Why we need a bunch of new Democratic leaders to take over—like right now

The system that got us here can not get us out.

Sometimes, no matter how deeply you feel something, words fail.

In the closing minutes of the latest episode of Next Comes What above, Andrea Pitzer offers an explanation I’ve been in desperate need of. She nails why many Democrats—two-thirds in a recent CNN poll—have been so disappointed or mystified by Democratic members of Congress. To me, many reps seem stunned by what feels like a blitzkrieg attack on our government and Constitution by Donald Trump enabled by Elon Musk.

Andrea said:

 One of the key reasons that legislators are unable or unwilling to do as much as people would like is that the same system that elected Donald Trump elected them.

Just as legacy newspapers are bound to the current US political and economic systems in ways that make it difficult for them to report in unusual times, current elected legislators are, by and large, bound to the current models of politics in ways that make it difficult for them to work against the current administration.

The authoritarians have been waiting for a king

The system, especially since the Roberts Court entered the Citizens United era, has been designed to give us Donald Trumps.

It’s intended to provide us with a blustery con man who wants to be king and operates more like a Führer than a president. Republicans realized this twisted fantasy by rigging the system through a perverse view of Constitutional law that increasingly takes a document designed to destroy monarchy and bestows all the power of democracy on their MAGA monarch.

This Citizens United system is not designed to give us Democrats who can defeat Donald Trumps. And this system has gotten radically worse over the last eight years. This steep decline that has all but erased civic virtue is thanks to a Supreme Court dominated by Trump appointees and sympathizers. Those six Justices have used Trump’s Grievance Myth as a cover for throwing out the most basic checks in our system. Meanwhile, we’ve seen the steady and intentional disintegration of an information landscape already decimated by the consolidation of the media and the hollowing out of journalism by the way the internet decimated ad revenue.

Throw on top of that a highly successful pincer propaganda effort that targeted newsless young MMA fans and billionaires alike.  MAGA and their Nerd Reich allies have weaponized a chauvinism that has framed a Democratic party—that did more for the rural working class under Biden than any Republican president ever and maybe more than any Democratic president since FDR—as fey, jealous, effeminate professors who must be smitten into oblivion for daring even to mutter the words “wealth tax.”

A traumatized Congress

Let’s toss into our growing abyss something that I haven’t heard anyone else address (maybe because America doesn’t know how to talk about feelings) yet will haunt us all for the foreseeable future: This is a traumatized Congress.

Donald Trump sent a mob of neo-Nazis to murder them and his running mate. That mob trapped them in their workplace for hours, hounding them, screaming for their necks. Then, he was rewarded for this by a return to power, which was marked by his promises to smash any checks on his power that made them nearly equal participants in the governance of the United States. As he was plotting his revenge, he gained the massive buoy of Elon Musk buying the closest thing to a town square the globe has ever had and turning it into a Nazi-spawning machine. Now, the threats that marked early Trumpism have been increased at scale so that anyone who questions Trump or Musk in any noticeable way is immediately bombarded by sick threats to them and anyone they love.

It’s impossible to describe the geological levels of fucked up implicit in this dynamic.

And because Congress is meant to serve us and feels to many of us as if it is failing in this crucial and historic task of resisting this assault on our democracy, I won’t use it to offer them any excuses. I’m just saying we have to face reality if we hope to wake up the defense we need. They’re scared. And they probably should be when even the richest member of Congress fled rather than face Trump’s threats to his family.

I’m even sympathetic to the argument that Democrats in Congress are doing pretty much all they can procedurally. I think that argument will deteriorate quickly when Democrats vote to keep the government open next month—a move that will destroy their best opportunity to explain to America that their government has been taken over by a handful of megalomaniacs bent on destroying everything the government does that doesn’t explicitly benefit religious fundamentalists and their billionaire allies.

The ‘choir preaching’ gap

That presents my biggest problem with our current crop of Democrats. There are a few notable exceptions (whom I did my best to include in the above Next Comes What episode) who understand how the Citizens United system discourages activating the people in support of progressive policies.

But in general Democrats communication through words and deeds is uninspiring by design. The goal is to hit poll-tested bromides targeted toward at the focus grouped thumbs of mythical swing voters.

House Republicans, meanwhile, have figured out, by necessity, that they need to constantly sell the Republican story to the choir in their base who will do their preaching for them if they’re effective. There are endless reasons why Republicans are more suited to this task and why the Republican agenda—which is far more confident and cohesive thanks to billions of dollars of messaging and an unmatched media machine with unified donor and base voter priorities. And they all start in the brain.

But more than anything, GOP members of Congress are rewarded for endlessly assailing Democrats. Meanwhile, Democrats are herded by their pollsters who prioritize voters’ desire to see “compromise” and “across-the-aisle reaching,” which may be a winning formula for a vanishing number of Democrats in swing districts but ends up hollowing out what should be the party’s primary purpose—exposing and defeating not just the Republican party but their billionaire-captured agenda, which now has adjured the Constitution itself in favor of Elonald’s wettest dreams.

The only good news

The only good news I can offer you is that the next generation of Democrats is now being meted by fire. And that fire is coming from Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their Incel Clown Posse.

And the people being shaped by that fire are firing back:

The Democrats who led us into this situation will not be the ones who lead us out. And even if some of the names and faces are the same, they will reborn and in a new spiritual form to rise to this crisis we face.

I don’t know that we know who or what these leaders will resemble. But I think we have some good hints:

But here’s the thing. We need these leaders now. November of 2026 may be too late. And any victory these new leaders win may be hollowed out by the neutering of our democracy in the meantime.

In the episode above, Andrea Pitzer also offers the two ways that democracy’s can pull out of what she gently calls a “ destabilizing internal threat.” They are in, spoiler alert, the title:

1. Courts
2. Crowds

That made instant sense to me.

Our residual legal system is functional, largely, because it still is the guarantor of the most important asset the American people hold: our economy. That, they want us to believe, can be unwound. But currently the courts are courting democracy.

Crowds or the people are the sovereign. We’re ultimately the decider for as long as this system holds. Trump is directly threatening that with his king bullshit. But it’s the whole deal. There are more of us than there are of them. And if they abandon even the pretense of self-rule, the fascists may destroy the system but the people will always have the power should they unrelenting dedicate themselves restoring it.

This Next Comes What episode includes quote from Andrea from this longer interview on Democracy Now when she was asked about how Hitler was able to lay the groundwork for the Final Solution:

” Unfortunately, as we've seen across history, it really only takes a small number of people to be dedicated to this harmful goal and then a larger group of people who are willing to let it happen.”

The question right now is how will the larger number of Americans react to this assault on their liberty? Will they reject Elonald’s useless, nonsense, their senseless revenge fantasies, their bumbling dick waging?

We know that when we break down what’s actually being done in their names, they reject it all, except maybe mass deportations, which has sadly become the policy of both parties as they’re represented in Congress.

But we must stop underestimating the power of propaganda. Not just the Nazi-generating machine Elon now runs but the thirty years of the AM radio-to-Fox-to-MAGA pipeline.

Republicans are much better at selling tyranny than we are at gently offering poll-tested freedom. That’s not—mostly—because they’re better or smarter than us but because they’re far better funded. That’s because Republican politics is an actual business. The most profitable business that has ever evolved in human history. Democratic politics—largely—are mostly a hobby until it’s time to fix a Republican mess. Then the whole world kinda chips in.

Our singular task it to make sure we begin to fix this Republican mess while we still can. And to do that, we need leaders who owe nothing to our Citizens United system—except a dedication to saving our Constitutional order that for 250 years has kept justice, or at least the promise of it, alive.