Is This All The Democrats Have Got?

The party in power has been reduced to begging.

There are few things Democratic leadership seems to love doing more these days than making grand gestures of comity to a wholly nonexistent wing of the Republican party. On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer decided to give it another shot.

The Hill @thehill

.@SenSchumer: "I know not all Republicans embrace the views of MAGA Republicans. I know many of them support women's rights and embrace diversity and reject conspiracies like White replacement. I urge these Republicans [...] to repudiate the MAGA wing taking over the GOP."

Schumer’s Pelosi-esque attempt to draw a distinction between the “MAGA wing” of the GOP, and this fantasy of reasonable, abortion-loving, non-racist, non-fascist Republicans comes just days after President Joe Biden debuted the deeply focus-grouped term “Ultra-MAGA,” calling it “extreme, as most MAGA things are.” Like Schumer, Biden seems to be trying to create space for this imaginary breed of non-MAGA republicans to…well, I don’t know exactly? Have some false sense of dignity when they inevitably vote for the most extreme right wing agenda imaginable anyway?

Why do high profile Dems love doing this? Is it that the party bigwigs all reached for the same piece of pizza and bonked their silvery noggins in unison? Did they eat that moldy bread that made the pilgrims trip balls and think their wives were having midnight orgies with Satan? Perhaps most neurologically punishing of all, have they all been reading Thomas Friedman’s latest bout of verbal diarrhea?

Politics is first and foremost an exercise in seeing and understanding the world as it exists — warts and all — in order to affect positive change. If Democratic leadership can’t even grasp the fact that they are in a fight against a wholly authoritarian movement that has purged all dissent or moderation, then they’ve failed in that most basic political prerequisite. These kumbaya appeals only serve as a tacit admission that the Democratic party is bereft of any real alternative to the fascism it faces. Rather than say “well, here’s what WE stand for, and how we plan to give it to you,” the Democrats in charge have opted to say “why don’t THEY change, so we don’t have to.”

Is this really all they’ve got? If so, I think we can all see where this is going — and how it’s going to end.