The House of Representatives is exactly that

 QUIT FIXATING ON THE TEN DEMOCRATS! 

Condemnation surged across social media for the ten Democratic representatives who voted to censure Al Green of Texas for his display at the current occupant of the Oval Office's address to the joint session of Congress on Tuesday night.

The Democrats have never felt bound by Ronald Reagan's commandment not to speak ill of another member of their party. They don't make a habit of tearing each other down, but they don't fall into line the way conservatives do. In competitive districts, Democrats have to figure out how to remain Democrats while still attracting enough uncommitted voters to win the election. The overt binary choice between Democrat or Republican masks the adaptations that individual candidates have to make in order to promote most of the values of the party they choose to represent.

Some Democrats are so watered down that you begin to wonder whether they picked their party affiliation by flipping a coin. It wouldn't matter except that when the numbers are all added up in Washington, one party or the other technically controls the House or Senate. Or both. A tiny majority is still a majority, and can lay waste to the hopes and dreams of millions of people, as we are seeing now.

The ten Democrats might have felt that they needed to engage in this piece of political theater for their voters at home. If they piss off the Democratic component of their electorate enough to attract a primary challenger, that challenger has to be confident that they can corral enough of the undecided voters in their district to deliver the goods in the next general election. Otherwise, the Democrats lose the seat entirely. Who knows, in the context  of the national results, whether that's a fatal loss or a mere blip in a more general pendulum swing that brings the Democrats strongly back to Congressional power.

Remember: these days, even a resounding victory has no more than two years to live, unless things go really, really well.

I see people on social media calling out for Democrats to fight, to get nasty, to take the gloves off. When has that ever worked for the Democrats? While the exchange of barbs might feel good, it has never really changed anyone's mind on either side. It just makes the already committed voters cheer for their team.

As for the really dirty fighting that the Republicans are doing right now, it's just flat out illegal. They're only getting away with it because of their tiny majorities and complete willingness to surrender to greed, corruption, and Russia. The Democrats have limited options for playing hardball. At the same time, they have to try to woo the voters they lost in 2024 and the voters who felt like they could just stay home, in order to get that technical majority and force the dictatorship in the White House into a direct confrontation. Congress has always had the power to yank Trump's chain and shut the whole thing down. The Republican majority simply refuses to use it.

The Democrats have been on the back foot since 1968. Jimmy Carter won in 1976 because Republicans were under the last shadow of Nixon. Clinton and Obama won their respective elections by being to the right of Eisenhower. Obama was helped by the incompetence of George W. Bush. The party fared better in Congress, but after the mid 1990s the Republicans had started really focusing on their state machinery. At the same time, right wing media ramped up, pushing what had been fringe positions into more and more impressionable minds.

We have this misconception that young minds are the breeding ground for hippie notions and that conservative viewpoints come with age. Instead, young minds are receptive to whatever sounds plausible and seems cool. The circumstances that created peace and love culture in the 1960s were unique to the 1960s. Young people were divided even then. Now it's worse, because right wing concepts have been honed by decades of information warfare.

Of the coalition of enemies of democracy now tearing away at government by the people, Elon Musk represents the greatest threat. The religious right is too mired in medieval beliefs to do more than drone on about putting women in their place and publicly hating gays, while pimping for Judgment Day. The merely greedy oligarchs are fixated on their money game. They are just useful idiots for the tech billionaires bent on running the world according to their own fantasies, in which We the People are just wasting oxygen.

The Republicans are operating on the belief that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." It's never true. You might forge an alliance, as the Allied forces did with the Soviet Union in World War II, but remember that Communist Russia was seen as a threat prior to World War II, and was treated as one again immediately after it. The Republicans have handed all power to the tech crowd, content to let them demolish the support for citizen government. The tech crew, for their part, are eager to weed out the undesirables in society.

All Democrats should be talking about right now is arresting Elon Musk and unplugging DOGE immediately. That will still leave plenty of destructive plans in motion, but unless someone asserts the Constitutional power of elected government right now the next step will be bloody, with an uncertain outcome. It will definitely involve drones and armed robot dogs.

Because none of this will happen tomorrow, or next week, or even by summer, lots of MAGA cultists will be happy at the prospect of DOGE's destructiveness. Undecided voters will waver. Vocal opponents will appear hysterical. I'd love to be overreacting. I'd love to look hysterical in retrospect, from a place of renewed hope and progress, because the opposition to this coup was successful in some unspectacular but conclusive way. That just doesn't seem likely right now.