Donald Trump has wasted no time rolling out several draconian measures affecting women’s reproductive rights and immigrants. There has been a flurry of nonsensical and dangerous statements, including attacks on journalists, denials of realities such as climate change and the promotion of outright lies. Meanwhile, there is now officially no single Democrat left who has consistently opposed every one of Trump’s cabinet nominees.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s shift from grilling Ben Carson to voting to approve him for the top job at the Housing and Urban Development agency has puzzled many. Her explanation that she has continued concerns about Carson’s inexperience for the position but was swayed by his promises is feeble at best. Ardent Democratic party loyalists and centrist commentators are rationalizing away these votes but fail to see the larger picture.

Everyone knows that 48 Democratic senators cannot stop Trump’s cabinet picks. The question then is what is the purpose of meaningless, symbolic “yes” votes?



In the past days, top Democratic officials have expressed a pragmatic strategy to pick battles and strategically work with Republicans and Trump’s administration on certain areas in order to create a wedge between conservatives who have ideological differences. Yet this tactic is freighted with problems.



First, it assumes a good faith in Republicans that they will work with Democrats to mitigate Trump’s damage if the Democrats behave nicely. Second, in looking for a rift among conservatives, this tactic papers over deep rifts the Democratic party has within itself and its progressive base. Third, this tactic continues to assume a normal democratic chess game in what is quickly becoming an anti-democratic regime.

As of Thursday morning, some Democrats have said the “grace period” is over and are calling for a scorched earth campaign against Trump. The relationship this strategy will have to the pick-your-battle tactic described above remains unclear.



Yet the credibility of this party’s establishment continues to nosedive. As millions of people, including a large segment of the party’s base, mobilized for women’s marches across the United States (and beyond) in fierce opposition to Trump, many top Democrats skipped marching to attend a luxury donor retreat hosted by the political operative David Brock.



This was after the centrist thinktank Third Way announced that it would be pouring millions of dollars into researching districts Trump flipped and into fighting the influence of progressive populism within the party. Most recently, Democrats are holding “lessons on how to talk to real people” in conjunction with David Brock and the Center for American Progress CEO, Neera Tanden.



People are right to be angry at the Democratic establishment. Their anger cannot be dismissed as an impractical crusade to enforce ideological purity tests. The establishment’s centrist posture has not prevented the party from entering a political “wilderness” in which it lost 1,034 seats under Obama and is positioned to lose more.



Most of the party leadership is over 60 years old. Cory Booker, one of its younger rising stars, is a reversion to the post-racial fantasy of Obama’s era and has stood for neoliberal educational policies in New Jersey which resemble Betsy DeVos’s stance. Mark Zuckerberg, who Booker partnered with to implement a school reform movement in Newark that failed, is also on a shortlist of celebrity candidates – along with Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Cuban – that Democrats might run to counter Trump in 2020.

One would think that having the establishment’s “most electable” candidate lose to an orange-faced, proto-fascist reality TV star would lead to some major introspection, self-criticism and calls for deeper transformation in Democratic party.



Yet it appears that the inflexible purists are not the progressives or leftists criticizing Democrats but the party’s centrists and their ardent loyalists who cling to the politics of neoliberalism even as they are proved both wrong and impractical.



Elites controlling the party have refused to talk about the party’s problems in terms of politics, instead opting to reduce issues to a matter of procedure and knocking on more doors.

Political vision is needed not only to fully resist Trump but in order to understand how we got here. We need to fight for something better than the status quo which preceded Trump because it created the conditions and machinery for Trump.



For example, it was Obama’s administration that bailed out Wall Street and that helped normalize deportations and detention centers, deporting more than 2.5 million immigrants in 8 years.



In light of this and Democrats’ tepid resistance to Trump, progressives and independents have every right to be angry. Trump must be met with strong resistance and a progressive political alternative like the anti-racist and democratically socialist one that Martin Luther King Jr forged toward the end of his life.

If the Democratic party is to have any future, it will not come from following rich white men like David Brock. It must center on those who are at the bottom of our society. Resistance in the name of a better world has to happen and Democrats have to decide if they want to be part of it or not. If not, they must move out of the way.