What is the future?
Or where to the Democrats go from here?
“I just forced the Republicans to delete their ridiculous bill name,” Senator Chuck Schumer tweeted to unanimous derision. “It’s no longer named the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill.” There’s a specific and lacerating shame that comes with being even loosely associated with Democrat Party politics, and this is not just because the people at the top are so often cringe. Much of American politics is thwarted in ways that invariably lapse into pretty much crime for more or less the same reasons; the recent flash flood that killed at least 129 people in Texas, for example, can be traced back to DOGE undersaffing the National Weather Service as part of its chaotic quest to dismante of the federal government—and something like this is the inevitable outcome of depraved oligarchs dictating political reality to service their idle whims and delusions. In the face of this deranging reality, the job of Democrats has become terminal in basically every sense. And this job is taken up by delusional blowhards and weird vain crooks who believe that a Blue Cross Blue Shield exec can peacefully coexist in the same coalition as people whose health care claims are being denied by Blue Cross Blue Shield.
National-level Democrats have mostly been reduced to watching Donald Trump do whatever and periodically going on TV to congratulate themselves for not caring too much about the awful things he’s doing. They’re an isolated and conflicted opposition party squaring off against an administration that’s currently speedrunning a half-dozen concurrent nightmare scenarios. Now that the Big Beautiful Bill—or whatever the fuck it’s called now—has been passed, it shouldn’t be analyzed as a mechanism of economic policy. It is a finely calibrated instrument of systemic violence, a statistical genocide written on spreadsheets. The $1 trillion cuts to Medicaid can’t be separated from the ongoing televised spectacle of the degradation of American civic life, which is Trump’s way of couching any domestic anxiety over how cruel and vicious life is going to be with how it will be much more cruel and vicious to other people. The other cuts to disability benefits, SNAP, and social services will result in a quantifiable number of excess deaths among the most vulnerable populations across America. Trump’s Covid response was an actuarial calculus of weighing mass death against the orderly maintenance of profits, and now we are witnessing the ruling class calculating an acceptable number of casualties required to achieve their desired profit margin.
The fact that many of these cuts don’t kick in until after the 2026 midterms scans as a demeaning taunt; Republican politicians are essentially betting on their base being too stupid to recognize that this is a crime against humanity laundered through the legislative process. Given that Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files has done more to nudge the MAGA faithful out of their fascist fever dreams than his suspension of due process or turning ICE into his personal Gestapo, it seems like a solid wager.
This is all very bad. While Democrats will generally say as much, they also can’t seem to figure out how much of that bad stuff they actually object to, or how vociferously they wish to object. To describe this as loser energy is doing it a favor, and you would have to accept that this is a party making repeated ultra-dispiriting mistakes, and not one simply capitulating at the absolute worst time and in the absolute worst way. Their calculation is easy to see—let the party in charge take the blame for all the awful and destructive things that it’s doing, and hopefully voters will notice on their own—and it reflects a strategic passivity that is either merely nauseating or downright criminal. Something like Alligator Alcatraz could be viewed as tax dollars wastefully diverted from sheltering the homeless into a pop-up concentration camp, or it’s the kind of shit Lex Luther would get up to in a ‘60s Saturday morning cartoon. The Democrats don’t object to these kinds of policies on moral or economic grounds; they mostly just watch Republicans careen wild-eyed and slavering from genocidal shitposting to White House UFC fights, and trail behind with their polite concerns.
This does not mean the Democrats are not doing stuff. While they seem disconcertingly at peace with the extent to which they are politically flaccid at the national level, they have been vigorous in enforcing power where and when they can, which is in races like the New York City mayoral election. In a stunning upset, Zohran Mamdani routed Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York whose hamfisted mismanagement of COVID killed tens of thousands of people and reluctantly resigned after a prolonged sexual harassment scandal. And Mandami did so by engaging young voters and other communities that are not traditionally big parts of the Democratic Party electorate. Cuomo campaigned through mostly negative advertisements paid for by PACs supported by Trump-aligned finance creeps, the city’s landlord lobby, and, for some reason, DoorDash. Mamdami, a democratic socialist, campaigned on expanding affordability and has been charismatic and effective in communicating those goals.
Now, let’s stipulate that one candidate is preposterously corrupt and vindictive and generally unpleasant, and his main appeal is Getting Tough on all the problems NYC has, all of which he appears to understand in the same way as the average New York Post casualty. The other is a young, social media-savvy Muslim man who communicates affordability policies with working-class appeal in a way that expanded the Democratic tent. Which candidate do you think the Democratic Party elites would support? Keep in mind, this is the same Democratic Party that has committed to spending $20 million in an attempt to connect with younger voters. Also, keep in mind, this is the Democratic Party.
In the weeks since Mamdani’s win, the Republicans have responded with rote Islamophobia and stock Red Scare fearmongering. At a time when the GOP passed a horrific and devastating piece of legislation, the Democrats—who are contending with the reality that an endorsement from Cum Town podcasters may hold more sway than one from Bill Clinton—have been attacking a fellow Democrat who doubled the youth turnout and won the city primary in historic numbers. It’s unsurprising to the progressive wing of the base that Vote Blue No Matter Who isn’t applied to a stridently left-wing politician, especially after the party rallied around stomping on Bernie’s 2020 presidential campaign with more ruthlessness and efficiency than they’ve rallied around literally anything over the past decade. The Democrats are out of power but not quite powerless, so they are prioritizing the influence they have in the present over a future in which they might play a smaller or different role.
As with the many Democratic politicians who gave queasy and qualified endorsements after calling for Cuomo’s resignation just four years earlier, this seems like the same shameful reflex that powers so many of the party’s most embarrassing capitulations. The only real argument for this decision, and the only one that Cuomo even feigned, is that the alternative would be worse. This has, not coincidentally, been the Democrats’ platform in each of the last three presidential elections, two of which they managed to lose to the living embodiment of The Alternative That Is Worse. The establishment types endorsed Cuomo not only because his strident unwillingness to change reflects theirs, but also because his victory would’ve temporarily forestalled the arrival of a future that looks and sounds and campaigns like Mamdani. For a party that perceives all of its defects as a matter of messaging and optics, it is jarring to watch its aging and unaccountable elite rally around a disgraced sex pest on perverse principle. They oversee an exhausted and abstracted party that can’t or won’t argue against its lavishly fascist opposition, and now understands its purpose as arguing against any deviation from that approach.
The upshot of Biden’s one-term failures and the atrophied and sclerotic resistance that has succeeded him is that Democratic voters are forced to reckon with the inarguable shortcomings of dead-end centrism. However peevishly indifferent and ineffective the Democratic Party has become, this presents the discomforting possibility that they might be more sympathetic to MAGA-adjacent politics than to a guy who wants to impose rent control and open five municipal-run grocery stores. For a decade now, it has been clear to progressives that the Democrats would rather lose to Trump than win with Bernie; they’re fighting Mamdani harder than Trump because now they are pressed to make an affirmative case for AIPAC neoliberalism as opposed to coasting by on anti-Trump hysterics. Their idea, unfortunately, is to preserve a degrading and patently unworkable status quo, to make sure this increasingly untenable present is held in place so it does not slip into anything else.