Shouldn't All The Democrats Who Don't Envision Themselves As Part Of An Opposition Party Retire Now?

Offering An Alternative To— Not Embracing— Kakistocracy Is Their Job Now

I didn't dress them but that's Elizabeth Warren in blue & Jeanne Shaheen in red

“It’s all over,” a prominent— and dejected— progressive congressman told me Tuesday evening. “This is oligarchy’s end game. They won… with crypto and AIPAC as the enforcers that no one is standing up to. Liberalism is— at least for the foreseeable future— dead.” I never heard him sound so pessimistic before. It scared me. It’s haunted me ever since.

Kakistocracy has costs. And Alan Rozenstein went through them for Lawfare readers Tuesday. “By nominating unqualified loyalists,” he wrote, “Trump undermines the Constitution's vision of merit-based governance.” That poll from Puck we referenced earlier indicates that most Americans don’t want that. 68% of respondents “said the Senate should reject Trump nominees who ‘cannot pass a standard security clearance.’ Majorities also gave the Senate latitude to reject a nominee ‘who does not know a lot about the field they are being nominated for,’ a nominee ‘who has conflicting business interests,’ and a nominee ‘who has acted immorally in their personal life.’” I guess many of them didn’t apply those standards— or didn’t understand them— when they voted last month.

Rozenstein noted that though TIME made Trump “person of the year,” The Economist made “kakistocracy” the word of the year. Nominees like Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Russ Vought, Charles Kushner, Pam Bondi, Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon, Tom Homan… will do that. “More than just a problem of policy or politics, kakistocracy undermines a core constitutional principle: Functioning democracies need qualified individuals to hold public trust. Trump’s nominees threaten key constitutional norms in unprecedented ways: through their flaws, their number, and Trump’s willingness to skirt the procedural safeguards that ensure the Senate’s role in the appointments process. And like with so many of Trump’s norm-busting actions in his first term, constraints will mostly have to come from the political process rather than the legal one… Trump's nominations represent an unprecedented triple assault on constitutional appointment norms: First, many are unqualified or hostile to their agencies' missions. Second, rather than making a few controversial picks, Trump has flooded the zone, nominating an entire slate of problematic candidates that burdens the Senate's capacity for proper vetting. And third, Trump has signaled willingness to circumvent the confirmation process through legally dubious tactics such as forced Senate adjournment. Together, these moves threaten to transform the appointments process from a constitutional safeguard into a vehicle for installing loyalists regardless of competence.”

Fundamentally, Trump’s second term marks a return to a premodern approach to executive administration, reminiscent of the “spoils system” earlier in American history, before the framers’ focus on good governance was instantiated in law and practice. Early presidents such as Andrew Jackson appointed loyalists and political allies regardless of competence, resulting in inefficiency and corruption. Another notable example is Warren G. Harding's "Ohio Gang," unqualified cronies and corrupt associates who exploited their positions for personal gain.

These historical parallels highlight a departure from the merit-based norms of modern American governance. While the 20th and early 21st centuries saw a trend toward professionalizing the executive branch, Trump's nominations mark a reversion to governance as a means of rewarding loyalty and advancing personal or ideological agendas. This shift risks immediate harm from unqualified officials in critical roles and normalizes such appointments, setting a dangerous precedent for future administrations to prioritize partisan loyalty over public service.

Trump's assault on appointment norms extends beyond the quality and quantity of his nominees to the confirmation process itself. It was unprecedented for Trump to demand that candidates commit to recess appointments and give up the Senate's institutional power. It was also bizarre, given that the chamber will be under Republican control and would thus likely confirm even marginally acceptable nominees.

Are the Democrats in Congress— mostly, though not all, values-suppressed careerists— up to fighting back? Not from what I’ve seen so far. New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, for example, is up for reelection in 2026. She no longer has Manchin and Sinema taking the heat for her reactionary politics but has already made it clear that she and the other right-of-center corporate Dems in the caucus are opposed to taxing the billionaires. So that’s that. The Democrats can’t win with politicians like Shaheen at the fore. And she may not be able to herself.

Although Kamala managed a narrow win New Hampshire last month (50.9%), the Democrats lost legislative seats and their gubernatorial candidate, Joyce Craig, lost to Republican Kelly Ayotte by a wide margin— 436,122 (53.7%)— far more votes than either Kamala or Trump won— to 360,149 (44.3%).

