Should Democrats be raising more actual ->Hell<- publicly about Trump, etc

Politics & Elections
1

I didn’t want to launch this in The Pit, as there is already a lot of discussion in that forum about WHAT there is to raise Hell over. Also, I’d like to hear from Dopers who don’t visit the Pit. (My first few years on the board, I never went there. :roll_eyes:)

My question is: should Democrats at the national level – Senate, House – state legislatures & Governorships, local – Mayors, City Council members, County Commissioners, Dogcatchers, etc. (or whatever your brand of local politician is) be raising more of a minute-by-minute public screaming hysterical raging outcry regarding the minute-by-minute atrocities being committed by Trump and his gang of flying monkeys? And they are minute-by-minute.

I mean an outcry similar to what Rachel Maddow is doing every night, or what Paul Krugman is putting in his (almost) daily Substack. or what we do here in multiple burgeoning threads? Or what the protestors (estimates range from 3 million to 6 million) did with their eloquent and expressive signs a couple of weeks ago?

Should Senators and Congress members be going on TV interview shows every day, writing op-eds every day, speaking out loudly and publicly every day and at every level? Pulling out all the stops? Taking off the gloves? (And other similar metaphors.)

Maybe they are and I’m just not seeing the right media to be aware. I know Bernie and AOC have been on the road, as has Tim Walz. But why aren’t we hearing loud screams and seeing vigorous fist-shaking from Democratic politicians everywhere at all levels?

I do understand that if they pull focus from trump, then THEY will become the story and the Republicans who seem to own the media will cry “obstructionist” and “Democrats hate America” and other bullshit like that. In a way, it makes sense to sit back and let Donnie, et al, keep knitting the rope that we hope will ultimately hang them. But can Democrats afford to sit back and hope and watch?

Maybe this is a naive question to ask. :woman_shrugging:t4: Maybe I’m naive.

I’d appreciate it if we can manage to keep this out of The Pit. But if it needs to be sent to the cornfield, I’ll understand.

In a state of increasing despair,
ThelmaLou

2

That strategy seems to work for the republicans. Just constantly fill the media with people talking about how horrible things are under democratic leadership. It works pretty well when they do it.

When there is nothing to complain about, the republicans start talking about tan suits, dijon mustard, Biden’s taste in ice cream, Hunter Biden’s drug problems, etc.

Most people barely pay attention to politics and seem to be easily swayed.

3

Elected Dems are raising Hell when it comes to email and text donor solicitations. My Gmail Promotions folder gets about 50 outraged pleas for cash every day. So they do want to keep the choir outraged. I think they are waiting for Trump to just shit himself in front of the people in the pews. Give him enough rope and all that.

4

I’m hard pressed to believe every potential voter here in the United States doesn’t know who Donald J. Trump is and what he’s all about. They know Trump is an adjudicated rapist, he cannot run a business without committing fraud, he is a convicted felon, he stole classified documents when he left office the first time, they witnessed a mob of his followers attempting to overturn an election, they’ve heard him tell bald faced lies and change his story when those lies don’t stick, they know he’s not concerned about little things like due process or separation of powers.

The painful truth is a significant number of Trump’s followers love this about him while the others are indifferent at best. Raise hell? What more hell is there to raise? Everyone already knows.

5

I think this has been hard to accept, that as a nation we just don’t have common morality. 77 million people are perfectly happy to have a sex offender, malignant narcissist, felon, traitor, moron in the white house.

I guess the best metaphor is eating meat. I eat meat, but I understand that its morally wrong. But I know there are people who are disgusted by people like me for eating meat.

Or abortion. To some people, abortion is abhorrently immoral. But I’m fine with it.

What counts as an unacceptable evil to one person is not a big deal to another person. I guess we just didn’t realize it extended to being a rapist and traitor too.

I guess Trump woke a lot of us up to the fact that a lot of us in this country do not share the same moral code, or that there are lots of people who couldn’t care less about competence or morality when it comes to leadership or power.

No matter how bad Trump fucks up, how evil he is, how much he screws things up, how criminal he is, etc he is guaranteed 70-80 million votes every election cycle.

This isn’t meant to turn this into a pit thread, but I think that theres just nothing we can do to make people care. Trump could cause stagflation, an economic collapse and help China become the new world superpower, and he’d get 80 million votes in 2028 if he is able to find a way to run again. He truly is made of teflon.

6

They absolutely should be raising hell a lot more than they have been doing.

The centrist establishment Dems have been speaking out against Trump and his administration’s actions and providing resistance at little as possible, seemingly just trying to wait it out until the 2026 election. The only ones who are worth a damn these days are progressives like AOC, Bernie, and Jasmine Crockett. Instead we have do-nothing assholes like Schumer and Jefferies providing cover for the Republicans as they destroy the country.

