Burying the Donkey

A Liberal's Argument for Declaring the Party Over

It’s taken a while but we finally have an unignorable fascist problem in the U.S. Arguably it’s a blessing that our problem is yoked to one particular political party. Hypothetically it means that all we have to do to quell this disaster in our own back yard is beat Republicans in elections. Which, all things being equal, shouldn’t be too considerable a task. Unfortunately—for us, the global community, and the prospects for every living thing on Earth—things aren’t equal. The GOP has figured out how to exploit constitutionally built-in advantages that give them an insuperable lock on electoral competitiveness for the foreseeable future.

Rules controlling the composition of the Senate can’t be changed without constitutional amendment. Nor can those that describe and enforce the Electoral College. It isn’t a coincidence that we stopped passing constitutional amendments during the same decade the GOP started regularly gaining control of the House of Representatives. They know how to exploit a competitive imbalance when they see one, which is how they’ve come to so completely master the federal government in spite of their tiny—and oftentimes negative—vote majorities.

Current trends suggest this situation will only get worse. The big blue bastion states of California, Illinois and New York have been shedding population to cheaper red states for years and at a pace that is accelerating with the deepening housing crisis. While it’s conceivable that some or even many of these blue state expats will bring progressive voting patterns with them, that is not a foregone conclusion, and, even if they do, their numbers aren’t significant enough to overcome established GOP majorities in those areas any time soon. But they are significant enough that, when it is time to adjust statewide congressional delegations/electoral votes based on the 2030 census, reliably blue states will lose out to reliably red. Even small shifts in this direction will have enormous consequences for capital “d” Democrats. A Democrat running for president today only has to plan on winning by a majority of 5 to 7 million votes in order to ensure victory, while their counterpart can squeak by with a comfortable minority. Imagine how much worse this will be when California, Illinois and New York have ceded electoral pull to Texas, South Carolina and Florida.

People who’d prefer not think a lot about politics don’t want to expend energy parceling out culpability among powerful actors. It saves time and requires a cooler, more diffuse negativity to simply dismiss the entire enterprise as hopeless or corrupt beyond repair. This has had the tragic result in our time of degrading the concept of public service in and of itself as well as generally lowering people’s expectations—both excellent outcomes for the forces who’d rather you not be looking at what they’re getting away with in the fetid cesspool on the Potomac.

As over the years the GOP has aligned itself with, exploited, or been co-opted by (take your pick) the ascendant “burn it down,” “drain the swamp” element, Democrats have been forced to become default champions of the status quo. It’s hard, I think, to blame them. If one of the two parties authorized to hold the nuclear keys is off their gourd, the other had better come to work every morning with their shoes polished and their cuffs pressed and their hair did.

In 2016, New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote that she was “hoping people realize [that what Donald Trump promises is the] kind of change you get if you decide to remove the trash by driving a bulldozer through the kitchen.” For quite a while now, the GOP’s posture toward the obligations of governance of our shared home (staying open, paying its bills, safeguarding certain realms of human activity from the profit motive, etc.) has compelled Democrats to insist on the sanctity of the edifice. Somehow this refusal to get out of the way of the bulldozer ends up being construed in the minds of many as an implicit allegiance to the trash.

The effect on the ground of all this liberal sobriety and upstandingness has been a cataract of funding. Whereas the GOP continues to be chiefly bankrolled by corporate interests and billionaires, the Democrats are now brought to you by corporate interests, billionaires, millionaires, the vanishing middle, most of the professional classes, academia obviously, still the labor unions for what they’re worth, and the sea of small donors who might nearly have saved us from Trump by way of Bernie—could the left have gotten out of its own way. It’s a ton of money but, as Republican Supreme Court justices have long averred, money is speech, and that which flows into the coffers of Democratic candidates arrives in a cacophonic tide. Rather than a clarion call to action, the very multifariousness of democratic support lends it the incoherence of the voice of the crowd. As the GOP has winnowed its ideological breadth down to a spearpoint of kleptocratic libertarian nihilism, the Democratic tent has struggled to cover a resultantly expanding constituency. Since Reagan, more or less, what passes for the national debate of ideas has pitted an ever-collapsing tunnel vision against a blob mentality. It was hard enough forming a coherent platform while juggling the delta between Bernie and Joe Manchin. Now the Cheneys have boarded the train. That Dick Cheney and A.O.C. have a common enemy would no doubt be to our advantage as a freedom-loving people were it not for the aforementioned constitutional bullshittery. Never in three contests has Trump won an outright majority of votes cast. Almost 600,000 more Americans voted for someone else in 2024. It doesn’t matter.

The fascists are winning because the Democrats have become too weak to defend democracy.

Photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash

Consider the solitary thread of hope clung to today by those of us disinclined see the country dissolve beyond all recognition. The midterm congressional elections are historically seen as a referendum on any presidential administration’s first two years in office. Given the state of the Republican house majority, 2026 looks favorable for Democrats, but even those wearing the most cobalt-tinted glasses admit that it would take a miracle to flip the Senate. Which means it’s reasonable to project that the likeliest best-case scenario for Democrats is a narrow majority in one half of a body of government vested with no authority a sufficiently indifferent executive can’t ignore (and win approval among his constituents by so doing). Congress has been surrendering power to the executive this entire century. Now we have an executive at the top of a party hellbent on being unchecked and unbalanced, hoovering up the rest. I submit that if tenuous and (inevitably) brief control of half a defanged Congress is the country’s best hope for salvaging its lower-case republican and democratic principles, that is no hope at all. That is a horse that needs putting out to pasture.

The Democratic reaction thus far to Putin’s clown posse putsch has been instructional. Abject disarray is the textbook diagnosis. They’re also completely powerless, which is only one iota less powerful than they are when they are in power in Congress. Party mandarin James Carville counsels playing dead: let the GOP own the disaster of themselves, then come out shooting for the midterms. Ezra Klein considers that it is time Dems began tempering their kneejerk support of government: they need to be the party of effective government, not merely the party of any government. Matthew Karp, from the vantage of Harper’s formidable Easy Chair, seeks to let the air out of the present hysteria, suggesting that Trump is not such an aberration that the usual dismal gravity of second terms won’t apply. Parul Sehgal beautifully surveys the (re)emerging It-field of solidarity, “a notion so oddly elastic and enticingly vague,” she says—not in fact drawing any comparison to the Harris campaign.

While myriad immediate and compelling reasons exist to bemoan the advent of the second Trump Administration, its direct actions to undermine and reverse environmental progress made under the Biden Administration must be considered paramount. As the world’s largest economy and worst polluter, America is too big to fail. If the only feasible alternative to a political party dedicated, explicitly or not, to generational disinheritance of a livable planet, is a political party that cannot offer meaningful or enduring victories, don’t we owe the future a different party? Isn’t that the very least we must attempt?

Many of the authors of our republic were convinced that factionalism would ultimately kill the experiment. They may well have been right, but rigorous, disciplined and triumphant factionalism is its only realistic hope now. Nuclear and economic clout render us for the moment an unconquerable problem for the world. No one is coming to save us, including our existing institutions, and we have the power to ruin things for everyone. I propose for your consideration that the Democratic Party face the reality that, in the twilight of its usefulness as an organizing entity, it has been effectively euthanized by its dishonest little brother. The chaos cleaving the party today, with a tottering old guard under Chuck Schumer retaining veto power over a much more numerous younger element temporarily unified by dismay, points up but one of many chasms the party in its current incarnation will face as it attempts to find its footing as a bulwark against the dystopia Putin has in mind.

We can’t afford to wait.

Imagine Joe Biden was the last Democrat. You couldn’t invent a better: amiable, dizzy with age, intermittently coherent, a consensus seeker gracefully manning the helm of a ship whose passengers had long since turned against the crew and each other—a ground reality too insane to sufficiently alarm so supremely reasonable a person. Famously the poorest Senator, one touched often by tragedy, capable of dating himself with soaring oratory but better known for using the word “malarky” several decades too late, his last three noteworthy acts on the world stage were 1) dying during a very important debate, 2) withdrawing from a very important race, and 3) gamely donning a MAGA hat to be insulted by a Trump supporter while smiling on tv.

Perfectly for a Democrat, his greatest achievements will almost certainly redound to his least honest detractors. The vast investments of the Inflation Reduction Act will only begin percolating through the economy during the second half of the Trump presidency—assuming the current presidency abides by the traditional schedule and that there is still at that time an economy through which an effective government can percolate funds. Neither of which are sure things.

We have run out of time to refit-at-sea this sinking ship.

In so far as anyone can be a lifelong this or that, I am a lifelong Democrat. Dyed-in-the-wool and yellow dog have been apt descriptors. I come from a long line of capital-d Democrats and had I ever managed to father any tiny Americans I’d have been really annoying about it. I love a big raucous room full of Dems. I love that there’s so much we can’t agree on. I love the native resistance to falling in line so as-if genetically rooted that we tend to make a mess of our own coalitions. But the stakes are too high now to allow for our discord. This is a very old, disputatious and confused donkey. I think the party’s over.

My hope with this piece has been to provide an argument for turning the page. As to what we choose to write on the tabula rasa of the future, a Pew Research poll conducted in February of last year provides a potential blueprint. Only eleven issues were identified by more than 50% of participants as needing immediate addressing by the government. Of those, strengthening the economy, reducing the influence of money in politics, reducing health care costs, solidifying Social Security, and improving education were among the most popular. Imagine a new left party, severed from the debilitating distractions of the culture wars and the burdensome—if unarguably honorable—baggage of the Democratic past, consecrated to a platform founded starkly and forcibly on those five promises.

Today, entire generations of politically disengaged Americans have ample reason to doubt that they will ever enjoy a future secured by homeownership in a stable, functional, affordable country. Their votes are up for grabs, and the world’s oldest political party isn’t likely to win them.