The Democratic Party could only suppress its own id for so long.
The Democratic Party could only suppress its own id for so long.
W eary of their more excitable comrades, the Democratic Party’s seasoned establishmentarians embarked on the second Trump era with a warning for their allies: Take it down a notch.
James Carville put it most succinctly. Democrats, he advised in February of last year, must “roll over and play dead.” The president and his allies would make a politically exploitable mistake soon enough. And the Democratic opposition would only be able to effectively exploit it if it presented itself as a sober, rational alternative to Republican governance.
Carville’s admonition irritated the Democratic Party’s professional activist class, but it seemed to channel the zeitgeist on the left. “Some folks are burned out on outrage,” the founder of the awkwardly named progressive activist group Outrage confessed. “We’re kind of, like, crises-ed out,” one Trump critic told the New York Times at the outset of Trump’s second term.
In observance of the public’s measurable “exhaustion” with politics in the wake of the 2024 election, Democratic political professionals agreed that expressions of opposition to Trump’s program must be smarter, more circumspect, less apocalyptic, and, perhaps above all, stripped of the melodramatics that typified the “Resistance.”
It was sage advice, but the Democratic Party could suppress its own id for only so long. Over the weekend, the dam broke.
The release of new footage of the confrontation between federal law enforcement and protesters in Minnesota last week that resulted in Renee Good’s shooting death occasioned an outpouring of casually reckless commentary.
The video tape, which features ICE agents inspecting Good’s vehicle as she and her partner escalate their efforts to antagonize law enforcement, and which culminated in Good striking an agent with her car — an incident to which the officer responded with deadly force — has triggered a flood of Resistance-style histrionics.
Here’s the Democratic Party’s official take on the sequence of events captured on camera:
Newly-released footage reveals Renee Nicole Good’s last words. pic.twitter.com/Q0NsuUrpDR
— Democrats (@TheDemocrats) January 9, 2026
There is no justification for the party’s elision of the events that occurred in between Good’s sneering contumacy — she disobeyed an ICE agent’s order to get out of her SUV and instead accelerated the vehicle — and “*gunshots*.” No justification except the party’s desire to inflame passions around this confrontation and cultivate hostility toward federal law enforcement.
We cannot attribute that recklessness to rogue elements inside the Democratic National Committee’s social media shop, as Democratic Party Chairman Ken Martin’s statement over the weekend attests.
“From Tehran to my birthplace of Minneapolis, people are rising up against systems that wield violence without accountability,” Martin wrote, linking the Islamic Republic’s ongoing campaign of mass murder against the dissidents in Iran’s streets to the events in Minneapolis. “Solidarity across borders means opposing authoritarian power everywhere and defending the right to live free from fear and state violence.” When challenged, Martin doubled down:
If comparing the U.S. to Iran makes you angry, ask why. Killing protesters. Crushing dissent. Kidnapping and disappearing legal citizens. Ignoring courts. Threatening critics. Terrorizing communities. That’s authoritarian behavior—anywhere. If you’re rushing to defend it, maybe… https://t.co/nh6krxBHul
— Ken Martin (@kenmartin73) January 11, 2026
Martin’s morally vacuous false equivalence was in keeping with the sentiments expressed by progressive activists and Democratic lawmakers alike. “This is what authoritarianism looks like,” said Arizona Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari. “This is what happens when the leader of a nation turns a federal agency into his personal paramilitary force against the civilian population of the United States.”
The militant delusions that fueled Resistance-style politics in the first Trump era are back in vogue. Establishmentarian Democrats held out for as long as they could.
They suffered their voters’ censure when those voters objected to the behavior of the progressive lawmakers who heckled and brought props to disrupt Donald Trump’s 2025 address to a joint session of Congress. They were told that they had to be “willing to get shot” in the name of anti-Trumpism because “there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public.”
Establishment Democrats’ palliative activism couldn’t hold a candle to captivatingly eschatological tracts like the provocative essay by George Mason University Ph.D. student Nicholas Decker, “When Must We Kill Them?” They failed to dissuade their base voters from joining Resistance-style clubs that train activists to confront law enforcement and put themselves at risk — one of which Good herself belonged to. For a certain sort of progressive agitator, engaging in tense confrontations with armed police has become a sport.
Democratic officials may have forgotten why they advised their compatriots against scene-chewing displays of opposition to Trump, fueled by delusional and narcissistic narratives about how they are a noble remnant engaged in an underground war against an illegitimate, totalitarian regime. Theirs was a wise admonition, not just because the Resistance mien repels more voters than it attracts.
Resistance-era narratives inculcated in the Democratic Party’s voters the notion that engaging in politics as usual is tantamount to collaboration with evil. Resistance-era themes convinced the activist class that congressional Democrats had more power than they were comfortable wielding — that Democratic lawmakers could make their vision manifest through sheer will, and the only explanation for their failure to do so is a conspicuous lack of zeal for the anti-Trump cause.
In fact, Resistance-esque frameworks all but compel those who subscribe to them to engage in the very sorts of risky behaviors in which Good and her compatriots were involved. If Trump is “more fascist than any successful American politician yet, and the most dangerous threat to pluralist democracy in this country in more than a century,” as Georgetown University Professor John McNeill put it at the dawn of the first Trump era, defiance and resistance are compulsory — not just morally but procedurally. In a tyrannical system such as that, there is no other recourse for redressing offenses committed by the state but direct action.
That does not describe America in 2026. There are legal avenues to register dissent, protest mistreatment at the hands of law enforcement, and secure a remedy and compensation if the circumstances merit it. That is why there is no justification for committing yourself to a dangerous confrontation with law enforcement to frustrate their activities. The proper venue for litigating grievances with Trump’s policies is in the political arena and the courts.
Democratic establishmentarians used to know this. Perhaps they know it still. But their base voters desire a politics that is as radical as their policy preferences, and they were always going to get what they wanted.