The Frog or the Scorpion: Who Caused the Mess We're In?

And why it matters

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, President Donald Trump (Getty Images)

One of my favorite Nation writers, Dave Zirin, has a piece worthy of attention: “Why Democrats Won’t Throw a Real Punch.” I’m sure you can guess the reason(s). I’ll tell you why it matters in a second. Zirin starts with this:

Masses of enraged, terrified people are looking at the analog, slow-motion leadership of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and the zero-calorie rhetoric of House leader Hakeem Jeffries and want them replaced by people who know how to fight. As The Nation has reported, when Democratic politicians have shown up to protests, people aren’t cheering their presence. They are howling at them to do more.

The Problematic Hakeem Jeffries

Let’s look at Jeffries for a moment. It will teach us a lot.

First, on a related issue, the corruption of pro-Trump Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, Jeffries had this to say when asked to take a stand against him (h/t Ken Klippenstein):

Jake Tapper: You are one of the two leaders of the democratic party. Is it not important for Democrats, while criticizing Donald Trump for various allegations of corruption, to be able to call it out in their own party?

Hakeem Jeffries: … It would be premature for me to say anything about the charges that may or may not go away until then.

Zirin’s right; Jeffries won’t throw a punch. Why?

Jeffries is as corrupt as they come, in the Zephyr Teachout meaning of the word: “Placing private interests over the public good in public office.”

What’s Jeffries private interest? Staying in power, staying on top in the Democratic Party.

What’s the public good that’s being ignored? Proving to voters that Democrats are the anti-corruption alternative to Trumpist rule.

How are Democrats ever to hold themselves up as the alternative to Trump if they travel the same dirty road, but in different cars? Answer: They can’t, and voters are responding accordingly.

November, 2023. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Sen. Joni Ernst, join hands at the March for Israel on Nov. 14, 2023, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Mark Schiefelbein/AP

A second problem with Jeffries: He’s rabidly pro-Israel (“Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever”), pro-Israeli genocide, and works with AIPAC to defeat progressives like Jamaal Bowman and Nina Turner (if you click just one link here, click on “Nina Turner”). Jeffries is also the all-time top recipient of AIPAC money at $1.6 million and counting. Genocide: not a reason to like a man.

Why would progressives ever support a ‘party of reform’ so-led? Answer: They don’t; they’re starting to stop.

The Mess We’re In

Thus the mess we’re in. In simple terms:

The rebellion against the rich and their misrule has been treated by national Democrats as a threat to the status quo, from which they get rich. Thus they force the rebellion to be led by Trump, where it’s badly misused.

In fact, Trump and Musk are about to complete the billionaire coup against the FDR State that began with the failed Wall Street Putsch of 1933, a literal attempt to create their own fascist state. Unlike then, today’s “party of the people,” also billionaire-led, choose not to interfere.

Zirin’s Reasons We’re Here

You can see my reasons above why we’re in this mess. Let’s look at Zirin’s; you’ll find an overlap (emphasis mine below).

The question then is why, amid this tornado of anger, are Democratic institutions so soft? …

1. They’d rather have peace with the billionaire tech bros—see Jeffries’s recent Silicon Valley visit to “mend fences”—than wage a struggle to get their money out of politics, have campaign finance reform, and, for the love of God, tax their obscene and unearned wealth. …

2. A wing of the Democratic Party actually supports the substance if not style of what Musk is doing, accepting the argument of bureaucratic excess and the need to stop “waste.” Several put themselves forward to join the entirely made up, extra-constitutional operation known as DOGE. …

3. The legacy of Clintonian triangulation and the corporate-centered rightward pull of the New Democrats means their top campaign consultants for a generation have been insulated, isolated, and utterly incapable of being left populists or the “brawlers for the working class” that AOC says they need to be. …

4. The legacy of Obama was that a coalition based upon “demographic destiny” would win elections in perpetuity as long as they were not Republicans. …

5. Israel. Israel. Israel. In 2025, marching lockstep behind Israel means defending ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and billions in weapon sales so they continue unhampered. It’s also taking the opposite position of what their potential voters, particularly young voters, want to see. …

6. Democrats are allergic to raising people’s expectations, and as a result, they cannot solve problems. Instead of codifying Roe legislatively after the Supreme Court killed it, they raised money off its death. …

Cash-addled, complacent, complicit. If voters continue to see Democrats in this way, the Party may be lucky to win one time in three, and in office they’ll change nothing of substance. This can’t go on.

‘It’s my nature. It’s what I do.’

Democrats blame Republicans for this mess. But a snake is always a snake, and all scorpions sting. In the famous fable of the scorpion and the frog, when the frog asks the scorpion why he delivered the blow that ultimately killed them both, the scorpion said, “Why be surprised? It’s my nature. It’s what I do.”

It’s the nature of a Koch-ruled party to corrupt the country; the pro-wealth Powell Memo had a Republican source. The rich, like parasites, can always be counted on to murder their hosts. Why be surprised by their short-sighted, dangerous greed?

But the frog, the Democrats, had choices, or some thought they did. If so, they chose wrong. Poor frog. Poor those who depended on them.

Why This Matters

As I said, this can’t go on. The best the country can hope for is what Democrats offer: a return to the status quo ante, the world of Barack and Bill, when the rich drank everyone’s milkshake but some things seemed better. (In the scene below, by the way, Daniel is “capitalists.”)

Does America today want that? Do they want to go back? Or are they more hungry for hope, if even from Trump?

All other outcomes are worse. Consider the poles the nation is poised between: a rigid and well-policed Republican state with FDR dead and Democratic “messaging” that replaces reform; or a rocking from failure to failure, from party to party, also well policed, until climate makes government moot and we’re all on our own.

None of these outcomes are good. That’s why this matters. Zirin, at the end, talks about people he knows being “ready to throw [themselves] on the gears of this system.” That’s chaos, of course, something most people won’t choose lightly. But the world goes to hell if they don’t.