This is not a viable opposition

A brief history of the Chuck Schumer saga – and where the movement for constitutional democracy goes from here.

Alex Edelman / Getty Images

In the weeks after November 5, 2024, the many millions of Americans who had voted against Donald Trump faced a personal choice. Trump and his allies had made chilling promises––and prevailed. There were now basically two ways to understand the country we live in and our place in it: Either this moment in U.S. political history was more or less normal, or it was not. Where one came down on this question would have great bearing on what they felt should happen next, and what––in a society that wishes to remain democratic––would be required of each of us.

Around anxious family dinners, at organizing retreats, on podcasts and radio shows, and in all the places where people deliberate, half of America, finding itself now in the opposition, debated this question.

One argument went like this: This moment, strange and alien as it feels, still sits within the normal bounds of American political history. Yes, the characters are more eccentric than usual, and the new guard surrounding the President-elect is more wiley and disciplined than the last. The courts may create a glidepath for conservative cultural victories and the nature of the Western alliance may change. But the answer to a devastating political loss isn’t a revolution; it is simply a politics more responsive, in style or in substance, to the wants of the electorate. America has endured far worse; our memories are short, but the nation’s life has been long––our democratic institutions can withstand the strain. Let’s call that Universe A.

The other argument said that this really wasn’t normal––not even close. This view predicted that Trump and his people would do everything they said they would do, and more. Their North Star would not be a more conservative democracy, but Budapest on the Potomac––a society that performs the rituals of democracy but only after stripping them of any real meaning. With the most vulnerable among us now hyper-exposed and new oligarchs waiting in the wings, the American people hadn’t just elected a new president; they had hired a death doula, prepared to usher our very form of government through hospice and into the great beyond. Universe B.

In the months before the election, Democrats had sounded every alarm that a Trump victory would plunge the country into Universe B. On the airwaves, the party’s top brass warned that the Republican nominee wouldn’t represent only an ultraconservative regime or an era of unprecedented corruption; he would, in their words, govern as a “fascist.”

But the election came and went, and within a few weeks of their defeat, the same party faithful who had warned of Universe B descended upon Washington for annual holiday receptions. The alarms heralding the end of the republic were drowned out by the clink of champagne flutes. As Inauguration Day neared, many of the elected officials who had held up signs and chanted slogans of objection in late 2016 and early 2017 seemed to opt for a quieter passage into the new world. This was not the conduct of a movement which earnestly believed that the fascists were at the gates. It was not the conduct of a movement at all.

This strange dissonance seeped into the early days of the new presidency, as the party elite continued to describe Trump’s threats in dramatic prose while using few new tactics outside the regular box set of Universe A political tactics (press conferences, speeches at committee hearings, the occasional protest outside a government agency). Then, last Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer allowed a stopgap funding bill to advance to the Senate floor, essentially handing Trump the funds to continue dismantling the government. The Democratic dam broke, and with it came a monumental flood of anger from party activists, rank and file voters, and House Democrats––some of whom had taken personal electoral risks to stand in opposition to the Trump government.

There’s been an instinct among some political commentators to cast the anger over the Democratic concession as unreasonable. Josh Barro mocked liberals frustrated with Schumer, scolding that it’s not the Senate Majority Leader’s job “to satisfy your emotional needs.” Matt Yglesias argued that Schumer’s detractors, whom he suggested were Twitter warriors, were “engaging in cheap position taking” because they hadn’t coalesced around a concrete alternative to voting down the measure.

The longtime public servant (and institutionalist) in me is sympathetic to these arguments; I felt this way constantly when I worked in local government and our office would come under fire from frustrated constituents or the local paper’s editorial board. People outside government often can’t see the hours, days, sometimes years of invisible work it takes to get good, new ideas through the creaky, narrow, brittle piping of old bureaucracies. We are tremendously constrained, and we have to make hard decisions, I’ve often thought when serving in government. What do you actually want us to do?

But the political project before us now is broader than those battles. It’s different in kind from getting new housing built, or paving potholes, or driving down the cost of living (though it must include those aims and I will write on this more). The goal is to fend off authoritarianism. Research shows that the extremely difficult work of reversing antidemocratic trends requires engaging huge swaths of the population in civil resistance and pressuring different parts of society, including powerful elected leaders, to stop playing by the regime’s rules.

That means helping people see that things are not fait accompli, and that there is a place for them in a movement where they can find community, identity, and purpose. It means relentlessly drawing contrasts for the public, creating friction for the regime, and counter-narrating every harmful decision the Administration makes (one role of a “shadow government” in parliamentary systems).

Imagine if, instead of caving, Schumer had gone on TV with union leaders, local party chairs, and 2026 House candidates. He could have called on people across class and racial lines to rally in front of Republican Congressional offices in swing districts and demand they stand up against Medicare and social security cuts. He could have invited new people into the movement, opened midterm season, and put scores of Republicans on defense. This political fight wasn’t about making online activists feel vindicated; it was about starting to build a dynamic culture of opposition that sweeps more and more Americans into this work.

We missed the moment. But we can’t afford to miss any more. Americans who have long operated under a certain set of political assumptions have been forced to forge new civic neural grooves, to recalibrate their personal political obligations. For our elected leaders to take a moment to get their bearings after the election was frustrating but not entirely unreasonable. But to operate this way now is absurd.

Schumer is thinking like a dealmaker, working to game out a system of incentives that no longer exists, but this is an astonishingly small way to behave in the face of the bigness of rising authoritarianism. Yes, the shutdown saga was a wasted opportunity to galvanize a new wave of defiance and activism. But it was also a confirmation to those of us who see all the signs of where the Trump regime is headed, that the Minority Leader is living in a different universe––in Universe A.

I will write and share more in the coming weeks and months exploring the topics of risk, personal and political courage, and building an oppositional culture in the United States. But the bottom line is this: we are in Universe B. There is no longer ambiguity about the authoritarian intentions of the new regime. The broad, multi-ideological democratic front we build can either have leaders who need to be pressured, pushed, and embarrassed at every fork in the road, or we can elevate people whose instinct is to think capaciously about political conflict, who embrace defiance and friction as a creative, comprehensively animating political ethic.