The last six weeks have been tough. Although most of what has happened was entirely predictable (there was an actual playbook), the speed at which longstanding, bipartisan structures have been attacked and dismantled has been overwhelming (also, in the playbook).
What makes these last six weeks since the inauguration particularly difficult is the lack of a coherent opposition. Even on longstanding, bipartisan issues like the support towards the National Institutes of Health or the Bush-era PEPFAR program, Democratic lawmakers have had a tepid, disappointing response. Their leadership has demonstrated a complete unwillingness to follow the strategies that Mitch McConnell used to stymy Democrats when they marginally controlled the Senate. Their outreach, in both social media and communiqués, has been as robotic as a Kamala Harris stump speech. Their actions, bound to the mirage that if they take the high road, all will be fine, eventually (I still cannot forgive Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for their lack of foresight in voting to confirm Marco Rubio). But my main disappointment has been with progressives. Not because their politics are too bold for the country (they are not), but because they too have failed to live up to the challenge.
When Trump was first elected, a glimmer of hope emerged in the form of a new generation of young progressives that seemed to break with the inertia of the democratic party–the Squad. Best represented by the talented and passionate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, this cohort became a source of hope. During Trump 1, they were a voice of clarity that reminded many of what actually mattered. During Biden’s intertrumpium, they shaped some of the most meaningful policies of the administration, working assiduously with their democratic peers in crafting a path forward with the slimmest of majorities in the Senate. They worked from within the party to shift its politics away from the imaginary centrist-neo-Reaganite-who-would-vote-for-democrats-if-given-the-right-incentives voter that had been the primary audience of establishment Democrats.
Progressives were, however, always at the fringe of the party. Some, like AOC, could sway discussions by converting their social capital into intra-party political force. But others were largely tolerated by the establishment. When things got tough, the the party’s machinery abandoned them to their fates: Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, for example, were primaried out of their seats by tepid, centrist, candidates.
The marginality of progressives within the democratic party has become even more apparent in the last six weeks, when leadership in both chambers has put protocol before values to protect an institution that is burning to the ground. Most recently, this structural apathy was demonstrated in the Democrat’s response to the State of the Union address. Democrats praising Reagan must be a new low for the party. Anything progressive that might have existed in the past is now gone. In this environment, progressive lawmakers are even more marginalized from the party’s core power structures, perhaps even seen as being a ‘problem’ to solve.
That is the key and fundamental issue confronting progressives: having to work through the democratic party and its ultimately conservative and subservient culture means certain defeat. I am not prophet–heck, I’m not even an expert in politics, but just someone who spends too much time online–but the future of the democratic party is bleak. Schumer and Jeffries have demonstrated a continuous inability to forcefully and creatively confront the situation. They have stood back, hoping that the collapse of the government’s bureaucracies will lead to eventual popular support for their party (the Carville argument). All these good wishes and speculations are, however, unfounded. There is no certainty about how the party might perform in the midterms, far less in the next general election–that ActBlue, the only strategic advantage the democrats have, is under attack from republican lawmakers just renders a darker future for the party.
Roxane Gay recently skeeted, quite correctly, that “Whomever is advising the Democrats right now is criminally bad at their job”. This is true. Yet this crisis in the is not something that will be resolved by shifting consultants. The post Obama democratic party has built its entire identity and infrastructure around imagined centrist voters and dubious data practices. Advisors may trim the edges of this structure, but they will not fundamentally reform it. In many ways, the democratic party is a sinking ship, with elected officials rearranging deck chairs as the waters encroach.
This is the fundamental problem for progressives. They are tying themselves to the masts of a sinking ship, hoping that their words of wisdom will be heard by the conservative (and, frankly, politically inept) structural majority of the party. AOC recently rallied her 1.9 million followers on BlueSky, urging “a massive amount of people to run for office. Flood the school boards, councils, county seats, state legislatures, Congress, etc. Big changes at the top happen when the ground shifts at the bottom. And that can start now.” Functionally, however, this implies working within the structure of the current democratic party, using its infrastructures for voter outreach and data collection, for fundraising and media. However noble it may be to run for office, progressive voices will likely not succeed doing so under the tent of the democrats. They will be marginalized. They will be primaried without support from party leadership. And, ultimately, they will sink with the ship.
The democrats are dead. Change won’t come from them. But how to effect change in a political system that effectively hinges on a two-party system is, at least to me, an unknown. We need some creative destruction. Sooner rather than later. And one that will offer the correct, counter-conservative discourse that has proven to be effective at reaching the concerns of voters across the country. If you have any ideas, let me know. I need some hope.