IS This is the way the Democratic Party ends – not with a blow, but with a groan? Last week, the party’s caucus seemed to be ready to do something that they had never done before: blocking the continuous resolution proposed by the Trump administration and closing the government. This would have been a largely symbolic decision, which reported an opposition to the usurpation of the Trump administration of the Congress expenditure authority and a desire to play procedural hardball in order to slow down the radical anti-government program of Elon Musk. This would also have reported a party willing to take itself seriously as an opposition to a president with authoritarian ambitions.
Government closings are unpopular, but therefore, at the moment, is the Democratic Party: several senators from Swing States seemed ready to remove their neck, ready to bet that it would be better to be seen doing something – anything – to oppose the Trump’s agenda to return again. And for a few days, at least, he looked like Chuck Schumer, the leader of the minority, Save them.
Then he didn’t do it. Schumer suddenly reversed the course on continuous resolution, promising both to allow the government’s financing bill to come to the Senate and to vote for that itself. The bill has been adopted.
For many, the moment was emblematic of the singular reluctance of democratic leadership to oppose Donald TrumpAnd their bizarre belief that the Republican Party – that the Cabale of more and more fascist politicians who spent the last decade calling their opposition pedophiles, attacking the rule of law and eroding democratic autonomy – can be reasoned, cajolé and brought back to their senses. Weak, ineffective, unloaded by consciousness or the principle, little willing to take its side in an argument, and preferring to lose with dignity that to gain the risk of offending anyone: in the budget combat, Schumer embodied all the worst pulses of his party, those which allowed Donald Trump to take control of American policy and to transform our constitutional order to marry.
In many ways, Schumer reads a 30 -year game book, the one who brought Bill Clinton to power in 1992. Clinton, a moderate, followed on the right, moved away from his party on social issues, of compromise appreciated and presented itself as difficult for crime. This formula worked once, and the conventional wisdom of the Democratic Party demanded that the party will come back there again, again and again, despite modified circumstances and decreasing yields – like the pet dog which continues to lick a greasy place on the sofa where it found a piece of fallen cheese. Times have changed since 1992; People who were infants that year that Clinton’s centrism has swept power are only adults, but also adults with back pain. There was a moment in the 2024 campaign, after the selection of Tim Walz as a skateboarder of Kamala Harris, when it seemed that the party could finally abandon this old strategy and undertake a more aggressive and affirmative tactic; Instead, Walz has been stifled, and party leaders are now merge the result of their right strategy as a product of failure to adhere to it faithfully. Politics has changed, but the Democrats do not have it: they are old and disconnected, not only in their gerontocratic leadership, but in their vision of the world. In the New York Times Last month, James Carville, a 1992 Clinton campaign veteran, advised his party to “ride and play and death”. But if the Democrats were really dead, could anyone make the difference?
But a democrat seems to show refreshing signs of life. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York’s progressive young Democrat, had seemed in recent years wishing to show her desire to cooperate with Democratic leadership, acting as a key vote and a public messenger on crucial issues. But his patience with his party seems to have exhausted. In a CNN interviewShe described Schumer’s capitulation to prevail over an “enormous error” and a “huge slap opposite” to democratic voters – and to a large federal workers’ union, who had approved a closure. “There is a huge feeling of betrayal” among the voters, she told journalists during the reluctance of traditional democrats to fight.
The dominant current of the Democratic Party has long accused progressives – like Ocasio -Cortez and its mentor, Bernie Sanders – a kind of moral vanity, a desire to sacrifice effective governance or political gains for the good of personal purity. The shoe is now on the other foot: it is the leadership Democrat -public – Schumer and its allies – which now promote the decorum in relation to the public interest, personal dignity on the principle, a vain for a return to the policy of the past on their responsibility to engage with the realities of the present. He’s the centrist DemocratsNot the progressives, who live in an illusion, and who sell the country to maintain it.
Schumer may have been a better man for work in another era. “Schumer had once a salted and external bite that worked to counter Trump”, the writer Sam Adler-Bell wrote in New York magazine, “but mine today is tired and distracted.” Now he seems tired, his red glasses sliding along his nose, his exhausted effect. No wonder he doesn’t want to fight Donald Trump – he doesn’t have a lot of fight in him at all. After his public break with Schumer, some have hypothesized that Ecasio Cortez could challenge him in primary for his seat in the Senate. She should. Schumer appeared at his re -election in 2028, when he will be almost 78 years old; Ocasio-Cortez will be 39 years old. Would that even be a fair fight?