Activists Demand That Democrats Set Themselves on Fire

By Noah Rothman

Friday, March 14, 2025

 

When Democrats’ efforts to oppose a GOP-backed short-term government-funding bill collapsed, the most instructive reaction came not from the progressive Left but from the political reporters who were aghast at the incompetence on display.

 

The GOP dealt out to congressional Democrats “probably the best ‘jam’” that “I have seen in my entire career covering the Hill,” Politico’s Rachael Bade said. “Dems asked for something they were never gonna get — handcuffs on DOGE. And this made it kinda easy for the GOP to call their bluff and make them swallow something they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

 

NBC News reporter Sahil Kapur agreed. “The Democrats’ CR strategy (if you can even call it that) was a discombobulated mess,” he said. It seemed to him that Democrats simply assumed that Speaker Mike Johnson would not be able to pass a stopgap spending bill through his narrow conference. And when he did, there was no plan B.

 

As a result of this strategic ineptitude, Democrats spent the past 24 hours arguing with themselves about how much voters would reward their party for shutting down the government. But Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, after what seems to have been a contentious and anxiety-fueled meeting with his fellow Senate Democrats, put the kibosh on the activists’ shutdown gambit. As a result, Schumer has become an object of contempt within the activist class — a cohort that includes more than a few congressional Democrats. That hostility might explain why Schumer has defended his eminently sensible outlook with table-pounding and theatrically spicy language. Theater — not strategy — is what Democratic partisans now demand of their elected officials, and they’re not getting nearly enough of it.

 

For weeks, the minority party’s leadership has pleaded with their voters to take stock of how little leverage Democrats have following their mediocre performance at the polls in 2024. They have tried to placate the restive Left with interpretive dances, uninspired 1960s-style protest songs and chants, and the unbecoming deployment of a lot of four-letter words. It is a performance designed to convey zeal on the cheap, and it’s hard to hold it against progressives who resent the utter vacuousness of it all.

 

Democratic elected officials are only responding to their voters’ demand for enthusiasm. It is now abundantly clear, though, that the current cast of Democrats cannot give their base what it wants. That tension seems set to come to a head far sooner than Democrats had probably anticipated.

 

An open letter drafted by unnamed House Democrats has accused Schumer and his allies of “capitulating to” the GOP — not, more accurately, of mounting a doomed rearguard action that could only have ever ended in failure. “I think there is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of Schumer’s prudential effort to keep his caucus’s members from engaging in acts of political self-harm. “Listen to your constituents,” fellow “Squad”-mate Ayanna Pressley begged her fellow Democrats. “This Trump spending bill is only going to make people hungrier, sicker, and more poor,” she added, noting that Trump is a “dictator” who must be met with “defiance.”

 

Pressley provided one more observation that offers insight into the Democratic mindset: “The Democrats can’t only be the adults in the room,” she noted. “We have to be the fighters, too, and that is the message that we are hearing every day from our constituents.” Pressley is right to imply that behaving like “adults” in this moment is incompatible with the kind of political performance art that Democratic voters are demanding.

 

The temptation to abandon prudence in favor of scenery-chewing pugnacity seems irresistible. Even Nancy Pelosi’s vaunted strategic acumen has been corrupted by the demands of the party’s activists. “Democrats must not buy into this false choice,” she wrote on X, in a veiled attack on Schumer’s approach. “We must fight back for a better way.” That “better way” would, in her view, be obvious if only Democrats would “listen to the women” in her party, some of whom have pushed for a clean, one-month continuing resolution. But, as PBS News correspondent Lisa Desjardins observed, “There is not a world where the one-month CR can become law today.” Pelosi knows this, but she also knows that the base is fed up with the art of the merely possible.

 

Republicans should recognize the emerging dynamic on the Democratic side of the aisle better than most. Damn your tactics, the base insists. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures. It doesn’t matter whether those measures are destined to fail or even backfire. It’s in the trying, the accompanying sacrifice, and in the martyrdom that follows a foreseeable disaster, that activists seek and often find catharsis. The party’s loudest supporters are not interested in delayed gratification or strategic reserve. They want to see their existential dread reflected in their representatives. And the most authentic expression of panic is irrationality.

 

If the polling is any indication, the Democratic base has, indeed, lost faith in the ability of its congressional leadership to meet the measure of the moment. That does not mean that they have warmed to the progressive politics embraced by the majority of the congressional Democrats who insist that the party’s leaders should self-immolate, if only for the psychological gratification enjoyed by the conflagration’s spectators. A recent survey conducted by Echelon Insights confirms that more than 80 percent of Democrats want their party to be “much/somewhat more combative” in their dealings with Trump and the GOP, though only 20 percent of Democrats want to see the party move “to the left politically.” Rather, a plurality of Democrats would like to see their party move “to the center.” Right now, however, that’s not what Democratic leaders are offering. At the moment, progressivism and dramatic, Resistance-style politics are a package deal. Take it or leave it.

 

The passions of this moment suggest that Democrats will take it. Dan McLaughlin is right: “Anger is not an argument.” But the party is not interested in making, much less winning, arguments right now. That would be an intellectual exercise. In Otter’s immortal words in Animal House, what this situation requires is a really stupid and futile gesture on somebody’s part. And somebody will take up the call — indeed, many already are. The Left will get the politics it wants, even if the politics it wants are hopelessly self-defeating.