Don't Do Nothing.

                                     

So many people have written or said it that I can't find a clear original source, but it's too true not to use. If anyone knows, please share its origin. Goes like this:

"If you ever wonder what you would have done in Nazi Germany, take a look at yourself. You're doing it right now."

I'll be at the rally tomorrow in downtown Los Angeles. Where will you be?

In his "Off Message" newsletter today titled "Fighting Means Fighting" (available on Substack), Brian Beutler urges Democrats to Do Something! and addresses two of the countless iniquities committed by the Trump regime. As is wont to happen under this mafia government, "as travesties pile up by the hour," the Big Story of Trump secret police disappearing people off the street has been shoved aside for the kitchen table issue of utterly insane Trump Tariff Trade Wars. 

The Dem rank and file has been clamoring for action for a couple hundred years now, which is hyperbolic because it only feels like forever. Forever since Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman and conceded. Forever since the Iraq vote. Forever since no public option and NEVER CLOSING GITMO. Enter the Trump Tariffs.

The resulting crash in the stock market that threatens to crash the housing, job, and retail markets along with everyone's retirement savings is good for ratings (look at that ticker go!) and gives Democrats an opportunity to appear sentient. As Beutler puts it, "because this hits people’s wallets, Democrats aren’t afraid to throw their weight around."

That's the easy part. The hard part is that people are still being kidnapped by secret police.

This should be an easy call. But for Democratic politicians and the pollsters they love, it's complicated. Yes, as Beutler writes, "Trump’s security services are snatching innocent people off the streets, hustling them out of state into federal detention far from their homes—pit stops along their way to a gulag in El Salvador, and perhaps other black sites," but polls show immigration is Trump's Popularity Stone, and that gives Dems the heebie-jeebies. Yikes! It's too scary to talk about. 

With the Immigration Question now the alleged third rail for the spineless, expect some Dems to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge their way through all encounters that broach the subject.

Cue Brave Brave Sir Ruben (Gallego) providing what Beutler calls "a window into the minds of the Democratic strategic class and its front line members" when, in an interview with the Arizona Daily Star, Gallego expressed "qualified support for sending migrants to El Salvador, 'if they are dangerous.'" 

The reporter, Emily Bregel @emilybregel.bsky.social, did a really good job of trying to pin Gallego down on whether he supports the deportations--even to the Salvadoran torture prison--as they are being implemented by the Trump admin. He responded to her persistent questioning with a master class in hemming and hawing, repeating talking points, "if only"s, and "there's nothing we can do"s. Classic Dem attempt to walk the razor's edge and pretend to say something without actually doing so. 

It's weak and disgusting, and Beutler described the hedging this way:

This is a stain on the party. But it’s explicable, if you’ve watched how Democrats have operated over the past several years. And in this moment of mass intraparty revolt against supine leadership, the moment might be ripe to fix it.

I'm not so sure. This "supine leadership" has been unwilling or unable to stand up for a long time. Maybe their muscles have atrophied from years of disuse. Beutler admits that, rather than playing safe and avoiding contentious issues, rather than reading polls and following the disastrous advice of consultants trapped in the same timid time loop, "It’d be better if they had their own well-defined moral centers and good instincts." 

Yes. Yes it would be better. For example, it would be great--and I'd argue politically powerful--if they not only had those moral centers and good instincts but campaigned on them, acted on them, resisted based on them.

Beutler thinks we actually might be at an inflection point of sorts. "In my optimistic moments, I think things might be starting to change. The rising against congressional Democrats after the government-funding fight didn’t go undetected by party weathervanes." Big, if true.

I say we're not there yet. We've got AOC and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. We've got Chris Murphy and Jasmine Crockett. We've got Janet Mills and Tim Walz and J.B. Pritzger. Dinosaur Chuck Schumer did receive serious blowback for his cowardice and blinkered judgment on the CR vote and had to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge his way through a book tour he shouldn't have taken for a book he had no business writing.

But the weathervanes won out in Wisconsin where Musk illegally meddled in the Supreme Court election and evaded accountability as cooler heads and colder brains urged restraint. But where is the outrage--expressed publicly and passionately--over the kidnapping and rendition of people without due process? This should not be a matter of opinion, or a political calculation. It is fundamental to who we are as human beings and who we will be as a nation. Sadly, I think Beutler is right:

But of course the real problem with the disappearance and trafficking regime is moral. It is illegal and it is evil.

And yet, by comparison to the partisan opposition to tariffs, it’s crickets.

Referring to Elon Musk and his interference in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, Beutler writes: 

I think it would be better for him to fear that Democrats might do something, rather than do nothing. That might make him fear committing election crimes anywhere Democrats have law-enforcement power. And the effect won’t be simply to protect off-cycle elections. “Doing something” is also how Trump’s last reservoirs of political appeal turn toxic, and American democracy survives.

Again, yes, it would be better. 

We need leaders who will do the right thing rather than the safe thing. Yes, your first job is to have a job, but I think the calculation that doing the right thing--for the right reasons--cannot also be popular is faulty. Maybe if you can't do that, you need to have a different job.

It's true that Trump is out of reach in many ways thanks to his private form of immunity bestowed upon him through an illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court's outrageous and lawless decision. And yes, the party formerly known as Republican is in thrall to the aspiring dictator and will do whatever is the opposite of standing in someone's way. 

Still, for Democrats, and for all right-thinking people, doing something is better than doing nothing. We can't afford to leave the fight to people who may not have the stomach for it. And it is something I like to think I would have done 

in Nazi Germany.

I'll see you tomorrow. It's not everything, but it's not nothing. 

If you love the country and want it to survive, Don't Do Nothing.