These Overcautious Democrats
Democrat dithering equals a tap out in the la nouvelle bloodsport politique ...
One argument goes that Trump is not unlike the fabled scorpion that stung the frog midstream. It is in his nature to self-destruct. He is, in fine, a simple, predictable beast. A triumph of the Freudian Id. And like the Id, Trump represents the “untamed, instinctual and unfiltered portion of the human mind,” in the words of Counterpunch’s Glenn Alcalay. Just leave him to his own devices, the argument continues. He will self-destruct — possibly from inflation; possibly from backlash from his tax cuts to his billionaire chums— and in that dreadful aftermath, the midterms, we will pick up the pieces and move forward, briskly, towards a more equitable future. And then Trump will recede into the background and proceed to be a lame duck President, presumably eating well-done burgers slathered with catsup while accumulating money in Russia and the Middle East. The things that he truly cares about, after all. For History, we are told by the pundits, is a cold shower to a sitting President during the midterms.
In that saccharine scenario, the always-prepared Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer would reclaim Majority Leadership of that august body. Followed by Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker of the House, ushering in a Democrat Majority, hopefully by more than a handful of votes. That will be the ray of light that will sustain us through the last, difficult two years of Trump’s lame duck Presidency and his dying-last-gasp EOs, even as Vance and the Republican players move to anoint their next King.
Charmed, I’m sure.
But we cannot fail to note that both Schumer and Jeffries — native New Yorkers, like Trump — who would presume to positions of national leadership next year, yet fail, rather mightily, in calling for the removal of Mayor Eric “Turkish Delight” Adams from office. This is, to me, a political Rorschach test in real time. Borborygmous are the corruptions of Adams, and his popularity rating in the city is essentially on par with My Chemical Romance. (Averted Gaze)
According to AP VoteCast, two-thirds of New York City voters in November’s election said at that time that they would be okay with the Governor removing Adams. However, Governor Kathy “Hamlet on the Hudson” Hochul shares the over caution of Schumer and Jeffries. It is a sentiment the Democrats share with the Dark Dane. Annie McDonough writes in City and State:
Now Adams faces new calls to resign while Gov. Kathy Hochul faces escalated calls to remove Adams from office – a power she has under both state and city law. Hochul hasn’t ruled out using her power to unilaterally remove the mayor from office, but it would be a monumental and unprecedented step. It carries procedural and legal questions, as well as political repercussions, like making lefty Public Advocate Jumaane Williams acting mayor and potentially giving more runway to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to run.
The developments in the story are fast-moving and not, as Adams suggests, behind us. But as of the time of writing, three key players have not yet publicly called for Hochul to take that drastic step. The Rev. Al Sharpton and Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Greg Meeks – three Black political leaders with ties to Adams’ base of support – are part of a “permission structure” from which Hochul would likely seek approval, several political observers have said.
To Be or not to Be. Therein lies the problem. Despite the fact that two-thirds of New Yorkers in November wanted Adams out the Governor, Senior Senator and Congressional delegation leader cannot seem to show political leadership. In a blue state! Instead, we get: calculating, triangulating, even quadrialeralism — In fine: Overcaution. Always, Overcaution. Just as Shamelessness is the central psychological characteristic of Trump, Overcaution is at present the chief psychological characteristic of the Democrats.
