There is No Progress Without Sacrilege

The problem with the leaders of the Democratic Party is not what you think it is

Watching the debacle of the defection of 10 Vichy Democrats who chose to serve the anti-American, anti-rule of law, anti-knowledge agenda of the fascists in the White House and the Congress was as heart-breaking as it was infuriating.

If the last six weeks are any indication, the damage Trump and Musk and MAGA will do in the next six months will be horrific. Millions of lives will be shattered whether due to job losses, loss of vital government services, national economic misfortune resulting for economically ignorant policies, international programs shut down, and illegal prosecutions and arrests. Critical government capabilities will be obliterated. The rule of law and our rights under the Constitution will be relentlessly attacked.

Senate minority “leader” (and I use the term very loosely) Chuck Schumer argued weakly that he felt Democrats would have a better shot at pushing back on the MAGA agenda when those six months are up. But at what cost?

Clearly Schumer and the nine Dems who voted along with him are as visionless as they are spineless. They will now be complicit in whatever havoc MuskTrump wreaks.

Their actions compound a question that is dogging Democrats. Where are the leaders we need in the moment? Certainly Schumer and his Neville Chamberlain Caucus are not among them. Former Democratic presidents and presidential candidates have been as silent and therefore as useless as church mice in the face of Trump’s torrent of daily abuses. Others in the Democratic leadership are being complacent, inert or submissive. Watching them during Trump’s address the joint session of Congress illustrates that point well.

There are a few voices who have emerged who deserve credit. The best of these, for my money the real leader of the Democratic Party we need right now whether she has the title or not, has been Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. I was not a Bernie Bro but he has made virtually all of his colleagues in the Senate look pathetic in comparison with his energy, clarity and sense of urgency. Jasmine Crockett, Jamie Raskin, J.B. Pritzker, Michelle Wu, Senator Chris Murphy and recently, Senator Mark Kelly have also spoken truth and deserve credit. The rest of the party has been, to paraphrase a comment I saw on Bluesky but whose author unfortunately I cannot cite, acting as the minority party in a democracy rather than as the opposition seeking to stop an authoritarian regime.

What this suggests is that some in the party are suffering from gutlessness and others are suffering from cluelessness and many are suffering from both.

(And please…spare me the chiming in at this point to note that Trump and Musk and Vance and the rest of the GOP mob are the bad guys. I know it. But the only antidote to bad guys is good guys or better yet smart, great women, and frankly, we are in desperate need for those to step up and identify themselves.)

The more I think about it however, the more I think that seeking the courageous and the plain spoken and the decent is not enough. Even having the common sense and open eyes to recognize that we are in a crisis unlike any this country has ever faced is not enough. (And having spent a lot of time with senior and influential Dems recently, the latter necessary degree of perceptiveness is in dangerously, shockingly short supply.)

FUBAR

But the problem goes deeper.

Because the primary argument of the few Democratic leaders who are willing to stand up and be counted is that we want to defend our democracy, institutions and values. In short, and this may be a bit hard for people to hear, the primary argument of Democrats—particularly, you’ll forgive the expression, centrist Democrats—is that we are here to defend the status quo.

But as Trump and MAGA realized, the status quo is broken. In the language of the Greatest Generation, it is fucked up beyond all recognition (FUBAR). MAGA’s diagnosis as to what to do about it is staggeringly wrong and in many respects downright evil.

On the one hand they are using widespread disaffection with our system to empower the creation of something much worse, the most common play in the despot’s playbook. But, when you look at their prescriptions for fixing our problems, they are saying that the primary force that created what they see as the flaws in the status quo was progress and that the answer to that inevitably must be turning back the clock.

For them, the direction they want to go is somewhere between the pre-Revolutionary America of the 1750s and the pre-Civil War America of the 1850s. Let the white men rule. Let the aristocrats rule. Let’s have a king. Let’s forget science and the enlightenment ever happened.

Their slogan might as well be, “Hate the present? Let’s go back to the past.”

But the Democratic message is not much different. It is “Hate Trump, let’s go back to Biden or Obama.” Now, love Biden or Obama however much you may (and candidly…well, I’ll leave that for another day…) they existed in the recent past. And the Dem message is that we’re here to restore America to the recent past, to the results of the progress the country made in the last 100, the last 50, the last 25 years that the Republicans hate so much.

And I get it, people like the familiar and there is a strong argument that even flawed democracy is better than none at all.

But, here’s the thing about the past: It’s not the future.

And here’s another thing about the status quo that I may not have emphasized sufficiently, it’s fucked up beyond all recognition.

It’s appealing to invoke the Constitution when Trump and his crew are shredding it. But that same Constitution is profoundly and in all likelihood irreparably flawed. It gives far too much power to our least populous states, virtually guarantees the Senate to the GOP in perpetuity and therefore makes it much easier for them to win presidential elections. It is also at this point in our history virtually impossible to amend or update as the founders intended. (Those old references to militias have cause untold death and suffering in the world of modern weaponry.)

Combine that with the flaws in our judiciary (see the Supreme Court) and our legislature (see Senate traditions like the filibuster) and misintepretations of the Constitution by that court and those legislators and you end up with where we are today. And the forecast for perverting it all further is not encouraging.

