Now Is Not the Time for Surrender [View all]

New York Times
Opinion by Jamelle Bouie
December 18, 2024


Democrats may be in the minority, but they are not yet an opposition.

What's the difference?

An opposition would use every opportunity it had to demonstrate its resolute stance against the incoming administration.
It would do everything in its power to try to seize the public's attention and make hay of the president-elect's efforts to put lawlessness at the center of American government.

An opposition would highlight the extent to which Donald Trump has no intention of fulfilling his pledge of lower prices and greater economic prosperity for ordinary people and is openly scheming with the billionaire oligarchs who paid for and ran his campaign to gut the social safety net and bring something like Hooverism back from the ash heap of history.

An opposition would treat the proposed nomination of figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth as an early chance to define a second Trump administration as dangerous to the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans.
It would prioritize nimble, aggressive leadership over an unbending commitment to seniority and the elevation of whoever is next in line.
Above all, an opposition would see that politics is about conflict -- or, as Henry Adams famously put it, "the systematic organization of hatreds" -- and reject the risk-averse strategies of the past in favor of new blood and new ideas.

[snip]

If Democrats want voters to blame Trump for any potential foreign policy failures, they must work now to highlight and emphasize the extent to which the president-elect wants a more or less inexperienced set of hacks and dilettantes to lead the nation's national security establishment.
Even something as obvious as the connection between Trump's billionaire allies and his support for large, upper-income tax cuts has to be dramatized and made apparent to the voting electorate.

More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/18/opinion/democrats-trump-opposition.html