The News
RICHMOND, Va. — Democrats are pivoting again.
At their rallies and protests, in interviews and Senate speeches, Democrats are once again offering themselves as defenders of American democracy and tradition — a new Tea Party movement, rebelling against a new mad king. It echoes a closing message from Kamala Harris’s campaign, which worried some Democrats at the time, and which fell out of favor after Donald Trump’s victory made them ask whether they had lost focus on pocketbook issues.
They’ve grown more comfortable with that rhetoric this year, while hammering the administration over tariffs. More elected Democrats have started calling Trump and his administration “fascist,” a word most had previously left to activists and academics who weren’t trying to win elections. In his appearance at Hamilton College last week, Barack Obama said that pressuring colleges who don’t “give up students who are exercising their right to free speech” was “contrary to the basic compact” of America.
“You know, our state motto is Sic Semper Tyrannis,” Virginia House Speaker Don Scott said Tuesday at a rally here, for Abigail Spanberger’s Democratic campaign for governor. “We don’t like kings in Virginia!”
On Saturday, at more than 1,400 “Hands Off” rallies organized by the liberal nonprofit Indivisible, every policy issue got a shout-out and a sign. But it was shot through with appeals to history and tradition — Trump was not just a political problem, but an existential threat to democracy.
“People are concerned that this isn’t a traditional policy fight,” said Ezra Levin, who co-founded Indivisible with his wife Leah Greenberg in 2016. “It’s between people who want a traditional constitutional republic, and people who want to replace it.”
The View From Democrats
Harris’ campaign message had plenty of critics at the time. They questioned whether the party that protected Joe Biden from a primary was truly “democratic,” and asked whether appeals to tradition meant anything to voters struggling to pay bills.
But those skeptics have grown more comfortable with that strategy, reaching into the same phrasebook to denounce how Trump is using his powers.
At each stop of their rallies last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood between the American flag and the flag of the state they were speaking in; in their remarks, they warned not just that Trump and Elon Musk were depriving working people of benefits, but that they were at odds with American tradition.
“The people who founded this country took on the most powerful person in the world at that time, the King of England, and they said, ‘We never want to have one person in this country who has all of the power,‘” Sanders said in Denver.
“Fascism” is becoming a popular name for that threat. In DC, House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark promised to fight “against the fascist lie that our bodies are not our own.” Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar warned that the ultra-rich were “utilizing the chaos our fascist president is creating.” Florida Rep. Max Frost warned that “authoritarians and fascists succeed when we are quiet about what matters,” a line he’d used days earlier at a Transgender Day of Visibility rally.
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, quoting Thomas Paine to connect Trump to George III. The new administration had “the politics of Mussolini and the economics of Herbert Hoover” — not just authoritarian, but incompetent.
Levin said that organizers had considered a different date for their rallies: April 19, the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord. It was moved up because that date would have clashed with Easter and Passover.
“In many ways, this is a small ‘c’ conservative movement,” said Levin. “MAGA is not a conservative movement. It is deeply reactionary.” The DC rally, he noted, ended with a chant that didn’t mention either party. It was: “How many kings? No kings.”
David’s view
The anti-Trump polity has shifted from its conviction in his first term that the president wasn’t a true victor and that it was the true majority that was cheated out of power by the Electoral College, or that Democrats were just one more demographic wave away from victory.
They now see Trump as the most successful avatar of a new right-wing nationalism that’s won elections from Brazil to Hungary. The argument isn’t that Trump isn’t legitimate — winning two elections settles that — but that there is an American tradition he isn’t part of.
That’s driven a shift away from the internal criticism of America that Democrats embraced in the early Trump years, and that conservatives very successfully campaigned against. It’s been 10 years since Iowa Democrats dropped the names “Jefferson” and “Jackson” from their annual party dinner, explaining that they needed to “align with the values of our modern-day Democratic Party: inclusiveness, diversity and equality.”
The party still defends those values. But it’s far more comfortable attacking the new administration over competence or norm-busting — and talking about an America founded in 1776, not 1619. Its new Paines are Heather Cox Richardson and Rachel Maddow, not any of the thinkers who wondered if American law and tradition was built on lies.
“They want to take away our pride, as Americans, for the Constitution and due process,” Ilhan Omar said on Saturday.
This isn’t the lunch bucket approach that politicians like Sanders suggested after the election. That’s why his use of it stood out to me. He still says that the Democratic Party has lost touch with working Americans, but in the larger context that America is becoming a “psuedo-democracy,” where elections are for sale and presidents rule by divine right.
Winning Wisconsin’s supreme court election last week calmed some nerves about the election-buying question. No calm is coming on the presidential power question; Democrats are getting daily reminders of how Trump will exert his power and how far the Supreme Court may go to allow it. Arguing that the current administration is not just wrong, but tyrannical, had been fairly effective for conservatives as they resisted Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Democrats are now very comfortable with that script.
Room for Disagreement
Claremont Institute senior fellow Daniel J. Mahoney argues that liberals are overusing and misusing their historical analogies, especially when they compare Trump to a fascist.
“The defamation of American conservatives committed to the preservation and sustenance of a constitutional republic is accompanied by, and culminates in, the trivialization of the monstrous evil that is National Socialism,” he writes. “What is sacrificed is nothing less than the truth and the capacity for measured civic and moral judgment on the part of those who hurl such slurs, and those who hear and accept them.”
Some Democrats have fretted about the party being defined by opposition to Trump, like Maine’s Jared Golden, who has repeatedly defended the president’s experiment with tariffs. “I kind of rejected the premise that you just have to play to your base,” he told Time Magazine in February, explaining how he won enough Trump voters to win.
Notable
- On her Substack, Margaret Sullivan asks why Saturday’s protests got relatively muted news coverage. “Many mainstream news organizations basically see this as Fox News does: Just the usual suspects — ‘liberals’ — doing their thing. Nothing to see here, move along.”
- In Esquire, Charlie Pierce talks to independent Maine Sen. Angus King about the “grave danger” of Trump’s power moves. “We are arguing about the fundamental structure of the Constitution.”