A Betrayal

Senate Democrats didn't just squander an opportunity to rein in Donald Trump and Elon Musk. They confirmed all the stereotypes that have made them toxic to progressives and swing voters alike.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The comedian Bill Burr appeared on the NPR show Fresh Air this week and—how else to say this?—he became the change I want to see in the world.

Burr delivered an extended rant in the familiar vein of us vs. them class politics, but where the “them” aren’t rich people per se, but specifically people with immense fame, clout, and influence, who use their online notoriety to exploit “us.”

When host Terry Gross asked him who he had in mind, he said “Elon Musk,” and then exploded:

That guy, who evidently is a Nazi? Like I just refuse to believe that it was an accidental two times Sieg Heil. And he does it at a presidential inauguration. This is why I hate liberals," Burr said. "It's like liberals have no teeth whatsoever. They just go, ‘Oh, my god. Can you believe? I'm getting out of the country.’ You're going to leave the country 'cause of one guy with dyed hair plugs and a laminated face who runs—who makes a bad car and has an obsolete social-media platform? You're gonna leave this? Why doesn't he leave? Why isn't he stopped? What are we so afraid of this guy who can't fight his way out of a wet paper bag? Why do liberals just sit back and—they, just, they have nothing.

When Gross followed up to ask Burr what he was doing about all these bad things that liberals refuse to stand up against, he didn’t skip a beat: “THIS!”

“You gotta speak up about it,” Burr said. “You don’t just go, like ‘Oh my god, what? Ugh!’ First of all, it’s like I’m a standup comedian. It’s not my frickin’ job. I’m talking about Democratic politicians. Where is their pushback.”

In an instant, Burr reached a huge audience with a critique I’ve been mounting for years on a much smaller stage. We take for granted that Donald Trump, Musk, Congressional Republicans, and neo-Nazis are the bad guys. But we express our disdain for them through criticism of elite liberals and Democrats, because, as often as they squander their power and influence, they might at least listen.

Democrats have been agonizing since the election, and even before, over how to communicate in the new media, and how to reach young people—men in particular. And here, in the words and very existence of Bill Burr, is both an answer to the question and a diagnosis of why the current approach has failed. “They have nothing.”

On Thursday night, Senate Democrats proved Burr’s point. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that he will provide the deciding vote to give Musk and Trump a blank check. Fund the government without any mechanism to make the Trump administration follow the law, plus a bunch of extra right-wing goodies thrown in for good measure. Most Senate Democrats will oppose that bill, but they will also go along with the ruse that they were simply outnumbered. That the fix wasn’t in. That there’s no reason to throw out the leaders who hung them out to dry.

They were not guaranteed to win, but they did choose not to fight.

The way Democrats do things, the way they respond to threat and provocation, has made them a laughing stock across every frontier of what you might call critical culture or subversive culture. We sometimes shorthand this as the “manosphere” or “podcasts,” but it isn’t just men, and it isn’t just podcasts. It’s male comedians, but also female comedians. It’s progressives, but also swing voters. Everyone who trades on or enjoys a healthy dose of iconoclasm can see it. It’s only keepers of some imagined populism of rectitude who treat Dems like master practitioners, and save all their enmity and contempt for the GOP.

But you can’t grow if iconoclasts have you pegged as offering nothing, and we can’t stop Republicans if Democrats aren’t willing to do something.

So step one for these Democrats: Go find Bill Burr and sit down with him for an hour. Make your case or confess your sins to him. Gavin Newsom has launched a whole podcast apparently for the purposes of increasing the profile of, and finding reasons to agree with, some of the most dishonest people in right-wing politics. He and other prominent Democrats would reach way more persuadable people engaging with good faith critics. Not me, necessarily (though I’m easy to find) but specifically mad-as-hell people like Burr whose senses aren’t failing them, and who see “they”—you—“have nothing.”

FOOL ME ONCE, BLAME ON YOU

I confess I’m not terribly familiar with Burr’s actual comedy, but I think it’s important for as many people as possible to hear his message, insofar as it might make Democrats question their political culture, and expose regular people to searing criticism of the new right.

