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**MARCH 20, 2025**
On the Prospect website
Move Fast and Break the Mortgage Market [link removed]
The chief regulator
for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is now also the board chair of both companies. What's the long game here? BY DAVID DAYEN
Washington on the Brink [link removed]
With its city's future in the balance, the District of Columbia watches and waits on the House. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
Trump's Plan to Dismantle Education Department Threatens Classroom Funding [link removed]
Federal cuts would hurt students with disabilities, English learners and poor districts the most. BY KALENA THOMHAVE
Meyerson on TAP
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**** The Varied Strains of Democrats
There are ideological differences and anti-Trump activist differences. Both matter.
The most useful way to think of the range of Democratic strategies today is to envision a square. The x axis represents ideology, with the centrism of, say, Joe
Manchin on the left-hand side of the square and the social democracy of, say, Bernie Sanders on the right-hand side. The y axis represents the degree of anti-Trump activism, with what we might call the "respond as if things were normal" semi-passivity at the bottom of the square and the "respond as if we're in a constitutional crisis threatening democracy" activism at the top.
The alignments along the x axis haven't changed that much since January 20th, but neither have they gone away. Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, for instance, voted against the Republican bill to keep the government open until September, but he also was the sole Senate Democrat not to co-sponsor a bill introduced earlier this month that is this year's version of the PRO Act, which would enable workers to join unions without fear of being fired. As Warner's Virginia colleague Tim Kaine, not to mention the two Democratic senators from Georgia, were among the bill's 46 co-sponsors, Warner can't credibly claim
that his decision not to sign was an act of realpolitik deference to Southern anti-unionism, at a time when unions' approval rating exceeds 70 percent. Rather, it was simply a manifestation of Warner's anti-unionism.
By the same token, many view the Democrats who joined Chuck Schumer in voting for that Republican bill averting a government shutdown as deficient in meeting the challenges of the moment, though all are stronger proponents of workers' rights than Warner, which, to be sure, is an absurdly low bar to clear.
None of them are as deficient as some nonelected Democrats who have counseled their fellow Democrats to focus almost exclusively on the 2026 midterm elections rather than wasting their time on protesting Trump's actions. As John Halpin made the case on The Liberal Patriot [link removed]
****yesterday:
Arguing about the fact that Trump is president and is mostly doing what he said he would do, good or bad,
achieves nothing. Raging on social media and "fighting" inchoately about Trump is basically no better than yelling at the clouds. If you don't like what he's doing, convince more people to vote for Democrats in 2026 and 2028.
[link removed]
The problem with this argument, of course, is that it counsels Democrats to remain silent while Trump attempts to turn a democracy defined by its separation of powers into an autocracy. Working to take back the House next year, focusing on the reduction of services and safeguards to the American people and the diminution of democratic means of redress, can be done even while protesting a top-down coup; they're anything but mutually exclusive. I've long thought that The Liberal Patriot's
****founders were entitled to keep the word "Liberal" in the outlet's name, as they still averred a belief in vaguely social democratic economics. I now think, however, that they've forfeited their claim
to the word "Patriot." Resisting America's conversion to autocracy is the essence of patriotism, and if our means of resisting are in many ways deficient (save, so far, going to the courts), that doesn't make resistance any less necessary. Indeed, I suspect the signs of life inherent in resistance are essential if the Democrats are to have sufficient credibility to win back the House next year.
Some mainstream journalists looking at the Democrats' varying responses to Trump and Musk argue that a generational fault line explains the differences. Older Democrats, it's said, are still in the thrall of pre-Trump politics, when traces of bipartisanship still could be found and even enjoyed. This theory fails to explain anomalies like Sanders, who's been drawing large crowds across the Midwest for his anti-Trump speeches. The real fault line-certainly, the one that explains Sanders-is the one dividing those Democrats accustomed to being part of a somewhat consensual
establishment (however much that establishment has all but vanished) and those who are not so accustomed, and are happily accustomed to locating themselves outside that establishment (or the illusion of that establishment).
Now that the Republican establishment and the corporate CEO establishment have completely caved to Trump and Musk, it's time for Democrats to disenthrall themselves, as Lincoln told Congress in the early months of the Civil War, from "the dogmas of the quiet past," which he termed "inadequate to the stormy present." An establishment this discredited merits no respect, much less Democratic outreach. That said, there are smart protests and dumb protests, and those protests with the greatest impacts will focus on those Trump policies that outrage the most Americans. There are many such; curtailing health services to war veterans, as I've noted previously
[link removed], should be high on that list.
I haven't addressed the presumed conflict between "abundance" Democrats and "fairness" (or "process") Democrats, but I will, soon.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
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