There’s been some real dark comedy over the past few months in watching Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker set his cult of personality up for inevitable disappointment. In press conference after press conference Pritzker has cut promo after promo on President Trump, warning him to stay out of Chicago and that he would do everything in his power to prevent federal troops from entering the state. And the spectacle of a governor defiantly calling on Democrats to fight back has been the perfect catharsis for liberals who feel disempowered under Trump’s rule. Men in particular enamored with the idea of a large man who’s even richer that Trump is big dogging him in the media and online; fascism mobilizes ideals of masculinity against the opposition, so it’s not surprising to see liberal men try to compensate for this with their own impression of machismo.
But what exactly was Gov. Pritzker ever going to do about any of this? It is all well and good to give inspiring speeches, but practically speaking it seems like he has only ever had three possible options:
Challenge Trump in court like California Governor Gavin Newsom did, which may yield some meaningful results down the road but which will hardly give his fans the immediate satisfaction of aggressive resistance they crave.
Go to war against the federal government, which some of his fans actually seem to think is a good idea, but which in practice would almost certainly mean a swift military crackdown by Trump, a quick defeat, and the statewide imposition of martial law.
To hold more press conferences while quietly folding.
Pritzker, predictably, has picked a combination of options one and three. The notion that he was ever going to try to turn the National Guard against the federal government has always been preposterous. So after all of this endless posturing, Pritzker has essentially chosen the path of Governor Newsom.
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I am not fond of making excuses for Democrats, but the progressive discourse on resistance to Trump has become truly bizarre. To listen to it you would think that the 2024 election had zero consequences and that the party is not disempowered in a way that is basically without precedent in my lifetime. Even twenty years ago when the George W. Bush administration held both chambers of Congress for six years they routinely suffered major defeats in the Supreme Court; moreover, the institutional and procedural norms that make liberalism hum simply hadn’t yet eroded to the degree they have today. Today, the Republican Party holds both chambers of Congress, has a rubber-stamp Supreme Court on its side, and is operating with such legal impunity that one wonders if they really expect to lose power ever again.
In my view the surest and quickest path back to meaningfully opposing Trump involves taking back at least one chamber of Congress in 2026; which means winning as much popular support as possible in the meantime; which means focusing on the issues that Americans care about the most; which means, much to the chagrin of our progressive resistance, focusing on the economy. This is why I’m pleased that Democrats have made their stand during this government shutdown on stopping Medicaid cuts, an extremely unpopular part of Trump’s agenda that he still has to flat-out lie about. That’s why I’m pleased that Bernie Sanders — who at this point is plainly the de facto leader of the opposition — remains laser-focused on the economy even as he touches on Trump’s assault on democracy.
This does not, however, appear to be a very emotionally satisfying response for a lot of people. But what do you people want instead? This is a sincere question! I am open to any parliamentary shenanigans or legal maneuvers or outside-the-box strategies you can come up with. But what I am not open to is stuff like this:
As I noted a while back, Beutler is one of a broad range of progressive pundits who have grown frustrated with talk about Trump’s economy and want Democrats to “fight” instead. That’s fine — but this is your alternative? Twitter flamewars? Beutler has an article up right now celebrating “the first signs of a real fight” against Trump from Democrats and it’s…a press release about Jimmy Kimmel. His great ambition is that this could lead to a failed resolution in Congress. Why exactly are we pretending that this would accomplish something more than driving down Trump’s numbers on the economy, the issue that voters care about more than anything else?
I have all the sympathy in the world for progressives who are frustrated with the impotence and complicity of our supposed opposition party, but if they don’t learn the right lessons from this nothing is ever going to change. You can’t run a campaign for president as disastrous as the Democrats did in 2024 and then expect that there won’t be any consequences for losing. Progressives can try to console themselves in the meantime by demanding that Democrats put on an emotionally satisfying show of Resistance Theater, hulking up like Pritzker or grandstanding like Booker or telling defiant jokes like Jimmy Kimmel. Sooner or later, however, they’re going to have to figure out how to win back power.
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