The Ongoing Craptacularity of the Democrats

[Gandalf]

Firstly, a Guardian op ed.

Why are the Democrats so spineless?

What does the Democratic party believe in? It’s difficult to tell. In 2024, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris ran a campaign of moderation, reconciliation and emphasis on restoring institutional norms. This failed to capture much public attention when compared with the Trump campaign’s carnival of grievance. In the months since their defeat, the Democrats have been confused, conflicted and internally contentious over how to best proceed.

The results have been contradictory and ineffectual. The Democrats have alternated between declaring Trump a fascist and a would-be dictator, and congratulating themselves on peacefully handing over the reins of power to him; they have railed against his corruption and his subordination to the unelected South African billionaire Elon Musk, but have also made themselves available to cooperate with Musk’s project to gut the federal bureaucracy and reshape it in his own interests, the initiative that has been moronically termed “Doge”.

They pledge resistance to the Trumpist takeover of the state, and then pledge to work with Trump on what they insist are their shared priorities. “I suspect we can find common ground on some things,” said Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, often cited as a future Democratic presidential candidate. “You have to look at the issues,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, the leftwing standard-bearer from Vermont. “It can’t simply be, ‘Oh, it’s a Trump idea, we oppose it.’”

This is a vision of American politics in which the Democrats have no power to set the terms of the debate on their own

What you will notice is that this is a vision of American politics in which the Democrats have no power to set the terms of the debate on their own, or to advance their own priorities: the far right alone can make policy proposals, to which the Democrats can merely flip their thumbs up or down. Many of them are giving the thumbs up. Democrats have crossed the aisle to vote in favor of Trump’s cabinet picks, and no fewer than 12 Democratic senators voted in favor of Trump’s anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act.

Gone is the fevered energy of 2017, when Trump’s first ascent to power galvanized a resurgent left wing and encouraged elected Democrats to obstruct the new president’s destructive agenda with aggressive media, legal and procedural strategies. Now, the Democrats seem less like a resistance than an acquiescence. They are not mounting any meaningful opposition to Trump’s aggressive, sadistic mission. Instead they’re rolling over, like a submissive dog showing its belly, and alternately casting this posture as either a principled commitment to constitutional order or as an unfortunate inevitability for which they can’t be blamed.

Increasingly, political commentators have compared the Democrats of 2025 to the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government in second-world-war France. “It’s a regime born of capitulation and of defeat,” writes John Ganz of the newsletter Unpopular Front. “It’s a regime of born exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism: the loss of faith in the old verities of the republic.”

More than anything, what Democrats seem to wish for, at the outset of the second Trump presidency, is for it to be 2012 again. They want the Obama coalition back; they want the niceties of former norms and institutional procedures; they want bipartisanship to be a virtue, and they want to be seen as reasonable, pragmatic and dispassionate. They want Trump, and the changes to our political world that his ascent has ushered in, to never have happened.

The far right, restored to power over the past two weeks, is said to be setting out to reverse the 20th century, undoing its progress for racial equality, women’s rights, queer dignity and freedom, and democratic fairness. But if the Republicans are seeking to reverse the 20th century, the Democrats seem to wish to simply ignore the 21st. Their strategies and impulses, their vision of how American politics works, no longer function in the present. Instead of adapting to the future, they seem to be sticking their heads in the sand, and waiting for the return of the past.

This is why the Democrats have not adjusted to the new age of political communications, in which voters can be animated and convinced by their information environment: Democrats tack to the right, over and over, and use traditional media like newspapers, cable news and press releases to show off their new positions and distance themselves from their old ones. Voters don’t see it; they are too busy on social media, where Republicans are deftly setting the agenda that the Democrats can only feebly follow, chasing their opponents to the right even further. The result is that the party has not advocated its own actual worldview for years: Democrats have not shown a set of social values, or a theory of governance, or anything like a commitment to principle. They have not stood up for targeted groups, or articulated a real vision of democracy; they have never picked a bold fight, and they have never taken a stand that they don’t back down from when Republicans oppose it. No wonder the American public, when it thinks of Democrats at all, tends to think of them as out of touch, opportunistic and cowardly. That is because they are.

The result is not so much that the Democrats are a weaker party as that they are not much of a party at all: it is the extremist Republicans, and they alone, who are communicating a vision of America to the public, and the whimpering, servile politicians who pass for an “opposition” never counter with their own vision but only whisper, barely audible, the feeble response: “Not so far.”

What Democrats need, now, is to discover their spine, and to articulate a set of values that they do not flinch from. The point is not to try to feign positions that they think the electorate already shares: the point is to take a stand with principle and integrity, and to let that guide draw the voters to them.

