One of the most baffling things that’s happened since congressional Democrats began organizing opposition to President Donald Trump and the GOP was when Elizabeth Warren—the Massachusetts senator whom many expected to help lead the Trump resistance—decided she would support Ben Carson’s nomination to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Carson is laughably unqualified for the job, and has made a second fortune for himself—as a right-wing author, speaker, and failed presidential candidate—scolding the very people who support and benefit from the programs that HUD administers. For Warren to know all this and still support Carson looked like a betrayal—something you’d expect from a Trump-country Democrat rather than one from the most liberal state in the country. That Warren is facing reelection this cycle, and an unexpectedly uncertain future, was a troubling sign for those expecting Democrats to lead an effective opposition. If a progressive champion like Warren will bend the knee, which Democrats won’t?

Here's @markos on the oceans of Democratic YES votes on Trump's nominees - including Warren's on Carson https://t.co/pDvF3OlhBt pic.twitter.com/iKyGNO5FCR — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 26, 2017

Severe backlash to every perceived act of surrender can be an effective source of political pressure, as Republicans learned during the Obama years, but it can also herd the opposition party into traps. Resistance can be galvanic, but a false sense of strategic failure can be demoralizing. Quite frequently, at the urging of people who should’ve known better, conservatives scapegoated their elected representatives for allowing things to happen that those members lacked the power to stop. It was this sort of blind thirst for impossible victories that drove Republicans to shut down the government and nearly send the U.S. government into default on its debt.



There is a better balance, but it can only be struck if liberals and progressives accept that they are about to lose a whole lot of fights.

Only Elizabeth Warren knows what was really going through her mind when she gave Carson her backing, but here’s the explanation she gave—which, for whatever it’s worth, perfectly matched my assumptions about her thinking when I heard about her decision.