"Democrats can't do anything"? Don't believe it.

Democrats could organize nationwide boycotts of all companies that are empowering and supporting fascism in the United States. Why won't they?

I read this in the Washington Post from Matt Bai yesterday:

"It seems to me that Democrats have a substantive messaging challenge, too. If they’re defending agencies and bureaucracies, then they’re also stuck defending the status quo of Washington’s government. Which is really not a position you want to be in."

I am tired of hearing this because it isn’t true. This train of thought, prevalent among Democratic elected officials and political commentators alike, is evidence of the type of limited imagination that has made the Democratic party ineffectual and impotent.

Republicans, having embraced lawlessness and chaos, are not bound by any rules and this has freed them from any kind of rigid definition. Many if not most Republican “lawmakers” today do not even conceptualize their roles as government officials who were elected to legislate even though that is the job description.

Many—you know who they are—truly seem to believe that their primary role is to create themselves into antagonist pop-culture celebrities, and the only gauges of their success are how much media attention they can direct toward themselves and to their Führer, Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of Democratic elected officials appreciate that the job description of a member of U.S. Congress is to pass laws in the interests of their constituents. They can’t do it now because they don’t hold the reins of power, and so they and their acolytes think they can’t do anything. In a way, that is as ignorant and as insane as the perspective of democratically elected MAGA-Republican government employees who want to dismantle our democracy, who want to fire all government employees [except themselves], who conceive of themselves as ingenious celebrity trolls who exist to ‘own the libs,’ and who feel an unconditional loyalty to a billionaire who is loyal to no one.

What can Democrats actually do right now?

Lawmaking is off the table. We get it. Every Democratic member of Congress in every video appearance tells us so. Fine, fine—if you are impotent, why do you need to tell everyone every chance you get? Do something else.

1. Talk about something else. Keep showing up on the talk shows, but stop telling us what you can’t do—what we can’t do—and tells us what people need to know. Remind us that Russia and Vladimir Putin have been the greatest adversary of the United States of America for decades, and that has not changed. So what does it mean that the Republican party has fully embraced Russia and Vladimir Putin? It substantiates Democrats’ claims that Republican party leaders in fact are adversaries of democracy generally and of the United States of America specifically. Putin unabashedly wants to destroy the United States. We are the United States—Republicans, Democrats, and everyone in between. Democrats need to explicitly, in one unified voice, tell the American people what is happening: Donald Trump is working to destroy the United States, and every single American person’s life will suffer if he is successful. This goes beyond party lines, and anyone who supports it is effectively committing an act of national suicide.

2. In the United States, money is everything—so weaponize it. Would it be risky for an entire political party to discourage spending? Yes. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and this is a desperate time. Money is effectively the only thing that matters in the U.S. today—or am I the only person who has noticed since the Citizens United ruling that our votes are irrelevant to presidential candidates? We are told incessantly in the year leading up to federal elections that candidates cannot win without our money, and then more of it, because—can we be honest yet?—we have to buy our presidents, and that means our votes are useless. Well, now elected legislators’ votes within Congress are useless, too. They are impotent, they tell us. No, you’re not impotent. You have the power of influence. Any member of Congress can get on almost any media broadcast at almost any time. It’s time to get on the air and to lead a national boycott of all corporations that are enabling a hostile takeover of the United States beginning, of course, with Tesla, X, SpaceX, and the Boring Company. The message: Divest today, not tomorrow, in any stock that enriches Elon Musk. Take your money from his companies today, and as soon as that is done, divest from Amazon, divest from Meta, divest from every corporation that is enabling the killing of the United States of America. If Elizabeth Warren can’t pass a bill in Congress, she certainly can make a case for a nationwide boycott to pressure newly fascist corporate leaders and corporate boards to exert their power on elected officials to stop before the United States of America ceases to exist.

3. Get the hell off of X NOW, and shame journalists for being there. This is a no-brainer, and it’s shameful that it has not happened yet. Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he fired a majority of its staff, he made it into a hate-generating white supremacist hub first of misinformation then of disinformation, then of state propaganda supporting his own illicit governmental activities. And what do Democratic officials and journalists alike still tell the public? Here’s my Twitter handle—meet me there! …?!?!?!? Politicians and journalists alike are addicted to Twitter, and they actively encourage the public to participate in Twitter. What is the effect of this? Constant exposure to disinformation, propaganda, and even white-supremacist hate group recruiting. The popularization of actual Nazism, complete with swastikas and Roman Nazi salutes. Twitter/X remains the de-facto hub of all journalists on the Internet, even when viable alternative platforms exist and have become mainstream for many users. There is no excuse for any Democratic official or for any journalist anywhere in the world to use X. Democrats need to make “GET THE HELL OFF X” a primary talking point and shame every single so-called journalist they speak to for remaining on the platform. There truly is no legitimate excuse for any non-propagandist to use X at this point. Why won’t anyone say it?

