When Will the Democrats Stand Up Against Fascist Culture Wars and For the Party's Base?
The answer, I fear, might have to do with porcine wings and an extreme cold snap in a very hot place
I don’t believe in god or hell. But there are days when, if I had the power of a deity and a hell to send “sinners” to, my better angels would almost certainly lose the battle for my conscience and I’d consign quite a few Democrats to eternal damnation. After all, most members of America’s current “opposition” party are perfectly willing to put transgender Americans into a hell of our own—or at least to stand by and look the other way while Republicans do it.
The time to dispense with a “bipartisan” posture was about a zillion years ago, or at least back in the Obama years, when Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell implemented a scheme of pure obstruction to undermine the president and the Democrats at every step. An even better time would have been back in the 90s, when I was in middle school and Newt Gingrich ran the House of Representatives with a hard right iron fist. Meanwhile, independent counsel Ken Starr, who would go on to let a major college football rape scandal happen on his watch as president of the oh-so-Baptist Baylor University, did immense damage to many people’s lives in his scorched earth inquisition that led to the impeachment, and acquittal, of President Bill Clinton (who, yes, was indeed a sleazeball with consent and power dynamics issues).
And what did Clinton do? He made concessions to Republicans at every turn. (Look up the details, kids—if there are any of you reading this. It builds character.) It didn’t even seem like he needed much prompting to listen reverently to the likes of Ayn Rand devotee and then chair of the Federal Reserve Bank Alan Greenspan on economics. Clinton seemingly happily went along with the undercutting of New Deal protections (such as the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933), which led directly to the subprime loan crisis and the Great Recession. And he (and his attorney general Janet Reno) seemed to be gleefully all-in on the “tough on crime” ethos of the era. Not to mention the welfare reform that disproportionately hurt African Americans. Sure, he left a balanced budget to George W. Bush, who promptly obliterated it. But with Democrats like these, who needs Republicans?
Let’s be clear. “Wokeism” is code for supporting trans rights.
Between now and then? As Kurt Vonnegut quipped in “Welcome to the Monkey House,” a (definitely problematic) 1968 short story about a dystopian future, “America had changed in many ways, but it had yet to adopt the metric system.” Along the same lines, the sky remains blue and the Democrats remain absolutely useless.
To be perfectly fair, of course, the Democrats weren’t entirely useless in the 1960s. Pushed by the heroic efforts of Black Civil Rights activists and martyrs—who, by the way, we should celebrate all the louder this Black History Month given the Trump regime’s attacks on “DEI” (which are not a “distraction”)—Democrats passed national civil rights and voting rights legislation. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who personally whipped votes for these bills, also championed a set of policies he called “The Great Society,” building on FDR’s New Deal legacy to help make the United States an easier place to get by for ordinary people. (Yes, Johnson also got us deep into Vietnam and was rightfully lambasted by anti-war protestors as responsible for American atrocities in a war we never should have fought.)
As a result of all this, the segregationist Dixiecrats split off from the Democratic Party, and, long story short, they and their ideological descendants became Republicans. Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, his Southern Strategy has dominated Republican politics ever since, and we are very much reaping the whirlwind of that now—along with, of course, the legacy of the 1980s embrace of right-wing evangelicals by Ronald Reagan.
Many, many things have gone wrong as a result of the success of these Republican moves, and, for the most part, national Democratic leaders have either failed to fight seriously against the cruelest Republican initiatives or have been outright complicit in them. Dems let abortion rights be chipped away with their undue deference to “real Americans,” for example, and then were somehow shocked when the illegitimate Supreme Court ( thatthey did nothing to address when they had the ability to do so) overturned Roe v. Wade. Is it even naivete at this point? It’d be hard to believe it isn’t willful, if not for the fact that it’s such obviously bad political strategy—and yet the Democrats double down on it again, and again, and again.
Enter “moderate” Minnesota Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar, who pretty much embodies the worst impulses of today’s Democratic Party (at least since Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, cursed be their names, stopped bothering to pretend to be Democrats at all). Naturally, The New York Times adores her.
You can’t tell a typical Dem their party is anti-fascist. I mean look, some of their best friends are fascists.
How do you, as a national Democratic leader who has lived through the last two weeks of endless illegal executive orders and memos attacking marginalized groups, get through an entire interview without once mentioning transgender Americans, immigrants, or birthright citizenship? Klobuchar shows the way.

The way involves writing off the “chaos” and “corruption” as possibly “a distraction,” asserting that “Americans want us to work together [with Republicans] when we can and find common ground,” and using the phrase “hold accountable” a lot without even gesturing at doing so in any serious way. After all, how could you hold Republicans accountable when you’re still taking Donald Trump at his word that he cares about bringing down the price of eggs, and insisting that he is different in private than he is in public—that he “listens to my ideas.” The way involves responding to a question about the supposed need for Democrats to distance themselves from “wokeism” by talking a lot about “building trust” and rural Americans and farmer and small businesses and “bread-and-butter issues.”
Let’s be clear. “Wokeism” is code for supporting trans rights. But rather than talk about how they’re happily abandoning us to the raging fascists we call Republicans, “polite” “centrist” Democrats like Klobuchar simply deflect to talking about “real Americans.” A typical Dem balks at the suggestion the suggestion they’re intolerant of fascists. I mean look, some of their best friends are fascists.
