Who will win the battle for the Resistance 2.0?

The Democrats have gone pretty quiet in the five weeks since President-elect Donald Trump’s comeback victory. Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t had much to say, President Joe Biden appears to have “quiet quit,” and a triumphant Trump is already traveling the world meeting with world leaders and setting the tone for the next four-plus years of American policy. “They’re pretty shell-shocked,” one Hill veteran cracked when I asked about it.

That doesn’t mean they won’t be causing hell for the next four years, though. The contours of just how Democrats will resist the Trump 2.0 administration have been taking shape for weeks. The latest battle pits former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) against Squad leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and is emblematic of the different ways Democrats might tackle the new administration.

Sure, it’s a battle of old versus new. But it’s also a battle over how the Resistance is going to play out.

Ocasio-Cortez is running against Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) to become the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. It’s a big job that will give the winner a lot of camera time as well as a lot of power over the direction in which the Democrats take their fight to the Republican Party.

This might seem like so much inside baseball, but a key difference exists between the two candidates. AOC is a young firebrand and a household name. This last election, she bounced around on stage and yelled a lot. She might not always know what she’s talking about, but she riles up the base. In the worlds of Will Ferrell, “She’s provocative! She gets the people going!”

Connolly is different. To put it in perspective, when Ocasio-Cortez was born, he’d already spent a decade as a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (and that’s back when Congress did actual governance). When he joined the House Committee on Oversight and Reform as a congressman, his celebrity colleague was still in college.

Sure, it’s a battle of old versus new. Connolly is a white man in his mid-70s who is battling stomach cancer. That’s a far cry from AOC, and his health might make a difference here. But it’s also a battle over how the Resistance is going to play out. Will it be about rallying the base or putting hits on the administration?

We’ve seen this sort of dynamic across the country, where California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called for a special emergency session of the legislature to combat the next president but refused to allow any exchange of ideas (or grandstanding). Instead, he just demanded tax dollars to tie up the Trump White House in court. He got his way. Pelosi’s win on oversight is less assured.

Democrats successfully rallied voters against Donald Trump in 2018, 2020, and 2022. By 2024, the message had finally run out of steam. If they want to stop him this time, the battle will consist of less yelling in the streets and more fighting in the courts and in Congress. It won’t be easy going for the White House, especially given the weakness of so many of its allies in Congress. The party will need to come prepared. And a lot will come down to who ends up winning the fight for Resistance 2.0.

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Remembering Dr. Lee Edwards (1932-2024)

Lee Edwards passed away peacefully Thursday morning. He was 92. Lee was an incredible man and a witness to history, known to many as the historian of American conservatism. But more than that, he was a gentle and caring soul who nurtured and mentored the future even as he studiously preserved the past.

I first met Lee 14 years ago at Cafe Berlin, a favorite of his that reminded him of his time in Germany with the U.S. Army. Alongside some pals, I’d just relaunched Young Americans for Freedom’s New Guard magazine — long a voice for the new right, but by then defunct nearly 20 years. Lee had founded the magazine in 1961 and edited it for years before handing it on. We brought a 50-year-old copy of his first issue and a fresh print of our own.

He was flattered but cautious. Prudence was a quality he both valued and practiced. But I guess he liked what he read. The next time we met, he gave me a first edition of National Review No. 1 alongside words of advice and encouragement. Over the next decade and a half, we’d meet for lunch or at his classroom at Catholic University or when he came to lecture up-and-coming reporters for me. He always asked about what I was working on, and more than once, his gentle, unspoken look of skepticism put me back on track (though there’s something to say for that year reviewing beer and liquor in exchange for free samples).

Eight years ago, I wrote a profile of him for the Daily Caller that followed his life from occupied Germany to the left bank of the Seine and from Barry Goldwater and Bill Buckley to Ronald Reagan and anti-communism. You can read it in full here.

Lee was a kind man. He was a writer and a teacher who loved his children, his grandchildren, the church, and the Lord. He loved his wife and missed her terribly after she passed just over two years ago. When I last visited him this summer after the cancer diagnosis he bore so bravely, a beautiful photograph from their wedding day hung in the entryway among the photos of generations that grew up around their love. We’ll miss him here, but it’s wonderful to know he’s home, reunited both with God and with Anne.

This man, ‘the Voice of the Silent Majority’ for a half-century, has lived conservative history like none other

The New York Times called Lee Edwards "the voice of 'the Silent Majority,'" as he stood among 25,000 Americans he had gathered at the Washington Monument to support U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. It was November 1969.

At 36, he had spent the past decade at the birth of American political conservatism. He’d helped found Young Americans for Freedom in 1960 at William F. Buckley’s estate and launched their magazine, the New Guard, in ’61; he’d worked to pack Madison Square Garden with 20,000 anti-Communists in 1962; served as the press director for Sen. Barry Goldwater’s seminal presidential campaign in ’64; traveled with Ronald Reagan as he geared up to run for California governor in ’65; and covered Richard Nixon in 1968. At 36, he was at the top of his game. And he was about to leave that life behind.

On a cloudy Tuesday morning in August, two weeks after the Republican Party nominated Donald Trump for president of the United States, Lee is standing in the handsome, dark-wood-trimmed seventh-floor theater of Washington, D.C.’s Heritage Foundation, looking out the window at the city he’s made home for most of his 83 years.