Activism
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December 19, 2024
It’s time for the Democratic Party to abandon its staid, rules-based resistance to Trumpism and wage a fierce, moral response.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) (L) and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), join fellow congressional Democrats to reintroduce the Freedom to Vote Act in the Lyndon B. Johnson Room at the US Capitol on July 18, 2023 in Washington, DC.
(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
No more deals. No more games. No more parliamentarian parlor tricks designed to dull the roughest edges of Donald Trump’s unconscionable policies. My greatest holiday wish for the shambolic political party known as the Democrats is that they abandon the cloying institutional response to Trump that they have deployed to such little effect and instead let the people have what they say they want.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not suggesting that the Democrats should help Trump; I’m not recommending that they join in the evil he is about to unleash on the country and the world. But they should not spend another four years humping guardrails and holding a “center” that has already shifted so far to the right that it makes George W. Bush look like a benign moderate.
We’ve already seen how little that approach achieves. Since 2016, the Democrats have deployed institutional responses—lawsuits, hearings, impeachment efforts, and unreliable Republican allies—to try to stop Trump, while Trump has used raw political power, billionaire buddies, and anti-establishment rhetoric amplified by a cowed and captured media to bend the political universe to his will. Even when the Democrats have “won,” they’ve looked weak and ineffectual. Think about it this way: The single greatest institutional victory for the Democrats during… (Content truncated)
Current Issue
Step 1: Don’t vote for it. That includes you, Representative Richie Torres. That includes you, Senator John “compassion-for-me-but-not-for-thee” Fetterman. Don’t. Vote. With Republicans. If you cannot find it in your political self-interest to stand with 20 million people Trump is threatening to force-march out of the country, or the millions and millions of other people who count citizenship as their birthright despite having immigrant parents, then you are already on the wrong side of the moral and ethical divide in this country, and are of no use in the battles to come. Democrats who want to find common ground with Trump need to switch parties and rid us of their bullshit. It’… (Content truncated)
