IThis is how Democrats end – not banging, but with whispers? Last week, the party’s Senate Caucus seemed poised to do something they had never done before. It blocked the ongoing resolution proposed by the Trump administration and shut down the government. It was primarily a symbolic move, showing opposition to the Trump administration’s take over Congressional spending power and willingness to play procedural hardball to slow Elon Musk’s radical anti-government agenda. It would have signalled the party, willing to take itself seriously, as opposed to a president with authoritarian ambitions.
Government closures are not popular, but for now they are Democrats. Some senators in the swing nation seem ready to stick their necks out, and betting that it’s better to do something than to fall again, or against Trump’s agenda. And for at least a few days, it seemed like the minority leader Chuck Schumer would back them up.
Then he didn’t. Schumer suddenly reversed the course with an ongoing resolution, vowing that the government funding bill would come to the Senate floor and vote for himself. The bill has been passed.
For many, the moment symbolized the singular dislike of Democratic leaders to oppose Donald Trump and the strange belief that the Cabal, an increasingly fascist politician who has called out opposition pedophiles for the past decade, attacked the rule of law and eroded Democratic autonomy, could bring their senses back. Weak, ineffective, burdened by conscience and principles, reluctant to take away our side in arguments, preferring to lose with dignity rather than winning at the risk of everyone becoming uncomfortable. In the budget battle, Schumer embodied everything that Donald Trump allowed to seize control of American politics and crush the constitutional order.
In many ways, Schumer reads from the 30-year-old playbook that led Bill Clinton to power in 1992. Clinton, tracked to the right, distanced himself from the party on social issues, distanced himself on important compromises, and promoted him as being strict about crime. This formula worked once, and the Democrats’ traditional wisdom demanded that the party return again and again despite the changing and declining circumstances. Since 1992, times have changed. Those who were toddlers whose power was taken away by Clinton’s centralism that year were now adults as well as adults with back pain. There was a moment in the 2024 campaign after Tim Waltz was chosen as Kamala Harris’ running buddy. Instead, the waltz is muffled and the party leaders are now mistaken as a product of their failure to faithfully follow the outcome of their right-directed tacking strategy. Politics have changed, but Democrats aren’t. They are old and in touch with not only the leadership of the elderly, but also in their worldview. Last month in the New York Times, James Carville, a veteran of the 1992 Clinton campaign, advised his party of “rollover and play dead.” But if Democrats were really dead, could anyone tell the difference?
But one Democrat appears to be showing refreshing signs of life. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young progressive Democrat from New York, appears to have wanted to show his willingness to work with Democratic leaders in recent years, acting as a key vote and a public messenger on key issues. However, her patience with the party seems to have run out. In an interview with CNN, she called Schumer’s surrender a “risky mistake,” a “huge slap in the face,” and a “big slap” on the union of major federal workers who approved the closure. “There’s a “big sense of betrayal” among voters, she told journalists she dislikes the mainstream Democrat fight.
The mainstream of the Democrats have long denounced progressives like moral vanity, like Ocasio-Cortez and her leader Bernie Sanders. The shoes are now on the other foot. It is Schumer, the leader of the mainstream Democratic Party, and his allies. They are now a futile hope for a return to past politics for their past interests, personal dignity for principles, and responsibility for engaging in current reality. It is not progressives, but centristic Democrats who live in delusions and sell the country to keep it up.
Schumer might have been a better person for his work in another era. “Schumer once had a salty outside picket that did some work to counter Trump,” author Sam Adler Bell wrote in New York Magazine: Now he looks tired, his red glasses slipping through his nose, his effects exhausted. No wonder he doesn’t want to fight Donald Trump. He doesn’t leave much of a fight with him. After a public break with Schumer, some speculated that Ocasio-Cortez might challenge him in the Senate seat primary. She should. Schumer appeared for re-election in 2028. At that point he was nearly 78 years old. Ocasio-Cortez is 39. Is it even a fair fight?
