What is wrong with these people?*

*Democratic party leadership

This week I have been on a book research trip, only catching up on news in short bursts of checking my phone while on subways and between appointments. I guess it’s healthy-ish to not be staring all day every day at my computer, my inbox lighting up ceaselessly with chilling headlines. But something about the way I’ve consumed the news this week has made it jarring in a different way: a slow-rolling display of Democratic cowardice and moral collapse, delivered in staccato jolts.

As the NIH defies the court and continues to cut scientific research funding; as another person maybe dies of measles while our HHS head posts smiling pictures of himself hiking; as a governor and a billionaire crow about the firing of a state agency employee for refusing to remove his pronouns from his email signature; as the economy judders in response to massive job losses and Trump’s erratic tariff play; as the President continues to treat the annexation of Canada as a real possibility …

In the midst of all this malevolence and peril, some Congressional Democrats responded with fury! Fury! At Al Green, the eleven-term Democratic Congressman from Texas who had the moral fortitude and basic human decency to stand up during Trump’s speech to Congress on Tuesday and yell, among other things, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!”

Green was forcibly removed from the chamber, and on Thursday, ten Democrats voted with Republicans to censure him for his righteous behavior, forcing him into the well of the House to be publicly shamed. Thankfully, a couple dozen of his Democratic colleagues—including Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Maxine Waters and Ilhan Omar—surrounded him there in support, singing “We Shall Overcome” as Speaker Mike Johnson tried unsuccessfully to silence them.

But the spirit of solidarity did not animate Democratic leadership, who in the days after Trump’s speech called in others who had been disruptive—including Texas’s Jasmine Crockett, Florida’s Maxwell Frost, Oregon’s Maxine Dexter (who tweeted “I left the State of the Union because I will not dignify his cruelty”) and New Mexico’s Melanie Stansbury, who held up a hand-written sign reading “this is not normal”—to lecture them about the behaviors that party leadership saw as undignified. An Axios story about that meeting included one of the funniest-not-at-all-funny quotes I have read recently: “They are not being talked to like they are children,” a source who may or may not have been Dr. Becky assured the reporter about leadership’s disciplinary approach, “We are helping them understand why their strategy is a bad idea.”

Meanwhile, in the same week that it was reported that incarcerated trans women have been forcibly moved to men’s prisons in defiance of court rulings claiming that Trump had no standing to order it, California governor Gavin Newsom decided it was a perfect time describe trans athletes’ participation in sports as “deeply unfair.” At the Atlantic, Tim Alberta spoke with Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin about how Democrats’ imaginary history of enforced “land acknowledgements [and] pronoun policing” was “weird,” taking what was one of the best communicative weapons Democrats ever deployed against Trump and his boys, and turning it instead on themselves. Meanwhile the New York Times reported on politicians, university presidents, and business leaders who want to speak out against the administration but are scared about the retributive harm that will befall them and their families. This is a real and terrifying dynamic, designed to quell dissent from the powerful, and the speed with which it has done just that must be particularly devastating for the millions of less powerful people and their families who are already being harmed by the administration.

How can political opposition possibly weaken itself any farther than through this kind of gutlessness and garbage capitulation to nasty, fictionalized narratives crafted by the cruel autocrats they’re supposed to be standing up to? It is so possible to be the Good Guys in this moment! These leaders are in a position to challenge an administration that is taking away healthcare, jobs, social security, dignity and democracy; Musk and Vance and Trump and Vought aren’t metaphorical supervillains, they are actual supervillains, who have adopted an actual horror movie prop to enact a chainsaw massacre of our democracy, the economy, and our basic civil rights and protections.

But somehow any pushback more profane or disruptive than the little hand paddles raised by some Democrats during Trump’s speech—as if this were an afternoon at Sotheby’s, our wellbeing and future as a nation on the block—is too over-the-top, too rude, too unruly.

And look, this is not new. This is exactly how Democratic leadership acted back in the summer of 2018, when Maxine Waters, then going head to head with Trump over child separation and the righteousness of protest, was scolded by leadership of her own party. During that summer I wrote about the suffocating calls from the left for "civility,” always a code word for the protection of those already in power from those who object to how they wield that power. "To publicly rebuke a Black woman’s support for protest, and not the powerful white patriarch’s thinly veiled call to violence against her is to play on the very same impulses that Trump himself plays on,” I wrote six years ago, in a piece that could have been more or less written about the party’s treatment of Al Green and his fellow protesters this week.