On the other side — the comparative blinding speed of the gut-instinct. It is no accident that Trump’s first post-Presidential victory lap was at a UFC event, and that he became the first President to ever attend a Superbowl. Previous Presidents feared getting booed on camera, in front of the roaring crowds, so they never took the risk. Trump does not and did not and, in that projection of strength, gets the rewards of that irregular, sports-obsessed subset of voters (which is quite large). To paraphrase Niccolo Machiavelli: “Fortune favors the bold.” The New Media Elite — of which Joe Rogan is a part — veered Trump, but that doesn’t have to be a permanent condition. As I wrote on the subject of the Death of mainstream media last month:
But consider the finger-wagging of the former class presidents, valedictorians and salutatorians at CNN and the Washington Post, decrying the now-President’s lawlessness(!). Think of all the hundreds of hours MSNBC and old liberal media organizations spent explaining in prime-time on the various (and quite righteous) investigations into Trump that came ultimately, entirely to naught! And in the evaporation of those charges — charges like his strange relationship with Putin; the top secret documents case; the Georgia election heist; January 6th — the network’s credibility fell and Trump’s outsider-ish projection of manly, raw survivalist instincts rose in the hearts and minds of persuadable and irregular voters. Such are the perils of moving at frontal cortex speed in an amygdala-influenced, testosteronal mirror-universe where only the rapid detection and elimination of threat is rewarded in the final arena. In the 2024 election, MAGA was (and still is) moving at the primordial speed of the lizard-brain, the part controlling our core impulses, like fight-or-flight and sex.
It is perhaps the nature of the beast. And everything this blogger wrote on the archaic bust of dying legacy media could just as easily be said about Schumer, Hochul and Jeffries. They come from leadership factories, deliberate fanatically, yet lead in slow motion, propelled by events rather than embracing hearty risk-taking in their way of being. They are in it for the long haul, more fearful of the political error that can unmoor them from their upwards trajectory than blazing a new path forward in the battle against MAGA. It is not so much leading from behind as leading from behind the times. They look effete and weak, even as they dare to aspire to political leadership. If Republican Governors and legislators have caved to Trump in fear of losing relevance and, of course, proximity to power (for further reference, see: Lindsay Graham), then Democrats have fallen victim to an Hamletian indecisiveness. Which is not to say that both are equal states of being at all. Quite the contrary. Its just that in a knife fight, as is our politics now, the hand of the moral coward is far more deadly than that of the intellectually paralyzed.
What is to be done? The Establishment — as it has for time immemorial — seeks to have us tack to the center. Or, in the words of Princeton’s Julian E. Zelizer, proceed to the center with caution. In his very cautious argument in Foreign Policy, Zelizer looks back at the Clinton Presidency and its relation to that now-forgotten entity known as the aggressively centrist Democratic Leadership Caucus (Anyone remember Al From? Or, for that matter, Al Gore?). “After all,” Zelizer writes, “the DLC helped Democrats win the White House in 1992 and 1996.” It did, to be sure, until, of course, it didn’t. NAFTA, which went into effect in 1994, was a defining moment in American politics, reverberating through Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the so-called “blue wall” states to Biden’s green industrial policy. We are still dealing with the aftermath of NAFTA. Zelizer writes:
As tempting as this historical model might be, Democrats will do well to understand the costs that were also a result of the strategy—costs that Democrats are still paying today in painful ways. One of the signature decisions in the first year of Clinton’s presidency was to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The agreement, which opened the flow of commerce between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, had been worked on by Bush before the end of his term. Clinton, who saw NAFTA as a way to brandish his New Democrat bonafides, stressed that free trade was an inevitable reality and that it would lift all boats.
Not everyone agreed. During the 1996 presidential campaign, third-party candidate Ross Perot, who received over 19 million votes, said the “giant sucking sound” U.S. workers heard was well-paying jobs being moved abroad. Many liberals and progressives joined Perot in his critique as Congress considered what to do. In 1993, Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders, an independent, said, “NAFTA may be a good deal for the people who own our corporations, but it is a bad deal for American workers, for our family farmers, and it is bad for the environment.” Gephardt, who was also House majority leader at the time, led a campaign against the bill, as did Michigan Rep. David Bonior, House majority whip.
Zelizer’s piece is a classically overcautious article. It draws no conclusions from the lessons of NAFTA other than to proceed cautiously — always, cautiously — towards the time-trusted querencia of Establishmentarian centrism. But the low key vindication of Bernie Sanders, Ross Perot, David Bonoir and Dick Gephardt is not insignificant here. Most of those names have been lost to the recesses of recent American political history (United States of Amnesia, remember?) But the age of centrist, Establishmentarian overcaution— perhaps highlighted best by the tragic overdeliberation of the Harris campaign — is in as critical shape as is legacy media at present. Trump broke the wheel. Chuck Schumer has yet to get the memo.
