Democrats need better leadership

Drawing the right lessons from the shutdown fiasco

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The Democratic Party is in meltdown following Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision last Friday to enable a government funding bill to pass. I covered this last week, but the basics are that progressives and much of the party’s base wanted to refuse to fund the government in order to punish the Trump administration for Elon Musk’s antics, whereas Schumer argued (and I broadly agree) that a shutdown would actually have made it much easier for DOGE to destroy the federal bureaucracy.

The tactical debate over Schumer’s decision is certainly important. If the progressives and the base are right, then the party missed an important opportunity to impose costs on Trump as he edges ever closer to igniting a full-blown constitutional crisis.

Conversely, if Schumer and the cynical middle-aged commentators like myself are right, then letting a shutdown go ahead could have dramatically hastened the destruction and MAGA-ification of the federal government.

All of these things are important. But like a lot of things in politics, what this appears to be about is to a large extent not what it is really about. Instead, it’s about the powerlessness of the Democratic Party’s current position, the urgent need for generational change within it, and the untested nature of its current leaders.

Being in the minority sucks

Let’s start at the beginning: being in the minority party is not fun. You have to sit and watch as your opponents use the power of the presidency to shred your policies. You lose control of the oversight machinery in Congress, making it impossible to hold the executive to account. If you’re really unlucky, the majority party even manage to get major legislation through the perennially gridlocked Congress, reshaping some major area of national life.

When I say this is “not fun”, I’m not suggesting I’m concerned about whether Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries are having a great day or not. I’m saying that when you’re in the position that they and the rest of the party are in, you are under enormous emotional strain. You’re dealing with anger, frustration, and a sense of powerlessness. That applies to the base as much as to the politicians. And it inevitably has an impact on how you do politics and the balance of power within your party. Witness the Tea Party surge of 2008 - 10, which came at the GOP’s lowest point in decades, and which was in many ways the beginning of Trump’s rise.

What happened last week was a particularly exquisite example of that anger, frustration, and powerlessness. Once Republicans managed to get their shit together and pass a funding bill - which Schumer and co. didn’t expect them to be able to do - the Democrats were, as someone in the White House put it, “totally screwed”. Pass the bill and they missed an opportunity to punish Trump, enraging their base. Refuse to pass it and they created a crisis in which Trump’s destruction of the government could accelerate.

On one level, the intensity of the debate which ensued was just a function of the party’s lack of power to produce a good outcome. It’s hard to admit that the opposing party has done a number on you - particularly when that party is Mike Johnson’s House Republicans, a byword for incompetence - and that there’s nothing you can really do about it. It’s hard to admit that you currently have almost zero levers to influence the situation. It’s much easier, in fact, to turn on each other.

Democrats need generational change

That said, the intra-party dispute which has exploded in the aftermath of last week’s events is raising some important points. Democrats need to talk about generational change and how to reconnect with new audiences. And if you look at the substance of the critiques that are being posed by progressives and younger Democrats since last week, this is what they’re actually talking about:

Younger Democrats are chafing at and increasingly complaining about what they see as the feebleness of the old guard’s efforts to push back against President Trump. They are second-guessing how the party’s leaders — like Mr. Schumer, who brandishes his flip phone as a point of pride — are communicating their message in the TikTok era, as Republicans dominate the digital town square.

And they are demanding that the party develop a bolder policy agenda that can answer the desperation of tens of millions of people who are struggling financially at a time when belief in the American dream is dimming.

[…]

That urgency is also driving younger Democrats to try to usher their elders out of the way. Some older House Democrats have already been pushed out of key congressional posts. Younger primary challengers are laying the groundwork to try to oust more senior lawmakers from office entirely, with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 84, among those targeted.

And in private, 30- and 40-something lawmakers commiserate about having to decipher the mysteries of the internet for their older colleagues; one said she recently had to explain to another House member what a podcast was.

I really do think these are important points. American politics is a gerontocracy, and the Democratic Party is particularly afflicted by too many older members who ought to make way for new blood. MAGA has managed to take over a lot of the ecosystems of new media. Democrats need to talk about how to turn this around.

Great points as these are, I’m really not sure what they have to do with what happened last week.

