In recent weeks, I’ve been fortunate enough to observe two competing visions for Democratic senators should they retake the upper chamber in next month’s midterm elections. On the one hand, we have Senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse, who announced at the end of September that they were teaming up with their Republican counterparts Mike Lee and Shelley Moore Capito on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, which the quartet believe will “reform the federal environmental review and permitting process.” Per their press release, “This groundbreaking agreement will deliver cheaper energy, more jobs, and responsible growth across the United States.”
On the other hand, we have Senator Jon Ossoff, who has taken the debate stage twice in recent days to tell his Republican opponent to his face that he’s a racist scumbag.
My paraphrasing here is more blunt than the rhetoric that Ossoff has been using, but only just. In the pair’s first debate, Ossoff threw daggers, accusing Representative Mike Collins of hiring “half the Third Reich to staff [his] congressional office,” adding, “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” During Tuesday night’s debate, an embittered Collins tried to play the civility card, claiming that Ossoff’s incendiary statements about Collins’s very real embrace of white supremacy had led to death threats. Ossoff breezily brushed away the accusation and went back for more. Referring to Collins’s son-in-law, a white-nationalist influencer, Ossoff jabbed: “Can you commit for just three weeks to stop the production of neo-Nazi propaganda from your home?”
This is like watching a fever finally break, and it’s not just Ossoff. In the Michigan Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed has gone at Mike Rogers with both barrels, repeatedly referring to the former congressman as weak and cowardly. In Maine … well, let’s just say that I wished Troy Jackson had a bit of that dog in him, but he doesn’t. Still, I can tell he’s trying, and his better moments against Senator Susan Collins, like telling her “You can’t eat road salt,” at least have a bit of a surly edge. At any rate, the rise of rude Democrats has got me believing in the potential cure for one of our greatest civic maladies: degenerative Senate brain, the very condition that leads a Sheldon Whitehouse or a Martin Heinrich to work with MAGA filth bent on desecrating the constitutional order.
Right now, there should not be a bipartisan anything, unless it’s a negotiated agreement to mass-retire Republican lawmakers. As I’ve noted numerous times before, the GOP is essentially a criminal syndicate, aiding and backstopping a corrupt and self-dealing presidential administration. There can be no collaboration with Donald Trump and his goons on any level. So, no: I don’t want to see Democrats reaching for comity and accommodation. I don’t want collegiality. What I want to see is Democrats dogwalking their Republican opponents on live television. People like Ossoff are giving me faith that there are members of this party who are truly wedded to the notion of robust accountability, which is what the post-Trump era desperately needs.
One thing that the years ahead can do without, however, is pundit and anthropomorphic smarm-fountain David Brooks, who is apparently not a fan of Ossoff’s sublime debating technique. This week, in an appearance on PBS Newshour, Brooks complained, “Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it’s time to shut up. That’s just not what we do here in this country.”
Let’s take a look at the litany of things that we have been doing in this country that occasional TNR contributor Greg Greene compiled in response to Brooks’s call for toned-down rhetoric. The Trump administration is putting the finishing touches on a new prison for immigrant children and families. It has continued to murder people in the Caribbean. It has destroyed a girls’ school in Iran with a “double-tap” strike, killing 165 people. The shuttering of USAID has led to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Just this week, Representative Ilhan Omar’s home was raided by federal agents in a trumped-up criminal probe into her citizenship. Then there’s the ICE violence, the criminalization of dissent, the abrogation of the media’s First Amendment rights, and the constant flow of white supremacist rhetoric from the Department of Homeland Security.
All of that is to say that, contrary to Brooks, I don’t think Ossoff’s debate rhetoric really rates as a problem right now. Let me put it plainly: Civility is a con. It’s a tool of the status quo. It’s most often called for when the people who get mauled by the powerful try to vindicate their rights or their humanity. It’s a brand wielded by smarmy phonies; demagoguery dressed in the robe of a high priest. And as TNR contributor Nacona Nix explained at length, the liberal commitment to civility theater does a lot of real-world harm: It’s currently one of the primary vectors by which antisocial and undemocratic ideas get laundered into respectability. And while it may seem laudatory to wish for a day when there’s nothing but an abundance of highmindedness for all to share, the Trump era can’t be ended by a change in tone or temperament. We can’t nice our way to a better future. As Nix writes, “The task now is not to lower the temperature, but to raise the standard.”
Democrats should embrace the rudeness and vitriol if for no other reason than because it’s fully what the GOP deserves. But they should also just watch Ossoff cook, because the man is straight-up running a debate clinic. He’s calm, composed, and fully committed to tearing his Republican opponent to shreds. I find it comforting to watch Collins disconsolately shuffling his papers and stumbling back to his talking points. That he looks like a hunted man on that stage alongside Ossoff makes my soul feel lighter. That’s how Trump’s enablers should feel. That should be an essential part of the midterm message: Hunting season is coming. When I hear Ossoff’s debate rhetoric, I hear nothing discordant. I hear the sound of standards being raised.