The Left Will Get the Politics It Wants

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

 

Democrats in the rank and file seem to have had their fill of wallowing in their political failures.

 

The weekend’s CBS News survey found a significant shift in Democratic attitudes since January, when Democrats recognized their defeat and were open to behavioral changes that might rescue them from the wilderness. Then, 54 percent of self-described Democrats said they were willing to “try to find common ground with Trump.” That sentiment has evaporated in the intervening weeks. Today, just 35 percent of Democratic respondents say as much. By contrast, 65 percent now say Democrats should “oppose Trump as much as possible,” up from 46 percent last month.

 

The party’s elected officials sense the growing restlessness within the ranks. They know their offices are receiving an overwhelming volume of calls from constituents calling for a second “resistance,” and they’d be happy to oblige. But what Democratic voters and activists want to see from their representatives amounts to magical thinking. At least, that’s what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries implied.

 

“What leverage do we have?” he asked exasperatedly. “They control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It’s their government.” According to Axios, the frustration the activist class is displaying toward Democratic officeholders is more than mutual. “People are pissed,” said one Democratic House staffer in reaction to the efforts by organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible to nudge the party toward a more theatrical, if not effective, opposition.

 

Democratic tacticians have convinced themselves that their pathway back to relevance and power will follow a trajectory similar to that which culminated in their 2018 midterm victories. All they need to do is sit back and wait for Trump to make exploitable mistakes. That’s a sensible approach, but it’s one that compels the party’s base voters to delay gratification. The base might be more willing to place their faith in the party’s leadership if they had confidence in the Democrats’ ability to turn the tables on Trump when the opportunities arise. It sounds like Democratic voters have been uninspired by what they’ve seen so far, and it’s hard to blame them.

 

The party’s elders have so far responded to Trump’s restoration by putting on impotent pageants in which the party’s most gerontological specimens reenact the mid-century protest movements of their youths. Watching the likes of Maxine Waters, Chuck Schumer, Kweisi Mfume, and other Democratic Methuselahs attempt to summon passion from their crowds is more likely to conjure bitter memories of Joe Biden’s decrepitude than anything else. And although this aged dynamic does not typify the whole party’s approach to navigating the second Trump era, it’s one the radicals on the fringes of Democratic politics are eager to exploit.

 

Take, for example, the upstart New York City mayoral bid being mounted by Zohran Kwame Mamdani — a Democratic Socialist looking to capture control of the city’s Democratic Party. In a bid to convince his fellow socialists to re-register as Democrats for his benefit in the primary, Mamdani’s campaign zeroed in on the geriatric spectacle the party’s leadership has made of themselves.

 

“He’s running on freezing the rent, union-built housing, city-run groceries, universal child care, free buses,” one of Zohran’s enamored fellow travelers mused about the Bolshevik social compact the candidate is retailing. The ad is a love story, but so, too, was the movie Reds. The atmosphere in which the story’s protagonists found one another was also one in which the Soviet terror state was going about liquidating undesirables and consolidating power at gunpoint. We can expect as much from the Democratic Socialists of America, which would be considered a hate group if its political program was more right-of-center.

 

That’s what Democrats want right now: a satisfying catharsis in the form of unapologetic political activism. Democratic lawmakers cannot give them what they want and maintain the stable, steady course correction they’re attempting to engineer. But American voters tend to get what they want. If Democrats demand an emotive expurgation from their politicians, even at strategy’s expense, they’ll get it. And if Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer can’t provide it, they’ll find someone who will.