You can definitely imagine a world in which Chuck Schumer had stepped down from his Senate seat a few years ago, New York Governor Kathy Hochul had appointed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to replace him, and her new podcast was going gangbusters with the under-30 crowd. You can imagine a world in which she was just one of many new progressive influencers reconquering social media from MAGA and inspiring a new generation of young progressives to run for office. You can even imagine a world in which Democratic officeholders are leading high-turnout protests up and down the country against Trump’s increasingly lawless administration

That’s a world I’d be pretty happy to live in. But substantively, it’s not one in which the dilemma facing the Senate Minority Leader last Friday would have been any different. He would still have faced a choice between funding the government and enraging the base or not funding the government and making it easier for Trump and Musk to take away people’s welfare and fire federal employees.

I think one of the problems here is a lack of appreciation for the different roles that exist within political movements. You need to control institutions in order to win at politics, so almost by definition you need institutionalists. You need people who are comfortable making compromises and doing boring stuff. But you also need to energize and mobilize people, and the institutionalists tend to be bad at that because they’re busy making compromises and doing boring stuff. So for that you need activists.

Ideally, you want these two tendencies to co-exist. There will be tension between them, but they ought to operate within certain limits. Instead, what we’re seeing right now is essentially a battle of institutionalists versus activists. But that is ultimately self-defeating - because, to repeat, you need both to win. What the Democrats really need are leaders who can synthesize both necessities and build a solid movement. And for that, they need better leaders.

Democrats really need some better leaders

For me, one strange result of the Democrats’ defeat in 2024 was that some writers decided that this was proof that the Democrats Have Always Been Terrible, or at least have always been terrible since the Trump era begin in 2016. And I’ll grant you that 2024 was not a banner year for the Democratic Party - they lost to Trump, and hence allowed an extinction-level threat to American democracy to come into being.

A huge amount of the blame for that defeat can be placed at the door of Joe Biden, but it was also caused by a level of inflation which swept the whole globe and which the American people had not experienced in decades. That experience is not likely to be repeated in 2028, and if it is, it will have been caused by Trump.

Given the unusual circumstances of last year’s election, it seems to me quite short-sighted to decry 2024 so much that we forget that the party knocked every other election from 2018 to 2022 out of the park. It had a “blue wave” midterm in 2018, won the presidency convincingly in 2020, and had a historically good midterm in 2022. None of that happened by accident. It happened because the activists and the institutionalists managed to work together in a way that complemented each other. And they did that because they had good leadership.

If you think back to the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election, this was a time when Nancy Pelosi was exercising her iron-like grip on the party. Pelosi wasn’t perfect, but she did do one thing, which was absolutely make sure that the party didn’t fall into the sort of petty infighting that we’re seeing right now. She managed to become a focal point of activist energy and a competent steward of institutions.

Pelosi understood that to beat Trump meant winning back the institutions, and to win back the institutions meant energizing the activists. She could also be condescending and arrogant, as institutionalists often are. In those cases, she benefited from the fact that her activist critics - AOC and the rest of the Squad foremost among them - also showed admirable self-restraint and kept in their lane, never seeking to blow too wide of a rift in the party.

Rather than throwing out their whole playbook, Democrats basically just need to repeat this performance of institutionalist-activist fusion from 2016 - 2020.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. But what we can say for sure is that what we are witnessing among Congressional Democrats right now is the opposite of what they need to do. Schumer and Jeffries have not only allowed a division to open up between the institutionalists and the activists - and, even worse, allowed each of them to become identified with just one of these camps - they’ve also made some pretty grave tactical mistakes.

Schumer, who seems to have been so convinced that the GOP wouldn’t be able to pass a budget that he failed to think about what would happen if they did, clearly lacks the tactical genius that made Pelosi such a titan. For his part, Jeffries clearly lacks either the inclination or the ability to tell the base that they need to eat crow when they need to eat crow, which was one of Pelosi’s superpowers. Between them, they’ve taken what should have been a painful but survivable situation and turned it into a rift that, if they’re not careful, will destroy the party’s ability to work together and resist Trump going forward.

This is a time for Democrats, guided by their leaders, to step back and figure out how to get back on track. Schumer and Jeffries deserve another chance to do it. The midterms are nearly two years away, and they can still make this a forgotten footnote if they solve the problem quickly. But solve it they must, or they’re going to have to go. Because in politics, nothing is as corrosive as chaos, and nothing is punished like division.

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