Out With The Consultants
Democrats have long outsourced political judgment to professional-services providers (pollsters, strategists, lawyers)—but what do they know about defeating a coup?
I alluded to this at the end of Monday’s newsletter, but want to flesh out the idea at length.
We see in news stories when reporters quote Democratic strategists, and in the comments of the party’s congressional leaders, that they’re still running their response operation to Donald Trump through the filter of their normal campaign thought: Stay away from unpopular victims of Trump’s lawbreaking. Tout your commitment to bipartisanship, etc.
This is why establishment-brained strategic interventions—like when David Axelrod says Democrats fighting to uphold the Constitution are playing into Trump’s hands because the public supports “cut[ting] foreign aid”—are so noxious at this moment. The torch must pass now from party strategists seasoned in (though not terribly good at) normal electoral competition to tacticians who understand how to wield power maximally in the here and now. What’s at stake is the highest principle, not whether [John] Fetterman’s odds of re-election in four years slip a fraction of a percent.
Regular readers know I think this form of Democratic opposition politics is weak stuff even when we’re not in the midst of a legitimation crisis, but it’s particularly inapt as a response to one.
This is why the anti-Trump grassroots was so appalled to see a headline in Politico Monday reporting “[Chuck] Schumer signals Democrats won’t pick a shutdown fight.”
The piece was based on a letter Schumer wrote to Senate Democrats stipulating “Democrats stand ready to support legislation that will prevent a government shutdown,” the letter reads. “Congressional Republicans, despite their bluster, know full well that governing requires bipartisan negotiation and cooperation. Of course, legislation in the Senate requires 60 votes and Senate Democrats will use our votes to help steady the ship for the American people in these turbulent times. It is incumbent on responsible Republicans to get serious and work in a bipartisan fashion to avoid a Trump Shutdown.”
You can see why that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, but it also doesn’t support the original headline.
If you parse it closely, Schumer is stating plain facts in language meant to make Democrats seem reasonable, by contrast to obstreperous Republicans. Funding the government will require bipartisanship: Fact. Republicans will thus have to negotiate: Fact. If Republicans reject those facts, the government will shut down, and it will be their fault.
Though bloodless, it’s perfectly compatible with Democrats demanding a return to the rule of law in exchange fore their votes.
But you can see why people rooting for Democrats to make non-negotiable demands found this so disheartening. Ambivalence in the face of mortal danger reveals weakness, and without a widespread public understanding that the Constitution is in crisis, the public won’t necessarily rally to Democrats’ side in a budget fight. To the contrary, this is how Democrats could end up footing the bill for a shutdown if it happens, because Trump and the GOP don’t bother with strategic ambiguity.
Trump, as both president and the impresario of right-wing media, already controls most of the country’s political agenda-setting power. When Democrats withhold declarative demands or expressions of outrage while they await internal unanimity, or for swing members to get comfortable, or for polls to change, they cede Trump the small slice of agenda-setting power they control. While they drag their heels, he will simply say, “Democrats are threatening to shut down the government because they’re trying to erase my historic victory.” Or whatever.
Why didn’t Schumer say something more plain. “Republicans control the House and Senate and can set the country’s budget on their own. If they’re too incompetent to do that, Democrats will be prepared to help—but only after Trump’s constitutional crime spree comes to a permanent end”?
It may be that Schumer doesn’t have that level of confrontation in him. It may be multiple things. But I am practically certain that he settled on this approach for one or more of the reasons I described above: to shield members from competitive states, to mind public opinion polling, or whatever else you might expect a caucus leader to do in normal times. I’m almost as certain Schumer chose this approach in consultation with his strategists and pollsters—that is people with a so-so record of winning Senate elections, and no experience of any kind pulling democracy back from the brink.
AT YOUR SERVICES
If there’s any silver lining around the Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity decision, it’s that John Roberts et al finally transformed Democratic Party over-reliance on professional-services providers (pollster, strategists, lawyers) from a crutch into an absurdity. Republican presidents were suddenly unbound by law—why would Democrats place all their trust in people still beholden to rules of fair play?
I can’t find the post now, but when the Court announced its decision, my friend
described it as transformative, a moment for lawyers to recognize they should pass their torches or batons (I forget which metaphor) as leaders of the pro-democracy movement to historians and comparative political scientists. The fight for liberal democracy abruptly shifted venues, from one where the rule of law applied, to one where it had crumbled.If anything, Dahlia may have jumped the gun by about six months. We are living through the moment of truth for lawyers right now; what happens over the next days will determine whether vigorous advocacy before life-tenured judges remains a working tool of opposition.
But the other tent poles of the Democratic Party’s sad, caution-driven approach to partisan warfare have more clearly exceeded their usefulness. We can confidently down-weight the input of pollsters and strategists, without necessarily expressing open disdain for them, because—whatever we think about the work they did a decade or two ago—they are trained to win normal elections not to resist fascism.
The notion that Democratic leaders would outsource so much judgment to professional-services providers has never made sense to me. Washington is full of professional-services providers (some good, some bad) but the nature of these fields is essentially to keep clients out of trouble. A huge share of the guidance they give amounts to “don’t stick your neck out.” Does that sound like good advice for someone seeking votes in an attention economy? Does that sound compatible with political leadership that rallies the masses?
We can see this in the sad-sack advice influential operators like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel have for Democrats, suddenly confronted with a president seeking to steal their legitimate power: Don’t go to bat for foreign aid. They opine as if this were actually a debate over how much the country spends on foreign aid, rather than over whether Trump gets to dissolve government agencies by fiat.
We’ve seen it over years from moderation-oriented pollsters, who will claim to know with scientific certainty that minor changes to policy design would translate to specific, percentage-point shifts in popular polling and elections. They advise Democrats to be message-disciplined, to the point of uncanniness, in steering all discourse toward issues that poll well, or that convey moderation.
They don’t know what to advise in the midst of an emergency when careful messaging can’t convey reality, and in any case, there’s no time to test messages usefully: by the time survey results are back USAID is shattered, or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a nullity.
Even in normal times, the anti-personalist, caution-driven approach of the professional-services class suffers from failure to imagine how their insights operate in the real world, where voters are inundated with sensationalist media and right-wing propaganda, and the Republican opposition campaigns on the language of invasion and predation. How is a person who absorbs messages like that every day supposed to react when the Democratic elite respond to this phantasmagoria by explaining that they want to means test a child benefit? Who’s a swing voter likelier to pick as the winner of a debate when she must choose between a fiery demagogue and a talking-points robot?
FOR SCHUM THE BELL TOLLS
Let’s end where we started, then, with Schumer and the rest of the leadership, and the proper response to this right-wing assault on constitutional democracy.
I’ve written multiple times now about the parliamentary approach they should take—where their real legislative leverage lies. (Spoiler: it’s the budget.)
But how should they talk about the crises?