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Notes -
I get the impression that the election results have been deflating for the Democrats, not just because they lost, but because of who they lost.
Democrats REALLY liked the idea that, regardless of the vote totals, the voters who would make up the future (minorities and young people) were overwhelmingly on their side. And so losing young men, and having a severe dent put in Hispanic votes, has been really demoralizing and disorienting.
And it's specifically demoralizing in the context of taking radical action. "We have to take direct action because, even though old white Fox News voters have a slight voting edge, our base of marginalized voters, full of righteous fury, demand it - they can't wait any longer!" is a great motivator to direct action for a certain kind of progressive. "White middle aged upper middle class Karens are super pissed and are going to take to the streets after being repudiated by their sons", on the other hand, is... I don't know. Whatever it is, it's not at all the same kind of moral justification story.
All of which is to say, I think its finally sinking in that certain aspects of left-of-center radicalism are REALLY unpopular to a much bigger part of the voting base than had been previously accepted, and its unpopular with groups that left-of-center types don't feel as comfortable writing off. And yet those same people are still, also, uncomfortable with crossing the radicals in their coalition, too. So they are left in a bind about how to respond to the current moment.
Also, I think there is also a sense in those circles that their media / communication situation is much more damaged than they had realized. To make protesting valuable, you need favorable coverage that reaches the kinds of audiences you care about, and that requires a favorable media apparatus with serious reach. I get the sense that Democratic thought leaders, right now, have a sense that they've lost that, with legacy media having less and less reach and less and less trust, and with new social media like Tik-Tok and X and huge bro podcasts being less than sympathetic at this point. And worse still, the corners of social media that are more sympathetic to them, the corners that actually have audiences, are also often steeped in the Pro-Palestine / Anti-Israel stuff that massively fractures the Democratic coalition by driving Jews crazy.
Those are some thoughts, anyway.
@FiveHourMarathon pointed out that, in Trump's first term, the Democrats kept hammering in the message that Hillary won the popular vote (something something electoral college reform etc.). This was electorally meaningless, but psychologically important to maintain the narrative that Democrats represented the real will of the country.
Losing the electoral college and the popular vote in 2024 (albeit only by a 1.5% margin) must be profoundly psychologically disorienting.
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I think you’re right that losing the emerging democratic majority is deflating but it’s also just that democrats don’t have a single ideology. Chuck Schumer no doubt is theoretically very progressive but probably he’s not entirely comfortable with trans. The radical activist wing is not able to execute radical solutions but that might be specifically the radical activist wing.
Said no one, ever.
Chuck Schumer is a generic liberal who has repeatedly acted to limit the influence of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
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This would imply that they took the sort of radical actions OP is describing in response to Trump's first term, where he didn't have this sort of delegitimizing gain amongst important demographics and Russia hysteria was at its peak.
I don't think they risked felonies even then.
They did.
Trump's first term was typifified by a series of escalations by the progressive wing of the Democratic party starting with disrupting senate hearings and government officials tweeting about joining the #resistance in 2016, and culminating with the "firey but mostly peaceful" protests and an election that a plurality of Americans are convinced was rigged of 2020.
A lot of these things were radical if viewed from the outside, but didn't put them directly at risk.
I would think the employed and well-off progressives were the ones providing cover in the NYT by shutting down things like Tom Cotton calling for a national response, not the actual people burning down cities (and even there there was more cover because some local authorities simply refused to use a strong hand).
OP is talking about them risking felony charges from a Trump-led government by trespassing on federal property or trying to bodily prevent Trump-appointed people from access. It's one thing to bully editors from your company discord for covering riots. But that is a different level of skin in the game.
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