Rants like his, or like this one from Stephen A. Smith, have the potential to accomplish a lot, even though they provide no mechanistic way to make change. To borrow a term from disdainful political professionals, Burr’s outburst was purely expressive.

The political scientist Sam Rosenfeld recently scolded critics who wanted to see Democrats exploit Senate rules to grind the Trump-Musk-DOGE regime to a halt. “[T]here's no argument made here for how using this ‘leverage’ could plausibly result in Trump and Republicans backing down, it's pitched entirely as a symbolic gesture to express Democrats' anger.”

Emphasis added.

Sam is a friend so I want to try to answer his implicit question in detail and good faith. The short version is that expressiveness is not synonymous with uselessness. Expression can be useless or productive or counterproductive, but it’s a huge part of politics. No one wages a battle for public opinion without putting thought and resources into expressing something.

I assume what Sam meant is that Republicans didn’t think they’d be blamed for a government shutdown, and thus wouldn’t feel pressure to negotiate any concessions to Democrats. Thus, Democrats were likely to harm themselves politically, and accomplish nothing.

That analysis may have been right. It’s at least correct, as I conceded this week, that a party that uses filibuster rules to precipitate a government shutdown will have inherent difficulty assigning blame to the other party. It’d be much easier if Republicans simply didn’t have enough votes, and weren’t willing to make concessions to Democrats to fill the gap.

But the counterargument is that once the government shuts down, the parties enter an almost exclusively expressive information war, and public opinion determines who wins and loses. The leverage isn’t to change Republican minds directly, it’s to force this standoff into the realm of public opinion, and let public opinion work its will.

There’s only so much faith one can have in a party that splinters in the face of conflict to win a battle for public opinion. The president also has non-expressive tools he can use to focus the pain of a shutdown on his enemies and their constituents. The risk was real. But the outcome was by no means preordained. History has little to teach us about who would have caught the blame here.

For one thing, we have a tiny n. There have been three lengthy shutdowns in my life, and a small smattering of much shorter ones. To the extent we can theorize about who wins shutdown fights, it’s usually safe to bet against the hostage-taking party. If you refuse to fund the government unless your opponent makes some non-germane concession, you’re the asshole, and people will notice. Since that’s almost always the GOP, I think we should suspect the public is primed to blame Republicans for shutdowns in general. A Thursday Quinnipiac poll found that, if there’d been a shutdown, 32 percent of Americans would blame Democrats, 31 percent would blame Republicans, and 22 percent would blame Trump. Not a bad place to start, under the circumstances, and given the GOP’s immense media advantage.

But there’s more than just theory and polling to look to.

For instance, when Trump took his own government hostage in 2018—refusing to sign an appropriations bill until Congress amended it to include funding for a southern border wall—the public blamed him. The president can lose a shutdown fight, if the public understands him and his party to bear the blame for precipitating the crisis.

Which brings us to today. We’ve never had a shutdown fight quite like this one. Nobody was asking Democrats to withhold their votes until Trump agreed to sign the DREAM Act. On the narrowest view, we ended in a place where Republicans were demanding that Democrats vote for a bill full of partisan riders—which is to say, they’re the ones holding government funding hostage to partisan aims.

That’s what Schumer caved to.

But I think most close observers understood that the larger fight wasn’t over the riders. It was over Trump and Musk and their cynical operations outside the Constitution. About the immense damage they’ve done to the government and economy in wholly illegitimate ways. Most liberal citizens oppose business as usual, because they know Trump will wipe his ass with a “usual” agreement. They want to hold out until Trump gets right with the law, and mechanisms can be put in place to stop him from recidivating.

Is that holding the government hostage for a unilateral concession? Republican propagandists would certainly say so.

But they’d be lying. There is no such thing as a classic “clean CR” because Trump has claimed dictatorial power to break the law, and demanded the only real concession: That Congress implicitly sanction his lawbreaking. The only way to fix that is to reup the current budget, and include real, hard penalties for violating the agreement. That won’t happen now; Trump got his demand.

Democrats, of course, couldn’t guarantee us that Republicans would back down. But they declined their one chance to try to make them. “They have nothing.”

