To Democrats In Office: America Is In Grave Danger. Fight like It!

Give up on the idea that this will be easy or that there is a simple solution. It is the cumulative weight and fury of outrage that turns the tide.

During WW1, the United States developed a wartime foreign intelligence department known as the Cipher Department. Around Washington, it was called the Black Chamber.

In 1929, newly appointed Secretary of State Henry Stimson disbanded the Cipher Department, declaring, "Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail." Stimson was one of those figures of the American ruling class who once dominated key positions in Washington. He graduated from Yale, where he was a member of Skull and Bones, the university’s secret student society. After Harvard Law, he worked on Wall Street and served as Secretary of State and later Secretary of War under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.

As Secretary of War during WW2, Stimson helped guide the Manhattan Project that created the first atomic bomb. He's credited with removing the Japanese city and cultural center of Kyoto from the target list, though it was not, as portrayed in the film Oppenheimer, because he had honeymooned in Kyoto. (He didn’t.)

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Stimson was 74 years old, and it's fair to say that his earlier naivety had morphed into a much more realistic and dark view of the world.

Today, when I look out at the political landscape of our troubled time, I have a deep fear that the Democratic Party is still operating under the sensibility of "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail," when what is desperately needed is the Manhattan Project mindset. Every optimistic pre-atomic bomb hope that the Japanese would surrender was as misguided as refusing to accept that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very idea of America.

If a hostile foreign power was successfully executing a plan to make America poorer, less healthy, less educated, more economically stratified with degraded upward mobility, and more racially divisive while fracturing the civil bond of rule of law, it is hard to imagine what would be done that Trump and his anti-American Republicans are not doing.

That's on the domestic front. On the international stage, America has shifted from the lynchpin of NATO to the best hope Russia has of winning a genocidal war in Ukraine. The nation that sent its son and daughters to die in Europe to defeat a dictator now sends its Vice President to Germany to rally support for a neo-Nazi party. For more than a century, America has stood with small democracies, opposing bullying neighbors who threaten their borders. Now, we are bullying and threatening Canada and Greenland.

In this national crisis, the Democratic Party is stuck in the "Gentlemen don't read gentlemen's mail" mentality. The result is a slow-motion Munich moment when confusion and denial are the on-ramps to appeasement. In American history, it is eerily reminiscent of the period following the battle for Fort Sumter almost exactly 164 years ago. As Canadian journalist Stephen Marche wrote in his deeply disturbing "The Next Civil War:"

"On the eve of America's first civil war, the most intelligent, the most informed, the most dedicated people in the country could not foresee its arrival. Even when Confederate soldiers began their bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, nobody believed that the first civil war was inevitable.

But the farther back you look, the more inevitable events appear. How could there not be a civil war after bloody Kansas, after John Brown landed at Harpers Ferry? How could there not be a civil war after slaveholding congressman Preston Brooks beat the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner past unconsciousness with a gold-tipped cane on the floor of the Senate? How could there not be a civil war after South Carolina ignored federal tariffs during the nullification crisis of 1832? After the battles over the gag order?"

The Democratic Party – and America – cannot treat Trump's forcing of a Constitutional crisis as a policy disagreement. There are many explanations for the reluctance to respond with sufficient clarity to the most violent attack on the Constitutional rule of law, but let's start with one I know firsthand. Call it the "Cloak Room Delusion." I saw this as a 16-year-old Congressional page when Members engaged in often angry denunciation of another party's proposed legislation, quickly followed by laughter and drinks when off the House floor. For a long time, we applauded this show of civility, crediting it as the shared good faith of those who disagree on policy.

I've known dozens of Republican Members of Congress and Senators since I was that 16-year-old page loving a backstage pass to history. As a consultant, I helped elect many. Most of them are perfectly nice individuals, far from the mean-spirited anger of Steven Miller or the poorly socialized weirdness of Steve Bannon. If they lived next door, they'd be the good neighbors who have a key to your house in case of an emergency when you're out of town.

None of that matters now.

In an era when the most vicious battles were fought over policy differences like a 35% cap gains tax vs 25%, giving the party that disagreed with you the benefit of the doubt could be called constructive compromise. Today, it is a dangerous, seductive folly. It doesn't matter what they say in private, all the protestations of how much they hate what Trump is doing to their party. That is a weak, Good German rationalization. As Jonathan Last, the brilliant editor of the Bulwark, put it, "Any person or institution not explicitly anti-Trump becomes useful to him. You are either on the bus or you are off." In a piece I highly recommend, Jonathan writes:

"This is an extraordinary moment, and it requires extraordinary vision and actions. We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states.

The Democratic party has more to learn from Alexei Navalny or the protesters in Serbia than it does from Chuck Schumer or strategists obsessing over message-testing crosstabs."

This essential mindset requires abandoning the pretext that America needs a mature, governing party. No, what America needs is a party that views MAGA Republicans as an existential threat to the American Experiment. What does that mean in real-world actions? It starts with honesty. Stop calling the illegal kidnapping of American residents "deportation." In a must-read essay, journalist Garrett Graff writes:

"There's been a lot of misuse of language in this case — people keep parroting the Trump administration's frame of ‘deporting’ people to El Salvador, but that's clearly not what this is. Deportation is a formal process, with guidelines and due process, and one that primarily focuses on removing or returning people to their country of origin. What Trump is doing is closer to the "extraordinary renditions" we saw of accused terrorists post-9/11, but even that awful frame somehow describes something more organized, limited, and arguably humane than what is unfolding right now—and what Trump hopes to grow this into. It's hard to think that this is anything less than state-sanctioned kidnapping."

As I have written before, state Attorneys General should charge and prosecute those engaged in these criminal acts. The right question isn't, "Will that work?" while the status quo is allowing hooded agents of the state to send American residents to a torture gulag without the involvement of the American judicial system. The question should be, "Is what we are doing now working?" That is what should drive every decision and every action.

In any battle of good vs evil, which is what this is – it's impossible to know what will and won't be effective. Did the Freedom Riders end segregation? No. Did the bus strike in Memphis end racism? Of course not. It led to the assassination of Martin Luther King. The same for the March on Washington and every Vietnam War protest. No one action made the difference. Give up on the idea that this will be easy or that there is a simple solution. It is the cumulative weight and fury of outrage that turns the tide.

The key is to do everything possible to stop this powerful authoritarian movement. Use every parliamentary rule to shut down Congress. The AOC and Bernie Road show is a good template. Make news, don't react to news. Charter a big ass plane and fly it to El Salvador filled with Democratic elected officials. Do not fear anger or be deluded by the concern that America still wants a bipartisan system. That is focus group crack.

Start with the assumption that you are losing and there is little time left to win. Thinking of this as a 2026 battle is the first step to ensuring 2026 doesn't matter. Courage is contagious. Who dares wins. If you cannot find it within yourself to fight for America, resign. Let someone else take your place.

This isn't a battle of your choosing. But it is the battle for which you will always be judged. This is the moment you must show the world and history which side of the Edmund Pettis Bridge you are standing on.

Nothing else matters. On D-Day, Strom Thurmond was the oldest paratrooper to land in Normandy. On his 99th birthday, he was a United States Senator. But all he is rightly remembered for is segregation.

What you do in the days and months ahead is the destiny that will write your legacy. Fight like America is in grave danger. Because you know that is the truth.