Where Things Stand

It’s always better to know

On Monday, Hakeem Jefferies, Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, was asked if Chuck Schumer, Minority Leader of the Senate, was 1) effective, and 2) should keep his job. Jeffries said “yes” and “yes,” which I find troubling. We learned a lot of things about the Democratic Party and the Democratic base over the last week.

On election day, we learned that not just the Democratic base, but Americans more broadly, understand what’s happening to and in this country.

Last week’s blue wave was not an accident. The New York mayoral race, the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, the statewide Georgia elections, the elections in Pennsylvania for state Supreme Court seats, and more were not isolated incidents. They were all of a piece. Donald can say all he wants that he “wasn’t on the ballot,” but the fact is that Democrats ran the table exactly because he was on the ballot. Turnout was high and the margins of error were resounding.

Even though a not-insignificant minority of people in this country will believe anything Donald tells them, no matter how at odds with their day-to-day experiences, there are many more who value their reality-based experiences over the lies they are being told by the Trump regime—and they’re paying attention. They know inflation is up. They know that the cost of their groceries, and their gasoline, and their rent, and the products they buy at big box stores and Amazon are going up. They know that it’s wrong to murder people on boats in the Caribbean or in the Pacific Ocean, regardless of what crimes they may or may not have committed. They know that it’s wrong to deny people the right to due process in this country, whether they’re an American citizen or not.

On Sunday, we learned something else—there are too many elected Democrats who either don’t understand the fight we’re fighting or the stakes, or they’re just weak-kneed cowards.

I believe it is always better to know. There are Democratic Senators who are unwilling to fight for us and have shown themselves incapable of standing up to Donald. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has shown himself to be a weak, ineffectual leader, who is not the right man for this time. Whether he was complicit in the defection of those eight Democrats I do not know, but he set the precedent when he and nine other Democrat Senators voted with the Republicans to pass the appropriations bill in March. While this kept the government open, it also empowered Donald and the Republican Party. The havoc they have wreaked in the last eight months speaks for itself.

It’s simple: The Democrats willing to capitulate to Republicans need to go. Senators Dick Durbin and Jeanne Shaheen, two of the eight who voted to reopen, are retiring, which makes their capitulation even less fathomable to me. Durbin should resign immediately so Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker can replace him with a Democrat with a spine. As for the rest, they need to be primaried.

The Atlantic journalist Adam Serwer coined the phrase, “The cruelty is the point.” In March, he made this observation on Bluesky:

American politics makes a lot more sense when you realize that the GOP is afraid of pissing off the GOP base, and the Dems are afraid of pissing off the GOP base, but neither party is afraid of pissing off the Dem base.

Given that truism, here is what we need to do: We need to make them afraid of us. This is not an insignificant challenge because, apparently, they’re not afraid of fascism; they’re not afraid of autocracy; they’re not afraid of capitulating to a man who has shown his willingness to starve American children just to score cheap political points; they’re not afraid of the unspeakable corruption and cronyism that is operative at the highest levels of the American government; they’re not afraid of an illegitimate, corrupt super-majority of the Supreme Court that is systematically tearing the Constitution apart and destroying our individual liberties.

Why, then, should they be afraid of us? A good place to start is by making it clear to them that we will do everything in our power to replace them with the kind of Democrats we deserve. We need to make them understand that this culture of appeasement, this knee-jerk reaction to being bullied, this seemingly characterological defect that constantly has establishment Democrats trying to negotiate with terrorists, this default to play by rules that no longer exist, is going to lead to the end of the American experiment.

If that indeed happens and this history ever gets written, people like Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Merrick Garland, and James Comey—those who had the power to do something to stop or at least slow this country’s march towards autocracy—either did nothing or actively made common cause with those who seek the downfall of American democracy.

We need to hang all of this around their necks like an albatross and disabuse them of the notion that they can continue to vote against the interests of the American people. We shouldn’t stand for it any more than we should stand for what the Republican Party is doing to this country.