Bad as our political institutions are, they have been coopted and rendered immeasurably worse (thanks to the court and the legislature) by an economic system that has fostered grotesque and growing inequality and translated the wealth of richest Americans into an oligarchy in which those who make decisions for us in both parties actually do not even live on the same planet we do. How many members of Trump’s cabinet or of the occupants of both sides of the aisel in the Congress will ever depend on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, VA programs, or even public schools for their children and grandchildren. Both sides battle over the tensions between their selfish self interests and their imagined view of how the vast majority of Americans should live.

And don’t even get me started on many of our religious or cultural institutions. The rise of evangelicals for example, has led to the collapse of true Christian values in America. (Christ was, as many have pointed out, a revolutionary proponent of the poorest who was put to death for the political threat he was perceived to represent.) Jewish institutions that support a government in Israel that is more concerned with maintaining power than Jewish values have similarly corrosive problems.

And as for cultural institutions, their relative silence in the face of the crisis this country currently faces is a sign of the degree to which their pursuit of commercial successes has led them to be bland and risk-averse to a degree to which they feed and must bear some. responsibility for American numbness and complacency.

“Burnt it all Down”

As my brilliant opera singer cultural diplomat wife Carla often reminds me, one of her heroes, composer Pierre Boulez, once advocated that to achieve musical progress a good first step would be to burn down all the world’s opera houses.

He was on to something.

As comfortable as it is to stick with old institutions (that level of comfort and the inertia it produces are one of the foundations on which they are built), progress requires we recognize when it is time to tear them down. (That was the real genius of our founders. They were deeply flawed men. Washington was a great president but his cabinet was riven with scandal and division. The documents we worship…well, see above. But what they did that real made them stand out historically was that they had the courage to overthrow the status quo, to turn on and reject and defeat the most powerful government on earth.)

It’s not easy. Not only is the familiar soothing and easy to manage, but as people master its rules and some succeed and gain power, they then create myths, traditions and cultural imperatives to preserve the systems that have been so good to them. (What Gramsci called “cultural hegemony.”)

You doubt me?

What if I were to say on television or at a dinner party that American capitalism is a disaster? What if I were to say the Constitution has outlived its usefulness? What if I were to say that organized religion is one of the greatest sources of our problems? Heck, what if I even said the filibuster has to go and the Supreme Court should have 13 members who serve 15 year terms? Or that once you have enough money to pay for a dozen glorious lifetimes, say one hundred million dollars, that all the rest of what you earn goes to pay for the costs of the society that made those riches possible?

Can you imagine a society without billionaires? Or is it easier to start wondering whether I’m a Commie threat to the American way?

But you see, the inequality and divisions that flow from Darwinian American capitalism is actually the real threat to what was the “American way.” And it is what has corrupted our politics and long ago robbed the term democracy of any real meaning in this country.

Our most important institutions are broken. Our fundamental beliefs in them are misguided and our national mythology about them is dangerous bullshit.

Does this mean I’m advocating a Boulezian revolution, that we burn it all down?

Well, not quite. I do think the mythologizing of what is actually hideous or inhumane must stop. I think many of our “traditions” must go. I think that some of our institutions have passed their sell-by dates and that others…comprising the core of what makes our society tick are in need of serious reassessment and renovation.

Just maybe 250 year old institutions need a refresh and maybe ones that no longer serve the vast majority of society need to be junked.

And maybe Democrats ought to be promoting an agenda that advocates reassessment and change, that is future-oriented, that seeks to turn the page forward rather than backward. And maybe to figure out how to get there we need to be more open to ideas that the powerful have defined as sacrilege. (You know the pattern. You suggest the fact that we ought not to be the only country in the developed world that does not offer national health care and you are called a socialist. You want to help people and not companies? Socialist. You want to value the community as much as the individual? You’re a goddamn communist. You think there should be equitable taxes and that includes a belief in redistribution of wealth to serve the needs of the many over the few? Off to jail with you. Or a nuthouse. God help you if you say these things and you are staying in America on green card these days. You’d be on a plane to a camp in the Panamanian jungle lickety split.)

The Vichy Dems hate this talk. They consider it crazily progressive. And in so doing and trying to find middle ground with fascists they make negotiating with terrorists their formula for dealing with our current national crisis. And on top of that they run away from the ideals of the party they supposedly represent.

Since when did thinking about, imagining and advocating for real progress become dangerous? (I ask because that is after all, the core reason some of us are criticized for being pro-progress…you know, for being, Lord save our damaged souls, progressive.)

Most of the current leaders of the so-called opposition in this country do lack courage and a sense of urgency. But perhaps most worrisomely, they also lack imagination.

They can’t see that the crisis we are in flows from the vast majority of Americans in both parties being grossly dissatisfied with the status quo. And they don’t recognize that if one party’s solution to that is to go backwards…far backwards into dark chapters of our history…the natural role for the other party should be to seek to move forward.

Worse still, they don’t even dare discuss the changes that we are in dire and desperate need of discussing. They don’t even want us to discuss it. Raising such questions, is, after all, as we have established, sacrilege.

But then again, all progress, real progress, requires sacrilege.

Do we have the fortitude and vision and creativity to go there? Or will we as so many fallen great nations and empires of the past collapse under the weight of our untouchable ideas, our unchanging traditions, and our too venerated institutions?

p.s. I know this also requires either a reimagining of the Democratic Party or, at very least, a Dem equivalent to the Tea Party, a real pro-change (progressive) movement to elect 20-30 members of the Congress who could hold the balance of power in their hands and thus begin to nudge us in the direction of the changes we require. Because failing that, the only other option, now or later, planned or otherwise, is the option advocated by Boulez.