The Witness Chronicles, 12/20/24
The silence of the Dems
Where Are the Democrats? If There is Going To Be a Resistance, They Need To Lead
The silence is deafening
I’ve been trying to follow the craziness in DC while limiting my news intake and, to be honest, it’s not easy. The Republican Party is having a civil war right now over keeping the government open and the President-elect is not helping. He loves the chaos and he has his own chaos agent, the richest man in the world, making things worse everywhere he goes.
The Democrats are not helping, in fact they are conspicuously silent. I can understand a strategy of letting the right tie themselves in knots but checking out of the debate is not what we need right now. They need to step up.
Think about this: the only Democrat name that pops up is Chuck Schumer and it is only because he is the bogeyman the Trumpies cite when trying to define Democrats. But Chuck is silent too. The reality is that Chuck Schumer, Senator from my state, is not an attack dog, he tries to be the jovial voice of reason because it’s his nature. And that’s OK. But it shows up the lack of leadership we need if we are going to counter these destructive idiots.
Even as a keen observer of this, I can’t see that kind of leader emerging and we desperately need someone to rally the troops right now. The Republican Party under Trump and Musk is a total mess, no surprise, and that is a huge opportunity for the Democrats to look like the serious defenders of Democracy.
Instead, we get silence or worse, collusion.
What I think we are seeing is a massive failure of the party to plan for a Trump win and plain old fear to step up, fear sowed by Trump with his hysterical plans for vengeance and retribution. The accurate phrase, pardon my French, is chickenshit politics. It’s a pandemic in the government and the media, who are equally guilty of normalizing this Trump crap.
The reality is that Trump’s ability to govern is based on the flimsiest of bases and being led by wildly incapable people. Which includes Elon Musk, a man who thinks being rich makes him smarter than all the rest of us. He is smart about tech and making money but he is an arrogant idiot about everything else.
This, right now, looks like a lost opportunity of immense proportion. Unfortunately I cannot see who in the Democratic Party has the power to stand up and that is the root of this entire failure. Kamala, bless her heart, is a lame duck Vice President, which is about as invisible as possible in Washington politics. But she was never an attack dog, to her credit.
Ironically, whatever resistance there is, is coming from a few Republican Senators, including the architect of this mess, Mitch McConnell, and a few notable Republican women like Murkowski and Collins.
The ongoing budget battle is too arcane for any of us to follow and with the holiday looming, most of us are not paying attention to things like the debt ceiling. The Trump people know this and are taking advantage of it but they are in disarray too. Their tribe has too many nutty chiefs and ideologues to govern with any kind of unity.
Trump has always known that unity is his downfall in the long run. But the long run is now the short run and there seems to be no one to take advantage of his weakness, or to even acknowledge it. I’ll say it every time I write but he has no mandate and the thinnest of leads in both houses of Congress. He is vulnerable right now, despite his bluster.
The presence of Musk is simply strange. He has no right to be in the middle of this or to be taken seriously. Except for the ultimate weapon in modern politics, money. Trump is a money grubbing con man but Elon could heat his house with piles of burning cash and never miss it.
There may well be a disease diagnosed in the future, brought on by having too much money, but only after we survive this period of rewarding those with mountains of it by giving them power. Trump’s billionaire status, questionable as it is, has always been the basis of his fame and power. Now we have people like Bezos and Musk, and many lesser billionaires, trying to take over the government.
More ammunition for populist Democrats, except where are they? Certainly not Bernie who has said many things but accomplished almost nothing. That kind of progressivism is a relic of the Vietnam war era. I know, hate me Berniebots, but it’s true.
My Party is leaderless right now, with the old school aging out and few young lions emerging. I couldn’t even tell you the name of the leader of the Democratic National Committee right now. That’s pitiful.
It would be so easy to throw up my arms and give up, which is the vibe we get from our leaders right now. Of course for that to be true there would have to be leaders. I’m not seeing any out there. And Trump knows it.
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I get what you're saying & I do agree to a point, and I've heard this complaint before, but what do people want the dems to say or do? They're ridiculed if they say something because it wasn't the right thing to say or they say it wrong or they should have said it earlier. You call Kamala a lame duck VP, but what VP has ever been in the spotlight? Pence didn't even speak out when he was threatened with a noose. Kamala called Trump a fascist, which was true, and then that comment was used to blame her for losing the election. Why are the repubs even paying attention to musk dictating the budget after it was a bipartisan vote? Everyone agreed on it. This is still the current administration, not the incoming one. Why aren't the independent candidates, who basically stole votes from Harris, not speaking up? Why aren't decent billionaires like Warren Buffet speaking up? Everyone is silent. Maybe silence will be golden--everyone who voted for this will get far worse than what they thought they voted for. For better or worse (mostly worse), it's up to the people now to decide what kind of country they want. And for them to figure out how important the price of eggs really is. It's time for people to grow up.
One of the bright, rising stars in the Democratic party is Pete Buttigieg, who is young, smart and articulate. It's too bad he's gay though (and I say this as a gay man myself), because it likely disqualifies him from ever being elected either as a senator or governor from Indiana, or as U.S. president. Of course, I hope I'm wrong about that.
Then there's Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro who are future hopefuls. But as far as any Democrats currently in the Senate, I agree that there just don't seem to be any strong or outspoken enough to become our next leader.