The Wall Street Journal added fuel to the fire last week with a story that pitted younger House Democrats against their elders. “Age is a bigger headache for Democrats than Republicans for one central reason: Democrats have a lot more old members,” the Journal noted. This has come at a cost recently: Five House Democrats have died in office in the past 11 months. All were 65 or older; younger replacements might have been able to kill key GOP bills, had some key vacancies been filled. Another aging Democrat, Gerry Connolly, will have to give up his recently claimed ranking membership of the House Oversight Committee because the severe cancer diagnosis he was dealing with at the time of his ascension did not magically get better.
I’m sensitive to the argument that we cannot just discount experience and hard-won knowledge, and anyway, age isn’t the Democrats’ main fault line. What I’m seeing emerge among the Democratic base isn’t so much a tension between old and young but between inertia and the willingness to fight hard against Trumpian misrule. And that’s going to make for some strange bedfellows: Right now, the octogenarian Senator Bernie Sanders and the much younger Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are raising hell on an anti-oligarchy tour; they’re going to end up basically in the same trenches against Trump as would-be presidential candidate and current Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who is—let’s face it—pretty much an oligarch himself. Still, these are three Democrats raring for a fight, while others either blanch at the prospect of open conflict or simply accommodate Trump.
I’m happy to assist. The most important thing any Democratic elected official can do today is wake up each morning planning to relentlessly criticize and discredit the president and his party, who give Democrats a lot to work with. This is a task that needs far greater participation among Democrats than I’m currently seeing, especially on the economic front. As I said last week, we are headed into the Summer of Scarcity, which means barren shelves, shuttered businesses, lost jobs, and a deep recession. For Democrats too afraid to talk about anything but “kitchen table issues,” this is your moment. Get after it!
The Democratic Party also needs some of its members and best-known figures to start seeding the earth with the future they envision if they return to power. This begins with paving the way for “CTRL+Z 2028”—a promise to undo the damage done to the civil service with the same alacrity and doggedness with which Trump and his flunky Elon Musk destroyed it. Those plans, by the way, emerged into public view two years before the presidential election—numerous reports revealed the magnitude of right-wing schemes to dismantle the government, and numerous figures were excited to talk about the shock-and-awe tactics they were going to deploy. If we aren’t soon seeing similar stories about Democratic plans for renewal, then something is deeply wrong.
Democrats need their own anti-DOGE, they need their own Project 2025, and they need to get this People’s Cabinet—or something else with the same goals—off the ground. What we need less of is navel-gazing, pissing and moaning about your cable news coverage, sops in the direction of “working with Trump” and “reaching across the aisle,” defending outdated norms, and heeding the suggestions of political consultants who haven’t made a correct observation since last century, if ever. If you’re up for the real job of uprooting Trump and building a better future, then I say it’s fun for all ages. But if you’re only suited for the latter set of tasks, then it doesn’t matter if you’re 25 or 75—politics just isn’t your bag.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here. Read More Details
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