How Democrats can come back from the dead

There is only one way for the Democratic Party to survive

There’s no sugarcoating it: the Democrats are in bad shape, owed almost entirely to our unwillingness to fight. When Democrats are in the majority, they’re not willing to fully exercise their power. And when Democrats are in the minority, even in the rare instances where they do have leverage, they’re not willing to use it. The simple question here becomes: why should people vote to give you power if you’re not going to wield it once you have it?

This past week, the Democratic base was led to believe that the continuing resolution, the CR, would be used to extract concessions from Republicans if ever there was a chance of Democratic participation. After all, the CR required 60 votes in the Senate; Republicans only have 53 Senators. They would need Democratic buy-in. And in exchange for that buy-in, Democrats could have demanded that DOGE be neutered or that the federal employee firings stop or that Elon’s overreach be curbed or to guarantee protections for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security or to extract any concession whatsoever. That didn’t happen. The CR passed and it included major cuts to federal programs, and Democrats have nothing to show for it, aside from a very broken government continuing to remain open. One hell of a concession.

I’ll be honest: there were arguments that I found especially compelling in terms of why it was important to keep the government open. Chief among them, the courts essentially stop functioning if the government shuts down. The courts are currently our best bulwark against Trump. The courts are why his attacks on birthright citizenship aren’t working, why the fired probationary employees have to be reinstated, why DOGE is being blocked from accessing certain personal private information. The reality is that we need the courts to keep functioning because they are our best weapon right now. That’s persuasive for me. But the problem is that that case wasn’t made beforehand. Beforehand, we were told that our elected officials were going to fight this, that we weren’t going to cave, that the Republicans need us, that we’re going to stand up and show some spine and use our leverage, limited though it may be. None of that happened. And for a Democratic base that is desperate to fight back against an administration that is waging an unprecedented attack on this country, this felt like a betrayal.

Again, at least for me, this latest battle isn’t necessarily about forcing the government to shut down; it’s the principle that Democrats are wholly unwilling to fight on the same playing field as Republicans. It’s that the Democrats seem forever doomed to be the party that allows the parliamentarian to shut down our entire agenda, while the Republicans won’t even let the United States Constitution shut down theirs. As a Democrat, I am desperate for fighters. For brawlers. I know I’m not the only one.

We’ve already been through the period where we admonish Republicans for being hypocrites and liars. We’ve spent the last decade saying, how dare you! “How dare you give a Supreme Court seat to Amy Coney Barrett but not Merrick Garland!” “How dare you say you’re going to protect earned benefits but pass a budget proposing deep cuts to those programs!” We’ve already done the thing where we call out their hypocrisy and lies. We live in a post-hypocrisy and post-truth world. It doesn’t actually get us anywhere to call it out. The Republicans know! They don’t care! So at this point, our options are that we can keep complaining about it and wallowing in self-pity that this asymmetry continues to exist. Or we can fight back. I’m tired of option one. I’m desperate for option two.

Normally, our problem is apathy. We’ve got the opposite problem now. People are paying attention. They’re agitating. They are taking to the streets and to town halls and they want to fight back. And most importantly, they want the people who represent us in office who actually can fight back to use every lever at their disposal to do it. And if this crop of elected officials won’t, then voters are going to elect new ones who will. This isn’t about progressive versus moderate; this is about fighters versus non-fighters. It’s about giving power to the people who want to wield it. Quite frankly, the future of the Democratic Party depends on it.