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EITHER BE A DETERMINED OPPOSITION OR BE A LOSER  
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Jamelle Bouie
December 18, 2024
New York Times
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_ The Democratic Party lacks the energy of a determined opposition
— it is adrift, listless in the wake of defeat, ready to concede
that Trump is some kind of avatar for the national spirit. The choice:
either be a determined opposition or be a loser. _

,

 

Democrats may be in the minority, but they are not yet an opposition.

What’s the difference?

An opposition would use every opportunity it had to demonstrate its
resolute stance against the incoming administration. It would do
everything in its power to try to seize the public’s attention and
make hay of the president-elect’s efforts to put lawlessness at the
center of American government. An opposition would highlight the
extent to which Donald Trump has no intention of fulfilling his pledge
of lower prices and greater economic prosperity for ordinary people
and is openly scheming with the billionaire oligarchs who paid for and
ran his campaign to gut the social safety net and bring something like
Hooverism back from the ash heap of history.

An opposition would treat the proposed nomination of figures like
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth as an early chance
to define a second Trump administration as dangerous to the lives and
livelihoods of ordinary Americans. It would prioritize nimble,
aggressive leadership over an unbending commitment to seniority and
the elevation of whoever is next in line. Above all, an opposition
would see that politics is about conflict — or, as Henry Adams
famously put it, “the systematic organization of hatreds” — and
reject the risk-averse strategies of the past in favor of new blood
and new ideas.

The Democratic Party lacks the energy of a determined opposition —
it is adrift, listless in the wake of defeat. Too many elected
Democrats seem ready to concede that Trump is some kind of avatar for
the national spirit — a living embodiment of the American people.
They’ve accepted his proposed nominees as legitimate and entertained
surrender under the guise of political reconciliation. Senator Richard
Blumenthal of Connecticut, for example, praised Elon Musk, a key Trump
lieutenant, as “the champion among big tech executives of First
Amendment values and principles.” Senator Chris Coons of Delaware
similarly praised Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s so-called Department of
Government Efficiency, a glorified blue-ribbon commission, as a
potentially worthwhile enterprise — “a constructive undertaking
that ought to be embraced.” And a fair number of Democrats have had
friendly words for the prospect of Kennedy going to the Department of
Health and Human Services, with credulous praise for his interest in
“healthy food.”

“I’ve heard him say a lot of things that are absolutely
right,” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said last 
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concerns, obviously, about people leading in our country who aren’t
based in science and fact.” But, he continued, “when he speaks
about the issues I was just speaking about, we’re talking out of the
same playbook.”

And at least two Democrats want President Biden to consider a pardon
for incoming President Trump. “The Trump hush money and Hunter Biden
cases were both bullshit, and pardons are appropriate,” Senator
John Fetterman of Pennsylvania
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in his first post
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Trump’s social networking website.

Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina also said that Biden
should consider a pardon for Trump as a way of “cleaning the
slate” for the country. “If we keep digging at things in the past,
I’m not too sure the country will not lose its way,” he said in a
conversation on MSNBC with Jonathan Capehart
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Unmentioned was Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, which did not
clean the slate of American politics as much as it made legal and
political impunity the lodestar of Republican presidential politics.

Other Democrats have decided, in the wake of Trump’s popular vote
victory, that aggressive, full-spectrum opposition to his priorities
is a mistake. “Here is what I am not going to do for the next two
years and the next four years,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority
leader, said in a news conference after the election
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“I’m not going to deal with ‘It’s Tulsi Gabbard one day, then
an hour later it’s Matt Gaetz, then the next day it’s Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., then he says something on Truth Social, and then the
people connected to him are doing something outrageous.’ No, that
I’m not doing, because that’s all a distraction.”

It seems strange to think that it is not the job of an opposition to
oppose — especially when the people in question have little business
in government — but Jeffries isn’t alone in thinking that it is to
the advantage of Democrats to hold their powder and avoid direct
confrontations. He is in line with high-level Democratic strategists
who also think that it is a mistake for Democrats to make noise, draw
attention and seize the initiative.

“A pollster to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign told top
Democratic Party officials recently that they must confront
President-elect Donald Trump far differently than they did during his
first term,” Holly Otterbein reported in Politico
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“urgently pressing them not to focus on every outrage but instead
argue that he is hurting voters’ pocketbooks.” According to the
pollster, voters don’t care about who he’s putting in cabinet
positions and will “give him a pass on the outrageous” if costs
come down.