Somehow, every time the Democrats face a major national loss like they did in last November’s election, their loudest and most prominent voices show up to proclaim, along with a host of pundits, that all they need to do is be more bipartisan, compromise more with the completely uncompromising radical Republicans, take their base even more for granted (even though turnout and enthusiasm are what demonstratively propels them to victory), throw more marginalized people under the bus. In the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, this strategy has only led to one result: the country moving ever rightward, as Democrats move rightward in response to unmoving Republicans in order to chase voters who will never give them credit for anything.
What happened as Republicans chipped and chipped away at the scope of the Roe decision and found ways to limit, and even eliminate, abortion access in red states over the decades? Leading national-level Democrats at best kept their heads in the sand, all the way until the illegitimate Roberts Court overturned Roe and suddenly they were clutching their pearls in shock at this assault on “settled law.” But nothing is ever “settled law” to an extremist movement.
The thing is, when one political party is waging a culture war against the base of your party, and you don’t fight back? You’re too “high-minded” to acknowledge the war? You lose, that’s what fucking happens. Fully radicalized into fascism, the Republicans continue to wage a brutal culture war and class war. The Democrats sometimes pretend to care about the class part, but they don’t act like they actually recognize the urgency of any of it.
The Trump regime’s assault on the civil rights of trans Americans, and on racial and ethnic minorities (enacted through sweeping bans on a ridiculously broadly defined “DEIA”) will never stop because the Democratic leadership pretends they’re not happening and claims to love rural (Christian, white) people. But when you look at the Democrats with power in the national party, this deluge of executive orders might as well be happening on another planet. At most, they are a “distraction” not to be worried about. How nice for them. But to some of us? This sudden push for draconian discrimination is a direct threat to our lives and livelihoods.
The EOs targeting trans Americans include one instructing federal agencies to stop recognizing our very existence. While those of us with changed gender markers in our passports can still use those passports for now, it is entirely possible that this executive order will be interpreted as meaning that all transgender passport holders’ passports must be revoked. If that happens, those of us who haven’t left will be trapped in this country, and the federal government will have free rein to do anything to us (unless, for those of us in blue states, our state governments put up a fight, which I’m thankful that my state of Washington seems prepared to do to some degree).
I didn’t raise this scenario in public earlier for fear of seeming alarmist, but the way things escalated last week, I honestly find it entirely plausible. This would be one effective way to trap a scapegoated demographic inside a country’s borders without attempting to implement exist visas that would affect everyone, be widely unpopular, and probably be impossible to push through even in this environment. But trans people? Hardly anyone cares enough about us to bat an eye at these executive orders. Why should I think they’ll care more when we become literally trapped in the United States, perhaps to be subjected to “reeducation” camps with forced conversion therapy or any number of other genocidal possibilities.
Hell, Klobuchar and her fellow travelers were undoubtedly aware that billionaire doofus-in-chief Elon Musk and his subordinates were jockeying for access to the treasury—to acquire for Musk, a megalomaniacal and extremely anti-trans asshole who has no official role in the federal government, what amounts more or less to a line-item veto for the disbursement of congressionally allocated federal funds. The papers are now reporting that this has already happened, while Klobuchar tells the Times’s Michelle Cottle that she and other Democrats bravely stood up against the federal funding freeze and got it reversed. (Credit for that probably temporary reversal in fact goes to all the Americans who pummeled their senators and representatives with angry phone calls.) But that reversal won’t matter much in the long run if a fascist billionaire who isn’t formally part of the government is now calling the shots at the Treasury. Where’s the urgency in the face of genuine crisis?
National-level Democratic leaders insist on being hopelessly naive. In many cases, I can never tell if they are actually naive or just playing the game that way, but the result is the same. They are letting America fall to the worst and most vicious people possible because they don’t believe that predictable things will happen until those things happen, and they refuse to consider the demographics that make up their base to be as valuable and worth listening to as the Trump voter down at the Tastee-Freez.
Federal grant funding that was illegally frozen got unfrozen; great. But now, in an even more wildly illegal move, we have a broligarch taking on a completely extralegal position in the Treasury who is apparently able to do whatever he wants with that power. Will the courts declare this illegal? Almost certainly. Will the Trump regime honor court rulings that don’t go its way? Almost certainly not.
Things are not going back to “normal” here in these United States. And the Democrats, with their American-exceptionalism-addled brains, are going to manifest destiny themselves into ever more complicity with coming fascist horrors—and for what? The bought-and-paid-for accolades of the corporate legacy media outlets that refuse to call a Nazi salute a Nazi salute? Posterity will not look kindly on this damn fool Democratic Party.
In any case, we are in uncharted political waters. America is thoroughly broken, and something will have to give at some point. If the country emerges from this crisis as one nation (anything is possible at this point), I hope it will do so with a people’s party whose leaders actually care about the people who vote for them. We need a real reconstruction in the United States, and that will never happen so long as the nominally “progressive” party coddles the neo-Confederates.
We should start calling the Democrats the “Do Nothings”.
There really isnt a common ground anymore. Are you still on Insta? Check out this GREAT reel, "What are laws for?" https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFXtiVwutiH/ That may be close enuf to an explanation. (Just remember that an explanation is not an excuse.)