"Fear Itself" Is Palpable
It's also weak, undignified, and demoralizing. And as FDR warned, it's turning failure into a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Many commentators will chalk up the puzzling, evasive Democratic response to Donald Trump’s early blitzkrieg of lawbreaking to shock and confusion. They don’t know where to begin, and even if they did, they have little official power in the congressional minority to do much about it. They are also surrounded by the same coterie of pollsters and strategists who always tell them to focus on pocketbook issues.
So they talk about tomato prices.
I have been one of these commentators. And I still believe there’s merit to the analysis. Democrats are doing what Democrats always do, because the same Democrats that ran the party before run the party now. But I’ve begun to worry that something else—two novel factors—are contributing to their refusal to respond to an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government: Denial and fear. Not fear of public backlash or losing the next election, but physical fear.
THE END IS DENY
Fear drives denial, so let’s start with evidence of denial.
Long before the election, I told inquisitive friends two things: first, that if Trump were to win, they shouldn’t expect a robust, street-level resistance to materialize this time; second that Trump would be more malicious than he was in his first term, but not all that much more competent. He and his loyalists know much more about the architecture of the bureaucracy, but they wouldn’t appreciate how it actually functions, and they’d mess things up through sheer arrogance.
I get plenty wrong in the world, but those two pieces of guidance have born out. And Democratic opposition has molded itself around these two dynamics.
Without an organic, street-level resistance, Democrats feel little pressure to speak for the masses. They chase public opinion, and if public opinion suggested people were as alarmed as they should be about the attempted usurpation of the constitution, they’d be in the street. Since people haven’t marched, they mustn’t care, and front-running the public would be unwise. Don’t want to seem out of touch!
At the same time, Democrats can tell themselves that nothing will come of all this. They can survey the amateurish aspects of the past two weeks and tell themselves that they aren’t actually outmatched, let alone at risk of losing the country forever.
They see in this second Trump presidency slightly greater competence outrun by much greater arrogance. In 2017, Trump and his inner circle didn’t know where light-switches in the White House were located, let alone which room in the Department of Treasury controls financial transfers to citizens, agencies, and NGOs. Now they know all of that. But that’s about it. They know where power nodes exist, but they don’t know why they were created, or what purposes the rules they operate under serve, or how to change those rules effectively or responsibly. They are, thus, guaranteed to fuck things up in ways that perturb citizens. Indeed, they already have.
To the extent Democrats are mounting an opposition at all it’s the method of savvy passivity. They correctly realize that these are The Best And The Brightest, in the original, sarcastic sense of the term—legends in their own minds, who think pedigree (or maybe computer skills) supersede systems knowledge and good judgment. The plan, such as one exists, is to stand back while the Trump regime makes major mistakes and only then appeal to the public to vote them out.
It’s a highly conventional opposition strategy, but they’re deploying it against something highly irregular.
Yes, it’s true that Trump’s tariffs will make grocery prices rise, and so the Democrats’ favorite talking points will suddenly be germane. Here come expensive tomatoes and avocados alongside already-expensive eggs. Good for them, they positioned themselves well to generate and capitalize on backlash to tariffs. But that is hardly all that’s going on, and hardly the only thing that needs opposing.
Put bluntly, at this pace, and under this mindset, it’s almost impossible to imagine free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028.
If Elon Musk can send goons to seize control of federal payment systems; if they can get government security officials at USAID placed on leave for trying to enforce laws and regulations; if they can collapse duly established agencies and breach highly sensitive systems that they don’t understand, with no watchdogs on hand to track what they’ve done with the information; when everyone involved knows the president is immune from criminal process, that he will order federal law-enforcement (now fatally compromised) not to investigate them, and will pardon them if necessary…. Do these sound like people who will be respectful of election law?
At some level Democrats must recognize they face the danger of semi-permanent political extinction. And so if nothing else, you’d expect a self-preservation instinct to kick in—that they’d use the limited but powerful tools available to them to insist on a return to the rule of law.
The fact that they’ve left those on the table under these circumstances makes me suspect the paralysis is a manifestation of fear. They remind me of no one so much as Trump himself, who, as pandemic disease swept America, lapsed into denial and tried to convince the country that everything was fine by manipulating case numbers and tending to the stock market. Anything to keep them in their comfort zones and avoid reckoning with the existential threat staring them in the face.
TIL THE COWARDS COME HOME
This is the dynamic Franklin Roosevelt warned about in his first inaugural address. The reason Americans and their leaders had only fear itself to fear, he said, was that it would sap them of the will to save the country. He described “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”
Maybe not this time? We know Democrats are not young, and not particularly hip to modern media. But they aren’t dumb, and they aren’t oblivious to world events.