If the Democratic Party continues being useless, they can forget about gaining any seats next year. Their approval rate is already in the dumpster due to the party’s complicity and inaction, but it can get even worse.

7

There’s nothing you can do to make people care. The lie is that people cared before. That was a belief not the reality.

We were set up as a Republic in the belief that the best you can do to govern is to cede power to people you trust, and allow them to do what they want. The more you open that up to the common man, the more it becomes a game of “red v blue”. It’s a sports match with people picking teams, often for no grander reason than to be a part of a community, with no consideration of anything else and certainly no consideration of worldly matters.

The best that team blue can do, if they are willing to put country before party, is to ensure that they have systems in place that will produce reasonable, rational leaders that answer to everyone and not just their own party.

It may take some time for the states to win back against the Feds to restore law to the national government. A local government of Democrats - people like RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Eric Adams, etc. - aren’t a viable defense because the people most willing to tell the average person what they want to hear and most closely match the party line is, more often than not, the least honest and the least scrupled person of the lot. The person who knows how to lead the young and irrational away towards corruption is often the most radical from your side. And you only need a few turncoats, deeply embedded into important positions, to greatly endanger a region that you might view as a safe haven.

Reduce the number of elected positions, set up voting systems that favor moderates, don’t allow candidates to know who is supporting them, don’t allow voters to know how politicians have voted, etc. The more you remove the fun and excitement from politics, the more you’ll find yourself back in a world of sanity and reason.

8

These two comments make me ask myself WHY I think the Democrats should be raising more hell. It’s not to make people care or to change the minds of MAGAts, because their minds (excuse the expression) can’t be changed.

I guess I’m asking should they be raising hell because that is the right thing to do in these circumstances, regardless of whether it has any effect on anything. Some things just demand public outrage for its own sake.

I firmly believe that this is NOT the right way for Democrats to be approaching/reacting to the National Dumpster Fire. I want to see and hear more outrage from the other national party if only because what is going on is outrageous.

What would it take to get the kind of rise out of Democratic politicians that sent millions of people into the street with signs? What is the threshold that will produce some kind of massive reaction?

Would even this be enough to get them up off their butts, shaking their fists?

If trump ordered his goons to seize people’s babies and transport them to factories to turn them into pet food? Would that do it?

What is the Democrats’ collective problem? Lack of leadership?

9

Let’s say that I stay home and watch TV as the US government shows up in unmarked vans and snatches people off the street.

Let’s alternately say that I go out into the streets and wail, while it’s still occurring.

Neither really has much effect on the vans.

The only solutions are 1) wait two years and hope that Trump has wrecked the economy strongly enough while failing to corrupt the election systems that the people vote in Democrats, 2) strengthen the election systems, 3) various acts of criminal vigilantism.

2 sounds the most reasonable to me, and still recommended even if you’re gunning for option 1.

10

Your three options are not mutually exclusive.

11

Different Democratic politicians are going to have different approaches. There is no one size fits all hell-raising. Our local mayor is working with local organizations and migrants regarding safety measures for undocumented people. But I do not want to get national publicity that ICE might see as a dare.

The important thing is for the opposition to be unified. If the Democrats form a circular firing squad, Trump wins.

12

Ah, Democrats, unified. The dream…

13

The Katie Johnson allegations came out in 2016, and the public just don’t care.

We need to be outraged, but I feel like its an echo chamber of outrage at this point. The people who are outraged are already outraged. The people who are fine with it are fine with it. The people who don’t care don’t care. The public has had 9 years to learn what Trump is like.

Evenso, what would outrage accomplish? We need effective tools to block his agenda and hold people accountable. Constantly sitting at home angry just isn’t doing much to fix and prevent the damage.

14

What does work is what the abolitionists used to do.

When slave catchers would come north looking for runaway slaves, the abolitionists would beat them up and destroy their property. Then when the abolitionists were sent to trial, jurors who agreed with the abolitionists would vote not guilty. This created a culture where slave catchers became afraid to go into certain northern areas for fear of what would happen to them.

Jury nullification has gotten a bad name due to how it was used by southern whites to help people who engaged in lynching avoid justice. But abolitionists used jury nullification as a very effective tool to pursue their agenda.

If some of the 75 million Harris voters start using jury nullification in a strategic fashion, it could help block some of Trump’s agenda. Anyone can vote however they want to on a jury. Its one of the few effective tools we have.

