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Democrats were stunned by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's sudden decision to support Donald Trump's budget. The decision threw the party into disarray and seemed a betrayal of Hakeem Jeffries in the House of Representatives, where all but one Democrat voted against the GOP budget.
What made it worse was Schumer's explanation of why he capitulated. He called it a "Hobson's Choice." Either way you figured it out, it was all bad. If you voted against the budget, Elon Musk and company would get a green light to ride roughshod over the government. There was no symbolic resistance, only a whimpering explanation of how he sold out the party. Maybe Schumer was right, but the abruptness of action only served to weaken the morale of Democrats, as if they needed another reason to be depressed.
Schumer has never grasped the nature of the Age of Trump. Republicans have adopted the presidential preference for unrelenting conflict. Stephen Bannon does not call his program the War Room for nothing. And Bannon not only promises to defeat these opponents but, adopting a line from Pulp Fiction, promises to "go medieval" on Democrats and Republicans who never became Trumpers. Democrats like John Fetterman and others who support their leader think they can bargain as in the old days. But, when Trump promised voters he was their "retribution", he was not kidding.
Schumer's decision only magnifies differences that have festered within the Democratic party since Bill Clinton. The centrist position, clever as it was in the short term, bolstered the major donors and weakened the rank and file. Workers lost jobs because of NAFDA, and old Democratic bellwethers like West Virginia were lost.
Probably more damaging was the "Blue Dog" Democrats and their hunger for compromise with Republicans who desired their destruction. The Schumer Democrats hate a principled position as much as the Devil hates Holy Water. They resemble Whigs who split the difference on slavery, trying to unite "the Lords of the Loom" with "the Lords of the Lash." It was all about textile barons and the slaveholders controlling the cotton. In this, Schumer is a good Clintonian in that it is "the economy, stupid" and vague appeals for unity.
Schumer is a little bit like Daniel Webster after he voted for the fugitive slave law in 1850. Whigs of the anti-slavery version denounced him for acceding to what Ralph Waldo Emerson described as "filthy enactment." It served to expose the economic liberal Whig party as a bankrupt organization. The party was wrecked and replaced by the Republicans in 1856.
Perhaps the smug moderates within the Democratic party could learn from Amos Lawrence, who was a middle-of-the-road Whig, before he witnessed the round-up of an escaped slave, Anthony Burns, in Boston. The old textile magnate saw the error of his ways when federal authorities arrested Burns even after Boston merchants offered to buy his freedom. Lawrence became radicalized. He stated that he "went to bed one night old fashioned, Conservative Compromise Union Whig" but "waked up a stark mad abolitionist." Mr. Lawrence understood the spirit of the times.