Yesterday, Tal Axelrod reported on the pathetic “non-resistance” Democratic strategy, hoping to cooperate with Trump “on a range of issues, including immigration, federal spending and entitlements... ‘People want to see government work, and we're going to hold Republicans accountable for whether they're willing to help move things forward for the American people. So, if they aren't, then absolutely, that will impact them at the ballot box,’ said Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA), who led House Democrats' campaign arm this year and will do so again for the 2026 midterms. ‘I think we are telling them that we're here to govern,’ DelBene added. ‘And I guess the question is, are they serious about governing?’”

Ro Khanna told Axelrod that “To win in 2026 and beyond, Democrats must focus on building an economic message centered on good-paying jobs and revitalizing manufacturing. But we have a responsibility now to try and find areas of common ground where we can deliver for Americans. I believe that starts with reducing the Pentagon's oversized defense budget while strongly opposing any cuts to programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.” Maybe he knows something I don’t but Trump has already announced that he plans to increase the Pentagon budget and yesterday a new member of Congress, Greg Lopez (R-CO), left the first meeting of the DOGE Caucus and said there will be some cuts' to Social Security & Medicare. “I think these should be on the table,” he told the media.

"We are very open to working with the Trump administration," added Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, the Democratic Governors Association chair. "But no doubt if there are things that they push us to do that that we think are wrong, legal, anything like that, we’ll draw the line."

That attitude will leave Democrats, especially in purple states and districts, with some leverage— either to shape legislation, as they say they plan, or to hammer Republicans as obstinate, operatives said.

It's very possible battleground Democrats are at times taken up on offers for bipartisanship or are made themselves to accept offers. Both chambers have their share of moderate Republicans, too, including Reps. Mike Lawler New York and David Valadao of California, and Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Not “like.” That’s it and “traditional conservative”is a better description than “moderate.” And they have no power, especially not the two in the House. Axelrod continued, also misleading his readers, that “each chamber also boasts some Republican hardliners who view bipartisanship as a four-letter word and a sign that a piece of legislation isn't conservative enough.” Some? No; dozens. The extremists own the Republican Party. End of story.

Yesterday, David Dayen described the Democratic Party as a rudderless ship. “John Fetterman,” he noted, “thinks Democrats should give Trump a pardon on his ‘bullshit’ hush-money case, and support his executive brand nominees, even the controversial ones. Jim Clyburn also favors a Trump pardon, but to create a ‘clean slate’ for the future. Many Democrats, from Adam Schiff to Ro Khanna to Bernie Sanders, are citing points of possible agreement with Trump and shadow vice president Elon Musk. Some are doing this to look ‘reasonable,’ others perhaps to move some discrete items forward where Trump has made a rhetorical overture, others perhaps to set up an attack later if the common ground fails to emerge… Some have decided that the best use of time is to concede to Republican attacks on certain social issues. Some have decided it’s better to elevate arguments on economic populism. (These aren’t mutually exclusive, but differ in framing.)… Some prefer to say nothing and look look towaard the more advantageous politicl ground of the 2026 midterms. Some are in a denial phase, maintaining that the election didn’t really move the needle, and things will swing back. What of the leadership of the Democratic Party? What are they doing? Well, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opened a press conference last week by saying that Democrats are ‘ready, willing and able to find bipartisan common ground with the incoming administration on any issue,’ while also being ready to ‘push back against far-right extremism whenever necessary,’ including ‘any effort to end Social Security and Medicare as we know it.’ That’s not totally inconsistent, but it is unlikely to stir a dispirited party faithful, either… And from behind the throne, while convalescing in Luxembourg, Nancy Pelosi thought this was an opportune time, amid bedlam in the Democratic ranks, to engage in a bitter factional fight over who should be the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee.”

Dayen thinks the problem is that the Democrats don’t have “any leaders who command anything approaching respect. It breeds freelancing among backbenchers, a run for cover where they revert to relying on their political instincts, ensuring that the overall approach is incoherent. It breeds opportunism from party factions seeking to pull things in their direction, ignoring the near-term stakes of the early days of Trump’s second term.”

