For this essay, let’s not debate the pros and cons of our new old president. Detailing specific reasons that many Americans are upset with/scared of/annoyed by Donald Trump and the Republican Party would be a distraction from a point that desperately needs to be made. Suffice it to say, millions of people are angry, disappointed and would prefer entirely different political policies and priorities out of Washington.
The fact that we should linger upon is this: Many, many liberals feel very, very impotent. And this should be a major cause of concern.
When Republicans celebrate their win by mocking their opponents, they’re whistling past the small-d democratic graveyard of history. Winning an election is good. Crushing your opponents’ political will to live is dangerous.
For liberals, there is a lot not to like about politics since January 20th. Trump has signed a blizzard of sweeping executive orders on a myriad of controversial issues. His administration is attempting a radical revamp of the relationship between the American people and their government, much of it carried out by a brash break-things-move-fast tech-bro billionaire. Given the high stakes and the polarizing nature of the issues involved and that Trump’s approach is so radical, resistance should be expected from both Democratic politicians on high and street demonstrations from the grassroots.
Instead, Democrats at all levels have been compliant and largely silent. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a centrist Democrat, complains: “[Congressional Democrats are] failing to do what is their fundamental responsibility constitutionally—to be a check.” Republicans barely control the Senate, yet all of Trump’s nominees have been approved. Democrats even voted unanimously to support a far-right neocon, Marco Rubio, as secretary of state.
Activists have been passive. There have only been sporadic protest marches. Trump’s proposal to annex and ethnically cleanse Gaza, a would-be war crime, elicited little measurable reaction from the anti-imperialist Left, certainly no protests analogous in size to last year’s pro-Palestinian campus protests. Compared to the antiwar movement of the 1960s and similar demonstrations opposing Reagan, attendance at marches has been anemic. Seven out of ten Democrats are tuning out political news. Liberal-leaning cable news networks CNN and MSNBC have seen their ratings plummet and are shaking up their line-ups.
Democratic donors, taking note of the disarray, are closing their checkbooks. “[Democrats] want us to spend money, and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking,” a donor told The Hill.
When a substantial portion of a republic’s population believes that there is nothing it can do to influence political leaders, the system is in trouble.
With Trump barely a month into his second term, history may record Democrats’ current beaten-down-dog mien as a momentary blip preceding a spurt of determined reenergization and a journey to recovery, reinvention and future victory. A devastating 1964 defeat left the GOP crestfallen and depressed. “Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election yesterday but the conservative cause as well. He has wrecked his party for a long time to come; it is not even likely to control the wreckage,” James Reston wrote in The New York Times on November 4, 1964.
He was wrong. Ray Bliss, chair of the Republican National Committee Chairman from 1965 to 1969, led the GOP out of the wilderness by patching up ideological divides and organizing at the local level. Nixon won in 1968—barely—and a landslide in 1972. Reagan shaped much of the way government looks today.
But Democrats don’t seem likely to pull off such a trick. As they say in 12-step programs, the first step is admitting you have a problem. The party is addicted to campaign contributions from corporations like Big Pharma and Big Tech who influence it against doing much to appeal to the working-class voters they need to win elections and are migrating to Trump and the Republicans. But there’s no evidence they see that as a problem. Some top Democrats want to wean themselves off big corporate money by adopting Bernie Sanders’ proven small-contributor model, but the only suggestion we’ve heard from new DNC chair Ken Martin is that the party needs more and better messaging.
“We also need to give people a sense of who we are as Democrats, what we believe in and what we’re fighting for,” Martin said on February 17th. While Democrats say they oppose Trump, they don’t seem to believe in much at all. They’re not fighting, whether for or against anything. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to them: “The courts,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says, “are the first line of defense” against Trump.
What of the Senate, where Democrats hold seven more seats than needed to jam up legislation with filibusters? They’re abdicating their checks and balances to the judiciary.
If you’re a liberal voter, the ideological battlefield currently looks like the Ukrainians’ situation. You keep losing. You’re deploying the same old failed strategies and tactics. No new miracle weapons are coming. There’s no reason to think that anything will improve.
Liberals see that there’s no hope. So they’re alienated and checked out.
So Trump runs wild and the streets remain empty.
If you’re conservative, the prospect of a Great Liberal Vanishing should spook you. In late-stage Rome, citizens got tired of politics and allowed themselves to be distracted by bread and circuses. The Republic slid into autocracy. German liberals disengaged from Weimar Republican politics as the SPD, the dominant left-leaning party at the time, governed in a coalition with bourgeois parties who blocked attempts to address popular priorities like unemployment relief after the depression began in 1929. In our time, low voter turnout correlates with stagnant governance and populist takeovers—and U.S. elections begin with a lower turnout rate than many other countries.
A democratic republic can limp along, hollowed out, for a while. But the less people care about the system, the easier it is for a demagogue to step in and claim, “I alone can fix it.” By then, no one’s paying attention.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.)
