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Monday, May 12, 2025

Dems in Disarray!

Democrats are weak! Feckless! Disorganized! The most durable of political narratives, a familiar story that's easy to tell, "Dems in Disarray" scratches that corporate itch, satisfies the need for normal, and puts everyone back in their proper places. When corporate mainstream media--greedy and scared from top to bottom line--face the prospect of disorder, dissent, and threats to the quarterly earnings, they will crumble and escape to their safe spaces as they default to shilling for the Boss. Shills gotta shill, and it's especially effortless when they support the liars and their mission.

Thus, we get this from the Wall Street Journal on Sunday:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s leading voices. But some worry she will turn off the centrist voters needed to win competitive races.

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— The Wall Street Journal (@wsj.com) May 11, 2025 at 9:30 AM


"Dems in Disarray!" was the title of a David Leonhardt New York Times column in May of 2018. In it, he attributes the birth of this trope to a 2005 episode of The West Wing. Leonhardt then fast forwards to a March 2006 New Yorker piece by Hendrik Hertzberg. In between I found this in PrawfsBlawg, posted by Daniel Solove on July 16, 2005. 

However it started, it has become a potent cudgel as right-wing "sources," thirsty staffers, and hedging pols trying to save their corner offices feed talking points to a hungry press. And the "disarray" has become an article of faith for the compliant media, a convenient narrative for lazy journalists to snark up whenever Democrats disagree with one another (a shocking phenomenon unimaginable in the Republican Party of Marching Penguins). Now, every time the Natural Order of Things gets a little warped, a little out of alignment, the media fires up the machine and runs it at Democrats hoping to get a laugh at the dopes tripping over their shoelaces. And things right now are warped.

Just when it looked like things might go sideways for Mad King Donald and his merry basket of deplorables (Don't get me started on hate-troll Stephen Miller, and what the hell happened to Elon Musk???), just when the story of people being kidnapped and shipped illegally to a torture prison in another country might be a story with legs, just when it began to look like everything might not go to shit quite as fast as we thought, 

  • on April 15 we get this gift from Politico: 
In unprecedented move, DNC official to spend big to take down fellow Democrats
Leaders We Deserve, which Hogg co-founded in 2023, announced plans on Tuesday to spend $20 million in safe-blue Democratic primaries against sitting House members by supporting younger opponents.     
  • That was followed on April 16 when California governor and attention junkie Gavin Newsom honked up this phlegm ball, as reported by NBC News from April 18:

As California Gov. Gavin Newsom rolled out a lawsuit Wednesday challenging Trump’s sweeping tariffs, he had little to say about the Abrego Garcia case when asked about it.

 "This is the distraction of the day. The art of distraction,” Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential contender, said of Trump invoking MS-13 to justify his actions. “And here, we zig and zag. This is the debate they want. This is their 80-20 issue, as they’ve described it.”

"THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED MORE OF," Hogg wrote on X Thursday night. "We have to show people how we are fighting back and are here to protect the American people from [Trump's] reckless agenda."

The "Dems in Disarray" army got to work, aaaand they're off!  

  • Also April 18, Axios felt the need to remind us that "Democratic National Committee vice chair David Hogg's plan to spend $20 million to primary older Democratic incumbents in Congress has sparked intense anger from some lawmakers" under the headline "House Democrats fume at David Hogg's plan to oust lawmakers."


Turns out, Newsom may not even have said that, exactly. The quote came in answer to a question from Sacramento Bee reporter Lia Russell, who wrote about it on April 22. You can read the article and decide for yourself if the clean-up is any better than the spill. 

What is indisputable is that it was reported this way, and paired with the David Hogg reporting, the rift is the story. As usual.


Meanwhile, Trump remains vulnerable:


He appears increasingly unhinged:

REPORTER: Has Qatar asked for anything in exchange for that $400 million luxury jumbo jet, & how can the American people be so sure that they will not in the future? TRUMP: I think what happens with the plane is that we're very disappointed that it's taking Boeing so long to build a new Air Force 1

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 12, 2025 at 7:41 AM


And he's lost the Pope:

"Trump claims he’s making America stronger; he insists no one can defy him. But here are people defying him, and they seem better off for it, not worse. It makes him look weak — and people are a lot more comfortable defying a president who seems weak than one who seems strong."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 12, 2025 at 8:50 AM


That means the Disarray drumbeat must go on. 

