The Consultant Buzzword That Left Democrats Unprepared To Fight
There's no getting around having to fight on less-than-ideal terrain.
Something like what’s happened and ongoing in Los Angeles this week became inevitable the moment Donald Trump won the 2024 election.
Deploying military service members against U.S. citizens is a recurring theme of his totalitarian fantasies. He’s mused about it repeatedly, privately and publicly, over many years, with particular focus on multicultural cities in blue states, whose sovereignty he’s never respected. Though he has not as of this writing invoked the Insurrection Act to justify his assault on California, he and his inner circle have slobbered at the thought so prodigiously that rank and file Trump opponents came to understand it as a question of when, not if. So too did Trump’s own cabinet.
I remember seeing calls for Democratic governors to sync up with their state national guard adjutant generals as early as March.
Which is all to say: We knew he’d wield immigration enforcement cruelly, in a manner designed to draw protesters into the streets, and we knew he’d be eager to deploy troops once protests began. And now here we are.
Easy as it should have been, anticipating this couldn’t come as much comfort, not even for the most pugnacious Democratic governor. There’s no comfort in forecasting the path of a category-five hurricane, just an opportunity to prepare. You sit down with national guard leaders and draw clear lines between legal and illegal uses of force. Maybe you come to an understanding that gives you real confidence they won’t allow themselves to be used the way Trump wants to use them. That doesn’t do anything to solve the political and quite possibly lethal problem of protesters and armed agents of the federal government facing off across a dividing line in the middle of a city.
You need to win a battle for public opinion over that clash. Which means, among other things, you need to claim and defend the argumentative high ground over whatever pretext Trump might use to invade your territory. You need the people of your state—at least the ones most likely to be drawn into protests—to be as single-minded as possible about the importance of non-violent resistance relative to the alternative.
You need, in other words, to be prepared to fight on grounds of your opponents’ choosing.
That’s nobody’s idea of a good time. But it’s also not possible if your theory of opposition politics is rooted in conceding tough fights, or ducking contentious issues, hoping more favorable ones will materialize. It’s not possible if you’re surrounded by advisers who tell you your top political aim should be to “reduce the salience” of issues like immigration.