In Henry VI, Part 2, a character named Dick the Butcher utters one of the more famous lines William Shakespeare wrote: “The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” To return to national power and get things done for the nation, Democrats need to adopt something of the spirit of Dick the Butcher: no, not literal murder of the lawyers who dominate the party — but a departure from the lawfare that has blinded Democrats to what politics is all about.

Perhaps the pace at which President Trump has opened his second term will put them on notice. Trump opened the week with an Office of Budget and Management guidance that would freeze some $3 trillion in federal grants across executive-branch agencies. He also offered federal employees a buyout, in keeping with his plan to downsize the bureaucracy. He used the threat of tariffs to pressure Colombia over deportation flights. He mused about relocating the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the war in Gaza.

You may not agree with these moves — I certainly don’t — but on some level, you do have to admire the relentless focus of this new administration. The same can’t be said for its opponents. Tangled in legal arguments, mentalities, and procedures, Democrats have forgotten how to fight. Worse yet, they have forgotten what and whom they are fighting for.

It was that lawyerly frame of mind that compelled Democrats to expend an enormous amount of time and energy over the past decade trying to get Donald Trump through various avenues of lawfare: from the #Russiagate craziness to the first impeachment over his “beautiful” phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, from Jack Smith’s classified-documents probe to Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s hush-money case. And what do they have to show for it all? The satisfaction of calling Trump a “convicted felon” on cable news, and not much else.

Not all of these cases lacked merit. Just because one party wages lawfare doesn’t mean the other is innocent as a lamb. From the commander-in-chief down to the local councillor, when people in power break the law, the law can and should be used to hold them accountable. But establishment Democrats became so obsessed with this single element of our system that they all but ignored that democratic politics is about contestation: about trying to win over voters at the ballot box with an attractive vision. Sometimes by cajoling, sometimes by compromising. And sometimes by mixing it up — hard.

“Lawyers don’t lead — they tell you why you can’t do things, what to be scared of”, one disgusted House Democrat told me recently (he asked to remain anonymous out of concern for offending party leaders, many of whom are lawyers, too).

Consider the contrast. During the first Trump term, I spoke regularly with Steve Bannon, his chief campaign strategist and, for a little while, a senior West Wing adviser. But Bannon was best understood as Trump’s wartime consigliere. Everything was war with him, every day a battle. Bannon was always rallying MAGA out of the trenches, into the minefields of Washington.

“Every Democratic president since Jimmy Carter has been a lawyer.”

“We look at this as political warfare”, he told me of his War Room podcast that he started out of his Capitol Hill townhouse, now a top clearinghouse for MAGA opinion. “This for me is a life or death struggle”, he said. The impeachment inquiry then taking place was “highly sophisticated political warfare”. Looking over my notes from that day, I see references to “war horses”, “Bloody Kansas”, and the like. This is how Bannon talks. This is how Mike Davis, another top Trump affiliate, talks. This is not how a single Democrat talks.

It is worth noting that every Democratic president since Jimmy Carter has been a lawyer. There have been plenty of Republican lawyers, to be sure, but Gerald Ford was the last of them to have been president. The legal mindset is now endemic in the Democratic Party: not just the rule of law, but its language, the endless legalese that allows for no certitude, the constant evasion that prevents the rendering of a plain-spoken verdict or decision, the exhausting evaluation of risk, the excuses not to do something because the attorney general in Texas might file a suit.

“Of the hundreds of Democratic [elected officials] in Congress and in high state offices across America there may not be five of them who relish, enjoy, and are comfortable with fighting Republicans”, a Capitol Hill staffer, who works for a liberal Northeastern congresswoman, told me. “The modern Democratic official’s favoured posture is a legal citation, a grammatical correction, and a foetal position. I’m disgusted with it”.

Trump can be positively deranged, but at least he is confident in his derangements: no, I said the hurricane went that way. Former President Joe Biden and his top advisers, by contrast, seemed to always be parsing their way to victory. This was especially true when it came to the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, which may explain why the majority of Americans ended up disenchanted with Biden’s foreign policy, which was supposed to be one of his areas of expertise.

There was always some cleverness at work, some assertion qualified just so, fuzzed up by those who did not want to be pinned down. It was never clear what victory would look like in Ukraine, or in Israel’s war against Hamas. We gave the two allies billions of dollars worth of weapons, then called for the end of war. How many Ukrainian counteroffensives went by without the battlefield advances Washington promised and expected?

“With clear introspection and accountability, Democrats will rebound”, Donna Brazile, the veteran Democratic strategist, told me. She may well be correct, but that rebound sure is taking its time.

Shortly after Trump won last November, he joked to House Republicans that he may stay in the White House for a third term. In response, Rep. Dan Goldman, Democrat of New York, rushed out a news release calling on the House to pass a resolution he planned to introduce that “would reaffirm that the 22nd Amendment is explicit in prohibiting presidents who have served two full terms from running for the presidency again and condemn President-elect Donald Trump’s frequent statements suggesting he could serve past the end of his most recent term”.

If the Democrats are going to take this path every single time, it is going to be a very long four years. After Trump pardoned all of the Jan. 6 rioters — some of whom were sent to prison for committing outrageously violent acts — progressive Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner said he was looking for ways to bring charges of his own. I understand the impulse, but that’s not the battle Krasner’s constituents elected him to wage, not with crime and drug overdoses continuing to plague the city.

In other words, Democrats need to not only learn how to fight, but also which fights to pick. To be sure, Trump doesn’t get a pass when it comes to following the law, but the Democrats’ sustained lawfare makes it seem like they have an anti-Trump agenda that is removed from the concerns of ordinary people.

There have been a few signs of the recalibration Brazile says is necessary, though not nearly enough to make anyone to the left of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the arch-centrist Republican, especially optimistic. Democrats keep fretting about needing to win Waukesha County without having any seeming idea what Waukesha County actually wants from its elected leaders.

I can tell you what Waukesha County doesn’t want: vague talking points; incessant triangulation; strategic ambiguity; rhetorical sleight of hand; endless legal hedging, and attempts to win politics by lawfare. But a Democrat who knows how to throw a punch on behalf of working people just might punch his or her ticket to Washington. So let’s see those uppercuts, liberals.

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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/