The Democratic strategist’s advice that Democrats ‘roll over and play dead’ is based more on prophecy than prognosis.
An astonishing amount of attention has been paid to what, as far as I can tell, is the modern political equivalent of consulting the oracular wisdom of a haruspex.
In a recent interview, Mediaite’s Dan Abrams asked Democratic strategist James Carville about rank-and-file Democratic voters’ growing impatience with their leadership’s refusal to provide them with “Resistance”-style theatricality. The institutional Democratic Party’s wait-and-see approach to opposing Trump may be tactically sound, but it’s not emotionally gratifying. As such, it may not be sustainable for much longer. Himself an advocate of the Democratic establishment’s “possum” strategy, Carville advised restless Democrats to stay the course. Why? Because the auguries and portents are auspicious!
“This whole thing is collapsing,” Carville said of an administration just one month into its four-year term. After doling out a healthy portion of scathing opprobrium to the progressive activist groups that have declined to defer to his sagacity, Carville assured his audience that total victory is nigh. “I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days, is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion,” he added.
I can only attribute the coverage these errant remarks generated across dozens of media outlets to the fervent hope abroad in the press that he’s right. Little else explains it.
The data don’t buttress Carville’s prediction. Trump embarked on his second term in office with an average job approval rating of about 51 percent (according to the RealClearPolitics aggregator). Today, he averages a little less than 50 percent approval. There are warning signs for Trump on the horizon, but there is little today to suggest that a “collapse” is imminent.
Apparently, Carville has been bombarded with inquiries asking him to explain precisely what his gut was telling him. That would explain his op-ed in today’s New York Times in which he elaborates on his theory.
“The Republican Party flat out sucks at governing,” Carville posited at the outset. “Even Tucker Carlson agrees with this.” Already we’re confronted with dubious sourcing, but we’ll put that to one side. The good news is that “President Trump is hellbent on dismantling the federal government” and “there’s nothing Democrats can legitimately do to stop it, even if we wanted to.” Thus, Democrats would be well advised to make no sudden moves while the president and his party make a mess of things.
Carville is asking a lot of professional politicians when he asks that they “do not insert” themselves “into the discourse,” and his assumptions that Republicans will be able to enact a maximalist version of their agenda and that it will be wildly unpopular are questionable. But Carville is confident. “It won’t take long,” he claims. “Public support for this administration will fall through the floorboard. It’s already happening.”
When Trump’s public support craters — certainly before Memorial Day but likely prior to April — according to Carville, Democrats can turn their attention to “one of the most important elections in recent years: the Virginia governor’s race.” There, a revolt of the sympathetic and highly representative federal workforce will manifest in a backlash against Trumpism and set the nation on a course toward the Democratic Party’s restoration to power.
Carville and his fellow Democrats may have less patience with an effort to downsize the federal government, however messy it may be at the outset, than does the rest of the country. Even polls that buttress the claim that voters will recoil from chaos in government suggest as much. “Some 59% of respondents in the poll backed the goal of downsizing the federal government, including about a third of self-identified Democrats, most independents, and almost all Republicans,” read the Reuters/Ipsos write-up of its survey that found that Americans are apprehensive about the prospect of dysfunction afflicting the federal government’s public-facing aspects.
Carville’s forecast isn’t supported by the data. The tactics he favors that flow from his prognostication — that Democrats “roll over and play dead” — are a source of growing consternation among Democrats and are, therefore, unlikely to go unchallenged for much longer. And his belief that American politics will follow the same trajectory toward which they bent in 2017 is betrayed by the Democratic Party’s lack of confidence in its own agenda. As our own Charlie Cooke observed, the party isn’t even defending itself against Trump’s assault on Biden-era initiatives: “his demolition of the DEI infrastructure, his ostentatious deportations, or his destruction of the Biden administration’s electric-vehicle agenda.” Democrats will have to figure out what they stand for before voters will give them another chance to prove themselves.
Even if Carville’s strategic recommendations are unimpeachably sound, it is obviously unsatisfying for Democratic voters. It rests on the notion that America’s most stable state is Democratic governance and that entropy will ensure that it returns to that condition despite the occasional deviation. That is more prophecy than prognosis. But given the rudderless Democratic Party’s crippling insecurity, it’s not hard to see its appeal.