THE URGE TO PURGE

We can’t unsee what we’ve seen, what I recently called the long tail of failed leadership. Or at least I can’t.

It should be clear to everyone, though. Me, Bill Burr, everyone: The cowardliness I’ve been prattling on about since 2018, when it first dawned on me that Dems were scared of Trump and that their fear would become a problem for the fight against dictatorship.

Well here we are.

My regret after all this time is that I don’t have a detailed plan written up with steps to fix it. But I think we kind of know. Parties have been taken over before. It starts with new leadership elections, and with the understanding that the winners will bring in new people. One not-entirely-unfounded fear when Bernie Sanders was ascendant was that he’d replace the Democratic establishment with a hodgepodge of new deputies, including some savvy operators, some wonks, and a bunch of reckless bomb throwers and grifters. New people, new party.

But fighting liberals understand that the goal is to rebuild the party as a force of opposition, not to prop up any one leader figure, or empower a new set of cronies. Murshed Zaheed recently wrote us a playbook for building a Democratic communication and strategy war room for the 2020s. That knowledge exists. And we could scale it up on a party-wide basis.

It would be hard, but it wouldn’t necessitate an indiscriminate purge. Just new leaders, new expectations, and an after-action inquiry.

Tim Walz recently told Politico, “We shouldn’t have been playing this thing [the 2024 election] so safe… in football parlance, we were in a prevent defense to not lose when we never had anything to lose because I don’t think we were ever ahead.”

And so I would ask him, Who advised you to muffle your criticism of Republicans, and what rationale did they cite? Those people would be gone, their way of strategic thinking held up as a habit for the rest of the party to unlearn.

I’d ask the Biden brain trust, Who settled on the day-one strategy of diminishing an unvanquished Donald Trump? Whose idea was it to call him “the former guy” whenever anyone mentioned him and change the topic quickly? Those people would be gone, too. Whose idea was it to appoint Merrick Garland instead of a seasoned and aggressive prosecutor to run DOJ? Gone! Who are the advisers that sourced this eyebrow-raising 2020 NBC story? What role did they play in convincing Joe Biden not to allow “his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor”—and then to make those wishes public? Gone, gone, gone!

In other cases the idea would be to re-weight certain jobs and and draw clear lane lines. There’s no sense in firing good pollsters, but there is sense in making it clear to pollsters that they are not soothsayers or possessors of forbidden wisdom. They’re there to keep Dems between some pretty forgiving guardrails. Their input can be valuable, but it can’t be the essential ingredient in most Democratic decision making. It can’t keep being the case that events happen, controversies arise, and Democrats disappear for days into a side system of surveys and focus groups awaiting insight on how to respond. Machinery like that can’t be integrated with a 21st century flow of political news and information.

But that’s basically it. A more responsive party that is less afraid of its own shadow, and much hungrier to fight Republicans.

Renewal doesn't by any means commit the party to a prefab policy agenda, nor should it. Democrats won’t be able to recruit dynamic candidates if leaders, new or old, insist on controlling every aspect of the party’s agenda. A New Jersey Dem and an Arizona Dem will have very different constituents and thus very different policy priorities. There, old fashioned consensus building—the kind Nancy Pelosi specialized in—should continue. But the expectation has to be that on questions of process and partisan strategy, the leader makes the call—for the whole caucus, and the whole country, not just the frontline members—and everyone gets on board. An investigation is warranted? One will happen—and Dems from swing territory will use their political talents to explain and defend it to their constituents. Leader says filibuster? They uphold the filibuster. Leader says abolish the filibuster? They abolish the filibuster. Leader screws up, leader loses job.

It’s messy, but doable. It’s responsive to the concerns of wonkish writers like me and subcultural leaders like Bill Burr and millions of others. The old ways have become conspicuously obsolete, but the saving grace is that there’s still time to embrace new ones.

I can’t will a rebellion into existence. But I have a long memory. And I can tell a large, politically engaged audience who stands for reform—who’s calling for new leadership elections—and who’s standing for the status quo. Please join us.