This Year in Political Abdication
Leadership failures, neglect and what to aim for in 2026
At the beginning of April 2025, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker made a marathon speech on the Washington Senate floor where he characterized the presidency of Donald Trump as a "grave and urgent" time period in history.
To this end, Booker's been right. Trump's year in office has been catastrophic, ranging from prison camps in El Salvador holding immigrants to starvation overseas as food already purchased by USAID rotted in warehouses or were simply destroyed. Border patrol and ICE teams regularly sweep cities, rounding up numerous people that simply look foreign. In addition to simply kidnapping American citizens, they've been taking in people doing legal check-ins for green cards or documentation.
By October, however, Senator Booker, having seen all of this, was far meeker and milder than he was in April. When pressed by podcaster Jennifer Welch about the confirmation of Jared Kushner's father to a diplomat post, Booker was at the ready with the usual excuses of progressives demanding purity tests of Democrats. The Kushner and Trump families' overt corruption in both Trump administrations remains a central part of its political danger. Six short m0nths somehow had Booker change his position from twenty-plus hours of documenting Trump's harms to handing diplomatic leverage to his close in-laws.
Cory Booker is far from the only Democrat to abdicate the responsibility of staying consistent on his political principles in favor of taking the path of least resistance. Senate leader Chuck Schumer, after failing to whip votes to pressure a healthcare credit vote from Republicans, ended the six-week government shutdown to immense frustration from legislators and the voter base. They're seen, and rightly so, as taking the little leverage they have over Republican majorities and tossing it to the wind for small comforts like reliable Thanksgiving flights and appeased lobbyists that want the government turned back on.
Democratic disdain at the expectation that they dig in their heels and stand for consistent progressive ideas that they campaign on has been a lead weight around the party's neck.
Democratic Victories in elections are in spite of mainstream party strategy, not as a result of said strategy. Throughout 2025's messy New York City mayoral primary and general election, Party leaders dodged the grassroots-focused Zohran Mamdani, who heads to the Mayor's office in January. High-profile New York Democratic politicians like Tom Suozzi and former mayor Michael Bloomberg also placed their thumbs on the scale for Cuomo, even after he was handed a stinging primary defeat by Mamdani. Though other leaders like New York Governor Kathy Hochul stood by Mamdani after he won the nomination, the fact that an intra-party split became this visible is telling as to what concerns centrists the most. And it isn't Trump.
I characterize the trend of Democratic politicians' practices, strategies and rhetoric this year as nothing short of abdication. At every turn, they've swerved around higher political cost actions for paths of least resistance. They've neglected the expanding ideologically poisonous positions instigated by Trump about border security, patriotism and identity. During a year where trans and gender non-conforming communities have been repeatedly set back and exposed to violence and threatened queer children and families. In response, Democrats have repeatedly downplayed these threats as simply cultural quibbles, with former Presidential candidate Pete Buttegieg simply "asking questions" about trans people in sports as if his position as a open gay man is never going to be threatened by Trump. Potential Presidential Candidate Gavin Newsom is being on record as being "completely aligned on some transgender issues" with the now-shot-to-death podcaster and right wing pundit Charlie Kirk.
Within campaigns and while asking for your money and time, Democratic candidates love to bloviate about the kitchen table issues. They may go to our events, churches, synagogues, mosques, county fairs, diners and other places they think poorer people congregate. Unfortunately, these ambitious pitches have become one-note, especially in the face of abandonment by a supposedly left of center political party. The total abandonment of the course of 2025 has been a slap in the face to the American people that gave time, money and political support to them.
Democrats' pantomime of policy-making and making progressive change is no longer as convincing in the age of quickly advancing fascism. People outside of the central circles of power, including Democratic states' attorneys and prosecutors have been filing lawsuits to try to curb the most craven excesses of the Trump Administration. Neighborhoods are mobilizing to blow whistles and surround immigrants to shoo away ICE teams that close in on their neighbors. The will and potential to resist is there, but seldom in the halls of power.
As 2026 approaches, the chronic lack of imagination and consistency on the parts of Democrats who would cry urgency and then usher in another Kushner into the State Department is nothing short of malpractice. One entire year of starvation, illegitimate strikes at sea and imprisonment have already been logged in history, unerasable in damage and in political consequences. I'm not sure Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries and other top Party Brass understand the permanence of these consequences. That, or they don't care.
