Welcome to the Opposition

Spoiler: you’re it.

Please welcome this week’s guest editor, Greg Greene. (A political operative and writer, Greg can be found online through Bluesky at @greene.haus.)

“It is the duty of the opposition to oppose.”

Those words have rung in my thoughts since the election. Spoken in the late 19th century by Lord Randolph Churchill, a British politician whose son gained some notoriety for facing down international authoritarianism, they capture the basic role of a party locked out of power: stand apart from the governing coalition’s agenda, slow it down, and call out what makes it merely wrong or flat-out immoral.

Some people this week seem to have understood this assignment. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), with an assist from Jaime Raskin (D-Md.), blasted Republicans over their votes for the Laken Riley Act — assailing supporters of the legislation for “lining their pockets with private-prison profits.” Rep. Nydia Velasquez (D-N.Y.) lit into the new president for his pardon of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, declaring that he “didn’t care a bit about safer communities when he released those who were convicted of beating the sh*t out of police officers.”

At the higher echelons of the congressional Democratic Party, though, the picture has seemed … bleak.

I’ve written acerbic social-media posts for public figures in my time, so take it from me: against a backdrop of mass pardons for criminals or shutdowns of life-saving research, senatorial drollery about UFOs rings a false note.

The off-key posts from Democratic leaders bugged me enough that I posted to wonder whether any older lawmakers remembered 2006 — when Democrats stormed to congressional majorities in the midterms. Republicans’ lethal mishandling of a major disaster aided that result, but a scandal fanned in the last week of the election played a pivotal role. Why, I wonder, couldn’t Democrats learn a lesson from that and throw a punch?

Later, I came to realize a mistake: maybe I had taken the wrong lesson from 2006.

The scandal that sent Republicans into a tailspin? Democratic campaigns and PACs had little to do with breaking that story. Instead a blogger brought it to light. Using a pseudonym to post damaging materials, a rogue congressional staffer set reporting in motion that within days drove a high-ranking House member from Congress — and drove the GOP off message.

The institutional Democratic Party in Washington may have little stomach for practicing fierce, muckraking oppositional politics. The reasons why are neither here nor there for this newsletter. (For my part, Yale political theorist Kevin Elliott makes a good case that most Dems have yet to wrap their heads around a shift in U.S. politics to an atavistic, friend-enemy model in which Republicans pursue domination rather than cooperation.)

Rather than despair, though, people appalled by the new president’s program can use 2006 as a motivation — and get creative about blunting his agenda themselves, rather than waiting for elected officials to catch up.

As Melissa noted earlier this week, Bishop Marian Edgar Budde demonstrated exactly this type of opposition from her pulpit at Washington National Cathedral — speaking from her authority as a cleric and person of faith, rather than looking down across the District for cues on Capitol Hill. Her plea for mercy and decency drew much of its power from having nothing to do with partisan jousting or Beltway-speak messaging points.

The podcaster and writer Dan Sinker has also pointed a way forward toward do-it-yourself opposition — urging people who can to build means to communicate “in new ways independent of the oligarchs that now control the government after already controlling much of our lives”:

That means moving away from the platforms that have dominated the way we've connected, collaborated, and disseminated information for the last couple decades. The rise of mass social platforms has been at the cost of a truly independent, truly open internet. But it's still there. You can still build anything on it, free of platforms and the overreach of monopolists and oligarchs.

It also means reacquainting ourselves with offline connections. We've built for scale for so long (in our software and in our focus on swelling our own follower counts) that we've forgotten the power of a handful of people around a table. It's time to stop chasing scale and start chasing the right people. Spread information table to table, person to person. 1:1 is everything right now.

On Inauguration Day, my wife and I had friends and neighbors over for biscuits, arts, and crafts. It gave us time to talk, face to face, about what the next years might hold and about the good trouble we might get up to together. When it comes to setting a tone of opposition to the new administration, such gestures, using what tools we have, make an important start — and could add up to more, over time, than we now know.

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ICYMI

A Capitol Rioter’s Son Is Terrified About His Father’s Release (Wired)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the family members who turned some of the insurrectionists in and how fearful they must be right now. The Reffitt family have all talked to the press quite a lot and are some of the most high-profile examples but they’re hardly the only family impacted by this.

The Proud Boys Are Back, Thanks To Trump Pardons (HuffPost)

Written by Andy Campbell, who literally wrote the book on the Proud Boys.

Legacy Media Is Dead Because It Surrendered Its Power to Joe Rogan (Pajiba)

This piece has lived rent-free in my head ever since I read it last week. It’s got me thinking back to the early days of the progressive blogosphere and excited about what could emerge this time around.

Dear Civil Servant (If You Can Keep It)

For my readers who are civil servants or have a friend or family member who is. A practical guide to what comes next in the era of Trump.

Want even more content? Subscribers receive bonus content on Fridays.

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Coda

I was on NPR’s All Things Considered this week. Talking Elon Musk and nazi salutes with Shannon Bond. You can listen to the segment here.

I also talked to The Washington Post about Elon Musk’s nazi salute.

We’re close to 100 paid subscribers on Substack, with another 70 supporting via Patreon! Thank you! The newsletter will always be free to read, but paid subscribers allow me to produce even more content. I appreciate your support and your faith in the value of my work.

Thanks so much to Greg for taking the reins this week. Be sure to follow him on Bluesky. I’ll be back to it next Sunday.

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