Here's how bad it is for Democrats

A lot of ink has been spilled on the parlous state of the Democratic party. One way to summarize would be to say that the incremental, accommodationist politics-as-usual approach the party practices has been vanquished by a movement whose approach to politics is completely different.

As suggested in an earlier post on the firing of the Archivist, the Trump-led Republicans emphatically repudiate politics-as-usual. In fact the president’s brand is predicated on the rejection of accommodations to moderation, going all in on an oppositional style. And that brand is clearly winning.

Consider the clean energy tax credits
Here’s a good example: Democrats were playing the politics-as-usual game when they included clean energy tax breaks in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The idea was to make them invulnerable to elimination by focusing a fair share of the rewards on companies in Republican districts. How could a future Republican regime revoke the credits if growth and jobs in red states were at stake?

Of course it didn’t work that way, as the big, beautiful reconciliation bill of 2025 phased them out. In fact there was very little pushback from the affected congressional Republicans; instead, any opposition came from those who wanted a firmer guarantee that the breaks would be eliminated to the extent practicable. As this Washington Post article notes, the president came through with that guarantee in the form of an executive order.

It’s a new day in Washington
As everyone knows, the administration has acted forcefully in multiple areas in just the first few months of the term, threatening and sometimes imposing tariffs; getting tough with with European allies; engaging in full-frontal attacks on the regulatory state, major media entities, law firms, and the educational establishment; slashing funding to the bare bones or less in humanitarian categories of foreign aid and in the arts and humanities; going after the broader science establishment and the medical establishment in particular; and changing the very nature of federal employment. All with the near total complicity of congressional Republicans and much with the provisional complicity of the Supreme Court.

In short, the status quo has shifted under our feet. The status quo ante reflected Democrats’ moderately-liberal establishment interests well and, in many areas (education, the arts, the environment, the media) was overwhelmingly progressive in its orientation.

In the electoral arena it’s been clear for the better part of a decade that Republicans had a distinct advantage, at least in the battle for the Senate and in the Electoral College, if not in the House (although that will change in Republicans’ favor after the 2030 census). Democrats for their part have been complacent about this, but here’s the key: their complacency was unsurprising in the sense that it was unimaginable that the kind of upheaval we’re seeing now would happen.

Trump I
The first Trump administration was terrible in Democrats’ eyes, but what really changed? After all, for the most part the normal incremental ups and downs prevailed. Massive tariffs were threatened, but Trump was talked out of it. National security policy stayed more or less the same. The EPA might have been less vigorous, but nothing that a Biden administration couldn’t reverse in the wink of an eye. The same held true in most areas of policy.

A perfect case in point on a very small scale: funding for the arts increased during Trump I despite being “zeroed out” in every presidential budget request. Talk about politics-as-usual — appropriations continued apace with most agencies seeing bump-ups, and federal workers kept their jobs.

No reason to panic, Democrats reasoned, especially because they figured they could scare people into voting for the Democratic ticket in 2024 by focusing on the “existential threat” posed by a second Trump administration. But why take that threat seriously when the party seemed fine with a weakened 82 year old as nominee, settling under extreme duress on his vice president who had done little to distinguish herself in California politics or the Senate, and who was not even a major player in the administration?

The system would hold the line, right?
Let’s face it, Democrats did not act as if they were actually panicked because, well, deep down maybe they believed that — for example — turning the regulatory state on its head, cutting funding for science, putting an anti-vaxxer in charge of HHS, and effectively ending humanitarian foreign aid couldn’t possible happen. The system simply had too much ballast to allow these sorts of things to happen.

Well, as it turned out in only a few short months everything has changed. Politics had always been an existential game for the populist Republicans — they believed the country had gone to hell and could only be saved by a knight in shining armor masquerading as a reality show star and real estate mogul. Now it’s the Democrats’ turn for an epiphany on what the stakes really are. Too bad they had to learn the hard way.

The last word
Losing elections to an unhinged Republican party was never enough to get Democrats to change their ways, probably because of complacency on the part an establishment that had retained its influence over the major institutions in society through thick and thin. But that time is over. Even the education establishment, where progressive control was almost total, is on the ropes.

What’s at stake is no longer a matter of conjecture. The question is: do Democrats have it in them to compete in this new environment?