By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
Elections analyst Nate Silver is exhilarated. The Democratic Party has been
batted around like an orca’s breakfast for long enough. Suddenly, “perhaps for
a change,” he wrote, “they’re in the mood to fight back.”
He cites the polling that has long shown that Democrats
want a more pugilistic party. We don’t need survey data to confirm that. It’s
the little things, like the Democratic base’s desire to see their elected
officials get shot and their insistence on taking every morsel of bait served up by Donald Trump, that
suggest a restlessness is abroad on the Democratic left. That’s hardly oracular
wisdom. Still, Silver contends, the Democratic Party’s willingness to throw
sharp elbows is something new.
“The initiative marks the end of a decade-plus of a ‘when
they go low, we go high’ attitude among Democratic leaders, which the party
base has increasingly soured on,” he wrote. “And here, the base has the right
strategic instincts.”
Maybe. But having the “right strategic instincts” is not
the same thing as having a strategy. The absence of long-term strategic thought
is what Democratic voters resent, even if they cannot articulate it. And they
cannot articulate it, perhaps, because of the undue self-reverence apparent in
Silver’s post that hinders the party’s ability to critique itself. After all,
Democrats do not “go high” nearly as much as they seem to think they do.
It was Michelle Obama who electrified Democrats during
her July 2016 address to the delegates at the party’s
presidential nominating convention. “How we explain that when someone is cruel
or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level?” she averred. “No.”
That’s when she admonished her party to model the behavior they want to see in
their neighbors. It was a high-minded appeal to a sort of civility that her
party never exemplified and that has served as an embittered excuse for the
Democrats’ mercenary legerdemain ever since.
The former first lady’s husband campaigned for reelection
tacitly endorsing the tendentious claim that Mitt Romney’s “vulture capitalism” rendered him complicit in a negligent homicide (Obama’s 2012 campaign later tried to
distance itself from the attack before Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter
was revealed to have coordinated it). That was the year Joe Biden accused the
GOP of seeking to reimpose chattel slavery on black Americans, a year in
which Democratic strategists of all stripes tried to convince you
that words like “Chicago,” “golf,” “Constitution,” and even “cool” were coded messages that only white racists could
hear.
After four years in which the president channeled
Americans’ rage (“I don’t want to quell anger, I think people are right to be
angry!”), advocated confrontational politics (“I want you to argue with them and get in their face”), and
embraced the Chicago Way (“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”), few
Republicans were shocked by the Democrats’ muscular politics in 2012. But that
was nothing compared to what would come.
Barack Obama cultivated a bad habit throughout his term —
one that he evinces even today — in which he castigates partisan politics as
though he were above it. In reality, he and his party were expert practitioners
of hard-nosed politics.
No issue was too sacred for Obama to demagogue it.
“What’s more important to you: our children or an A-grade from the gun lobby?” he argued during his failed 2013 push for new gun-control
legislation. Republicans didn’t just oppose the implementation of Obamacare;
they were engaged in “blackmail.” Obama’s staff borrowed the act. “What we’re not
for is negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest,” current
podcast bro and former White House strategic communications adviser Dan Pfeiffer said of the GOP’s approach to banal debt
ceiling negotiations. “It is not a negotiation if I show up at your house and
say, ‘Give me everything inside or I’m going to burn it down.’” In a display of
the Democrats’ inviolable commitment to holding one arm behind their back, that
was the year that the late Harry Reid “nuked” the filibuster for judicial nominations
— an act of civic restraint that Democrats have regretted ever since.
The following year would see the Supreme Court take up the case of the Little Sisters of the
Poor, whom the federal government compelled to violate their religious
principles by forcing them to provide contraceptives and “pregnancy-related
services” to employees. That was the same year the Court liberated the crafts
store Hobby Lobby from Obamacare’s mandates, prompting congressional Democrats
to accuse the “five men” on the bench of oppressive sexism.