There's this April 26 article by Kayla Epstein from BBC News. It represents disagreements among Democrats in a typical zero-sum fashion: "But the Fighting Oligarchy tour is only one theory about how the Democratic Party should evolve," and "New guard or old guard?" and "Some Democrats accused their party of falling out of step with more conservative Americans on subjects like transgender rights, or failing to accommodate diverse viewpoints within the party's ideological spectrum." As if you can't be anti-oligarchy and anti-discrimination at the same time. Some Democrats.

Sidebar: I think some Democrats, maybe because of unfamiliarity or embarrassment or prejudice or fear, refuse to address transgender rights from the correct stance. The Republicans have dominated the narrative by focusing on transgender as a scare word and offering slogans and dubious anecdotes to shape opinion. Many Democrats simply shy away from the fight, and it makes them look weak, or complicit. Rather than offer a counterclaim, they leave the field entirely. 

In my opinion, the focus should always be on rights. This is not about sports or bathrooms, and it's clearly not about science. Focus on rights. Human rights are human rights, full stop. Fairly easy to understand and very popular, not to mention having a long, albeit imperfect, history of being the reason we're even a country. 

Republicans will always try to turn it inside out to protect the rights of people who are not transgender, but if Democrats are committed, that rhetorical jiujitsu can be met with a simple example: Did the freedom of enslaved people impair the rights of white slave owners? Yes, it eliminated their right to enslave people. The right to deprive others of their rights is always illegitimate. If Dems can't say that, they should take themselves out of the game. (And it wouldn't hurt to spread around a little actual science as well.) Sorry, this has been on my mind.


And we're back. While the "Dems in Disarray" machine runs best on fuel supplied by insiders, the whole BBC article reads like a premise in search of evidence as it goes door to door for quotes from a medley of dissatisfied "rally attendees," politicians in and out of work, the odd professor, and James Fucking Carville. Picking over the bones of recent and not-so-recent disputes, the article never gets around to weighing the substance of the arguments. It's the argument, Stupid.

Perhaps the perfect mixture of snark and toxic sourcing comes from Politico. "‘It’s time for Joe Biden to go away': Democrats are triggered by Biden’s return to the spotlight" reads the headline, and reporter Brakkton Booker has graciously accepted the gift of Joe Biden's appearance on ABC's The View and taken the time to confirm the Dissaray by talking to a writer, a former special assistant to President Biden, and two journalists with a book coming out about "President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again" with the modest title Original Sin.

You know who else Booker managed to dig up? FOUR! COUNT'EM FOUR! different Democratic strategists. One who worked for Bernie Sanders, one who worked for both Biden and VP Harris before the strategist quit, one who worked on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, and one who seems to have worked only for Sen. Raphael Warnock for a couple of years in Georgia. I'm not saying these sources were cherry-picked to support the narrative. I'm just saying. 

One other weird thing. Does anyone out there know the difference between a "strategist" and a "consultant"?

Finally, who is our "Dems in Disarray" champion? The answer may surprise you. We nominate NBC for this thoughtful April 26-27 article by Allan Smith, Alexandra Marquez and Natasha Korecki. It doesn't downplay disagreements among Democrats--over policy differences and leadership preferences, over focus on an economic message or moral/social issues, but the article generally frames the "conversation" as an effort to build something new and responsive to the needs of constituents. It doesn't choose a side or foreclose the possibility that there are more than one right answer.

It includes the voices of several young Democratic leaders and presents the "conversation" as a process of trying to get somewhere rather than a Disarray dead end worthy of a savvy eyeroll. It's our champ precisely because it does the opposite of what you'd expect after reading this headline (emphasis mine):

Democrats want a great new society post-Trump. They just can't agree on what it would look like.

Democrats are increasingly saying that simply unwinding Trump’s policies isn’t enough. But there are still broad disagreements on policy issues and who the next leader should be.

Well, it's a start. Baby steps. 


Thanks for reading. See you soon.




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