3 hours ago

Why are the Democrats so spineless? | Moira Donegan

What does the Democratic party believe in? It’s difficult to tell. In 2024, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris ran a campaign of moderation, reconciliation, and emphasis on restoring institutional norms. This failed to capture much public attention when compared with the Trump campaign’s carnival of grievance. In the months since their defeat, the Democrats have been confused, conflicted, and internally contentious over how to best proceed.

The results have been contradictory and ineffectual. The Democrats have alternated between declaring Trump a fascist and a would-be dictator, and congratulating themselves on peacefully handing over the reins of power to him; they have railed against his corruption and his subordination to the unelected South African billionaire Elon Musk, but have also made themselves available to cooperate with Musk’s project to gut the federal bureaucracy and reshape it in his own interests, the initiative that has been moronically termed “Doge”.

They pledge resistance to the Trumpist takeover of the state, and then pledge to work with Trump on what they insist are their shared priorities. “I suspect we can find common ground on some things,” said Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, often cited as a future Democratic presidential candidate. “You have to look at the issues,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, the leftwing standard-bearer from Vermont. “It can’t simply be, ‘Oh, it’s a Trump idea, we oppose it.’”

What you will notice is that this is a vision of American politics in which the Democrats have no power to set the terms of the debate on their own, or to advance their own priorities: the far right alone can make policy proposals, to which the Democrats can merely flip their thumbs up or down. Many of them are giving the thumbs up. Democrats have crossed the aisle to vote in favor of Trump’s cabinet picks, and no fewer than twelve Democratic senators voted in favor of Trump’s anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act.

Gone is the fevered energy of 2017, when Trump’s first ascent to power galvanized a resurgent left wing and encouraged elected Democrats to obstruct the new president’s destructive agenda with aggressive media, legal, and procedural strategies. Now, the Democrats seem less like a resistance than an acquiescence. They are not mounting any meaningful opposition to Trump’s aggressive, sadistic mission. Instead they’re rolling over, like a submissive dog showing its belly, and alternately casting this posture as either a principled commitment to constitutional order or as an unfortunate inevitability for which they can’t be blamed.

Increasingly, political commentators have compared the Democrats of 2025 to the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government in second-world-war France. “It’s a regime born of capitulation and of defeat,” writes John Ganz of the newsletter Unpopular Front. “It’s a regime of born exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism: the loss of faith in the old verities of the republic.”

More than anything, what Democrats seem to wish for, at the outset of the second Trump presidency, is for it to be 2012 again. They want the Obama coalition back; they want the niceties of former norms and institutional procedures; they want bipartisanship to be a virtue, and they want to be seen as reasonable, pragmatic, and dispassionate. They want Trump, and the changes to our political world that his ascent has ushered in, to never have happened.

The far right, restored to power over the past two weeks, is said to be setting out to reverse the 20th century, undoing its progress for racial equality, women’s rights, queer dignity and freedom, and democratic fairness. But if the Republicans are seeking to reverse the 20th century, the Democrats seem to wish to simply ignore the 21st. Their strategies and impulses, their vision of how American politics works, no longer function in the present. Instead of adapting to the future, they seem to be sticking their heads in the sand, and waiting for the return of the past.

This is why the Democrats have not adjusted to the new age of political communications, in which voters can be animated and convinced by their information environment: Democrats tack to the right, over and over, and use traditional media like newspapers, cable news, and press releases to show off their new positions and distance themselves from their own ones. Voters don’t see it; they are too busy on social media, where Republicans are deftly setting the agenda that the Democrats can only feebly follow, chasing their opponents to the right even further. The result is that the party has not advocated its own actual worldview for years: Democrats have not shown a set of social values, or a theory of governance, or anything like a commitment to principle. They have not stood up for targeted groups, or articulated a real vision of democracy; they have never picked a bold fight, and they have never taken a stand that they don’t back down from when Republicans oppose it. No wonder the American public, when it thinks of Democrats at all, tends to think of them as out of touch, opportunistic, and cowardly. That is because they are.

The result is not so much that the Democrats are a weaker party as that they are not much of a party at all: it is the extremist Republicans, and they alone, who are communicating a vision of America to the public, and the whimpering, servile politicians who pass for an “opposition” never counter with their own vision but only whisper, barely audible, the feeble response: “Not so far.”

What Democrats need, now, is to discover their spine, and to articulate a set of values that they do not flinch from. The point is not to try to feign positions that they think the electorate already shares: the point is to take a stand with principle and integrity, and to let that guide draw the voters to them.

Elections are popularity contests, and the way to be popular is not through policy, but through personal robustness, through a willingness to put up a fight. If Democrats fight what they have long believed were losing battles – trans rights and abortion; healthcare and childcare; education; social security; good, union jobs – they might find that it is the fighting itself that proves persuasive. They have already tried compromise; they have already tried capitulation. It is time to try defiance.