The Problem With Pretending To Be Dead Is That You Get Killed Sometimes

A debate with Carville on playing possum vs fighting them on the beaches and in the streets

A day after I quoted Winston Churchill and suggested that the Democratic and progressive strategy should be to fight the MAGA Republicans every step of the way, my old friend James Carville had what seemed to be the opposite advice, which was to “roll over and play dead”.

I have a ton of respect for James, and I think he has been right about how to win the political game more often than not in the 35+ years I have known him. I appreciate the courage he shows in saying whatever he thinks no matter what conventional wisdom in DC says.

But on this topic, at this moment, I think he is wrong for two reasons.

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The need to fight fascism

The first reason is that we are now dealing with full scale fascists. If Reagan or either of the George Bushes or John McCain were president, we might be able to get away with playing possum for a while. We are living in a different moment, though, where signs of weakness and being quiet will lead to all the more aggression by Team MAGA. Cowering before bullies rarely leads to the bullies backing off.

These aren’t garden variety bullies either. Starting on literally day one, Trump and his gang of bandits showed themselves ready, willing, and able to break the law with impunity. If we let them run roughshod over public employees and hungry children, they will get more aggressive and more ugly, not less.

The need to fight. Period.

The second reason is that our voters and activists are demanding that we stand and fight for them. All the polling and focus groups and message testing I was doing in the last four years with working class voters showed that the number one reason the Democratic Party brand is in the toilet is that they perceive Democrats as weak and unwilling to fight for them. When blue collar voters in focus groups heard Kamala Harris talk about how she would listen to everyone and work with everyone, what they thought was that the definition of “everyone” was the insiders in DC, not them.

What they wanted instead was someone who would lead the fight for them and their communities. They wanted someone who would take on the powers that be, the billionaires and the CEOs of huge corporations that were sending their jobs overseas and jacking up their prices.

And by the way, that is something our base and swing voters have in common. They want Democrats to be leading the fight, not playing possum. So if we want to start getting people excited about Democrats again, we need to show we are fighting the good fight every day.

One final note: James and some other folks pushing this playing possum idea talk about all the demonstrations and organizing the first time as if it were a bad idea. That argument would make more sense to me if we had lost as a result of being too loud or sounding too liberal. But we picked up 40 seats and control of the House in 2018, and we won control of the Senate and beat Trump two years later. We even defied historical expectations for a very strong midterm performance in 2022. What was it about all the fighting back that didn’t work?

None of this is simple stuff, I get that. Messages need to be calibrated, candidates from different districts and regions will need to calibrate things their own way. But mostly, we just need to fight the good fight, and, as John Lewis would say, make good trouble.