Sometimes you have to do the right thing, even if you lose.

Anything.

Schumer and nine others voted to approve the GOP’s budget deal. Giving Trump’s steamroller a nice gentle ride is not opposition.

A real party would be forwarding a clear and popular platform against the current administration, building party discipline around it, and using this to build support for local races, state races, and midterms. A real party would’ve already had some discipline (the Dems, in action, only punch left). A real party, even a capitalist one, would be taking easy wins on delivering one or two popular policies every decade. It is actually incredible that they didn’t force through cannabis legalization to at last pander for votes.

Democrats are controlled opposition. Their main impetus is to keep receiving donations from moneyed interests and to not rock the boat. Republicans have the same basic interests but they do get to rock the boat. The Republicans are the McKinsey consultants coming in to fire your entire department and the Democrats are the middle managers that say to the rest of the workers, “sorry it’s out of our hands, now let’s get back to normal”. Democrats are not passive in this capacity, as the status quo is violent, marginalizing, and disposessive, and they take a very active role in this. Just like the middle managers that provided lists of employees to fire, who signed the pink slips, who added extra security on the big day, and who will fight you tooth and nail if you apply for unemployment.

Americans alive today have almost never worked within a functioning political party, one that was built of and by its membership. One that deliberates internally and then commits to an agenda and then actually executes it. So they are surprised when you tell them that the Democratic Party isn’t a real party. The party never included them in deliberation, it just asked for unconditional support and money for whoever they picked to run for office. The party never even seemed to really fight the opposition party, not really. It always had an excuse for not delivering on promises once in power and an excuse for sitting on its hands when out of power. This was allegedly normal and Americans are told they are uncaring and unclever if they don’t buy the “lesser evil” calculus every 4 years. That’s questioning the unconditional support for the “party”. That is when Democrats take action: when people get wise and drift away, they hire PR firms to professionally make excuses on the media and blame their members for expecting anything from the “party”.

Fundamentally, this is because both major parties are beholden to capital. The US is really a one-party state, one with a single capitalist party built by and for capital, with two factions that trade places: the overt fascistic one and the cryptofascistic one. This is quite amenable to capital, it represents its own factions’ interests well enough.

I don’t think Dems are even capable of doing anything. They serve the same Capitalist interests that the Republicans do, so this isn’t surprising. The system is working as intended. People are slowly starting to realize this.

That said, anything is more than nothing, which is what they’re currently doing. At minimum they should do what the Republicans do whenever Dems have power: block, harass, impede, shutdown, filibuster… The problem is that there’s always a cohort of Dems that vote against party lines (again, working as intended).