4. Shame the Supreme Court justices for empowering the dismantlement of our democracy. Democrats need to do this at every single opportunity. The majority of Supreme Court justices have betrayed the United States of America, they’ve betrayed justice, and they’ve betrayed their oaths to the U.S. Constitution. Yes—their job is to interpret the Constitution, and their interpretations are their excuse for betraying it. Last year, the court preemptively gave Donald Trump full immunity from prosecution, effectively making Trump a king, according to Justice Sonya Sotomayor in her dissent to that decision. Last year, the court ruled that public officials including judges and justices can take bribes for favorable rulings as long as they don’t take them until after the verdict is rendered and as long as they call the bribe a “gift” for services rendered and not a bribe. This is all-out, corruption in all caps and bolded lettering. The public needs to understand the extent to which this Supreme Court has betrayed our justice system, and Democrats need to make the case loudly and relentlessly beginning yesterday because its decisions in the very near future will determine whether or not we remain a democracy, and shame can be a powerful weapon to change minds. Democrats never have focused enough attention on the courts, and they need to laser-focus the public’s attention on the court now. Supreme Court justices need to know that they will not fly under the radar and that they will have to answer to the public following whatever consequential decisions they make that affect American citizens’ futures.

5. Track and report how much worse life is getting for American people. Every Democrat in every public appearance has thrown out “the price of eggs!” as a punchline since the election. It’s not a punchline. Democrats in Congress don’t have the votes, but they do have staffing resources to track data and to report on trends. The Democrats should be releasing weekly reports telling us the cost of eggs is up a dollar this week, another dollar the next week, another and another. This number of American citizens lost their jobs this week. This number of American people were denied healthcare this week. Document all of the damages being done at a breakneck pace and present these data simply every single week. Start a Devastation-O-Meter website that shows these trends progressing week by week so that any person can go to the site on any given day and see how we are failing more and more by the day, more people suffering, and show where this is headed.

6. If Republicans were genuinely concerned about children, I’d also recommend that Democrats present clearly, with empirical data, the estimated number of transgender American people, the estimated number of transgender American children, the number of transgender athletes in high school and college sports, and then the number of American children who are killed by gunfire, the number of children who are homeless, who are malnourished, who will lose healthcare when the Republican party cuts Medicaid. The numbers speak for themselves: The focused attack on transgender children in the United States is inherently cruel and inhumane, full stop, no further commentary needed, but to claim that the existence of transgender people is a threat to children while choosing to look away from school shootings, domestic abuses, poverty and all the other real harms to children that pervade the United States is patently obscene and I can’t not mention it here. However, I don’t think Democrats should waste their breath on this reality as a political strategy because—once again, I will say what seemingly no one else will say—Republicans care only about “winning,” and not at all about the wellbeing of children. If they cared at all about children’s safety, they’d be preoccupied with all the things they choose to ignore.

I’ve got more on my list, but the ultimate point is that Democrats are wasting a lot of time and they’re bringing down morale among their own supporters by whining that they are impotent.

No one wants to hear about your impotence. Not many things can be said to be true about all people today, but that is one remaining truth: IMPOTENCE IS A PRIVATE CONCERN. DEAL WITH IT IN PRIVATE.

I asked someone who has lifelong experience with the federal government, “Serious question: Did you know that the president of the United States has the power to eliminate words from English-language vocabulary with an executive order? I did not think this was possible.”

His response to me: “All I can tell you is that the Democrats are lacking in imagination and Republicans are not.”

I disagree morally, ethically, and legally with this assessment on the grounds that what the Republicans are doing right now is nothing Democrats would have imagined because Democrats are not motivated by becoming dictators.

However, the more I’ve heard Democratic leaders whine that “we can’t do anything for two years,” the more I’ve realized how unimaginative they are. The message they’re putting out is, “We have no way to win a vote, and so we have no power” is a lie. It’s just simply not true. They have power of influence over public thought. They have access to media outlets that the average person and the above-average person does not.

They can do more than talking.

They can organize nationwide protests.

They can organize nationwide boycotts.

They can go after the only thing that Republicans actually care about, money, by cutting off the circulation of dollars to all corporate entities that are empowering fascism in the United States.

The question is why they won’t do this. Is it a lack of imagination, or is it a lack of courage?