Elections are popularity contests, and the way to be popular is not through policy, but through personal robustness, through a willingness to put up a fight. If Democrats fight what they have long believed were losing battles – trans rights and abortion; healthcare and childcare; education; social security; good, union jobs – they might find that it is the fighting itself that proves persuasive. They have already tried compromise; they have already tried capitulation. It is time to try defiance.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

I saw this article today, and it seemed to sum up the issues with the Democrats at this moment.

As a slight aside, there was also the controversy around when AOC ran for ranking member House Oversight Committee. She lost to 74 year old Gerry Connolly. Combined with the ages of other prominent legislature Democrats, as well as issues with Feinstein and Biden last term, I can see why some declare gerontocracy. Newsweek.

[Soontir C'boath]

The Democratic Party did a great job convincing people that their incompetence was acceptable, because hey, you don't want to elect a Republican in right? Except that their feckless nature allowed people like Trump to come to power anyway.

Many of them should've been primaried years if not decades ago. Nancy Pelosi's been around since 1987? She should've been gone after 2010 as well as many others after the fiascos that happened then. Losing a ton of seats to the Republicans and allowing Minority fucking Leader McConnel to play them like a fiddle should've had them thrown out the door.

[Elfdart]

Democrats are not only not cowards but are in fact quite brave. It takes real courage to be willing to lose elections by telling the people you claim to represent that you're not doing much of anything for them, then daring them to stay home on election day. They don't even offer kayfabe theatrics to their voters the way Republicans do. It's also unfair to call them inept. They know exactly what they're doing.

When Democrats decided to go on the take from big donors, screwed the working class and most recently, became the party of empire, forever wars and the police state more than the Republicans, they signed their own execution order just like the Whigs in 1844 when they squealed that they would be just as pro-slavery as the Democrats. By 1860 they were ancient history.

There is a very outside chance control of the party can be wrested from the miscreants in charge, but that's a pipe dream. It's like being a fan of a sports team where they're more interested in raking in money than winning: The owners aren't about to fire themselves.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

What is the expression, "Stale, male and pale"? Where AOC is the antithesis of that.

[Raw Shark]

"I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat." --Will Rodgers

[Dominus Atheos]

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/democratic- ... eadership/

There’s No Hope for a Party That Hates Its Own Base



Can a party mount a comeback by rejecting its own activist base? Democrats seem to want to use Donald Trump’s second term to test the idea.

This certainly is not what the Right has done. Republicans waged one of the more shockingly successful comebacks in US politics during the Barack Obama era. Only two years after Democrats took control of the presidency and both chambers of Congress, the GOP was mired in crisis, and there was widespread talk of a “permanent Democratic majority,” Republicans took back the House. Six years later, they had the Senate and the White House too.

How did they do it? One part of it was a campaign of aggressive and relentless opposition to almost anything and everything Obama did, deciding that “if you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority.” The other part: they hugged their activist base tightly, capitalizing on the oppositional energy in the right-wing grassroots that took form in the Tea Party protests, and working in concert with right-wing activist groups. The next two years saw Democrats hounded in angry town halls, rolling protests against health care reform and government spending, and targeted pressure campaigns against lawmakers — efforts that may not have completely halted Obama’s agenda, but that set the stage for his 2010 “shellacking.”

The Democratic Party today has a different theory of the case. Influential party strategist James Carville wants them to “roll over and play dead” as part of a “strategic political retreat” that lets Republicans “crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.” His advice echoes Senate leader Chuck Schumer’s remark in early February that Democrats should play the waiting game, since “Trump will screw up.”

This is certainly possible. It’s a bet the party has made before — and lost spectacularly, in both 2016 and this past election, when anti-Trump sentiment wasn’t enough to overcome demoralized key blue-voting demographics and checked-out working-class voters.

This confidence in simply winning by default stands at odds with where the party rank and file is. Simply put, Democratic voters seem to be yearning for more from their leadership.

Invisible vs. Indivisible
A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that the Democratic Party’s approval rating is deep underwater, hitting an all-time low of 21 percent, giving them a net approval rating of negative 47 percent. But most surprisingly, this isn’t just among Republican (-78 percent) and independent voters (-51 percent). Democratic voters view their own party overwhelmingly negatively, giving it a net approval rating of -9 percent.

As several commentators have pointed out, just one year ago, the party was similarly disliked by Republicans and independents, but its own voters at least approved of it by +54 points. In February 2017, after Democrats blew their first election against Trump and their shell-shocked voters watched him issue the Muslim ban and pursue mass deportations, they still approved of the party by +28 points.

