Where are the Democrats?

A feckless minority party can write all the letters it wants, but an opposition has to make meaning for people

In this second week of the Trump administration, a fully captured Republican Party is underwriting a second coup attempt. It’s what everyone expected.

But Democrats are absent, except when they’re confirming Trump’s deeply unqualified nominees, getting behind the administration on initiatives like AI competitiveness, and abandoning their agency in favor of putting their faith in a higher power.

Not to diminish the big guy’s role if that’s your belief system, but it’s hard to read this tweet — by the leader of the opposition party in the House — as anything other than an abdication of the earthly — and very real — powers still held by the Democratic Party, even in the minority. Failing to do that leaves the millions of Americans who did not vote for this — people who, even if they voted for Trump, did not sign up for an onslaught of illegal, unconstitutional maneuvers to hand over the national wealth to a handful of oligarchs and throw the world into chaos — rudderless, in the lurch.

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So where is the opposition? Geolocationally and morally speaking? Like, where are you? It’s a question many are asking. It’s a question we’re asking here at The Ink.

RANT: Where the hell is the opposition?

And it’s a question that demands an answer from the Democratic Party.

What’s needed now is something very different. Americans need leadership, and they need action. That is not, thus far, what’s being offered by those responsible for driving the Democratic Party. As journalist Marisa Kabas (who broke the story of the OMB impoundment memo we talked about earlier this week) points out, the Democratic Party is failing on both counts.

So where are the Democrats? Where are all the people who spent the last years asking us for five dollars every five minutes?

Mostly they are still asking for five dollars every five minutes. Maybe it’s for $3 instead of $5, but this went out today.

But as Indivisible’s Ezra Levin pointed out on Bluesky, talk from the Democrats means little without action — and sadly it’s a minority of Democrats who are offering even the most basic opposition.

It’s not just the former Democrats who are showing their true colors and joining the ranks of the oligarchy. Kyrsten Sinema is certainly entitled to get whatever job she wants — and going from perpetually cryptic to positively crypto tracks — but serving elected officials have a real role to play.

Now, there’s a place for pointing out the problems. And Bernie Sanders did a good job of that the day after the inauguration.

Sanders is right when he says of the Democrats,

Our job is not just to respond to every absurd statement…our job is to stay focused on the issues that are of importance to the working families of our country.

Sanders also points to the razor-thin Republican advantage in the House as an opportunity, and argues that Americans embrace presidentialism — the notion that the executive can do whatever it wants — at our peril. And it is true. But people need to be motivated to vote.

A real opposition party recognizes its role in motivating people, in shaping the national sensibility, defining what’s of importance, and rallying people to action. Not accepting terms like “pause” or “freeze” when the country is facing a coup. And certainly not supporting the administration’s griftiest efforts to reward its oligarchic backers:

As Flaming Hydra editor Maria Bustillos calls out, there are far more important things at stake than oligarchic competition over who makes and markets the large-scale plagiarism machines that even now are threatening human livelihoods.

Literary fiction editors get it. Plenty of people get it, and are getting loud about it. Even some Republicans get it:

The great political emotion of this age is the sense of defenselessness. It helped Trump win. But the response to Trump by Democrats has been to spread that emotion.

As Anand said on today’s rant video, Meaning does not make itself. Somebody’s got to do it; has to call things what they are and get people to understand. And it’s true, some Democrats do get it. But they aren’t in party leadership positions — in fact, the Democratic Party has consigned them to the back bench.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for one, is clear on the fact that her mission is to speak directly to and rally her constituents. It’s not complicated to make a clear stand against fascism.

AOC is setting the terms of the argument; she’s making meaning. Calling things what they are.

As Anand posted earlier:

We’ve talked before in the newsletter — multiple times, in fact — about how Germans have been able to mobilize in the streets against far-right threats. And that’s happening again, with tens of thousands making it clear that they won’t tolerate the AfD coming to power. They’re fighting against the same forces Americans are — oligarchic forces backed by Elon Musk. But the response there is very different. The opposition understands the threat, and they have their own story to tell about it.

Now it may not be the job of the Democratic Party to organize street protests. But it is up to them to explain to people what they are facing and what it means, to help them make meaning for themselves.

As we’ve talked about with Heather McGhee, helping people make meaning is what effective leaders do. It’s what Donald Trump has done, so well and so destructively.

Because he’s been a figure in reality TV — our other big significant institution in this country — he really offers to those who identify with him a way to understand to whom they belong, who is Other, who’s against them, who’s with them, and what any individual phenomenon that comes through the news or through their lives — whether the closing of a factory, the war in the Middle East, or Taylor Swift — means to them…

I think that we have to understand that to lead effectively, you have to really be in people’s lives in a way that helps them make meaning out of everyday life.

That’s the groundwork for citizens to act — whether that’s protest, voting, volunteering time and money or whatever.

It is unsustainable for one party to specialize in destruction — and the other to specialize in the narration of destruction and letter writing. Pushback is essential. And it has an impact — the outpouring of pressure against the OMB memo’s administrative coup appears to have forced the White House to roll it back.

But the fight is far from over (it’s week two!).

It’s time to stop making excuses for Democrats. Or overlooking the gazillionaire insider traders, the ones who won’t retire, the encrusted committee chairs, the party committee that isn’t an actual organization, the donor bottle service legislators, and everyone who won’t fight and doesn’t know how.

Nothing less than an extraordinarily agile, smart, savvy, ferocious, relatable, grounded, strategic, conquering party is needed as an opposition now.

If you’re not part of the future, thank you for your service!

Get. It. Together.

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Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images