State of Disunion
Is Anyone Going to Fight for Democracy?
As we face an incoming administration led by an autocratic felon with an insatiable appetite for fascism, our minority party still wants to play by the rules. So who will go to the mat for us?
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From the start, Donald Trump has offered autocracy to the United States. He has built his vision of the country on Big Lie politics, threatened, cajoled, and corrupted everyone who would challenge him, targeted millions of citizens as unworthy of rights, and rejected millions of would-be citizens, dismissing them as unworthy of life. His campaign lied its way into the Oval Office, attacking President Biden and then VP Kamala Harris on the premise that DJT would replace the real, complicated domestic progress of the current administration with a fantasy of easy, unrealistic perfection, with the only cost being that Trump would be in control of everything. Trump promised that we would receive a government free from the shackles of compromise, of complications, of checks and balances, of general welfare and common defense.
And in response to this unmaking of the American experiment, Democrats have promised … compliance.
They didn’t call it that, of course. They called it democracy. Four years to the day after Donald Trump launched the largest and most direct assault on the republic since the Civil War, the Democratic Party completed his coup by allowing a man, disqualified from holding power by his own actions, to receive, unchallenged, the office of the Presidency. Despite all of the corruption he has promised, the rejection and demolition of norms, the threat he poses to the republic and Congress itself, Democrats did not raise a single objection to his certification—because it would be uncouth.
Democrats in both the House and Senate shared their absolute abasement with pride, talking about certifying an insurrectionist into power with phrases like “setting an example” and “respect[ing] the winner” and even suggesting that this was a fulfillment of their oath to defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. All of this as if Donald Trump is a large toddler who was suffering from a lack of example or guidance when he told a mob to retaliate against his own Vice President for his commitment to the U.S. Constitution instead of overturning the electoral mandate that Joe Biden had won. Rather than clarify the terms on which it is good, relevant, and necessary to challenge election results, Democrats embraced the false equivalence that installing a dictator by force is the same as resisting him via paperwork.
The gutless certification was the crowning capitulation in a transition full of them. In the Senate, Democrats and allies have gestured at a willingness to provide confirmation votes for some of the most outrageous and dangerous of Trump’s viziers-to-be, including RFK Jr. for Health and Human Services and Pete Hegseth for Department of Defense, despite their manifest unfitness to run departments of the federal government. In the House, Democratic representatives have already made obsequious overtures to Trump allies in Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, even as their promise of $2 trillion in “savings” demands devastating cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP. And, of course, there’s the silence or compliance from Democrats on the alarming proposals to expand U.S. territorial acquisition by force, to punish citizens or political opponents for criticism, and to criminalize the existence of undocumented immigrants. So it is no real surprise that on the anniversary of his attempted coup, Democrats hollowed out years of political warnings about the threat of Donald Trump, consecrated his coronation as a king, and affirmed the Republican doctrine that it doesn’t matter if someone lies, cheats, steals, debases others, rejects rules and limits, and threatens the well-being of millions here and abroad: Winning makes all of it okay.
The result is an iteration of the Democratic Party that has authorized Trump’s unfettered right to rule and dismissed their own right to govern.
Despite the full doormat performance of Democrats, the past election was a close one. Approximately a quarter million votes across the seven swing states kept Kamala Harris from what would have been her historic presidency, and barely 2 million votes make up the margin in the popular vote—smaller than the gap between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016. Yet Democrats are not acting like they have been delegated authority to even argue with Trump and Republicans, despite the fact that they campaigned on how dangerous he would be to the essence of democracy. Even though millions of Democratic voters came out to support a vigorous, aggressive rebuke of Trump and what he represents, elected Democratic lawmakers have chosen to pretend that we don’t exist. Or worse, that we don’t matter.
The anniversary of January 6 revealed what should have been obvious for years: The Democratic Party as an entity is dead inside. It is a political party that reviles politics, a party without goals or aims, a party ashamed of its voters and more ashamed of what we ask of them. The majority of the party’s lawmakers prefer the appearance of comity over the reality of power, and they cannot help but see the purpose of government as an exchange of prestige and opportunity for officeholders at the explicit expense of their most vulnerable constituents. This is not the party of the New Deal or Great Society, heirs to legendary policy; this is the Democratic Party of the Reagan Revolution, running on trauma and cowardice.
They refuse to lead on vision or results like New Deal Democrats under Franklin D. Roosevelt, nor are they masters in the art of incentive and threat, carrot and stick, messaging and operations that marked the success of the Great Society under Lyndon B. Johnson. Despite the legacy of holding a united Congress for more than 50 years between 1932 and 1994, including a continuous four decades of control of the House, the 21st-century Democratic Party acts as if power is an anathema to its politics, instead limiting itself to whatever its Republican opposition allows and defining itself with Republican terms. At every turn, Democrats demur to poor framing rather than confront, concede bad policy rather than challenge, accept the lie of a conservative paradigm rather than transform our politics for the better. That is why their answer to Trump is no answer at all.
A party that knew its principles would not have let any election—let alone such a close one—stop them from standing up for what they believe in. A party that had a purpose would not feel so compelled to ask everyone else who and what it should be. A party that had faith in its voters, who believed in its constituents, would put itself between the vulnerable and those who would hurt them. Parties are not assembled to perform rules but to act to the limits of them. Operating without purpose, without faith, it is clear that the Democratic Party is no longer functional.
This past January 6, Democrats believed that their grace and forbearance would be marked by history with positive remembrance. They imagined that they were using the norms of democracy to demonstrate the process of transferring power, that they were setting an example that future generations could learn from and imitate. But the more likely truth is that the Democratic Party, unwilling to believe in its legitimacy to act, won’t be remembered fondly. Because without the courage of their convictions, the Democratic Party won’t be remembered.
In the vacuum of power and principle left behind by the party itself, the only room left is for citizens ourselves to rise. Our Constitution delegates power to representatives, to senators, to a president, to courts from we, the people, and it appears that it is time for us to take it back. For those of us who believe in the progressive and transformative power of government to do good for society, it will demand a focus on local and state efforts, mutual aid, affinity groups, grassroots community goals with a drive to make small changes snowball into major initiatives. We will turn to our county and city officials; we will turn to our statehouses and governors, and we will take the power of our activism and burrow deep into the machine, knowing that our votes are magnified as we get closer to home. And where we can, when we can, we will push at national Democrats to remember who they once were and what they might still be.
It will not be easy to shake the federal Democratic Party from its delusion that it can negotiate with terrorists indefinitely and lose nothing in the bargain. They are too deep in the bosom of fear and cowardice to change. But we do not need to stay with them; we do not need to lose our grip on defiance and resistance and hope. We can make lasting change without the titles, the fanfare, the power and esteem because we will take up the courage that national Democrats have left behind.
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