It hasn’t yet been five whole days since the president’s State of the Union address, and miraculously, it’s already being forgotten. That’s well and good, as far as I’m concerned. It was a pack of lies anyway.
I figured I wouldn’t spend time writing about it, but now I find that I must, not because of anything Donald Trump did, but because of what 10 House Democrats did, which is to say, acting like goddamn fools.
Before I go on, I have to explain something about the nature of public opinion. By the time I’m done, I hope you will understand why these 10 Democrats, while they probably meant well, are actually undermining their party’s infant effort to mount meaningful opposition to Trump.
First, most people don’t come to their own conclusions about politics. Their opinions are not theirs. No, not really. They’re someone else’s.
I know that sounds a bit insulting, like you don’t have a brain. I don’t intend to be insulting. I’m merely acknowledging a reality, which is that, for normal people who do not work in the media, politics happens in the background of their lives, and by the time they have a chance to focus on it, it’s been mediated one way or another by people like me.
As a consequence of this reality, the opinions that normal people have are a variation of the opinions that elites have, whether those elites are people in the media, like me, or people who have so much money they don’t have to work and can spend all their time thinking about politics as well as ways of getting normal people like you to agree with them.
In short, whatever the elites think is usually what normal people think. To be sure, there’s lots of fighting and argument and disagreement, and there are individuals and groups on the margins of the mainstream, but more or less, the elite consensus is the consensus.
The problem, with respect to the Democrats, especially in the wake of a presidential election in which theirs was the losing party, is that their instincts run against the grain of what they should be doing to shape public opinion against the party and the president that defeated them.
Their instincts are to say to themselves, well, the critics of the Democratic Party must have a point on account of the Democratic Party having been defeated. So it makes sense to give voice to those critics for the purpose of winning over people who voted against us.
In other words, their instinct is to “moderate” or “move to the center” or “compromise” in order to appeal to that elusive undecided voter.
This instinct, however, is counter to pretty much everything. Why? Because of the nature of public opinion. Normal people do not come to their own opinions. Not really. They adopt the opinion of the elites.
So when one group says the Democrats are the problem, and the other group says, well, yeah, some of us are indeed the problem, and a third group (let’s call them “undecided voters” or “centrist pundits”) says both sides are the problem, guess what the consensus is going to be?
The Democrats are the problem.
Which brings me to those 10 House Democrats.
Today, they voted alongside the entire Republican conference to censure (which is to say, reprimand) Texas Congressman Al Green for getting into good trouble at Tuesday’s State of the Union address.
At the beginning of Trump’s speech, Green stood up and shouted, and he kept shouting until, according to the AP, the vice president “motioned with his thumb” to the House speaker “to throw Green out.”
Afterward, Green told reporters he’d face any punishment because Trump “was saying he had a mandate, and I was making it clear that he has no mandate to cut Medicaid,” referring to the health care program used by 80 million Americans. “It’s worth it to let people know that there are some of us who are going to stand up against this president.”
https://www.tiktok.com/@nbcbayarea/video/7478189738709601566
The AP report had another telling detail. “Rarely has a lawmaker been so swiftly and severely disciplined for improper behavior.” That’s because Al Green is Black, almost certainly. And 10 non-Black members of his party chose to agree with the GOP, which is to say, they chose to sabotage one of their own while sending the message to people who might otherwise support them that they shouldn’t bother. They are:
Personally, I think the entire Democratic caucus, in the House and Senate, should have boycotted the State of the Union address. Their nominee, Kamala Harris, ran for president on the idea that Trump was a menace to democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. If they agreed with her, they would not have given the impression, with their presence Tuesday, that everything’s going to be fine. (Indeed, some Democrats did not attend the speech. They believed what they said.)
If they are hoping, and I think they are, to convince constituents that they are one of the good Democrats, one worth voting for and keeping in office, their presence at the State of the Union should have been enough. They did not need to censure Green to accomplish that.
But they did achieve two other things.
One is pissing off Democratic voters. Like the State of the Union, the vote to censure Green will be forgotten in short order by pretty much everyone except everyone who is looking to the Democratic Party for meaningful opposition to Trump. Come the midterms, undecided voters aren’t going to remember the vote. Partisans, however, will.
The other thing is worse. That’s undermining opposition to Trump by deepening the already powerful national consensus against the Democrats, by agreeing with the Republicans in saying that yeah, some of us Democrats really are the problem, especially the Black ones. How can anyone believe that the Democrats would stand united against Trump when some of them so easily throw one of them away?
These 10 House Democrats believe they are going to get something for their betrayal of Al Green, at the very least, a degree of goodwill from their constituents when in fact, all they’re going to get is more hatred and fury, not only from outside their party, but from the inside, too.
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