The Party That Refuses to Take Shots Loses

In the past week or so, President Donald Trump has expressed a desire to purchase and develop an ethnically cleansed Gaza, handed over the government to a sieg-heiling foreign dweeb, shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, taken over the Kennedy Center and renamed the Gulf of Mexico. That doesn’t even count the things he has claimed to do.

As for the Democrats’ response … well, what’s your March like?

Anyone playing “American Politics: The Home Game” would struggle to create a communications apparatus as antiquated and unresponsive as the Democratic Party. The closest you could come is loading Windows ‘98 onto a yellowed tower PC, attempting to stream a leaked copy of “The Matrix” via RealPlayer, then starving to death while waiting for it to stop buffering. 

If you’re a Democratic voter — or just a fan of two-player games where a second player shows up — you probably know this agonizingly well. Conservatives spent 49 years signaling their intention to do away with Roe v. Wade, and in that time the Democrats’ plan evolved from “Roe v. Wade” to “restore Roe v. Wade.” The party campaigned in 2024 on Trump being a corrupt fascist and have stood nearly mute as he does corrupt, fascist things. They don’t even have a mechanism for training other people to argue for them. Conservatives founded the Federalist Society 43 years ago; if you’re waiting for Democrats to create a parallel advocacy and mentorship organization to stovepipe new ideas, you might as well quit RealPlayer and try to load that digital rip of “The Phantom Menace” you heard about on IRC. They’re going to find your bones waiting on disappointment either way.

That things shouldn’t be this way is groaningly obvious. Between the House and the Senate, there are 260 Democratic legislators. That means we should have 260 different people celebrating victories, championing fights and airing regional outrage. Instead, more often than not, we have 260 people waiting to learn the one thing to paraphrase that day — a message already tortured into smooth, ungraspable featurelessness and designed to slip its way through a maze of problematic issues, reflecting each without actually touching any of them. It’s the hooded town council in “Hot Fuzz” droning “the greaterrrr goooood.” 

Democrats’ monomania is yet another example of the party’s institutional habit of playing monkey-see, monkey-do: “Republicans win majorities by hammering a popular message, so we need to find the popular message and hammer it.” But this back-think overlooks that Republicans say bizarre, stupid and off-book nonsense all the time (look up the House GOP caucus, spin the wheel, and you’ll land on a lunatic who you recognize), amplify the winners and defiantly memory hole the rest. While Democrats sequester themselves with a poll-generated theoretical human audience to A/B test two statements that give recognition to every item at the salad bar without putting a single one on the plate, Republicans slop the pen and see what gets the most oinks.

As with most Democratic sins, this wait-around-then-shoot-the-moon approach to messaging represents an exasperatingly single-minded misuse of resources. For one thing, the representatives themselves are a resource: Speaking in unison is helpful on some things, but leaders lead, and hundreds of people voicing their individual passionate commitments to individual constituencies and causes is more engaging than stashing them under a generic umbrella message. Voters like passion; it’s deceptively like progress and generally its precursor. It also solves the social media habits bedeviling most Democrats: dropping in four times per day to post two press release summaries, the 260th rewording of that day’s caucus-wide attempt to solve everything in a sentence, and a picture of them experiencing some privilege totally alien to 98% of Americans without ever making the effort to be a fucking human being. 

Resources and messaging aren’t confined to representatives. They have their own staff and contractors, after all, even if they’re all hired from the same strip-mall of haunted outlet stores. Other options exist. This country has minted more than 300,000 unemployed local journalists in the past 20 years, and most of them would be thrilled to take a $75K/year gig overnighting better takes than are generated over weeklong colloquies among $250K/year Ivy grad carpetbaggers who punched their lifetime tickets engineering the failure of Hillary For America. For every quarter-million-dollar comedy writer crafting the Colbert zinger that the Democratic caucus will repeat on social media for six days past its comedy expiration date, there are 20 who didn’t make the cut and would gladly take a fifth of that per year to work from home creating daily bespoke content for Amy McDebbie, R-Flyover, in between working on their next pilot. 

Admittedly, spending $13 million per year punching up every Democrat’s daily statements sounds like a lot. Then again, that’s only six times what the Kamala Harris campaign paid Oprah’s production company to host a single town hall. It’s about 1/9th of what the campaign spent per week. Or, worse, it’s roughly 1/23rd what it gave a single consultant. All this for a campaign 107 days long. Trump might be stomping these people into the dirt every day of the week, but there’s a ready-made slogan for this kind of campaign labor: We’re Not Going Broke.

What’s especially galling about Democrats’ self-muzzling singlemindedness is that they aren’t even consistent about it. While 260 members have to try to get over with one-size-fits-all ideas, actual congressional hearings get the participation trophy treatment: everyone plays! Rather than each committee member ceding their time to one able cross-examiner, pursuing the most advantageous lines of inquiry and probing each witnesses’ biggest weaknesses, momentum on “where did that Ukraine money go” stalls out when John Dadcoalminer, D-Pa., embarks on whatever jag most beguiles him that morning. If unity of purpose doesn’t matter when confronting crimes against the American people, it doesn’t matter anywhere.

Granted, 260 members each doing their best to get earned media time will lead to some chaos, but don’t sell the Democrats short: Anyone who’s watched them react to a socialist polling well in a primary knows how rapidly and adroitly each member of the caucus can find his or her unique perspective and constituency to bear on the threat. Also, chaos is a story, and the GOP nets untold earned media from it. A single message offers only one thing to report on, and while multiple messages bait the hackiest of “Dems in Disarray!” media narratives, any congressperson incapable of pointing across the aisle and asking “what about those clownshoe losers over there?” before pivoting back to their own message shouldn’t be allowed to drive a car with the radio on, let alone sit in government.

Until then, the alternative is House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries getting burned trying to duck a policy question from Jon “Rally to Restore Sanity” Stewart by sticking his head in the same oven he was using to reheat Bill Clinton’s 33-year-old “I feel your pain” leftovers. Given that leadership’s other pronouncements have included, “It’s their government, what leverage do we have?” and, “Don’t email my whip! Stop calling,” it was his strongest performance to date. 

Into the void left by him and Chuck “If we wait a little longer, I know Trump’s finally really gonna screw up” Schumer strode Cory Booker, a man more than a decade past a viral-darling status dependent on his running into buildings on fire. He invoked the power of a tuna melt at a meeting where Democrats fought over the number of battles they should forfeit. “Just go viral” is the kind of marketing tactic that saves the historic gazebo in a Hallmark movie; as advice goes, it’s only marginally less useless than telling your unhappy high-school daughter to “just be more popular.” People who’ve been on the internet or the inside of a high school know the good version of this advice: Be real, be yourself, don’t be shy.

Or, in sports terms: You miss every shot you don’t take. The second Trump administration creates more targets in a day than the George H.W. Bush administration created in a term. Shooters shoot. Pick one and see if you can drill it. Waiting a week to chuck one from half-court might win you a novelty check, but most of the time it’s going to get you six days of silence, a team jersey and an escort to the exit. Democrats need to get good at something other than that last part. Republicans have flooded the zone with opportunities, and so far, the only one the Democrats have chosen is to drown. Flood it back and see who and what on the other coast goes under. 

The cruelest thing you can say to somebody is that, with a little practice, they might be as good at something as Trump. But, at the risk of speaking for all the rest of the unelected damned: If you can’t strive to earn that degree of faint praise, then damn you, too.