If this is opposition, what would surrender look like?

In a long line of inept, morally-compromised Democratic leaders, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are peerless

Chuck Schumer with Donald Trump in September 2017. Photo credit: Alex Wong

Since the Trump era began, there has been a glaring contradiction at the heart of the rhetoric deployed against him by mainstream Democrats.

Trumpism, or so we have relentlessly been told by the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Kamala Harris, is something uniquely sinister and authoritarian: a dictatorship-in-waiting against which every democrat and patriotic American must unite to oppose. At the same time, the institutional norms and traditional etiquette of American politics — bipartisanship, elite brokerage, legislative compromise, and so on — are to be upheld no matter the situation. The result, as I argued in a 2020 essay for The Atlantic, has been a perpetually limp and feckless kind of opposition in which the very people casting Trump as an existential threat to democracy do not behave like they actually believe it. From the essay:

Since the president’s election four years ago, the political and intellectual leaders of America’s supposedly reform-minded opposition have issued warnings about the existential threat that Trump poses to democracy. Amid it all, senior Democrats have mostly maintained both the regular operation of government and a standard of congressional etiquette that connotes normalcy more than it does any state of exception: applauding the president’s speeches, approving his military budgets, awarding him new domestic spying powers, and even fast-tracking his judicial nominees. A line from one 2019 CNBC report detailing the overwhelming House approval of Trump’s marquee NAFTA renegotiation sums up the absurdity of this posture: “Democrats also wanted to show they can work with Trump only a day after they voted to make him the third president impeached in American history.” Determined opposition to Trump has sometimes been so nonexistent that Democratic partisans have had to invent it, as when an image of Pelosi during the 2019 State of the Union address went viral on the entirely spurious grounds that the speaker had intended for her clapping to look sarcastic.

Early in the first Trump administration, plenty of rank-and-file Democrats actually seemed to be in accord with this approach. One September 2017 poll, for example, found “a broad 74% majority of Democrats and Democratic leaners saying their party should work with Republicans in an attempt to advance their own priorities” with “just 23% advocating for a more combative approach.” I’d wager this changed somewhat in the lead up to 2020. But, regardless, it can safely be said that the situation is very different now. As CNN reported last March, Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents now want their leaders — by a margin of 57% to 42% — to “work [mainly] to stop the Republican agenda, rather than working with the GOP majority to get some Democratic ideas into legislation.”

What hasn’t changed is the rhetoric of Democratic leaders themselves. If anything, the dynamic duo of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries has only doubled down on the kind of faux-opposition strategy I’ve just described. Speaking recently on MSNBC, for example, the former had this to say about Trump’s threat to deploy troops in Portland: “I’d hope some of them [Republicans] would join us in legislation to prevent it from happening.”

Neither Schumer nor Jeffries, incidentally, has endorsed the duly-elected Democratic nominee in the New York mayoral race, though the latter recently offered kind words for the criminally-indicted Eric Adams on his way out the door.

Whatever one chooses to call this political style, it has nothing to do with opposition and still less to do with “defending democracy.” In a long line of inept, morally-compromised Democratic leaders, Schumer and Jeffries are among the weakest the party has yet produced. That both remain in their positions at all is itself a searing indictment of America’s would-be progressive alternative. It’s also testament to just how removed and insulated elite structures really are from public opinion. Neither figure is personally popular, and Schumer recently hit a 20 year low in his popularity with New Yorkers. Together, facing off against a president who has never been particularly popular, they have somehow led the Democratic Party to a 68 percent disapproval rate — its worst ever showing in a Quinnipiac poll.

In a functioning democracy, let alone a political party with even basic respect for the values its own leaders claim to be defending, this might matter. Instead, leading figures in the Democratic tent muse about retrenching on abortion rights, further gutting environmental regulations, and rebuilding their alliance with the barons of big tech and Silicon Valley.

If this is opposition, what would surrender look like?