The Opposition Party That Wasn’t

As the Trump White House continues its long destructive march through the institutions—and vast tranches of Americans’ personal data—the Democratic Party appears to be frozen in a permanent tableau vivant of Beltway pearl-clutching. The rank politicization of the FBI and the Justice Department as MAGA-enforcing franchises, the serial demolition of USAID, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and the Department of Education, the harrowing detention and seeming torture of legal Venezuelan immigrants—all these antidemocratic outrages, and scores of others, typically trigger among Democratic leaders one variation or another of one of the least compelling refrains of the 1.0 Trump resistance: “This is not who we are”—or to cite the feeble sign one Democratic House member briefly held aloft prior to Trump’s joint address before Congress, “This is not normal.”

Yet the evidence continues to mount that it’s the Democrats who aren’t behaving normally, by failing utterly to take up the standard of a disciplined and directed opposition party. Democratic senators could barely be stirred into suspending unanimous consent and traditional order as the Trump administration paraded one brazenly corrupt and/or unqualified cabinet nominee after another for rote confirmation hearings. Congressional Democrats have fallen meekly into line with key Trump policy goals, from jingoistic immigration crackdowns to crypto deregulation. And in the marquee confrontation with the deranged priorities of the Project 2025 White House—this month’s continuing resolution on government spending—Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer shamefully capitulated, handing over 10 “Yes” votes from the Democratic Senate conference, and getting virtually nothing in return. (The one concession Schumer obtained, a stand-alone bill to restore $1 billion in funding cut from the District of Columbia government, has yet to appear on the House legislative calendar, and rates a remote chance of passage if and when it does.)

In view of this lackluster showing, it’s small wonder that the party is now experiencing a historic nosedive in public approval. A recent CNN poll found that Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents strongly agreed that the party should be blocking the ruinous Trump agenda, by a 57-to-42 percent margin—and that result was recorded a week before Schumer’s ignominious collapse. (By contrast, a similar poll during the first year of Trump’s earlier term found that 74 percent of this demographic favored working closely with the GOP on bipartisan legislative goals.) A nearly identical percentage said that the leaders of the Democratic Party are taking it in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, among the public generally, the Democrats can boast a paltry 29 percent approval rating—an all-time low over the 33-year history of the CNN survey, and a full 20 points lower than its rating at the outset of Joe Biden’s term in 2021.

In a pointed rebuke to the zombie institutionalism of party leaders, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been hosting anti-oligarchy rallies that have outdrawn the crowds Sanders amassed during his two presidential runs. And grassroots organizations aligned with the Democrats, such as Indivisible and MoveOn, have sought to harness and organize the rapidly spreading popular disenchantment with the party’s leadership caste. The numbers here are also grim: In a survey of its membership, MoveOn found that 78 percent said that congressional Democrats aren’t doing enough to stop Trump, and 49 percent said that the party’s inertia-laden response to the administration makes them less likely to donate money to the Democrats. “Our members’ frustrations are at a boiling point,” MoveOn director Rahna Epting wrote in a letter to Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries. MoveOn and Indivisible, in concert with a host of other grassroots advocacy groups and unions, are planning a national day of action against the multifront Trump-Musk putsch on April 5.

In order to revive itself on the national political stage, the Democratic Party clearly needs to embrace this activist energy—yet it is also, by all appearances, structurally incapable of doing so. For starters, of course, there’s the party’s fierce institutional rejection of the Sanders insurgency, going back a decade. In engineering Biden’s nomination to the presidency via a coordinated series of withdrawals from rival center-leaning candidates in the heat of the 2020 primaries, the Democratic leadership underlined the chief takeaway of the 2016 Wikileaks document dump: that a party in their thrall would move heaven and earth to repudiate a social-democratic youth movement in its ranks. The party’s later insupportable mobilization behind the cognitively slipping Biden’s reelection campaign made it yet more clear that no youthful reformist energy was to be permitted at its leadership summit. Meanwhile, even with stout party insiders like former House speaker Nancy Pelosi calling his political judgment into question, Chuck Schumer is waving away calls for him to step down as Senate leader. The de facto motto of the party appears to be, “If it’s broke, why fix it?”

The party’s demographic conservatism is now so advanced that the GOP seems to automatically factor it into its own overweening agenda. At the outset of Trump’s presidency, some Beltway observers suggested that, by drawing an unusual number of House members as cabinet picks, the president might be jeopardizing the GOP’s exceedingly narrow majority in the chamber. But that was back in December; since then the Republicans’ House majority has grown by two, thanks to the deaths of a pair of Democratic House members who were critically ill when they ran for reelection last cycle.

The party’s organizing ideas, as well as its legislative workforce, are distinctly motheaten. The big new policy pitch in Democratic circles is the “abundance” agenda sketched out by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic editor Derek Thompson. Yet, on closer examination, the fistful of proposals aligned with this “pro-growth” directive add up to nothing more than warmed-over neoliberal market infatuation; the authors want to build out the country’s infrastructure and social capacity, but on the exact terms that a generation’s worth of Third Way Democrats cheered on the market plunder of social goods and secure manufacturing jobs. Amid a blizzard of friendly op-eds and podcast interviews, Klein and Thompson are promoting the very same policy assumptions about economic growth, reward, and punishment that gave rise to the MAGA movement in the first place.

Back when neoliberalism was still somewhat new, Bill Clinton used to assail the GOP’s adherence to trickle-down economics by citing an adage that his wife flagged from a book she was reading. The definition of insanity, he liked to say from the stump in 1992, was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” One might hope that today’s leaders of the Democratic Party would recognize themselves in that indictment. The likelier scenario, unfortunately, is that they’ve aged past the point of remembering it.