The inability to reckon with Democratic gerontocracy, from Dianne Feinstein clinging to her Senate seat to the angst over Biden running for re-election to today, is fundamentally damaging the party. Schumer, at 74, is practically a spring chicken compared to everyone else. His top deputy Dick Durbin is 80 and hasn’t decided whether to run for re-election. Even on the ideological left, Bernie Sanders is 82 and just ran his final campaign; Elizabeth Warren is 75 and may have also.

… Some in the Democratic coalition at least recognize their purpose. The multiple federal judges reversing their retirements when it became clear that their successors wouldn’t be confirmed has led to hypocritical seething from the likes of Mitch McConnell. Immigration advocates are readying themselves for resistance in the first real crisis of the second Trump term, when the deportations roll out.

But political parties are somewhat hierarchical organizations. In the complete absence of any tone from the top, the hierarchy collapses into anarchy. The party is coming off an election cycle where voters didn’t learn what Democrats got done, and didn’t see a vision for what Democrats would offer in the future. That vacuum of public consciousness has now been magnified, given all the contradictory and self-aggrandizing stances.

There are over two dozen Democrats in Congress who are 75 or older— and at least 14 over 80.

Jamelle Bouie took up the same problem yesterday and suggested Democrats understand they need to act like an opposition party. Asking the Blue Dogs, New Dems, Mark Warner and the two senators from New Hampshire to make a list of how to proceed and then doing the opposite might be a good start. Bouie points out that an opposition party “would use every opportunity it had to demonstrate its resolute stance against the incoming administration. It would do everything in its power to try to seize the public’s attention and make hay of the president-elect’s efforts to put lawlessness at the center of American government. An opposition would highlight the extent to which Donald Trump has no intention of fulfilling his pledge of lower prices and greater economic prosperity for ordinary people and is openly scheming with the billionaire oligarchs who paid for and ran his campaign to gut the social safety net and bring something like Hooverism back from the ash heap of history. An opposition would treat the proposed nomination of figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth as an early chance to define a second Trump administration as dangerous to the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans. It would prioritize nimble, aggressive leadership over an unbending commitment to seniority and the elevation of whoever is next in line. Above all, an opposition would see that politics is about conflict— or, as Henry Adams famously put it, “the systematic organization of hatreds”— and reject the risk-averse strategies of the past in favor of new blood and new ideas.”

Yeah, add John Fetterman to that list. And Angus King, Michael Bennett, Mark Kelly and Chris Coons. My guess is that we’ll be adding freshman Sen Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) to that list pretty fast. “The Democratic Party,” wrote Bouie, “lacks the energy of a determined opposition— it is adrift, listless in the wake of defeat. 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. They’ve accepted his proposed nominees as legitimate and entertained surrender under the guise of political reconciliation. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, for example, praised Elon Musk, a key Trump lieutenant, as ‘the champion among big tech executives of First Amendment values and principles.’ Senator Chris Coons of Delaware similarly praised Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a glorified blue-ribbon commission, as a potentially worthwhile enterprise— ‘a constructive undertaking that ought to be embraced.’ And a fair number of Democrats have had friendly words for the prospect of Kennedy going to the Department of Health and Human Services, with credulous praise for his interest in ‘healthy food.’”

Democrats have decided, in the wake of Trump’s popular vote victory, that aggressive, full-spectrum opposition to his priorities is a mistake. “Here is what I am not going to do for the next two years and the next four years,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said in a news conference after the election.  “I’m not going to deal with ‘It’s Tulsi Gabbard one day, then an hour later it’s Matt Gaetz, then the next day it’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then he says something on Truth Social, and then the people connected to him are doing something outrageous.’ No, that I’m not doing, because that’s all a distraction.”

It seems strange to think that it is not the job of an opposition to oppose— especially when the people in question have little business in government— but Jeffries isn’t alone in thinking that it is to the advantage of Democrats to hold their powder and avoid direct confrontations. He is in line with high-level Democratic strategists who also think that it is a mistake for Democrats to make noise, draw attention and seize the initiative.