In 2015, as Donald Trump embarked on his successful quest
for the White House, Obama delivered an oblique address commemorating the
passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. “Remember that our freedom is
bound up with the freedom of others, regardless of what they look like or where
they come from or what their last name is, or what faith they practice,” he
observed. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest clarified that what Obama
meant was that the GOP today is probably pro-slavery. “I’m not going to wave
you off consideration of the idea that that message stands in quite stark
contrast to the rhetoric that we hear from a variety of Republican candidates
for president,” he said. “So, I think it’s appropriate for you to notice
the difference in those messages.”
Obama kept on accusing the GOP of lacking a proper
appreciation for slavery throughout 2016, though he made his objectives
explicit in September of that year. “I will consider it a personal insult — an
insult to my legacy — if this community lets down its guard and fails to
activate itself in this election,” Obama warned black America. And yet,
Democrats seemed sincerely perplexed by the notion that the 44th president was
in any way politically divisive. The charge is not just “positively deranged,”
columnist Paul Waldman insisted, “it’s projection. They’re blaming
him for their own shortcomings, their own misdeeds, the political divisions
that they have worked so hard to exacerbate.”
The first Trump administration was hardly typified by
scrupulous observance of civic propriety or excess deference to its Democratic
opponents. But neither did the Democratic Party live up to its delusional
self-image. It was the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee
that, after April 2016, funded the work done by Christopher
Steele — work that produced a campaign of innuendo and implication around the
charge that Donald Trump colluded with Russia (and was entrapped by Moscow
after engaging in some licentious behaviors with prostitutes). When those claims
were investigated by an independent counsel and found wanting, the party would
not let the matter go.
“Attorney General Barr’s regrettably partisan handling of
the Mueller report” has “resulted in a crisis of confidence in his independence
and impartiality,” Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer wrote in a 2019 letter
excoriating the Mueller probe’s findings without attacking the liberal
dashboard saint who conducted the investigation. “With this report’s release,
we can confirm that U.S. individuals took actions that helped Russia undermine
the United States and its government,” former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer
insisted.
Twenty-eighteen showed how desperately the Democratic
base was spoiling for the opportunity to cast off the bounds of civility. That
summer, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was turned away from
a Virginia restaurant explicitly because the place would not serve Trump
administration officials. Sanders’s snubbing was preceded by the harassment of
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt in
similar settings, but it was Sanders’s mistreatment that set off “a national
debate over civility and decency in a time of political differences,” as CNN
put it. We know what side California Representative Maxine Waters came down on.
“And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department
store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd,” she told a cheering crowd. “And you push back on them. And
you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Then there were the 2018 hearings to confirm Brett
Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Only book-length treatments capture the scale
of that sordid episode. Suffice it to say, the embarrassingly thin accusations
of childhood sexual assault leveled against Kavanaugh from multiple interested
sources would not have passed journalistic scrutiny if any such scrutiny were
applied. The rules were suspended in this special case, but, ultimately, not to
Democrats’ benefit. The guardrails having been withdrawn, liberal columnists,
commentators, cultural figures, and elected officials tripped over themselves
to showcase the rank bigotry that had captured the progressive
zeitgeist.
“Guess who’s perpetuating all these kinds of actions?
It’s the men in this country,” Senator Mazie Hirono insisted. “Just shut up and
step up.” Like “a lot of white men,” Kavanaugh did “not know what it’s like to
feel threatened, powerless, and frustrated,” Hillary Clinton’s 2016
communications director Jennifer Palmieri observed. Fortunately, amid the
“reckoning of this lopsided power balance, there’s going to be a lot more of
this” in the future. Georgetown University associate professor Christine Fair
advocated “miserable deaths” and posthumous castration for the “entitlement
white men” who declined to convict Kavanaugh in the court of public opinion.
Indeed, the very act of defending himself against the charge of rape was
somehow untoward. The emotion he displayed in that moment was a display of
“trauma for white men unaccustomed to trauma,” then–Times reporter John
Harwood insisted. Kavanaugh was just one of many “entitled white men acting
like the new minority,” columnist Maureen Dowd insisted, “howling about things
that are being taken away from them, aggrieved at anything that diminishes them
or saps their power.”