This most recent rating is a low that not even the GOP reached during its time in the Obama-era wilderness. In March 2009 — probably the deepest depth of this Republican political nadir for the GOP, and when it was widely disliked by almost every voter demographic — they still had a +13 point approval rating with their own voters. The lowest this ever got was the -10 among Republican voters after Obama’s 2012 reelection, which swiftly rebounded (+35 percent) after Trump’s first win, and stayed positive (+13 percent) even after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

This isn’t just on paper. This month saw thousands of liberal voters gather in Iowa City to see Bernie Sanders speak to them about how they could push back against Trump. Speaking to those who came, three things became clear: these voters were hungry for some kind of national leadership and guidance; they were uninspired and unhappy with the Democratic response to Trump; and they were buoyed by being given some kind of direction and the sense of collective action the event provided after a rough month.

Democratic voters seem to be yearning for more from their leadership.
This was far from the only sign. Small-dollar donations to the party, which surged in Trump’s first term, have dried up. In liberal Oakland, hundreds of angry protesters demanded that Democrats “grow a spine” and “do your job” as the party’s House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, toured promoting a children’s book — something even a House Democratic aide admitted was “tone-deaf.” A few weeks back, an avalanche of calls from terrified voters demanding they do more to oppose Trump flooded Democratic offices, Jeffries’s included.

But the party’s response has been anger, complaining that they were the targets of pressure and not Republicans, and blaming the liberal (and staunchly pro-Democratic) groups MoveOn and Indivisible for helping organize the calls. A group of corporate-friendly “moderates” is now plotting to reject the influence of activist groups going forward and “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors” entirely. Jeffries has since boasted on ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith’s podcast that “the extreme left protest me more than they protest Donald Trump,” because he refuses to “bend the knee” to them.

In reality, the voters fed up with Democrats and protesting Jeffries right now aren’t far-left activists, but ordinary, Democratic-voting liberals. And progressive groups’ energies haven’t been devoted to driving people to Sanders’s Midwest speeches or ending their donations to the party. In fact, they’ve been the ones leading the very resistance that Democratic officials seem to be shying away from.

At the same time establishment Democrats complain about them, these exact groups are coming under attack from the Right — who charge, with reason, that they are organizing the rowdy town halls putting pressure on Republicans over the Trump administration’s mass firings and planned cuts to social programs. These protests have been celebrated on the Democratic side as an inspiring surge of emerging resistance to the Trump agenda, but stand in tension with party leaders who view these groups as a cancer to be excised.

Not every disgruntled voter has drawn this kind of resentment though. The same week Jeffries lashed out at the voters calling his office, he reportedly met and smoothed things over with 150 Silicon Valley donors who were both unhappy with what Democrats are doing under Trump and have started openly moving rightward toward the president. The “singular focus,” those involved said, was to “ensure Silicon Valley remains with Democrats” and “keep them in the tent.”

A Party Out of Step
This is all just the latest sign of a growing chasm between the Democratic base and its leadership.

Maybe most combustible was the issue of Biden’s candidacy for reelection. Despite years of polls clearly showing most blue voters wanted him to step aside in favor of someone else, Biden didn’t budge thanks to a Joseph Stalin–like level of lockstep acquiescence from Democratic officials. (We now know from numerous reports that many of them were lying about Biden’s fitness for office.)

In fact, they went further, resorting to a series of antidemocratic moves to prevent a serious primary challenger from emerging, despite Biden’s historic unpopularity and the fact that he was headed for defeat. Even when his horrifying debate performance cranked the dial up on voter panic, party leaders publicly closed ranks around the former president.

Jeffries, in theory one of the most powerful Democrats in the country, was a nonentity in arguably the most serious crisis of the party’s modern history. Democratic officials reportedly started planning to simply endure four more years of Trump and regroup in 2028, with one senior Democrat lamenting: “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” The preemptive surrender directly contradicted what party leadership had been telling voters for years was their earnest fear that Trump would become a dictator.

While Republican leadership is disciplined by its activist base, Democratic activists are disciplined by their party leadership.
Unfolding at the same time was the war in Gaza, another controversy where the party refused to listen to its own voters. The Biden administration’s policy of unconditional support for what more and more experts declared was an Israeli genocide was out of step with the public as a whole, but particularly with Democratic voters, supermajorities of whom consistently favored a cease-fire. Hundreds of party delegates at the national convention signed on to a statement calling for an arms embargo.

Yet the number of elected Democrats in Congress who favored either measure was never even close to the proportion of Democratic voters who favored doing so. A postelection poll found the issue was the biggest one for Democratic voters who abandoned the party last year. But as Sen. Sanders has admitted, members of Congress knew well that what Israel was doing in Gaza was unconscionable but were afraid to come out against it for fear of being swamped by pro-Israel money.

