The Movement That Couldn’t Say No
The Democratic Party bet everything on a cause it couldn’t explain and now can’t abandon. What began as civil rights has hardened into moral paralysis.
On a quiet afternoon in the East Room of the White House, Donald Trump grinned as he held up an executive order banning men from competing in women’s sports. Surrounding him were young girls in athletic gear, smiling. It looked like the photo-op from an alternate timeline. But it wasn’t. This wasn’t satire. This was 2025.
And the most confounding part? It worked. Not just the photo, but the framing.
Trump claimed the banner of women’s rights, and Democrats had no answer.
How did it come to this?
Tony Judt once warned that we live in an age where “we no longer ask of a judgment: is it true? We ask: does it sell?”
Nowhere has this shift been clearer than in the trans rights debate inside the Democratic Party.
What began as a struggle for equality was swallowed by something else — a performance of moral superiority so rigid, so allergic to complexity, that it could no longer see its consequences.
What we’re watching is not a policy mistake. It’s a crisis of meaning. The party tethered itself to a fragile orthodoxy it could neither defend nor abandon. To walk it back would be to admit not just strategic miscalculation but moral complicity.
So they don’t.
Start with the civil rights comparison. In case after case, Democratic leaders — including Supreme Court justices — have invoked Loving v. Virginia and Selma to justify pediatric hormone therapy and sex-based legal fictions. The intent was to wrap trans ideology in historical inevitability. But as Matt Osborne, a former Alabama Democrat, put it: “It’s ersatz belief. It’s not the real thing.”
Osborne’s point isn’t semantic. It’s moral. The original civil rights movement extended human dignity. The current project infringes on it. Not abstractly — concretely. In sports, in prisons, in medicine. The rights of women, especially poor and vulnerable ones, are not an afterthought. They are collateral damage.
Yet even those who know this stay silent. Because inside the party, the enforcement isn’t just cultural — it’s financial. This is where Howard Marks becomes essential. Marks teaches that markets — and by extension, institutions — are shaped by incentives, not slogans. And the incentive here is clear: billionaire donors like the Pritzkers and Strykers, whose money built the legal and activist infrastructure behind trans policy, have made it nearly impossible to deviate without consequence.
These aren’t isolated acts of charity. They are strategic bets with institutional leverage. Foundations, NGOs, and medical lobbyists form a closed circuit where ideological compliance is the price of admission. The ACLU takes millions to file lawsuits. State lawmakers take positions they admit privately are indefensible. Children are operated on, sterilized — all so no one has to be the first to say we were wrong.
Judt would say this is what happens when we replace politics with therapy. When discomfort becomes violence, and truth becomes a trigger. In this moral landscape, even Democrats who dissent — like Shawn Thierry in Texas or Jonah Wheeler in New Hampshire — are treated as apostates. Thierry voted to restrict surgeries on minors and was buried in death threats. Wheeler spoke in favor of single-sex spaces and had 100 fellow Democrats walk out as he spoke.
The contradiction persists because it serves a function. It allows the party to sustain a myth: that this is still the march of progress, not its distortion. That to oppose gender ideology is to regress. That silence is solidarity.
It isn’t.
Howard Marks teaches that the biggest risks are the ones no one is pricing in. Democrats believe that by leaning into this ideology, they are avoiding the Trump trap. That voters will hold their noses and choose the party of empathy over the party of cruelty. But that’s a gamble. And like all bubbles, the trans consensus is sustained not by conviction, but by the fear of being the first to break.
Tony Judt would remind us that real politics begins where illusion ends. The illusion that identity equals justice. That dissent equals hate. That young girls in tears at the finish line are acceptable losses in a culture war someone else declared.
The party will not change until the cost of denial exceeds the comfort of belief. And for many, that moment has already arrived.