I reflect frequently on the hours and days after the January 2021 insurrection, how clear it was to me and a small handful of others that House Democrats should have impeached Trump on January 7, and used his remaining two weeks in office leaning on Mitch McConnell to convene a trial, remove Donald Trump from the presidency, and disqualify him from future office.

Instead, fear and a vision of a future dominated by recriminations took hold of Democrats, and they scattered. Multiple Senate Democrats announced that they didn’t want to dwell on the attack; Nancy Pelosi adjourned the House; the moment of maximal GOP disarray passed; Trump avoided accountability.

When the impeachment trial finally did convene of February 9, after Trump had already left Washington, Senate Democrats were once again half-hearted about it. Many of us recall Chris Coons and his Valentine’s Day plans, but something else was at work—still wrongheaded, but at least somewhat admirable—driving Democrats to cut bait.

"I want to focus as much attention right now on the Biden agenda as possible and minimize the attention on anything other than the Biden agenda," said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), before the trial began—forecasting that the trial would be a box-checking exercise. Fear was at work here, too, as was Democrats’ related faith that kitchen-table issues are the most potent tools in politics. But so was a genuine impulse: This was, at the time, a fading echo of a bygone era when both parties sought power with an eye toward advancing long-held policy view.

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Culture war and institutional subversion have been part of Republican politics for all of my lifetime but at least until 2012, most leading Republicans viewed it as a means to an end.

The means were vilifying and scapegoating avatars of the broad left, and weakening its institutional power for marginal advantage in future elections. They crushed organized labor, engaged in maximal gerrymandering, including mid-Census, and attempted to suppress Democratic turnout with a variety of voting restrictions. But many of the ends lay outside the means: They had stuff they wanted to do with power that mattered to them. Cut taxes, cut social spending, privatize services, reform the education and immigration systems—things that required real political and bureaucratic effort. They still behaved as though they thought the point of all this was to gain power and use it to reshape the country. Time was valuable to them, and so they found a balance between shit-eating partisanship and fulfilling a legislative mission.

Kaine was speaking to a similar instinct. Democrats had stuff they really wanted to do. Even if they had the means and inclination to respond to the insurrection with the full force of accountability, it wasn’t worth it to them if it meant shelving or imperiling policy. Tick tock, tick tock.

I think it’s safe to say there is no longer even a partial symmetry between the parties on this score—particularly after Donald Trump signed his megabill cutting taxes and health care. The entire apparatus of the government is now geared in various ways toward harming and weakening progressives, liberals, leftists, Democrats, and their constituents. That has become the end in and of itself.

Democrats have, thus, never been more cowed. But they should look around: The Trump regime is a machine of crime and abuse, but most people are not impressed.

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I don’t mean that there are no ideologists in the administration. But their ideologies are all built around the conceit of crushing opposition—the institutional right’s only residual animating goal. Democrats over-fetishize bipartisanship, but Republicans have swung all the way to the other pole, where anything that happens to be bipartisan must not be worth doing—unless maybe Democrats have been coerced into voting for it. ...