[ad_1]
This past Tuesday, the seemingly indefatigable political strategist James Carville published an op-ed in the Times titled “The Best Thing Democrats Can Do in This Moment.” His prescription is as follows: “With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead.” Donald Trump and his cronies, Carville argues, have underestimated the American public’s tolerance for chaos, incompetence, and masculinity contests with other world leaders that may very well end in a crashed economy. The best path, then, is to just wait while Trump still has some afterglow from the election until his approval numbers have tanked and then “make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular.”
Carville’s gambit would probably work in a world where patience with both Trump and the Democratic Party were in endless supply. Trump and Elon Musk, I agree, are doing some very unpopular things, including asking millions of federal employees to write work e-mails over the weekend, and I imagine both will see their favorability numbers crater in the next year. The problem is that many voters who are being asked to wait are currently, and rightfully, in a state of panic. They don’t seem like they’re very much in the mood to wait, nor do they seem particularly amenable to keeping quiet while Musk, Steve Bannon, and other right-wing figures keep saluting onstage.
In the past two weeks, in town halls across the country, crowds have interrogated and booed Republican lawmakers for Trump and Musk’s budget cuts and the havoc that has come with them. At a town hall in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a woman named Teresa Borrenpohl vocally criticized local Republican officials and was wrestled to the ground and dragged out by plainclothes security officers. (On Wednesday, NBC reported that Republican lawmakers were urging their colleagues to stop holding these town halls altogether.) On Presidents’ Day, thousands of demonstrators in Washington and across the country gathered to protest everything from immigration enforcement to the gutting of the federal workforce. These actions received relatively little coverage from the media when compared with the Women’s March in 2017 and the impromptu protests that took place after Trump’s Muslim travel ban, but they also seem to reflect a real and growing movement. Last November’s election, it seems, did not kill off “the Resistance” as much as it separated it from establishment Democratic candidates such as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris.
I’ve been struggling to come up with the proper historical analogues for what the Democratic Party is going through right now. What I do know is that the establishment, which I’ll define as Party leadership like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, as well as the loose network of donors, strategists, and lobbyists that influence them, are all in crisis. Many of my colleagues in the media have argued that there is a groundswell of rage within the liberal electorate and that a “Tea Party moment” might be coming. According to this line of thinking, a host of new candidates will soon emerge to challenge incumbents for congressional seats across the country. A recent poll has shown that only twenty-one per cent of voters approved of the way Democrats in Congress were handling their jobs, an all-time low. Within a Tea Party scenario, such low numbers paired with over-all dissatisfaction from independents, a leaderless opposition party, and an unpopular outgoing President could lead to some radical change coming down the line. Many of these new candidates will be ordinary citizens who are fed up with the feckless and do-nothing politics of the Democratic establishment. They will have made their names at the small but growing protests and moments of civil disobedience that have started around the country.
Carville also underestimates the anger that many liberal voters feel toward their own party, not only for its inactivity in the past month but also for allowing Trump to win in the first place. He seems to forget that a clearly compromised Biden was allowed to hide in plain sight for months and run for reëlection. When Biden was ousted by an internal revolt, Party leaders named his successor without input from voters. The vast majority of liberal voters went along with this and even mustered up nationwide enthusiasm for Harris, despite her clear weaknesses as a candidate. Telling voters that Trump and Musk are unique threats to democracy and the future of the country, and then urging Democratic politicians to lie low, only to pop back up at the exact moment when people are suffering, is akin to arguing that a deadbeat dad who wants to reënter his child’s life should “strategically” withhold child support until the child’s mother loses her job and hits rock bottom. What will the pitch be from establishment Democrats in that moment? Hey, remember us, the ones who lost the 2024 election? I know we haven’t been around but guess what, that was the plan all along! And now things are so bad, you have no other choice! Donate to Kamala 2028!
The other choice is already being formed, albeit in a nascent stage. This decoupled, nü-Resistance feels far more angry, oppositional, and ideologically chaotic. This is not the Bernie Sanders movement of the 2016 and 2020 elections, which, while firmly anti-establishment, also was built upon promises to the working class that included Medicare for All, a higher minimum wage, and increased taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Rather, it is the rage of people who feel like the norms of their country have been stripped away and that the people who have been elected to fight for them have abandoned their posts. Last week, Chris Kluwe, a former punter for the Minnesota Vikings, gave a speech at the Huntington Beach City Council, in California, denouncing a proposed plaque on the local library that celebrated the “golden era of Making America Great Again!” Kluwe referred to MAGA as “explicitly a Nazi movement” and then said he would engage in “peaceful civil disobedience.” Kluwe was quickly surrounded by police officers, wrestled to the ground, and carried out of the council chamber.
Under a Tea Party model, Kluwe could start showing up in public spaces to register his opposition to Trump. He would build support among the organizers of the protests that keep sprouting up around the country, the disgruntled Republican voters who showed up at these town halls, and a handful of independent media figures. Fuelled by their chaotic energy, he would run for office in the midterm elections and ride the momentum into the 2028 Presidential race. Other nü-Resistance candidates might draw support from a handful of elected Democrats who may break rank, such as Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, who told Trump at a White House meeting that she would not enforce his executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. When Trump told her that he would withhold federal funding from Maine, Mills said, “See you in court.” The joyous online response to both Kluwe and Mills suggests that for a significant part of the liberal electorate, the spectacle of rebellion still matters. These dissenters, who have been the scant liberal signs of life, are clearly uninterested in Carville’s play-dead strategy. Carville may very well be correct in saying that the endless alarms of the first Trump Administration ultimately desensitized the public, but the Democrats also just spent the past year and a half telling us about Project 2025, the dissolution of democracy, and looming authoritarianism. When you tell people that hell is coming, some of them will actually believe you and expect their leaders to do everything in their power to stop it.
Another possibility is that the Democratic Party has found itself at the start of its very own Goldwater movement, in which an angry and committed set of activists, candidates, and thinkers propelled Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, into a disastrous run for President in 1964, but in the process turned the conservative agenda away from the moderation of Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller. Within this analogy, liberals would need their own Phyllis Schlafly, the driving force behind the Goldwater grassroots conservatism, or an updated Clarence Manion, the talk-show host and political operative who, according to the historian Rick Perlstein, started out his career as an “old kind of Democrat” who came to believe that the Party had been “captured by the Eastern internationalist big-government Wall Street boys and the radicals.” Manion then funded the Presidential campaign of T. Coleman Andrews, who ran on a platform of abolishing the income tax, before ultimately settling on the Goldwater campaign for President.
[ad_2]
