Party vs. Party Elders

Republicans want to make your life worse; Democrats want to make it better. This has been largely true since 1980, when Ronald Reagan and his friends took the Republican Party sharply to the right and want to keep going until it's just billionaires and peasants in the US.

The Democratic Party is a huge amalgam of constituencies that account for the majority of voters in the majority of states. Almost to a person, we think the OAFPOTUS and his droogs are horrible people who should never hold positions of power or responsibility because of how they've acted so far. But our geriatric Party leadership just can't seem to get their heads out of their asses.

Brian Beutler explained the problem this morning:

Imagine the biggest donor to the Democratic Party ran a website—a media platform, really—where users could send pictures of real-life women and girls to an artificial intelligence chatbot, and the A.I. would spit the pictures back out for them, with the women and girls stripped of their clothing. What would happen when this “feature” came online, and flooded the internet with sexual exploitation of innocents?

Would Republicans shrug? Would they insist on investigating the owner or his company, criminally, for generating child sexual-abuse material? Would they demand Democrats return his donations? Would they hound the media to cover the story, and accuse journalists who ignored it of bias?

This question stops being hypothetical when you swap the parties around. The website is X. The owner of the website is Elon Musk. He spends hundreds of millions of dollars trying to elect Republicans. His artificial intelligence software, Grok, has recently flooded X with this kind of material.

And the answer to the question—what happened?—is: basically nothing, so far.

The disparity here is indicative of a larger tendency: Republicans act, while Democrats react.

For instance: Tim Walz reacted to the Republican slander of the Minnesota Somali community by retiring from politics.

In pressing the Epstein Files matter in defiance of skeptical colleagues, Ro Khanna showed that Democrats can force Republicans into defensive crouches, too.

A small change in approach along these lines would help Democrats out of their doldrums. Tens of millions of Americans understand that their way of life is under threat from the country’s most morally repulsive individuals. But when they look up to see if their representatives are rising to protect them, there’s no cavalry. Sometimes there’s no one at all.

Yes. We need our side to act, not to sit around commissioning policy papers on the pros and cons of campaigning on issues like unprecedented corruption and a President whose frontal lobe has disintegrated into a mushy collection of barely-functioning neurons.

So imagine my eye-roll this morning when I heard that my Representative, Mike Quigley (D-IL 5th), became the first to throw his name onto the ballot for the 2027 mayoral election. Now, Quigley votes the way I want him to vote, so I have in turn voted to keep him in Congress each time his name has come up. But he's one of those old Chicago pols, an old-style, old-guard former county commissioner who did his time filling potholes and expects higher office as a reward for not making waves. (The absolute monarch of this approach was the late Roland Burris, who found his way into the US Senate by kissing exactly and precisely the right asses at the right times.)

We don't need Quigley on the 5th Floor any more than we need the continued presence of Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in the leader's office. We need people who are ready to fight. Let's show the Republican Party we're tired of their enshittification and we're going to spend the next ten years making the US and the world better, whether they like it or not.