It’s asymmetric warfare
Our friend Anat Shenker-Osorio once wrote, “Democrats rely on polling to take the temperature; Republicans use polling to change it.” Democrats are reactive, Republicans proactive. If ever there was a time for Democrats to get proactive and go on offense, it’s now.
“If the Democrats’ claim that they were fighting for democracy in 2024 seemed too abstract for many voters before Jan. 20, it is terrifyingly concrete now,” writes E.J. Dionne. He reminds we who don’t need reminding of the recent unlawful predations of the Musk-Trump cabal. But getting to the meat of it, he sounds a lot like ASO:
Democrats have a bad habit of pulling back from thorny matters by saying: “Oh, voters don’t really care about this issue.” What Republicans understand is that voters often notice an issue only if a party is persistent enough in forcing it into the public conversation. The trans debate and Hunter Biden’s problems were hardly front of mind for most voters. Republicans worked hard to put them there.
Citizens in large numbers will only start noticing how truly radical Trump’s designs are when Democrats find dramatic ways of standing up to them …
Yes, Democrats need to be for something. But Dionne suggests that FDR and Reagan first won support based on what they ran against. “In both cases, the power of negative thinking created paths to sweeping affirmative agendas.”
Where Dionne goes wrong is in heeding “party strategist” James Carville who hasn’t been right since the 1990s. Carville believes Democrats can restore their brand ahead of 2026 midterms by hammering Trump’s failure to fulfill his “No. 1 promise” to bring down “the price of everything.”
Midterms? That’s a mite presumptuous at this point.
I’ve suggested that Democrats don’t have a messaging problem so much as a “tree falls in the forest” problem. It doesn’t matter what Democrats say if no one hears it, whether it’s about the price of eggs or the collapse of the post-WWII international order. Republicans have the bigger megaphone. It’s asymmetric messaging warfare.
In this attention-driven political economy, and facing spotlight hogs like Musk and Trump, if Democrats have any chance of slamming the office doors on the Muskovites’ greasy fingers, they need to find creative, dramatic ways of upstaging them. Democrats have to get nuts, get attention, and make Americans care more about losing their country and their freedoms than the freakin’ price of eggs. As ASO put it, “to make popular what we need said.” Anything less is nation-state suicide. Never mind 2026.
But they’ll need help, Dionne suggests. The “resistance” worked the last time around:
Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist who studied the anti-Trump movement, noted recently in the New Republic that what worked the last time were the “persistent, community-based efforts by 2,000 to 3,000 grassroots Resistance groups in every town, city, and suburb across virtually all congressional districts.” The events of the past three weeks summon Americans again to diners, churches, libraries, union halls and taverns to organize, to pressure their elected officials (especially the 15 House Republicans who won last year by five percentage points or less), and to reach out to their friends and neighbors to warn them about what Trump is doing to their democracy.
“Move fast and break things” is the tech slogan inspiring what Trump and Musk are doing to our government and our constitutional arrangements. Those who want to stop their wrecking ball need to act with the same urgency.
Do Democrats have what it takes?