ArcaMax

SAN DIEGO -- Confused and rudderless, the Democratic Party has been derailed. Only Cory Booker seems to be on the right track.

The Democratic senator from New Jersey is demanding that fellow Democrats battle Republicans, stand their ground and fight GOP efforts to make America the 1950s again.

An autopsy is in order. Democrats wound up in a ditch by suffering a series of losses.

First, they lost their sense of who they were and what they stood for. In 2020, they got behind former Vice President Joe Biden because he was a moderate. Once he was elected, Biden was bullied by hardcore liberal Democrats to abandon the center and take a hard left turn.

Next, they lost the 2024 election and put Donald Trump back in the White House by failing to connect with everyday people, making Vice President Kamala Harris the party's nominee through a coronation and not leveling with the public about Biden's cognitive decline.

Now, they're losing perspective. Many of them no longer show up for work. They have forgotten that they were elected to thwart Republican efforts to scrap democracy and violate the Constitution and instead seem eager to serve as accomplices to the GOP in those efforts.

Booker believes that the opposition should actually oppose and that the resistance ought to resist. He thinks that, if there are going to be two major parties, the party out of power should present itself to voters as an alternative to the one calling the shots and not its clone.

That's the point that Booker made recently during a combative speech on the Senate floor in opposition to a pair of bipartisan bills intended to improve policing. What bothered Booker was not the contents of the legislation, which provided officers training and mental health services. He just didn't think Democrats should co-sign Republican proposals.

"This, to me, is the problem with Democrats in America right now," Booker said. "We're willing to be complicit with Donald Trump to let this pass through, when we have all the leverage right now there is. I say we stand, I say we fight, I say we reject this."

The senator has no interest in helping the Trump administration get anything through Congress because he thinks the policies and prescriptions from the White House harm America.

"When will we stand and fight this president?" he asked. "When are we going to stand up as a body and defend our work, defend our jurisdiction, defend this coequal branch of government?"

Finally, he added: "The Democratic Party needs a wake-up call. ... It's time for Democrats to have a backbone. It's time for us to fight. It's time for us to draw lines."

I'm not sure the time to draw lines was over a pair of seemingly harmless bills on policing. But Booker's larger point was spot-on.

Not everyone agreed. Writing for the Liberal Patriot Substack, Ruy Teixeira -- a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute -- mocked the senator.

"How thrilling--he wants to fight!" Teixeira wrote. "Cue the applause from Democratic activists, who can never get enough of this stuff. But to what avail? Famously, it failed to stop Trump from winning the 2024 election. And so far nonstop Democratic fulminations in Trump's second term have been notably unsuccessful in resuscitating the party's toxic brand."

Who said anything about brands? We're talking about leadership. Besides, when exactly did capitulation become a viable strategy? The damage it causes can last for years to come.

For instance, if the last three Democratic presidents -- Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden -- hadn't lurched to the right on immigration, Trump might have found it more difficult to now wage war on foreigners as well as U.S. citizens who look foreign.

Nor did Mark Halperin approve of Booker's stand-and-fight strategy. Asked by the Sirius/XM radio host if this more aggressive stance was good for Democrats, the political observer was skeptical.

"It's good for Cory Booker, probably. Although not necessarily," he said. "I can't find any other Democrat who thinks it's good for any other Democrat. Again, the resistance wants to resist. But we've seen since 2015 and 2016, for a decade now, that resisting in the style that Cory Booker just did doesn't seem to bear fruit."

I grew up in farm country, so I have a Ph.D. in fruit. You know what really tanks the harvest? Giving up. In both parties, we don't elect our leaders to go along just to get reelected. When they cave, we need to send them packing.

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To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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