Not for nothing, after that rageful 2018 summer of protest and discomfiture of the powerful—behaviors that party leaders were so sure were going to be a turn-off to voters—Democrats won in the biggest blue wave in decades.

So right now I’m focusing on sending thanks and acknowledgment to the Democrats who are taking this seriously, including those who gathered round Green in the well, the ones who got gentle-parented by Hakeem Jeffries, plus the lawmakers who did not even attend the speech, including New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Washington Senator Patty Murray and Connecticut’s Chris Murphy and Hawaii’s Brian Schatz. I also want to cite some of the more moderate voices who have been standing up, including my home state politicians Janet Mills (whose politics I do not like when it comes to criminal justice but whose willingness to defy the president regarding the state’s protection of trans athletes has been extraordinary so far) and Independent Angus King, whose Senate floor speech in early February was excellent.

I cite King in particular because I want to be clear that I am not suggesting a one-size fits all strategy for Democrats here. While my politics are left-progressive, and while I happen to respond warmly to pushy expressions of rebuke, I don’t believe there is any one tactic that will fix this grievous mess. I don’t think that every form of activist-protest is the answer, and I am not looking only to the politicians I’m most aligned ideologically for leadership. I believe that this period requires as many approaches to resistance as there are humans (and leaders) who understand the need to resist this administration’s terrifying overreach and destruction. Some of them will come from left-wing agitators, some will come from centrist defenders of norms; presumably they will reach different audiences and resonate for different sensibilities; some attempts will succeed in channeling public dismay and slowing the harm, others will surely fall flat.

The unforgivable error in my eyes is the choice of otherwise listless Democratic leadership to train its fury not at the malevolent Trump-Vance-Musk regime, but instead on the Democrats who have chosen to be vocal in their challenge, in their insistence in conveying that this is not normal, this is not mere partisan disagreement, that this is cruel and unlawful and fundamentally illegitimate. Resistance can look a million different ways, but if it’s aimed not at the abusers of power but at those with significantly less power (seriously, fuck Gavin Newsom) then it smells bad and right now the top of the Democratic party stinks like a dead mackerel, and is acting with about as much energy.

So I’m looking at the extraordinarily brave people out there who don’t have the power or protection of Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi, but who seem to understand far better than these lawmakers what is at stake, and behave accordingly, despite the risks and consequences being far graver for them. I’m looking to people like Frank Zamorra, the Texas Real Estate Commission employee who got fired for refusing to remove his pronouns even after having been ordered to do so and who simply explained to the Austin American-Statesman, “I could not, in good conscience, contribute to those actions in any way—no matter how small."

I’m thinking of my friends in Houlton, Maine, the very conservative rural Maine county where my mother and grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great grandfather grew up. Fifty-two Houlton residents came out this week in the biting cold, standing in slush and ice with signs about restoring democracy, waving flags for Ukraine and LGBTQ rights. A few days later, a group of my friends spoke to an ABC affiliate about the devastating impact that Trump’s on-again-off-again tariffs on Canada are having on their border community.

Can Democratic House leadership, or the Republican lawmakers we keep reading are terrified of Trump retribution, even begin to imagine how hard it is to be a public political dissenter in Texas, or in a small conservative town where everyone knows everyone else? These lawmakers who are so afraid of losing their political power, power that’s theoretically theirs because constituents hired them to fight for things they believe in: can they conceive of someone like Zamora, whose job may have had nothing to do with fighting for justice, but who lost it nonetheless, because having that fight was the right thing to do?

I promise (perhaps for some subscribers, this should be a warning) that not all of these Substack entries will be political rants. It would get boring, and I would just repeat myself; in fact, I sometimes feel as though I’ve been repeating myself for 20 years.

Also I am sinking into my book research, which begins in 1920s Germany and extends to the beginning of the 21st century in New York City. It feels good to be looking toward the past, even some of the ugliest parts of the past, because it is possible to see how people fought through and eventually emerged from global political crisis.

Spoiler alert: It was not by censuring Al Green.

— I have two big reading recommendations this week. The first is Jamelle Bouie’s brilliant column on Trump’s revenge campaign against the American people.

— The second is this by Gillian Branstetter, about how getting mad online (like I’m doing here, perhaps) can get converted into fuel by the civility-mongers. It has not convinced me to stop getting mad online, but rather to think about how power structures work cleverly to contain and minimize challenge to those structures.

Hysterics & Hashtags