No. of Recommendations: 6
It makes things worse if you fight in the wrong spots. To take a recent example, progressives thought that Al Green's protest and the various little signs and protest stickers at the Joint Session were a worthwhile "fight" to bring to Trump. I'm sure they were correct in assessing that their "Dem constituency" preferred those performative objections to normalizing Trump by sitting there (and maybe cheering the kid with cancer). But that "fight" didn't actually do anything. It wasn't a fight. It didn't affect Trump at all. It didn't make the Democrats look firm or strong (I didn't see anyone on the Democratic side think that was a successful outcome). It didn't energize the Dem constituency, because it failed.
So if Schumer had voted down the CR, it wouldn't have been fighting - it would have just been failure. The government would shut down for 5-31 days or so, the GOP would not bargain, and the Democrats would eventually just have to approve the same CR anyway. Mostly because no one ever can use a shutdown as leverage. It never works. It didn't work for Gingrich, it didn't work when Cruz wanted to lever the shutdown into defunding Obamacare, it didn't work for the GOP trying to get border wall funding. Voters don't like it when the government shuts down, they don't want anyone trying to use it to gain leverage on policy matters.
If I read you correctly then, you think there is nothing that can be done for the next two years (at least) to change the trajectory, or at least ameliorate the worst excesses of what is happening?
I disagree. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I would think some “performance” could be used to energize the democratic base (in preparation for the future), to point out the rabid hypocrisy of what the Republicans are doing (“We’re the party of ‘get the government out of your lives <cough> abortion, school curricula, etc </cough>.
I agree that the feckless and occasional shouts or silly signs at the Trump speech were a failure, but that is a failure of imagination and of political will. It’s either that or we are doomed. I hope it’s not the latter, because that will leave me depressed for another 22 months, minimum.
