A relative of mine—an older gent with a penchant for salty language—yelled over the phone at me in frustration, “Where are the damn cojones in the Democratic Party?”

His use of language aside, this argument—that the Democrats are not raising nearly enough hell as Apartheid’s Chestburster, Elon Musk, vivisects the government from the inside—is all over the liberal left. The phrase going around is, “The Democrats have brought a lectern to a social media war.” 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.

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To be clear, people aren’t criticizing the efforts of individual Democrats trying to expose this deadly grand theft taking place in plain sight. The cry is, “Why aren’t the Democrats as unified and ruthless toward their enemies as Republicans?”

Why aren’t they taking the fired federal workers who are sharing their heartbreaking stories—the ones that Musk says were being paid to do nothing—and making them famous? The cancer researcher on the verge of a breakthrough? The park ranger in Yosemite who won’t be there to conduct rescues and save lives? The air traffic controller who can speak to the connection between understaffing and recent plane crashes? Is it even safe to fly in Trump’s America?

The Democrats should be amplifying these folks—writing op-eds about them, refusing to go on camera without sharing their spotlight, pressuring their IG influencers to raise them up—but instead, we learn their stories from Reddit. As Moira Donegan wrote in The Guardian, “Why are the Democrats so spineless?” The conventional wisdom is that they simply “don’t know how” to wage a social media and public-relations attack that can, to use one blaring example, define people like JD Vance as a Nazi-curious Manchurian Candidate.

But we need to lose the theory that these Dems are “spineless” and just don’t understand how to wage political war. We know they can be vicious because we’ve seen them execute that kind of operation against the left since Ralph Nader caught them sleeping in 2000. We have seen them do it maliciously during Senator Bernie Sanders’s two primary runs. We saw Black and brown women stamped as “Bernie Bros” with enough, yes, ruthless, repetition to make it stick. We’ve seen President Barack Obama with all his rhetorical powers hector young Black men, but not aim his electric cadence at Musk and his Palo Alto brownshirts. It’s not that they cannot—they will not. When it was Sanders or an individual who demanded even a modest change in policy on Gaza, they brought out the knives. When it’s Musk and his apartheid army of incels, they wield sporks. Yet, as we keep seeing, spork fighting is demoralizing.

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

Here is what I think and here’s what I think we can do about it:

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. It’s not that this “waste” doesn’t exist—looking at you, defense budget—but in politics timing is everything. Legitimizing the need for DOGE at that moment provided Musk with the runway to destroy lives—he thinks workers are the “waste”—and wreck the best parts of this country: like the parks, the medical research, or the ability to fly on a plane with the certainty of landing safely.

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. I remember the Rev. Al Sharpton crushing right-wing hecklers at a Democratic primary debate when they went after fellow candidates Wesley Clark and Joe Lieberman. Since Sharpton was the only person on stage with real movement experience, he actually knew how to assert his will and inspire a crowd to join him in shutting them down. Too many Democrats are weak under the bright lights. Again, not everyone melts, but as an institution, this party is melting.

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. This not only bred inertia; it meant that in 2016, they were caught unaware by how much this country was becoming unglued. Yes, a “whitelash” was a big part of Trump’s Electoral College win, but that doesn’t explain everything. According to the highly respected University of Virginia Center for politics, 15 percent of Trump voters had pulled the lever for Obama. When Hillary Clinton lost, the party explained it by saying, “She won the popular vote, and there was Russian election interference” (both true!). But the party’s institutional response should have been: “Holy shit. What did we do wrong that caused us to lose to this fascist ass-clown caked in orange concealer?” Maybe if Democratic leaders pretended Elon Musk was a 22-year-old Palestinian from Dearborn, Michigan, they’d show more fight.

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. To watch Trump yank Netanyahu to the ceasefire table was so enraging because Biden could have done that any time. Instead of disciplining Netanyahu, Democrats armed him. They did this even at the price of not being able to do a rally on a college campus in an election season out of fear of being heckled and, due to the aforementioned isolation, they have no stomach for hecklers. When a Columbia University encampment for Gaza, led by Jews and Muslims, called for peace, Democratic darling Representative Jared Moskowitz compared the organizers to the Nazis of Charlottesville—instead of, say, comparing the actual Nazis around Trump to Nazis. This is morally bankrupt, and voters know it.

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. Biden could have opened clinics on federal land—and before one says Trump would have just closed them, that’s politics: creating viral images of Trump shuttering abortion clinics. And before one says they didn’t have the votes to codify Roe, think about how Trump’s thugs crack down on any Republican with even a stray musing that, for example, the drunk rapist with the Pat Riley hair and plausibly deniable white-power tattoos shouldn’t be in charge of the military. The contrast is shattering. President Biden let Senator Joe Manchin, a corrupt and charisma-free coal baron from a small, unwinnable state, become the most powerful person in the world. Real “brawlers for the working class” find a way to browbeat Manchin into voting accordingly.

I get why people are maddened by Democratic Party fecklessness. It’s easier to accept that we could build a fight, but the party is too cowardly.

We also do not have the time, nor is there any sign of mass inclination, to build a new third party for the working class. What we need to do is, yes, pressure these Democrats at every turn to fight and fight harder. I’ve made so many calls that my finger has become a misshapen claw, and you should be making calls, too. We need to go to town halls during the current recess and raise hell. We must also start to organize independent plans at every demo to move past Democratic passivity.

I’ve been to several rallies in DC where I’m among hundreds of people ready to tear apart Elon’s smug soldiers. But they end with Dems telling us not to lose the faith and, of course, to give them money. And then we go home. What’s needed is not compliant shows of strength but active disruption. If Representative Maxwell Frost is being stopped by security from entering the Department of Education—an absolute outrage—he shouldn’t just tweet about it (and raise money off of it) He should show up with hundreds of people. We are here: masses of us who would not be so easily moved. And if Frost wants to lead us inside, then more power to him. But if that’s not his plan, he needs to get out of the way.

Democratic Party leaders are not built for this moment. New DNC chief Ken Martin is no Marek Edelman. But for the Democrats that get the stakes and the ones who want to fight, they need to realize that their audience is vast and the time for niceties, like abiding genocide-enthusiast John Fetterman’s efforts to become the new Manchin instead of openly planning to primary him, is over. The salty old man in my life is ready to throw himself on the gears of this system. And he’s not alone.