Democrats Who Don't Fight Will Learn The Hard Way
Ceding the mantle of moral leadership during a crisis is a bad way to seize the center.
Over the past few days a dissenting faction of Democrats has begun to air misgivings about efforts to make Donald Trump follow the law and return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States.
Gavin Newsom most infamously wrote off the fight as another Trump “distraction of the day.”
“The art of distraction,” Newsom said. “And here, we zig and zag. This is the debate they want. This is their 80-20 issue, as they’ve described it.”
One anonymous Democrat told Axios, “Trump is setting a trap for us.... Maybe that doesn't matter in a [Democrat]-plus-30 district, but you're not going see any front-liners down in El Salvador.”
Between celebrated acts of bravery, and wild Republican dissembling, and favorable Supreme Court rulings (9-0, 7-2) I think the poll chasers and worriers have lost this argument. But I’m less interested in the rift across the party than in the rift among the subset of officials and strategists who believe Democrats should look first to polls before choosing whether or not to fight.
For every Newsom-type who assumes all immigration debates are lopsided in the GOP’s favor and believes Democrats should sidestep immigration conflict, no matter the details, there’s someone else pointing out that Democrats are on the right side of public opinion in this fight.
“You will usually find me shouting, ‘Democrats should shut up and focus on topics where they're popular,’” wrote the data analyst Lakshya Jain. “Usually, that includes being quiet on immigration…. I don't think it's so clear-cut here. Dems are not actually beginning from a deficit here. It's 61-26 *against* the deportations to El Salvador.”
You can sense the pull of moral urgency, and the cognitive dissonance it creates. Liberals and Democrats generally do not want the U.S. government to perpetrate atrocities; if their strategic ideas militate for ignoring crimes against humanity, something’s gotta give. They will go looking for datapoints that keep their strategic and moral callings aligned.
But they’d be better off if they would instead question whether their strategic ideas were well conceived. Chris Van Hollen would garner widespread praise for shining a light on the crime against Abrego Garcia even if the issue were 50-50 or better for Republicans. By contrast, leaders who check their righteous instincts against polls before speaking out in times of crisis, are liable to get lost in an uncanny valley of phony politicians.
Ambitious Democrats like Newsom thus have at least three reasons to leave their defensive crouches and join the fight.