It’s time for Democrats to go low

What the 2024 election results made clear is that the Obama coalition is dead. If Democrats are to have any shot at reclaiming power, so too must be the niceties and mores of the Obama era.

Yes, Democrats must get mean – ruthlessly, bitterly mean. This is not to say, however, that they need merely to cast aside the former first lady’s once-famous, now-infamous messaging mantra. No, what I prescribe is not just a new approach to political discourse but a new theory of opposition party politics.

Trumpsim has corrupted America in many ways, but one of the most obvious is how voters now expect lawmakers and surrogates to be truly vicious cultural warriors for them. One can see manifestations of this in the congresswoman Nancy Mace’s deranged bullying of the congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride, the endless and deliberate mispronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name, and the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the top fundraisers in the House of Representatives.

This phenomenon also exists on the left. The coffers poured open for Jasmine Crockett following a tête-à-tête with the aforementioned Taylor Greene, during which Crockett mocked her colleague’s “bleach-blonde bad-built butch-body”. And one could argue the strongest period of the Harris-Walz campaign – at least in terms of Democratic enthusiasm – was during the “weird” and “couch” sagas of Brat summer.

As the commentator SE Cupp recently observed, “it doesn’t get said enough, but Trump’s enduring legacy will be convincing BOTH parties to lower the bar, and that possessing moral authority on anything is no longer a currency that matters”. Democrats can either bemoan the fact the fundamental rules of politics and discourse have changed or they can adapt to it. In the four years to come, emboldened voices on the right will work to expand the Overton window. Democrats’ reaction to this effort must not materialize as feigned – or earnest – injury and horror. Take the punch and return the favor.

This new, more muscular messaging strategy must be combined with a far more aggressive war footing in the halls of Congress.

The Democrat Adam Gray’s unseating of the Republican congressman John Duarte in California’s 13th congressional district cemented a nigh-historically tenuous situation for the House Republican party. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, will have only a 220-seat majority. However, Republicans are poised to lose three seats (if not more) as members resign to join the Trump administration. That will leave them with a majority of 217-seats, meaning Johnson can only afford to lose one member on major – and minor – votes.

The Republicans’ legislative to-do list is nothing to scoff at. In addition to renewing Trump’s first term tax cuts and possibly imposing hyper-controversial tariffs on various imports, Johnson will need to pass a bill to fund the government. Democrats must not help him.

Time and again congressional Democrats have swept in to save Republican leaders – and Republican voters – from their own lawmakers. This generosity must end. The Dems must bleed the Republican party of its political capital at every opportunity, even if it means the American people experience some pain. On a Bulwark podcast this week, the writer Jonathan V Last channeled Alan Moore’s iconic comic book anti-hero Rorschach to describe the mentality Democrats should adopt: “The politicians will look up and shout ‘save us,’ and I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no.’”

Yes, Democrats should make the next four years of Republican governance as grueling and painful as possible. Do not help them pass a budget (if Johnson, as Last playfully notes, offers up DC statehood as an incentive for cooperation, we can have another conversation). Do not vote for a single cabinet nominee – even those who qualify as “adults in the room” (sorry, Marco Rubio). Relatedly, do not hold back from highlighting all the darkest aspects of said nominees’ backgrounds – from former Fox host Pete Hegseth’s alleged sexual assault to Robert F Kennedy’s purported role in the deaths of dozens during a 2019 measles outbreak in American Samoa.

While on the Hill, casual comity is fine. Lawmakers should continue to break bread and imbibe brandy with one another. That is all to the good. But Democrats’ outdated impulse to prioritize good relationships with their conservative colleagues at all costs must end. Recall, many of these men and women have spent years valorizing a violent mob that sought to kill them. Comity for the sake of comity is, well, utter comedy.

On that note, there is no world in which Joe Biden and Harris attending the inauguration makes basic strategic sense. Such a move would only serve to undermine trust in a Democratic party brand that’s already on life support. Either Donald Trump is a fascist or he isn’t. There is no such thing as Schrödinger’s autocrat.

Liberals made the decision to compare the former and future commander-in-chief to Hitler. Rhetoric like that can’t be memory-holed. Thus, symbolically lauding the man’s re-ascension to power will not preserve the Democrats’ reputation as the “party of norms”. On the contrary, it will cement the growing sense – particularly after the pardon of Hunter Biden – that Dems traffic in lies and deceit with the same shamelessness as Republicans.

These strategic shifts – in messaging, in oppositional governance, and in observation of norms – will be difficult for some to swallow. After all, as Robert Frost often liked to observe, “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel”. Democrats must get over themselves; far too much is at stake.

What gives me hope now

Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk. Composite: AP, Reuters

To the limited extent I’m optimistic about the next four years, my resolve is rooted in the fact that Trump’s incoming administration – and his Republican coalition more broadly – will probably prove to be more fractious and wracked with infighting than it was during his first term. As we saw following the “Doge” chief Vivek Ramaswamy’s deranged, 90’s sitcom-addled tirade about H-1B visas and the “mediocrity” of American culture, deep policy disagreements plague the current marriage of OG Maga and the Silicon Valley tech bro billionaire class.

Steve Bannon, even more recently, vowed to “take down” the “truly evil” Elon Musk and excise him like a cancer from Trump’s orbit. Throughout the president-elect’s last stay in the White House, intra-party conflict was largely drawn along old guard versus new guard lines. Trump has since turned the Republican into a cult of personality. As such, slavish loyalty to the king is the only coin of the realm – and there are now major competing policy interests among his yes-men. Couple this with the reality that Trump is a lame duck and party elites will constantly be jockeying to be viewed as the heir apparent, and his den of vipers may just consume itself.

• Peter Rothpletz is a freelance writer.