The Trade-Offs and Tough Choices of the Serious and Responsible People
Not everyone gets an equal say in determining “the way things are.”
This article is the second in an eight-part series. Read part one here.
Last May, Gideon Resnick and Maxwell Tani wrote in The Daily Beast about the political evolution of Brian Fallon, a former press secretary to Hillary Clinton and a longtime Senate spokesman for Chuck Schumer. The reporters observed that in the years since Trump’s election, Fallon had “self-radicalized and become a resistance leader,” helming a progressive advocacy group pressuring Democrats to be more ruthless in their opposition to Republican judicial nominees.
Fallon’s aggressive tactics and willingness to challenge allies as well as enemies surprised many in Washington. They also quickly began to irritate the staffers and party insiders who’d long been his colleagues and comrades-in-arms. What made his political and tactical transformation so jarring, Resnick and Tani reported, was that Fallon hadn’t always been an advocate on the party’s fringe or a guy who built a dedicated following on liberal Twitter. He was “once a fixture of the Democratic Party’s institution” — a product and proponent of working within the system. “For years, Fallon and other operatives of his age functioned under…
