Democrats Are the Guardrails of Democracy - And Must Act Like It

A stronger, sharper-elbowed and more disciplined Opposition is needed to save our institutions of liberal democracy - until we can win them back.

1.

We face this New Year with our liberal republic at the precipice. Or at minimum, the United States as we’ve known it since the Great Depression and the last time this country actually faced the radical authoritarians of America First. My view is simple: those of us who belong to the Democratic Party coalition - currently, the only thing standing between us and a deadly plummet from that precipice - cannot surrender our stance of strong and committed opposition through feckless pre-compromise with those who seek to destroy us.

“Democrats may be in the minority, but they are not yet an opposition,” wrote political commentator Jamelle Bouie last week, and this thought has been percolating in my mind throughout the Christmas break. To my way of thinking, there’s been too much silence and too much - and I know this is a loaded word - collaboration, or at least too many nods in that direction. As Bouie wrote, “Too many elected Democrats seem ready to concede that Trump is some kind of avatar for the national spirit — a living embodiment of the American people.”

That’s right - and he is not. Trump won the election clearly, but not overwhelmingly. His margin of victory was 1.47% - and yeah, all the voices rounding that up to 1.5% are wrong to do so. But it’s typical of what both the media and too many leaders in politics and business cede to Mar-a-Lago Mussolini. In this case, 46,000 unearned votes. Don’t give him an inch; he’s already stolen yards. Democrats lost, and Trump’s campaign promises carry the stench of totalitarian goals, human misery and the destruction of liberal democracy as we know it. So we’re going to bend and scrape?

“Institutions that assured us they would be in the fight for democracy are already backing down,” wrote voting rights legal eagle Marc Elias last week. “People who claimed they saw Trump clearly for what he is now have voluntarily put blinders in front of their own eyes. There is no segment of civil society that has been untouched by this capitulation. Some in positions of great power are preemptively acting powerless. Too many with the loudest microphones are turning them down.”

The question I have for these people is “why?” What prompts you to give up the fight in advance? Is your argument that failing to observe mythical bi-partisan parliamentary niceties will somehow hasten the onslaught after January 20th? Or - and this is worse - have you been subtly taken in by Trump and his minions, formed a grudging admiration for his Caligula and his cabinet, an innate desire that combines personal ambition with an attraction to toxic narcissism?

As Elias noted, “the guardrails of our democracy are not failing under violent contact. Rather they are being taken down in advance, by the very people who insisted they be entrusted to build them.”

2.

This brings me to an interesting exchange I had with Congressman Ro Khanna, ostensibly a progressive Democrat of the Bernie Sanders cohort, now busily making the cable television rounds suggesting that Democrats actively cooperate with the Trump Administration.

Khanna appeared on Fox News Sunday and said this: "If the president has actually a good idea to bring manufacturing back, or to cut wasteful defense spending, or to make our food system safer and get additives out of our food, why wouldn't we want to work on things that are good for the American people?"

A few days before, he’d tried clumsily to mediate a vicious dispute between MAGA influencer Laura Loomer and de facto incoming Trump prime minister Elon Musk - and all of their many followers. It was Loomer, Steve Bannon and the battalion of mega-online extremists versus the billionaire Musk and his cadre tech bro libertarians - allies during the campaign, now at each other’s throats over immigration, the H1B visa program for specialized workers, and a burgeoning white nationalist attack on Indian immigrants. A total mess of infighting and recrimination that was all too easy to see coming - and yet there’s Congressman Khanna, ostensibly a progressive wing Democrat, stepping in to the try and calm the extremist far right waters.

So yes, this did get my hackles up and prompt a bit of snark in response.

Which prompted the Khanna response that I’m naive, and that collaboration - inside a MAGA fight, mind you - is just trying to “solve problems.”

In which I strongly disagree on who’s naive in this particular conversation:

A point, in my view, strengthened by this one word response from Elon Musk to Rep. Khanna’s original statement: “Yes.”

Okay, it’s a silly Twitter exchange and Rep. Khanna is somewhat unique in his defense of the technology industry no matter how far right the figures he supports are; he represents a Silicon Valley district. And I do credit Khanna for his uniformly courtly style of engagement - we’ve often tussled on Twitter (and will no doubt do so on Bluesky) and he is always polite.

But I do think his de facto defection matters a great deal, because the House of Representatives is the center of the battleground against authoritarianism in 2025. And one prominent defector is unfortunately worth at least 20 loyal Democrats, especially when our elected Democrats are so relatively quiet in this run up to the re-inauguration of the worst president in American history.

3.

"To get good government and to retain it, it is necessary that a liberty-loving, educated, intelligent people should be ever watchful, to carefully guard and protect their rights and liberties," said famed Nebraska legislator George W. Norris back in 1934, shortly after abandoning his Republican colleagues to support the New Deal.

As a House member, Norris was famous for speaking out against U.S. entry into the First World War - and later as Senator, for backing first Al Smith (controversially, a Catholic) for President and then FDR’s New Deal. He was rightly lionized as a legislator who refused to be bullied, most prominently in the progressive era by the Speaker of the House.

We have a Trump loyalist as Speaker this time around, a man who wrote the coarse and cruel “Don’t Say Gay” legislation that demonizes LGBTQ children. Mike Johnson is Trump’s man, as the president-elect made clear this week (and Elon Musk made clear today). But he is also a Speaker with a very tenuous hold on his gavel - and sitting at the head of a caucus with an equally frayed and fragile majority. With a four-vote majority, he has exactly two votes to play with in a caucus rife with kooks, conspiracy theorists, and attention addicts.

Through those four votes must pass his own Speakership, the entire Trump legislative agenda, and the massive budget of the United States. Good luck.

In my view, Democrats must do two things and two things very well: stick together and speak out - in their own styles, with their own local concerns in mind, of course - but from the same general hymnal. Trying to help Trump and his minions or caving to “collaboration” or “reaching across the aisle” is both morally and politically wrong. Why? Because the legislation will be terrible. God-awful. In many cases, evil.

“Laws will not eliminate prejudice from the hearts of human beings,” said the great pioneering Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. “But that is no reason to allow prejudice to continue to be enshrined in our laws - to perpetuate injustice through inaction.”

And inaction is almost as bad as all this long-armed aisle reaching in the age of MAGA. It allows the straight up lies and disinformation of the Trump camp to take hold - lies about public health, immigrants, gay rights, women’s health, labor, public benefits, national defense. As Franklin Roosevelt said in 1940: “Those falsifications are being spread for the purpose of filling the minds and the hearts of the American people with fear. They are used to create fear by instilling in the minds of our people doubt of each other, doubt of their Government, and doubt of the purposes of their democracy.”

Which is why we need a stalwart opposition, not one that mugs for the cameras or works for clicks and social media engagement - but one that’s disciplined, tough-minded, willing to take a punch and throw a harder one back. One that doesn't shirk. One that’s in it for now, for the 2026 mid-terms and the 2028 redemption tour.

As the great New Jersey Congressman Peter Rodino said back in the Watergate era: “Whatever the result, whatever we learn or conclude, let us now proceed with such care and decency and thoroughness and honor that the vast majority of American people, and their children after them, will say: ‘That was the right course.’”

Amen to that. And Happy New Year.

listen to this

In honor of former President Jimmy Carter, who died this week at 100 years of age, here’s an appropriate song for this week from his favorite band.