
They’ll rend garments over the fact that almost no one seeking new office as a Democrat will commit to supporting the incumbent leadership.
They’ll scratch their heads wondering why, of all the Democrats in America, only Gavin Newsom has managed to build a following on the back of whoever happens to run his press office Twitter feed. They’ll lash out at activists who respond to these serial betrayals by imposing new litmus tests and backing primary candidates who speak clearly but controversially about morally urgent issues.
Then they’ll prepare to do it all over again in September.
As odd as it sounds, this is a perfectly viable approach to winning the midterms [ [link removed] ]—assuming the country manages to survive through November intact. The more enabled Trump is, the more likely he is to overreach, and the more desperate voters will become to end his party’s control over Congress. But, on a generous read, it defers confrontation with evil. The idea is to white knuckle it through 10 more months, hope for the best, and then maybe deal with all the party brand problems after the midterms, when Democrats begin campaigning for president in earnest.
I think they are approaching basically all of their challenges backward.
How does a party win back the respect of its own voters who’ve come to believe it’s led by a bunch of empty suits? Electing new leaders would be one way. Picking fights with the opposition and seeing them through to the end, without pulling punches, is another (though the latter may not be possible without the former).
Liberals were offered a small taste of what a fighting party might act like in October, when Democrats withheld their votes to fund the government for several weeks, before a surrender caucus of eight Senate Democrats [ [link removed] ], with quiet permission from Chuck Schumer, threw in the towel.
The shutdown walloped Trump’s approval rating, and (for once) got Americans talking about the horrors of Republican health-care policy. The decision to quit while ahead helped Trump regain some of his lost support and served as a reminder that the Democratic Party is not currently constituted to fight fascism in any durable way.
Episodes like these, mounting ceaselessly over the past year, have left the party with little running room. They have ironically made activists more inclined to impose litmus tests and speak in uncompromising language, because they believe that’s the only way to hold them to what should be shared goals.
If they want to interrupt this dynamic, they need to turn it on its head. If they want to disempower party activists, they need to resolve the severe crisis of trust that’s opened between tens of millions of people of conscience, and elected Democrats.
How might they accomplish that?...
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