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Why The State Of The Union Boycotters Have It Right
And what they can teach the rest of the party about winning friends and influencing people.
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Don’t look now, but Democrats are divided again—this time over whether to dignify Donald Trump’s State of the Union address with their attendance.
Many mainline Democrats—not just true-blue progressives—will boycott the speech, and I hope that by the time the doors to the House chamber are sealed shut, all or nearly all of them will participate. Even the frontline members.
But they won’t. The Democratic leadership, as it has every time Donald Trump has delivered an address to a joint session of Congress, wants members to show up in “silent defiance.”
“It is my view that you don’t let anyone ever run you off of your block,” Jeffries said, spinning submission as a show of strength.
Jeffries and Chuck Schumer invited Virginia’s new governor, Abigail Spanberger, to deliver a traditional official response to the State of the Union address, and some on the left have interpreted it as a sign that she’s sided with party leadership and the norms police over more righteous party actors.
That’s the divide.
I don’t really want to waste anyone’s time hyperventilating about the Democrats who follow Jeffries’s lead. We shouldn’t treat symbolic gestures as Critical Litmus Tests, particularly when we know many Democrats will fail them. That’s just casting about for reasons to be mad. I’ve wanted Dems to boycott Trump’s speeches since 2017. I wish more of them had seen the wisdom in that sooner. I also know that this isn’t the biggest deal in the world.
But I do want to say a bit about why the boycotters have the better argument—and about how this dilemma, and similar dilemmas, map on to the larger debate within the party over how to become less reviled.
If you agree with the rest of the piece, I hope you’ll share this article with your member of Congress—particularly if they plan to attend.
If you don’t, I’d love to hear why in the comments section. If there are better arguments than Jeffries’s lurking out there, I’d love to hear them. No bad ideas in a brainstorm.
The difficulty with State of the Union in particular is that the audience in the chamber is captive. If Democrats commit to maintaining a “dignified presence” while Trump speaks, as Jeffries requested last year, they will sit there unresponsively absorbing abuse and lies.
That leaves them in an inherently weak posture. The fact of being the out party doesn’t make a party weak, per se, but this particular ritual of minoritarian politics asks the out party to make itself vulnerable. That’s unpleasant enough under normal circumstances, but it’s intolerable when the president is a predator. The only reason to agree to participate in the ritual is to honor a dying and unimportant norm at the expense of one’s own dignity.
But there’s more going on here. I don’t think the Dems who plan to attend think this norm is very important. I think they think “maintaining a dignified presence” is good politics in and of itself.