At the heart of all of this — whether it comes from congressional
leaders, ordinary lawmakers or top pollsters — is the idea that
Democrats can float above the fray and reap the political rewards of
any chaos and dysfunction. Besides, voters say they want compromise
— and what else can Democrats do but follow the polls?

It’s as if Democrats see politics as a stable landscape — a static
field with clear rules. They can respond to voters, but they cannot
shape the basic orientation of the electorate. By this view, most
Americans are fixed in place and Democrats must meet them where they
are. If voters don’t seem to care about corruption, impropriety and
incompetence, then there’s nothing Democrats can do to make them
care.

But this is not true. We know as much because Trump just won an
election demonstrating that it’s not true. Trump rehabilitated
himself through relentless self-promotion. He built a constituency for
tariffs and mass deportation through endless repetition connected to
some basic concerns. His “stop the steal” obsession put him at the
center of Republican Party politics. He captured space in American
cultural life and refused to let go, winning political power in the
process.

Democrats can’t replicate this behavior, but there are lessons to
learn from it — the first and foremost being that the public will
not make connections and draw conclusions unless you do it for them.
And that takes a willingness, again, to seize attention, to throw
everything at the wall with the hope that something will stick. If
Democrats, following the pocketbook strategy, want voters to blame
Trump for any price hikes during his administration, they need to do
everything they can now, in as dramatic a fashion as they can manage,
to make Trump the culprit — to give voters a language with which
they can express their anger at the status quo.

If Democrats want voters to blame Trump for any potential foreign
policy failures, they must work now to highlight and emphasize the
extent to which the president-elect wants a more or less inexperienced
set of hacks and dilettantes to lead the nation’s national security
establishment. Even something as obvious as the connection between
Trump’s billionaire allies and his support for large, upper-income
tax cuts has to be dramatized and made apparent to the voting
electorate.

At this stage, there’s little evidence that Democrats are willing to
do any of this. Given the opportunity, for example, to effect a
changing of the guard — to promote younger and more aggressive
voices like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to leadership,
even if it upsets the usual rules of seniority, as I mentioned earlier
— Democrats said, in effect, _No thanks_.

This is a grave mistake. Trump’s hand is not as strong as it looks.
He has a narrow, and potentially unstable, Republican majority in the
House of Representatives and a small, but far from filibuster-proof,
majority in the Senate. He’ll start his term a lame duck, with less
than 18 months to make progress before the start of the next election
cycle. And his great ambition — to impose a form of autarky
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is poised to spark a thermostatic reaction from a public that elevated
him to deal with high prices and restore a kind of normalcy. But
Democrats won’t reap the full rewards of a backlash if they do
nothing to prime the country for their message.

There are other reasons for Democrats to try to take the initiative.
There are still many Americans rightfully concerned with an
authoritarian turn in the United States. Again, just over half the
electorate did not vote for Trump. They deserve leadership, too.
Indeed, the party’s refusal to fight sends ripples through civic
life. If Democratic leaders won’t fight, then it’s hard to expect
civil society, or just ordinary people, to pick up the slack. Either
democracy was on the ballot in November or it wasn’t, and if it was,
it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live
in normal times.

It is not a distraction to vocally oppose Trump’s would-be nominees
or highlight his extreme intentions. Democrats should look at every
aspect of the next Trump administration as an opportunity to do, well,
politics — to demonstrate their values and show the extent to which
this president has no plan to pursue the public good. The quiet and
supposedly responsible approach of the past four years is a dead end.
Attention is the only currency that matters, and Democrats need some
to spend.

Abraham Lincoln was assisted in his first campaign for president by a
cadre of young, costumed men who campaigned, marched in the streets
and showed militant enthusiasm for the Republican Party. These “Wide
Awakes” were as flamboyant and provocative as any movement that has
ever emerged in the history of American politics, and they soon held
the attention of the entire nation, friend and foe alike. The 1860
election was not, the historian Jon Grinspan
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“a dry government process but a public confrontation, and the Wide
Awakes had formed to help Republicans fight back.”

So it was and so it is. American politics has always been a game of
performance and spectacle, from the whiskey-fueled street debates of
the early Republic to the raucous conventions of the first Gilded Age.
To be sterile and sober-minded in this arena is to be, for the most
part, a loser.

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