The powers that be try to make effective tools of resistance illegal. Thats why labor unions are gutted with taft-hartley, and violence is only legal when the government says so. And if the public start using jury nullification, I’m sure there will be a bipartisan effort to eliminate that and criminalize it. But for now, its still legal to vote however you want on a jury.

15

IMO the perception among Trump supporters is that the Dems have been raising hell continuously for the last 9 years - and they long ago tuned it out.

The best thing to do is probably pick issues that will affect the average person and tie them to Trump. If/when the economy enters a downturn, talk about the Trumpcession and how the economy was improving under Biden. If people don’t get their social security payments or tax refunds on time, blame DOGE for gutting the government. When people complain about new electronics or whatever costing more, talk about the Trump tax.

Screaming about too many issues at once is less effective because it dilutes the outrage, and bringing up Trump’s attacks on checks and balances is unhelpful, because a lot of his followers believe he was prevented from implementing his agenda in his first term by the ‘Deep State’, and they want him to clear away these obstacles. You need to convince them his actual policies are bad, and bad for them, not for illegal immigrants or people in foreign countries.

16

Okay. Are they even doing enough of this? Are they even talking enough about Trump’s specific atrocities? It seems to me they’re being pretty silent. Maybe it’s just me --maybe I’m missing something.

By “raising hell” I didn’t mean screaming aimlessly into the wind. I mean speaking up publicly, continuously, and specifically about what Trump is doing to the country.

Tim Walz is going around the country holding Town Halls where Republicans won’t. Should more Democrats be doing things like this?

17

Your town must be a lot different from mine.

Jury trials nullification? I am not aware of that.

But more broadly, I am hearing and seeing a lot.

The community newspaper is running a series of sympathetic articles on migrant families. Maybe that helps at the margin, but perhaps not.

Much bigger, I think, is that many businesses brought in immigration attorneys to address employees about examining warrants to stop ICE.

No trespassing signs are proliferating.

Buildings that used to be, at least in practice, open to the public, are no longer. I know of one that hired a front desk clerk to sign people in.

I was questioned yesterday when walking my dog on a business campus where I have walked him for years with no issue.

Teachers are being told by administrators how to deny access to ICE when possible, and how to delay it otherwise.

Nobody is being told to physically restrain immigration agents, but their guns are a lot more accurate and effective than those of 1850’s slave catchers. What I explain in paragraphs above is the practical modern equivalent of effective nonviolent resistance. Is the word resistance used? No. Employees and teachers who may have even voted for Trump are buying into the idea that following legal methods to frustrate ICE is just a matter of going by the law.

There have been at least two anti-Trump 47 protests in my small town. I have no case to make against those. But protests are IMHO trivially significant compared to the other activity I describe.

In the longer run, public opinion is key, and Trump is pretty steadily losing support in polls. Considering that MAGA’s bad economic effects have hardly begun to hit (except maybe for those watching stock market gyrations), the decline is impressive.

18

No matter the subject of a speech, they should have an aside at the end for those things that need to be hammered home. Lately it’s Garcia. They should coordinate their messages like Fox does.

19

The opposition doesn’t need to be unified, they just need to stay out of each other’s way.

1. Don’t criticize a Trump opponent for being too strident. Or not strident enough.

2. Don’t quibble over the details of someone’s opposition to Trump.

3. Don’t check the purity or unity when someone is opposing Trump.

We are far past the point where we can be picky about who our allies are. You don’t have to like a fellow Trump opponent, but if you care about stopping Trump you’ll not hinder them.

20

Speaking of circular firing squads-- is this guy likely to help or hurt?

Not 100% sure this belongs here, but hey, it is my thread.

Less than three months after the young political activist David Hogg was elected as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, he is undertaking a new project that is sure to rankle some fellow Democrats: spending millions of dollars to oust Democratic members of Congress in primary elections next year.

Mr. Hogg, 25, who emerged on the political scene as an outspoken survivor of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., said his party must squelch a pervasive “culture of seniority politics” that has allowed older and less effective lawmakers to continue to hold office at a moment of crisis.

And so he is planning through a separate organization where he serves as president, Leaders We Deserve, to intervene in primaries in solidly Democratic districts as part of a $20 million effort to elect younger leaders and to encourage a more combative posture against President Trump.

…

His decision to engage directly in primaries threatens to fracture the leadership of the Democratic National Committee.

…

Ken Martin, the party’s chairman, said in a statement, “In order to ensure we are as effective as possible at electing Democrats to office, it is the D.N.C.’s longstanding position that primary voters — not the national party — determine their Democratic candidates for the general election.”

…

A generational divide has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s most contentious rifts in the early stages of the Trump administration, as younger officials press their elders to toss aside deference for more confrontation.
…

My bold.

Hmmm, I guess this does belong here.