The Democrats lost that fight, and there were more losses
to come. The following year, amid the rise of an incipient antisemitism that
would come to dog the party in the next decade, the party had the opportunity
to censure its members who accused American Jews of dual loyalty, of having
mesmeric powers over gentiles, or of being motivated by their obsessive need to
extract wealth from productive sectors of the economy. They passed on that opportunity, preferring instead to go as low
as possible rather than follow the GOP’s lead from earlier that year when the
party kicked Representative Steve King off his committee
assignments over similarly bigoted remarks. The price for going “high” in this
case was just too steep.
Donald Trump lost the 2020 campaign, but the seeds of his
comeback were sown even before the votes were cast. The former intelligence
officials (including some of the highest echelons of the Democratic national
security apparatus) who signed their names to a letter alleging that Hunter
Biden’s laptop was the most sophisticated Russian disinformation operation ever
executed led social-media companies to throttle Americans’ access to the New York Post. Democratic media allies
maintain that their co-partisans cannot be blamed for their roles in that
affair. After all, the so-called “Twitter files” revealed that the GOP’s representatives made
their share of requests to censor offending posts. It’s not clear how
exculpatory that is. After all, Silicon Valley didn’t act on the GOP’s demands
— only the left’s.
Then the lawfare began. Whatever you think of the merits
of the federal cases brought against Trump — charges that will never be
litigated — the accusations that were put before a jury were travesties.
The “hush money” trial, in which a single transaction was spun out by Manhattan
District Attorney Alvin Bragg into 34 felony counts, succeeded in saddling the
former president with a federal conviction. It also tainted the other charges pending against Trump with an air
of frivolity. Likewise, the appeals court that threw out the half-billion-dollar fine a jury imposed on
Trump after he was found liable for fraud in New York State Attorney General
Letitia James’s case exposes just how picayune that prosecution was. The Trump
Organization was accused of engaging in behaviors that rarely see the inside of
a courtroom and of defrauding investors who did not bring the complaint because
they actually made a return on their stake.
What do you call all this if not political hardball?
It’s not as if the Democratic Party has observed
Quaker-like passivity in the years since. “MAGA forces are determined to take
this country backwards,” Joe Biden insisted during an official presidential address in prime time, flanked by a
U.S. Marine honor guard. “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.
They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the
people.”
Vice President Kamala Harris goaded the national press
into spending a week establishing tortured and tenuous connections between Donald Trump and
Benito Mussolini after her 2024 contention that voters do not want “a
president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
Even today, driven by the mania that persists in online
forums, congressional Democrats are justifying their unremarkable
obstructionism by insisting that they’re trying to uncover the sordid truth
buried in those so-called “Epstein files.” Chuck Schumer went so far as to deem Congress’s August
break the “Epstein recess.” The GOP’s evasiveness isn’t “just odd,” he added.
It’s “alarming.” Democrats have alleged point-blank that Trump was fully
appraised of Jeffrey Epstein’s illegal behaviors and, at the very least, did nothing
about it. And make no mistake; this is a strategic initiative. “Trump
administration officials are either lying about the file and keeping it covered
up to protect themselves, or they lied about its existence in a shameless
political ploy to get elected,” Democratic National Committee messaging adviser
Tim Hogan claimed. Message received.
Nate Silver didn’t seem to find any of this recent
history especially informative when formulating his recommendation that
Democrats finally take the gloves off. “Democrats don’t merely have to
reciprocate,” he wrote; “tit-for-tat might be a game-theory optimal strategy
over the long run, but it doesn’t work as well if you’re always a half-step
behind. They should also consider acting preemptively, something few Democrats
other than Beto O’Rourke of all people have dared to suggest.”
Silver can pull from obscurity the advocacy of a former
congressman who lost the last three elections he waged for higher office, but
he seems somehow unfamiliar with the decade of remorseless political warfare
waged by Democrats. None of this is to say that the GOP’s hands are clean. It is
to say that the Democratic Party’s impression of itself is the product of
delirium. For that reason, the opposition party should probably reject Silver’s
advice. If a decade-old strategy is no longer working, doing more of the same
and expecting different results would be crazy.
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