I write about politics, but don’t do activism. I don’t make phone calls for candidates. I don’t knock on doors. I don’t even give money. That’s the way I am, but this time is different. I am so mad that for the first time since moving to Connecticut 15 years ago, I called my senators to ask them to do everything they can to get rid of Chuck Schumer.

There must be accountability for the fact that Schumer led the way for eight other Senate Democrats to stab the rest of the party in the back. They voted Friday for a bill that will put the gloss of legitimacy on Trump’s criminal dismantling of the people’s government. Nearly all the congressional Democrats voted against it, some at great risk, but nine opted for appeasement, betraying not only their peers but anyone who held out hope in the party mounting opposition to Donald Trump.

Schumer said the alternative was worse. He said that if the Democrats had filibustered the measure, triggering a shutdown, that the president would then have had more power to redefine “essential services” and cut them to the bone. Moreover, he said, a shutdown would impact the courts and the courts are the main site of resistance. 

That might be convincing had the nine Democrats gotten something for their acquiescence – I mean anything, really – but they did not. The “continuing resolution” was not a continuation of the previous year’s funding. It was a hodgepodge of rightwing fetishes and priorities that was cobbled together without input by the Democrats while giving the imprimatur of legality to Trump’s crime spree. These nine Democrats could have voted to allow the government to shut down briefly in order to extract bipartisan concessions. They didn’t do even that. 

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Schumer’s argument about the courts also might have been convincing were it not for the fact that White House is already ignoring the courts. Just one day after the vote, the administration deported hundreds of immigrants under a 18th-century wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, though a federal judge told it not to. (As for Trump having more power post-shutdown to cut federal agencies, he’s already cutting them, even sacred cows like the Social Security Administration.)

The point of voting no was never about who would win, who would get the blame or whether a shutdown would make things worse. But that’s what Schumer and other Democrats want you to believe. (I don’t just mean the other eight backstabbers.) They spent the weekend trying to explain to angry normie Democrats, who are sick of compromise, that “good people had to make hard choices between horrible alternatives,” as Sheldon Whitehouse said. They spent the weekend trying to cool down intra-party rage with detailed discussion of process and an implicit appeal: Trust us. It’s complicated. We did what we had to do.

The fact that they spent the weekend explaining themselves, however, indicates that they knew all along what the real goal was and that they are now worried that they’ve been found lacking in what it takes to achieve it. The goal was always about shaping public opinion, forcing Trump and the GOP to own whatever harm and destruction they inflicted during a shutdown, and otherwise standing apart from evil.

The Democrats failed. All of them.

Can we trust them?

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It’s going to take more than reassurances that the Democrats are going to keep fighting Trump, as such reassurances sound empty and barren now. There is no such thing as an opposition if all it takes for it to fall is a handful of collaborators. The entire party needs to reckon with that. 

No, it’s going to take accountability: hard and serious recognition on the part of all the Democrats that these appeasers have cast a pall on the entire party, triggering the wholesale collapse of public confidence in it. I mean, I don’t know what they expected after Trump called Schumer – who is a Jew – “a Palestinian” only days before the vote.

Weak. That’s what that was. And that’s probably the very worst thing that a political party could be seen as. Forget about messaging. Forget about perspectives. Forget about policies. No one in this country, not even the most loyal Democrat, is going to put their faith in a party that can’t look evil in the eye without blinking, without becoming evil itself. 

The conventional wisdom is that Trump’s policies (ie, crimes) will create conditions in which voters will be more receptive to the Democrats’ “kitchen-table policies.” What the Democrats do not get, as far as I can tell, is that no one, I don’t care how desperate they are, and I don’t care how marvelous and just the Democrats’ policies may be, is going to trust a party with a near-universal reputation for wimpiness. 

Donald Trump jammed the Senate Democrats. He said they can either a) pass this bill and see him act like a criminal president or they can b) not pass this bill and see him act like a criminal president. Instead of rejecting that as a false choice, and refusing to be party to their own blackmail, they caved and got nothing for their trouble but the all-around condemnation of normie Democrats spoiling for a fight.

This is why accountability is the way to restore public trust in the Democratic Party, or at least restore trust among normie Democrats in the party, which is just as important. Even if some Senate Democrats privately wanted Schumer to cover for them, they must push him out of the leadership now, as a show of fortitude and strength as well as understanding that the party understands what it needs to do.

Will it happen?

According to new polling, the Democratic base has categorically flipped. In 2017, a vast majority said the party should bargain with Trump whenever it can. Now, however, the vast majority says the opposite: hold the line, stand firm, even if that means nothing gets done. I think that’s due to the plainest of facts. Trump’s evil, though frightening, used to be theoretical. It’s not theoretical anymore.

Yet some are still not getting it, and I’m not just talking about Schumer and the eight other backstabbers. I’m talking about Democrats who do see evil in the administration, and who did vote against the president’s demands for blackmail, but who also see nothing necessarily wrong with members of their own party still trying to be reasonable with evil.

“I was willing to walk into that valley of government death to bring the battle to a head, make a clear break between sides, and (I believe) help brightly spotlight for voters the evil at work,” Whitehouse said. “But it’s reasonable to reach the other conclusion, and good people did.”

It’s not, though. Evil cannot be reasoned with.

If there is no accountability – if there is not some kind of demonstration of strength after humiliating itself as Trump’s footstool – the party can expect the worst from normie Democrats. They won’t make phone calls. They won’t knock on doors. They won’t give money. 

They won’t be Democrats.