Anyone who was bullied at any point as a kid understands the dynamic that the Democrats are constitutionally incapable of grasping. Bullies love to poke and prod and see how much they can get away with, then they run to the closest authority figure to lie about what just happened and paint themselves as the victim. At some point, you just have to fight back in some fashion and call the bully out. Luckily for most children, there are authority figures around them who can suss out the bullshit and figure out what really unfolded to dole out the proper punishment. In politics, we don’t have the luxury of adults, which is exacerbated by the fact that elite Democrats are all a bunch of weak-kneed ninnies.
Intellectually, emotionally and analytically, the Democratic Party elites paint themselves as a bunch of children terrified to take on the bully. Democrats have won just two presidential elections since the Great Society that did not take place during periods of economic distress under a GOP president or in the wake of an impeachment of one, and both instances came with very popular incumbent Democratic presidents who just four years prior, the party fought like hell against until they did what they do best and lost. These people genuinely look at 1992, 2008 and 2020 as their models for winning elections. The elites in the Democratic Party do not understand this country. They do not understand themselves. They do not understand anything. They have proven themselves to be more out of touch with modern America than the group of folks who think that people are eating cats and dogs.
The Republican Party flat out sucks at governing. Even Tucker Carlson agrees with this. For all the huffing and puffing on the campaign trail in 2016, the first Trump administration largely amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy, 500 miles of a border wall and a destructive pandemic gone viral.
That’s a very comprehensive, compelling and succinct line of attack! Someone should use that to try to chip away at Trump’s popularity and establish a narrative that people can easily grab when the consequences of the GOP “flat out suck[ing] at governing” hits home. Maybe the guy who thought Michael Bennett and his 916 votes in New Hampshire was what the party needed in 2020 still has a few tricks up his sleeve and he…wait…I’m getting word that he wrote more words after the first couple paragraphs detailing how much the GOP sucks at governing.
With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead.
…what
Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight, and make the American people miss us. Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat.
Ah yes, the Democrats, famously fighting tooth and nail to currently stop Trump while lying to you and refusing to say the words unanimous consent, they should…retreat…from…uh…the…fight? With the people they’re voting for and saying they want to compromise with, I guess? I’m not sure how Carville thinks this posture is any different from the Democrats’ current position of putting on a show in the middle of the night, then going along with unanimous consent to get Trump business done and give themselves three-day weekends. Let’s see what else the ‘ol Ragin’ Cajun has in his master plan to watch people’s lives get ruined and assume that they will automatically say “none of this is the Democrats’ fault who I just voted out of office a few months ago.”
Our first major test in the art of strategic retreat comes in a few weeks, as the Trump administration must get a budget passed that raises the debt ceiling. There are deep internal Republican divides over the budget: Republicans don’t know what they want to include, they don’t agree on an agenda, and they do not have a clear path forward…Let the Republicans disagree with themselves publicly. Do not offer a single vote. Do not insert yourself into the discourse, do not throw a monkey wrench into the equation. Simply step away and let ‘em flirt with a default. Just when they’ve pushed themselves to the brink, and it appears they could collapse the global economy — come in and save the day. Be the competent party and not the chaos party.
This is actually a good idea. The threat of default will roil the markets and could easily have knock-on effects in our economy propped up by the over-valued stock market’s wealth effect on rich people. The Democrats should absolutely use the debt ceiling date as leverage to make the GOP squirm while it deals with its own crazies threatening its historically narrow majority. Maybe I’m being too hard on Carville, and his “strategic retreat” is more of a “strategic attack” kind of thing.
This equation must be applied for the remainder of this year. Let the Republicans push for their tax cuts, their Medicaid cuts, their food stamp cuts. Give them all the rope they need. Then let dysfunction paralyze their House caucus and rupture their tiny majority. Let them reveal themselves as incapable of governing, and at the right moment, start making a coordinated, consistent argument about the need to protect Medicare, Medicaid, worker benefits and middle class pocketbooks. Let the Republicans crumble, let the American people see it, and wait until they need us to offer our support.
Okay never mind, he’s just applying the same “do nothing” braindead strategy to everything, and there is one very time-sensitive and straightforward instance where it could work. Cuts to Medicaid and taxes and food stamps, etc…will be felt when they occur, but assuming that people will immediately say “this is Trump’s fault” and not “Trump is still cleaning up Biden’s mess” is peak Democrat brain. Some folks can find ways to make ends meet in the meantime, and we don’t know how long the suffering would truly take to push Trump’s support into the 30s (save for the second-half of 2017 that dipped into the 30s, Trump spent most of his first term with approval ratings in the 40s). Maybe people don’t start to associate their deteriorating circumstances with Trump until after the 2026 midterms. Maybe because there’s only one messaging fight on the battlefield until some undetermined moment in the future, they never do at all, and Trump convinces them that their pain is the fault of immigrants, transgender people, and other vulnerable people the Democrats are too cowardly to defend in their “strategic retreat.”
There is a nonstop messaging fight the Democrats must undertake if they are going to reap the benefits of Trump’s incompetence. You cannot assume that his and Musk’s destruction will lead voters to the Democrats’ preferred logic. This is the kind of mistake the party makes more than any other. Bidenomics largely worked, but the election proved that people predominantly associated it with inflation because Biden failed to try to define the term until it was too late, while the GOP and the press hammered home how bad his economy supposedly was. You would think that Democrats understood the media will not do their messaging for them by now, but that could only happen in a party that is not intellectually stunted and incapable of learning from its mistakes.
Democrats live in the mainstream media, which is their biggest problem in terms of just relating to everyday America, as every piece of data you look at reveals that broad majorities of non-Democratic liberals widely distrust the mainstream media. Only consuming cable news and the big papers is to dedicate yourself to living in a bubble bereft of most of America. Part of the reason why the New York Times is like this is because they are playing to their elite liberal base that reveres people like James Carville, who convinced them thirty years ago that he was a genius by winning two elections without a majority behind one of the most popular Democratic candidates of the modern era by simply saying “it’s the economy, stupid.”
You know that cowardice is a belief system more than an analytical framework because Carville repeats the lie that other fundamentally unserious Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries are pushing, which is that curling up in the fetal position and saying, ‘hey America we’re here too!’ every time something breaks is “a wiser approach than we pursued in the first Trump Administration, when Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics.”
This is objectively not true. It’s a bald-faced lie that the Democratic elite are propagating, no different from the GOP’s cats and dogs line that was equally detached from reality. Democrats won the third-largest change of seats in the House in the post-Watergate era in 2018, and their raw vote margin was the largest in the history of midterm elections. By any definition, 2018 was a wave election. Democrats also won the 2020 election, if you might recall, and they even held on to the Senate when no one expected them to. Nearly every incumbent president ever gets smacked in their first midterm elections, but in 2022, the Democrats enjoyed one of the four greatest performances for an incumbent party in the last century. Biden even became the first president since 1934 to see his party gain governorships in its first midterm. Democrats fundamentally changed the dynamic around special elections to inherently favor them, even winning a +21 Trump district less than a month ago. What exactly about this era was a failure, save for the elite-backed megalomaniacal and genocidal president who destroyed any chance his party had to win in 2024?
The fact that elite Democrats like Carville are pushing the line that they failed in their opposition to Trump from 2017 onward is proof that they are either equally detached from reality as the GOP (which would scientifically make sense given their brain-breaking cable news diet), or they view winning elections as a failure. It’s very difficult to tell which one is Occam’s razor at this point.
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