“A pollster to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign told top Democratic Party officials on Friday that they must confront President-elect Donald Trump far differently than they did during his first term,” Holly Otterbein reported in Politico, “urgently pressing them not to focus on every outrage but instead argue that he is hurting voters’ pocketbooks.” According to the pollster, voters don’t care about who he’s putting in cabinet positions and will “give him a pass on the outrageous” if costs come down.

At the heart of all of this— whether it comes from congressional leaders, ordinary lawmakers or top pollsters— is the idea that Democrats can float above the fray and reap the political rewards of any chaos and dysfunction. Besides, voters say they want compromise— and what else can Democrats do but follow the polls?

It’s as if Democrats see politics as a stable landscape— a static field with clear rules. They can respond to voters, but they cannot shape the basic orientation of the electorate. By this view, most Americans are fixed in place and Democrats must meet them where they are. If voters don’t seem to care about corruption, impropriety and incompetence, then there’s nothing Democrats can do to make them care.

But this is not true. We know as much because Trump just won an election demonstrating that it’s not true. Trump rehabilitated himself through relentless self-promotion. He built a constituency for tariffs and mass deportation through endless repetition connected to some basic concerns. His “stop the steal” obsession put him at the center of Republican Party politics. He captured space in American cultural life and refused to let go, winning political power in the process.

Democrats can’t replicate this behavior, but there are lessons to learn from it— the first and foremost being that the public will not make connections and draw conclusions unless you do it for them. And that takes a willingness, again, to seize attention, to throw everything at the wall with the hope that something will stick. If Democrats, following the pocketbook strategy, want voters to blame Trump for any price hikes during his administration, they need to do everything they can now, in as dramatic a fashion as they can manage, to make Trump the culprit— to give voters a language with which they can express their anger at the status quo.

If Democrats want voters to blame Trump for any potential foreign policy failures, they must work now to highlight and emphasize the extent to which the president-elect wants a more or less inexperienced set of hacks and dilettantes to lead the nation’s national security establishment. Even something as obvious as the connection between Trump’s billionaire allies and his support for large, upper-income tax cuts has to be dramatized and made apparent to the voting electorate.

At this stage, there’s little evidence that Democrats are willing to do any of this. Given the opportunity, for example, to effect a changing of the guard— to promote younger and more aggressive voices like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to leadership, even if it upsets the usual rules of seniority, as I mentioned earlier— Democrats said, in effect, No thanks.

This is a grave mistake. Trump’s hand is not as strong as it looks. He has a narrow, and potentially unstable, Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a small, but far from filibuster-proof, majority in the Senate. He’ll start his term a lame duck, with less than 18 months to make progress before the start of the next election cycle. And his great ambition— to impose a form of autarky on the United States— is poised to spark a thermostatic reaction from a public that elevated him to deal with high prices and restore a kind of normalcy. But Democrats won’t reap the full rewards of a backlash if they do nothing to prime the country for their message.

There are other reasons for Democrats to try to take the initiative. There are still many Americans rightfully concerned with an authoritarian turn in the United States. Again, nearly half the electorate did not vote for Trump. They deserve leadership, too. Indeed, the party’s refusal to fight sends ripples through civic life. If Democratic leaders won’t fight, then it’s hard to expect civil society, or just ordinary people, to pick up the slack. Either democracy was on the ballot in November or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.

It is not a distraction to vocally oppose Trump’s would-be nominees or highlight his extreme intentions. Democrats should look at every aspect of the next Trump administration as an opportunity to do, well, politics— to demonstrate their values and show the extent to which this president has no plan to pursue the public good. The quiet and supposedly responsible approach of the past four years is a dead end. Attention is the only currency that matters, and Democrats need some to spend.

Abraham Lincoln was assisted in his first campaign for president by a cadre of young, costumed men who campaigned, marched in the streets and showed militant enthusiasm for the Republican Party. These “Wide Awakes” were as flamboyant and provocative as any movement that has ever emerged in the history of American politics, and they soon held the attention of the entire nation, friend and foe alike. The 1860 election was not, the historian Jon Grinspan wrote, “a dry government process but a public confrontation, and the Wide Awakes had formed to help Republicans fight back.”

So it was and so it is. American politics has always been a game of performance and spectacle, from the whiskey-fueled street debates of the early Republic to the raucous conventions of the first Gilded Age. To be sterile and sober-minded in this arena is to be, for the most part, a loser.