Grin Without a Cat

Sometimes on the internet you encounter one of those pictures that needs no explanation. A brightly colored bird foregrounded on a lawn, say, while a housecat lurks behind it in the grass, flattening its body to the ground. You know what comes next: The cat will pounce, because that is its nature. The difference between Democratic voters and party leadership is the difference between that image and one featuring a molded-concrete cat from the garden store.

Outside of a stunning defeat, there is never more left-of-center strife on social media than when a victory hoves into view, as one is doing now. People get excited and anxious and blurt out things with the spasmodic energy of that first conversation after quarantine, or the first time a teen asks out a classmate. Everything is right there, just behind a door, and if you can just burst through, all the delayed and denied tomorrows will be waiting on the other side.

That combative anxiety intensifies the further it gets from being a daydream. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the administration’s conception of immigration policy and enforcement is deeply underwater with Americans. Burning it all to the ground is overwhelmingly popular among Democrats. Beyond that lies an open field of related, long-desired reforms and radical policy changes around policing, privacy, corruption and the carceral state, all of which will require court reform to survive. Now we just have to wait to see what a leadership firmly to the right of its constituents will do after more than a generation of waiting outside the door, as still as statues.

It’s been a long wait, and already the excitement is wrestling with frustration. The dual nature of having so many great and morally necessary opportunities within reach is that they are all so close to slipping away, a sensation that feels so immediate and omnipresent because it is so familiar. People want to see the gap bridged between their urgency and that felt by their representatives. While Democratic leadership gives every appearance of seeking a promise from Republicans that the Department of Homeland Security will comply with certain procedures that are already the law, more and more moms, active seniors and members of the brunching class are embracing a wholly correct message to the DHS that boils down to, “The opening bid is Nuremberg.”

It is a breathtaking and awesome thing to witness a majority of Americans reject a law enforcement agency, even in a poll. But now the people are ready to kick through the door. The people on the streets in Los Angeles will do it. The people in the Twin Cities will do it. The question is whether the people with institutional power can recognize an opportunity and finally will themselves to jump at it. As it stands, it’s easy for voters to imagine the top tier of party leadership — those at the “expectations management” level — taking their 30- and 40-year-old suites of assumptions about politics to their political or literal grave, assuming that’s not the same day. 

Those assumptions are old and august enough to have statues built to honor them, which could double as a live-action video of them in action. The New York Times’ Peter Baker once described Democratic strategists’ plan to win the issue of Bill Clinton’s scummy affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and his subsequent Senate trial as “win by losing.” (Call it the Fabian Asshole Strategy, if you like.) As was the case with much of his term post-1994, Clinton & Co. avoided stereotypes of big-government Democrats and leveraged the Gingrich Revolution’s triumphalism against itself, negotiating from moderation and letting Republican rejections, tantrums and demands grow more offensively gloating, histrionic and unsympathetic. It’s just that nobody expected them to try to run the same play for 28 years. Using an opponent’s momentum against them is great, but sometimes the guy running at you is Jack Reacher. At this moment, Democratic leadership’s idea of winning a fight can’t be the equivalent of a beginner aikido student approaching some meathead in a bar and saying, “OK, now grab my wrist.” 

If there has been an overarching Democratic philosophy since 1972, it might as well be, “Whatever you do, don’t get carried away.” But momentum, once slowed, gradually halts and turns to stone. When applied to a government built from the ground up with antimajoritarian dead ends, barricades, concertina wire and signs with skulls on them marked, “BEWARE OF MOB,” it’s also redundant. When attempted in concert with a responsible opposite party that does not exist, the prime directive to not get carried away circles back around to downright crazy. There are no other adults in the room, no one you’d trust with your kid, your bank PIN, your car keys or even a potted cactus. There is no one else to owe a thing, and no one is keeping you from walking through the door. For God’s sake, just leave. Only a madman would stay.

Trump wanted to be great, and he already is, in the way that influenzas and famines are. Democrat leadership still seems incapable of grasping that this kind of greatness has a tremendous capacity for goodness, that the enormity of its tragedy and injustice demands more than mere remission from its excess and restoration of the mechanisms that propelled us here. A world that does not yield this again is possible. The Great Society, after all, was just the last stop in an interrupted journey begun in the Great Depression. 

While intraparty resentments, blame and jockeying attend even the best of times, the anxiety and shouting are worth it because, on the other side of the fights is supposed to be something like justice. Trump and the DHS have given Democrats the rare and splendid gift of so corrupting the things they’ve touched that they light up all the connections and illustrate the far horizons of the possible. Leave it to America’s greatest problem individual to be such a perfect storyteller for the disease of the body politic as a system, like dye soaking into cancer for an MRI. There is great potential in such illustrative, thoroughgoing perversion, because even after rolling back what they have done and undoing the structures that enabled it, there is still decades’ worth of malfeasance and damage connected to it that we can see, cut out and heal.

There are great distances for Democrats to travel, if only their leadership starts moving. But that’s a different story than we are used to. The cat pounces because it is in its nature to pounce. The stone one sits there because that is its nature, too.