Politics have changed but the Democrats haven’t – they are old and out of touch | Moira Donegan

Is this the way the Democratic party ends – not with a bang, but with a whimper? Last week, the party’s Senate caucus seemed poised to do something that they had never done before: block the Trump administration’s proposed continuing resolution, and shut down the government. It would have been a largely symbolic move, one that signaled opposition to the Trump administration’s usurpation of Congress’s spending authority and a willingness to play procedural hardball in order to slow Elon Musk’s radical anti-government agenda. It would have signaled, too, a party willing to take itself seriously as the opposition to a president with authoritarian ambitions.

Government shutdowns are unpopular, but so, right now, is the Democratic party: several senators from swing states seemed ready to stick their necks out, ready to bet that it would be better to be seen doing something – anything – to oppose the Trump agenda than to roll over yet again. And for a few days, at least, it looked like Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, would back them up.

Then he didn’t. Schumer abruptly reversed course on the continuing resolution, vowing to both allow the government funding bill to come to the Senate floor and to vote for it himself. The bill passed.

For many, the moment was emblematic of the Democratic leadership’s singular unwillingness to oppose Donald Trump, and their bizarre belief that the Republican party – that cabal of increasingly fascist politicians that has spent the past decade calling their opposition pedophiles, attacking the rule of law and eroding democratic self-government – can be reasoned with, cajoled and brought back to their senses. Weak, ineffectual, unburdened by conscience or principle, unwilling to take their own side in an argument, and preferring to lose with dignity than to win at the risk of offending anyone: in the budget fight, Schumer embodied all of his party’s worst impulses, the ones that have allowed Donald Trump to seize control of American politics and turn our constitutional order to dust.

In many ways, Schumer is reading from a 30-year-old playbook, the one that brought Bill Clinton to power in 1992. Clinton, a moderate, tracked to the right, distanced himself from his party on social issues, prized compromise, and touted himself as tough on crime. This formula worked once, and Democratic party conventional wisdom has demanded that the party return to it, over and over again, in spite of changed circumstances and diminishing returns – like the pet dog who continues to lick a greasy spot on the sofa where she once found a piece of dropped cheese. Times have changed since 1992; the people who were infants that year that Clinton’s centrism swept to power are now not only adults, but adults with back pain. There was a moment in the 2024 campaign, after the selection of Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s running mate, when it looked like the party might finally abandon this old strategy and take on a more aggressive and affirmative tactic; instead, Walz was muffled, and the party leaders are now mistaking the result of their rightward-tacking strategy as a product of the failure to adhere to it faithfully enough. Politics have changed, but the Democrats haven’t: they are old and out of touch, not just in their gerontocratic leadership, but in their worldview. In the New York Times last month, James Carville, a veteran of the 1992 Clinton campaign, advised his party to “roll over and play dead”. But if the Democrats really were dead, would anyone be able to tell the difference?

But one Democrat seems to be showing some refreshing signs of life. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young, progressive Democrat from New York, had in recent years seemed eager to show her willingness to cooperate with Democratic leadership, acting as a key vote and public messenger on crucial issues. But her patience with her party seems to have run out. In a CNN interview, she called Schumer’s capitulation to Trump a “tremendous mistake” and a “huge slap in the face” to Democratic voters – and to a major federal workers’ union, which had endorsed a shutdown. “There is a huge sense of betrayal” among voters, she told journalists, at the mainstream Democrats’ unwillingness to fight.

The mainstream of the Democratic party has long accused progressives – like Ocasio-Cortez and her mentor, Bernie Sanders – of a kind of moral vanity, a willingness to sacrifice effective governance or policy gains for the sake of personal purity. The shoe is not on the other foot: it is the mainstream Democratic leadership – Schumer and his allies – who now favor decorum over the public interest, personal dignity over principle, a vain hope for a return to the politics of the past over their responsibility to engage with the realities of the present. It is the centrist Democrats, not the progressives, who are living in a delusion, and who are selling out the country in order to maintain it.

Schumer may have been a better man for the job in a different era. “Schumer once had a salty, outer-borough pique that did some work to counter Trump,” the writer Sam Adler-Bell wrote in New York Magazine, “but his mien today is weary and distracted.” Now, he seems tired, his red glasses slipping down his nose, his affect exhausted. No wonder he doesn’t want to fight Donald Trump – he doesn’t have much fight left in him at all. After her public break with Schumer, some speculated that Ocasio Cortez might challenge him in a primary for his Senate seat. She should. Schumer comes up for re-election in 2028, at which point he will be nearly 78 years old; Ocasio-Cortez will be 39. Would it even be a fair fight?