Can the Democrats Escape the ‘Reactive Politics’ Trap? | The American Spectator

After years of saying that Iran should never be allowed have nuclear weapons, Democrats are in a quandary over President Trump’s decision to bomb the rogue nation’s nuclear sites.  His bold yet secretive attack garnered a variety of responses from a party that is usually disciplined in its talking points. 

Sen. John Fetterman, the unexpected voice of reason in his party, called the strike “the correct move” and expressed his gratitude “for … the finest military in the world.” Rep. Ilhan Omar, who never misses a chance to attack pro-American policies, howled that the move “[marked] a dangerous and reckless escalation of an already volatile conflict in the Middle East.”

The division in the party is not merely rhetorical.  Last Tuesday afternoon, Rep. Al Green of Texas introduced articles of impeachment against President Trump on bogus charges of having “declared war” on Iran without Congressional approval.  Over 120 House Democrats voted along with Republicans to quash this effort, leaving Green looking even more ridiculous than usual.

For almost a decade, the Democrat Party has been trapped in a strategic approach that values passionate reaction over measured proactivity.  The recent behavior of some Democrats indicates that they are finally looking to break out of this toxic pattern.

In business, a reactive strategy is founded on responding to external events, such as market changes or actions by competitors, as they occur.  While there are times when such a strategy is necessary (such as when managing a crisis), a reactive company is constantly playing “catch-up” and has little time or energy for long-term planning and innovation.

A proactive company, on the other hand, keeps its focus on basic principles and emphasizes planning for success and anticipating changes. Promoting this mindset sets the company up to see challenges as opportunities and take advantage of them while remaining adaptable enough to respond to whatever unforeseen events occur.  

Politically, a reactive strategy is invariably a sign of weakness. In The Prince, Machiavelli continually stresses that a ruler must only rely on his own abilities and resources. The greatest princes, while they can adapt to changing circumstances, never allow forces outside of their control to dictate their actions and thus never have to play “catch-up.” 

Democratic politicos have been playing “catch-up” ever since Trump came down the escalator in 2015.  After his upset win over Hillary Clinton, they styled themselves “The Resistance” and became a “party of no” on steroids, swearing to oppose not only the new president’s policies, but the new president himself in any way they could.  They quickly morphed into a party that stood against Trump rather than for any kind of independent values.

This foolishness led the Democrats down some very deep rabbit holes.  They swallowed and parroted every anti-Trump hoax invented by their leadership and the media.  For years after Trump got his tax cuts passed, they claimed that the cuts only helped the ultra-rich despite contradicting data.  When Trump ordered an air strike that took out Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s top terrorism mastermind, Democrat presidential candidates wrung their hands in fear over a reprisal that never came.

Even after defeating Trump in 2020, the Democrats could not stop letting him dictate what they said and did.  The Biden Administration’s termination of the Keystone Pipeline and opening of the border were not measured policy redirects, but simplistic reversals of key Trump efforts towards energy independence and preventing illegal immigration. The only reasoning behind them was that Trump supported what came before.  

Nowhere was this poor strategic choice clearer than in Biden’s infamous “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” speech in September of 2022.  In this vicious diatribe before Independence Hall, Biden revealed that his party’s strategy was based not on morally defensible principles, but on their irrational hatred of one man and the movement he led.

This whole approach came crashing down two years later because the American people got sick and tired of the Democrats being the “not-Trump” party.  Having convinced themselves that no one but the addled and corrupt Biden could defeat their bugbear, the Democrats manipulated their own primary rules to ensure he would face no effective challengers.  

After Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June and final withdrawal from the race in July, they “defended democracy” by installing Kamala Harris, a candidate who never received a single direct primary vote.  Her entire effort was an expensive exercise in reactive politics: she refused to give interviews, stole Trump’s policy ideas, and bizarrely claimed that she would have done nothing differently from Biden. Campaigning solely on how awful Trump was ended up revealing her inability to lead.

Despite this electoral embarrassment, many Democrats continue to cling to this failed strategy like a drowning man clutching a straw. Young progressive darlings like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett have never known any other political approach and often use their prominence to force their more moderate brethren back into line (as we saw last Friday with the vote condemning the L.A. riots).

Meanwhile, supposedly older and wiser figures like Chuck Schumer are so secure in their power that they have no incentive to change their mindsets.  And then there’s the legacy media, which has been so deep in the throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome for so long that not even being forced to admit Biden’s cognitive decline can shock it back to a measure of sanity.  

Sadly, these holdouts are preventing the Democratic Party from reversing its current slide into irrelevance.  This is a shame, for as steel sharpens steel, so too do conservatives need a proactive liberal party to test themselves against.  Hopefully, the Democrats who finally refused to play the usual “Orange Man Bad” game last week will inspire their fellow liberals to reject their party’s reactive politics and restore some measure of health to the American body politic.

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