A smile broke out across my face as I watched Trump’s Cabinet officials look like children in the principal’s office. They were frozen, jittery, clearly unable to land on anything resembling a coherent defense of themselves besides denials and doggedly wishing it would all just go away.
Then, just as abruptly as it appeared, my smile faded.
It faded because it occurred to me that this Congress could in fact do its job. It could exercise oversight. It could muster courage in coordination with the media to make these people look like the incompetent criminals they are. It is just that… it will only do this in defense of atrocities, of imperial violence, of blatant violations of international law.
Where was this outrage over an unelected South African billionaire gaining complete access to the digital systems, office spaces, and personnel decisions of the entire federal civil service?
Where was this moral courage when over 200 innocent persons were kidnapped and sold to a dystopian mega-prison run by one of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet?
Where are these elected representatives of the people when college students are being black bagged and disappeared into the ICE detention centers, literal concentration camp facilities where actual people are dying of neglect?
Where is the outrage over the simple fact that this text message fiasco was all about a war on a sovereign nation being prosecuted without any authorization from Congress?
The Democratic Party has had many chances to show that it had a little New Deal, Great Society, or Civil Rights left in it. Even a little “Change You Can Believe In,” as hollow as that turned out to be, would be a nice sign of life. In reality, I believe we have been witness to a significant break from that tradition and its electoral coalition, a break that we would have recognized long ago if not for the mirage of the Obama years.
The Democratic Party would like to remind you that its roots are in the slaveocracy, in the oligarchic counter-revolutions that defined US politics after the initial excitement of the revolutionary period and the period of the abolitionist-led “Second Republic.” The Democrats would like to remind you that they established the National Security regime, oversaw the McCarthyite purges, and provided the acceptable alternative to radical social change. They would like to remind you that the New Deal and later the Civil Rights and Great Society programs were only there because they were in existential competition with world communist revolution and so those things are not really so important anymore. They would like to remind you that when they criticized the Iraq War it was not because they opposed the war, only that they opposed doing it without getting a solid NATO coalition together. They would like to remind you that they threw Japanese-Americans into concentration camps and incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They levelled Pyongyang and Hanoi. And they love reminding you that they take part in the levelling of Palestine and Gaza with glee.
The Democratic Party would like to remind you that they are War Hawks and actually they will throw trans people under the bus—and yes, you will be next, whoever you are. Gavin Newsom is chortling with Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. Schumer is fine with being hit with a one-two punch of Antisemitism and Anti-Arab racism by the President and then betraying all of us to get him his 10 votes because he’s in on the game. The New King needs a Loyal Opposition and they want the job. They will hold up paddles when it is necessary and they will close ranks to censure the Al Greens and purge the Bernie Sanders and outvote the AOCs and call the NYPD on the anti-genocide protesters when it is necessary.
The Democrats are here to remind you that they do not care about you and that they will have to be thrown into the dustbin of history if we are ever going to get out of this nightmare. The Two-Party system has broken down before—it can happen again.
It is time we remind the Democrats what happened to the Whigs…