In other words, the party establishment’s decision-making was, in the end, driven by the concerns of donors, not its actual voters or activists. As you read this, its stance is still wildly out of step with them, with Democrats now overwhelmingly sympathizing more with Palestinians than with Israel.

Or just look again at the events in Iowa, where hundreds of liberal protesters spent last week pouring into the state capitol to demonstrate against Republican officials’ removing milestone civil rights protections for gay and transgender Americans that had been enshrined in state law eighteen years earlier. It’s grassroots energy ripe for the harnessing by a party counting on taking advantage of GOP overreach — but stands in tension with the Democratic establishment’s certainty that LGBTQ rights are an electoral liability they have to drop like burning coal.

An Open Lane
It’s not a novel point that while Republican leadership is disciplined by its activist base, Democratic activists are disciplined by their party leadership.

The GOP has tended to harness that energy, even when their activists’ most hard-line views — cutting Social Security and outlawing abortion, for instance — are wildly out of step with the electorate. This is probably because the modern Republican Party has increasingly been taken over by its activists, who have also successfully waged electoral battles to scare their electeds straight.

But the Democratic Party has long held a (highly ironic) unease with its own activists, who it sees as, at best, a nuisance to be managed, and at worst, a threat to be neutralized. Biden was, reportedly, among a group of establishment Democrats who viewed the millions of people behind Sanders’s 2020 campaign as “a scary bunch who, if given enough authority, would take too much from the haves and give too much to the have-nots.”

Over the years, this hostility has taken many different forms: the Democrats’ tradition of publicly bashing left-wing activists, the party’s various attempts to put its thumb on the scales in primary contests, Obama’s decision to demobilize his grassroots army following his 2008 win, or Democratic leaders’ open willingness to damage the party by overruling primary voters in 2020.

Twice now, in 2016 and 2024, Democrats have chosen to take their progressive wing for granted or actively antagonize it, and twice they lost catastrophically as turnout among key demographics dropped.
The question is whether the party can actually afford to keep doing this. Twice now, in 2016 and 2024, Democrats have chosen to take their progressive wing for granted or actively antagonize it, and twice they lost catastrophically as turnout among key demographics dropped. The one time they beat Trump — in fact, the only presidential election they’ve won in the past decade — was in 2020, when they made a concerted effort to bring progressives into the fold and aligned themselves, however disingenuously, with what turned out to be the largest protest movement in US history.

This is the paradox at the heart of the situation the party finds itself in: Democrats want the high voter turnout, committed pavement-pounding, and grassroots energy of an excited base but seem to resent that they should have to do anything to get it.

It’s a state of affairs that could well lead to another demoralizing loss, or even the party’s collapse. Yet it also creates an opening for a different kind of candidate: one who positions themselves as a loyal Democrat, economically populist and willing to full-throatedly back traditional Democratic positions the party is abandoning, and presents themselves as a fighter who will take on Trump and is fed up with a party establishment too weak to stand up to him. The question is who, if anyone, will take advantage of it.

[Zaune]

Got to admit, "Let the consequences of the GOP's bad decisions blow up in their faces" is looking like a pretty viable tactic... If you don't care about all the people who are going to get hurt in the meantime.

[Gandalf]

If people are hurting, the Dems sitting back and letting everything burn doesn't necessarily motivate people to turn up to the polls in 2026.

They may not be able to affect change directly, but they can highlight every fucked up Republican thing, and hopefully pressure enough in marginal seats.

[Alferd Packer]

My feeling is that the fundamental aim of the electorate has changed, post-COVID, reflecting the collective trauma the nation endured and the ugly truths about America and its people that the pandemic exposed. Simply put: there is a large segment of the voting population who no longer has any hope of improving their lives, communities, states, or the nation as a whole, and simply votes for the person who promises to inflict the most suffering on some perceived other. Why would they vote for someone milquetoast dipshit who promises to get funding at some point in the future for highway repairs? The firebrand who wants to punish someone now for the state of the world is much more appealing.

Republicans had this foisted on them by the Tea Party and other grassroots movements, and so are ahead of the game, but the Democrats do have a lane to win this segment electorate back: promise to hurt someone, but select your targets based on progressive ire. Instead of saying you're going to allocate funds to support addiction recovery in communities ravaged by the opioid crisis, promise that you'll unilaterally declare the Sackler family a drug cartel and use federal RICO predicates to seize all of their personal assets on day one of your term. I bet that's enough to swing the Midwest back in 2028. It's all performative, of course, but that's what people want. There may not be hope for a better future, but as long as someone gets hurt today, that'll be enough to get their votes.

[Ralin]

Please please please tell me where I can vote for this spite-fueled reverse MAGA once it gets going. It sounds great.