It is only fitting that the opening salvo of the only President ever to have courted the vote of bloodsports is psychological in nature. It is a cerebral assassination taking place in real time and overcautious Democrats, still in mourning from Election night, find themselves in the firing line of muzzle warfare. Like Hamlet, we have over mourned. “As President Trump begins his second term,” Luke Broadwater wrote for the Times, “he has enacted his agenda at breakneck speed as part of an intentional plan to knock his opponents off balance and dilute their response.” A UFC attack strategy of speed and mass against, to be sure, a distracted opponent to gain a fast victory is now underway. Democrat dithering at this point equals a tap out in the la nouvelle bloodsport politique. Curiously, among those frenzied Presidential volleys last month was a proposal to wrest strategic Greenland away from — of all places — Denmark. Thus far, the Danes have resisted Trump’s priapic pan passions. Can we say the same of the Hamletian Democrat Party?
It is time to get our head in the game. Throw off the funeral blacks of November’s loss. “To be or not to be,” was for the closing months of 2025. It is not too late to course correct. If the Democrat Party has wandered into the woods of a moody elitism — at least perception-wise, if not in truth — it is time to communicate effectively our relevance to the working class. And, in particular, working class men. Contrast our solutions to those of trump and his cultivated billionaire friends. A good example of a paragon (at least for now) is Kier Starmer, who seems to have brought the UK out of this global right-wing mind virus right-wise. Every other sentence of his mouth mentions the working class. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer should take note of this single-minded focus on how to make life better for those that play by the rules, are getting shafted and are the majority. Or, better yet, Jeffries and Schumer get out of the way altogether for someone more attuned, being-wise, to the breakneck speed of today’s attention economy. Like Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, who echoes the voices of Bernie Sanders, Ross Perot, David Bonoir and Dick Gephardt, but in a cadence that vibes right.
My message to the Democrat Establishment: Lead, or — respectfully — get the fuck out of the way.
“Rwanda is seen as a model of development across Africa. A country nearly 90 times smaller than Congo, it sponsors top European soccer teams and is known for its high-end resorts, where affluent tourists stay during expeditions to marvel at gorillas. Being here can give an impression of political stability and affluence, but many say beneath that veneer lies widespread surveillance, repression and unequal development. Congo, despite its dizzying natural resources, remains plagued by instability. Its eastern region is home to one of the world’s largest displacement crises, dating back to the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide 30 years ago. ‘The living standards are so different,’ said Théoneste Bitangimana, a Rwandan real estate agent and pastor who lives in Gisenyi and works on both sides of the border. ‘In Congo the rich get richer and the government doesn’t care. In Rwanda we’re constantly trying to improve the way we live.’ The Congolese have a different way of describing the wealth gap between the two nations: exploitation.” (Elian Peltier/NYT)
“Three years ago, Russian forces moved across the Ukrainian northern, eastern and southern frontiers, as well as in a coordinated series of missile and air assault actions, in the hope of a short, ten-day lightning war. The ultimate objective was that the Ukrainian government would fall, to be replaced by a Russian puppet government that would keep NATO out and Russia in. In On War, Carl von Clausewitz describes how ‘the political object, as the original motive of the War, will be the standard for determining both the aim of the military force and also the amount of effort to be made’. Ukraine, facing an existential crisis, has leveraged all its national resources to achieve the supreme political goal of retaining Ukrainian sovereignty. Russia, which has invented this crisis and constructed a make-believe tale about NATO encroachment and Nazi leadership in Ukraine, faced no existential challenge. And yet, Putin has manufactured a political environment where there is no Russian national life, in the economy, in schools or in the media, without total commitment to winning the war. Writing in the early days of the war, I described how no responsible military or political institution will be able to ignore the lessons that will emerge from Ukraine. Very few people anticipated the profound impacts this war would have on European and global political and security affairs. The insights from this conflict about the changing character of war extend from the technological to the industrial, the tactical to the political.” (Mick Ryan)