Booker’s message was powerful and simple: Just do something. Now it’s your turn.

The question has hung for months over America like the dreary gray haze from the latest climate-induced wildfire: What on earth is wrong with the Democratic Party?

There’s no simple bumper-sticker response, but I think you can find part of the answer in the undercurrent of cynicism that bubbled up from liberal posters on social media sites Monday night just after 7 p.m. That’s when New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker rose on the Senate floor and proclaimed: “Tonight I rise with the intention of getting in some ’good trouble’ — I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able.”

When some Democrats voiced enthusiasm for the idea of what they called a filibuster against the extreme authoritarianism of President Donald Trump, other posters obsessed with the ultimate “well, actually” noted that technically this was not a “filibuster,” since Booker wasn’t blocking a specific bill or appointment.

Some were quick to label Booker’s all-nighter as merely performative and to make a fuss that the speech was just … a speech, not accomplishing anything. Where was the former Newark mayor when Senate Republicans were passing a budget resolution last month? Others said, OK, this is a great speech, but check out some of the New Jerseyan’s past positions. Isn’t this just a case of a failed 2020 presidential candidate trying to make himself relevant again?

These are the voices of a political movement with an Ivy League diploma and an emotional IQ of 57, whose obsession with showing off their cold, brainy rationality got crushed last November by a lie-based movement that manipulated the raw passions of everyday folks.

Even after Trump captured a plurality of the U.S. electorate last fall, the appointed leaders of the Democrats have looked like dithering Hamlets gazing at a skull while Trump’s arsonists burned down democracy.

The good news — well, actually great news — for the Democratic Party and the teetering American Experiment is that the initial naysayers vanished backward into Homer Simpson’s bushes over the next 25 hours and 5 minutes. By 7:18 p.m. Tuesday night, when Booker broke the 68-year-old record for the longest Senate speech, held by segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond, the whole world was watching — not just the couch potatoes of CNN and MSNBC, but millions of young people catching the most electrifying bits on TikTok.

I do think Booker’s speech will be remembered for decades and hopefully centuries because of its eloquent defense of liberty and the moral values that America has aspired to — albeit wildly imperfectly and inconsistently — over 249 years. But the power and impact of what New Jersey’s senior senator did this week was best summed up when he said: “When our nation was at a crossroads, leaders like John Lewis stood up. They didn’t wait for someone else to act — they became the change they sought. That is what we must do now. These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.”

The truth is Democrats, and indeed big swaths of America and the world, responded to one simple thing:

Cory Booker did something.

For months, rank-and-file Democrats have been screaming at their party leaders to stop equivocating, to stop reminding voters of the things they can’t do after Republicans regained the White House and the Senate and clung to their narrow control of the House. This defeatism hit its inevitable nadir when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer let Republicans pass a bad budget extension because he was so fearful his Dems would be blamed for a government shutdown.

“Use what you’ve got,” an expert on authoritarianism, Notre Dame professor Laura Gamboa, wrote recently in Foreign Affairs in an article on how to save democracy. “Oppositions need to not only protect the institutional resources they have but also use them to delay, obstruct, and if possible, stop the incumbent’s consolidation of power.”

Booker clearly listened to his constituents who were demanding action, pondered his options, and understood that a U.S. senator has one resource only 99 other Americans have: a unique ability to command attention. He couldn’t marshal the votes to derail Trump’s clown car of cabinet nominees, but the sometimes odd traditions of the Senate as a deliberative body did offer him an opportunity.

Booker’s gambit truly paid off because of a unique understanding of the area where Democratic efforts have arguably struggled most mightily: messaging. The American people like a good speech, but we can be obsessed with somebody breaking a record. The theatrics of Booker’s 25-hour marathon — the physical stamina of this former high school football star, the notion of a Black lawmaker wiping one of history’s most notorious segregationists from the record book — were its winning features, despite the gaggle of naysayers trying to turn these into a bug.

As Booker closed in on Thurmond’s record Tuesday night, some MSNBC viewers posted they were screaming at the TV because the network was interviewing Sen. Elizabeth Warren — normally a left-wing fave — and relegating Booker to the bottom corner. On TikTok — the youthful social network brain-dead senior Democrats nearly shut down — a livestream of the speech received an unbelievable 350 million likes. For weeks, Democrats have been burning cash begging their consultants to tell them how to reach Gen Z voters, when the reality was all it took was one man with sturdy legs and a strong bladder.

But messaging won’t work if you don’t have a message, and the running undercurrent of what Booker had to say was the even more significant power of the 25-hour speech. The senator made clear that by speaking out, he wanted to remind people that Trump’s embrace of an American fascism is not irrevocable, that our recent history isn’t destiny, that we still possess the agency to reverse the slide.

No wonder he cloaked the entire enterprise with the “good trouble” mantra of the late civil rights hero Lewis, who took part in historic sit-ins, boarded buses for dangerous “Freedom Rides,” and absorbed repeated beatings to end another period of antidemocratic rule on U.S. soil: Jim Crow segregation in the American South.

“I don’t want a Disney vacation of our history!” he said, many hours into the spectacle. “I don’t a whitewashed history, I don’t want a homogenized history. Tell me the wretched truth about America, because that speaks to our greatness.” It’s so important to not forget that our nation’s history has seen waves of backlash and small-minded repression — from Tulsa, Okla., to Selma, Ala., to Stonewall and Kent State — and yet the long arc of the moral universe has still managed to bend toward justice.

But in stepping forward as an actual leader, Booker was also reminding us that leaders can’t do it alone. In essence, he was also telling the American people to ask not what the resistance to American dictatorship can do for them but to ask what they, too, can do for the resistance. In finding his special power as a senator, Booker also challenged us to find our own.

Many good people are already doing this. It was just a month ago that I wrote about 11 or 12 hearty souls who were standing on a chilly day on the dangerous curb of U.S. Route 30 in Devon outside a Tesla showroom with handmade signs urging people to boycott Trump’s billionaire copresident, Elon Musk. They told me that — much like Booker — they felt they needed to do something, and this was what they thought of.

Now, Tesla’s sales are down a whopping 13% — these #TeslaTakedown protests are certainly part of that — and corporate America may eventually get the message that fascism doesn’t pay. And that Devon protest has grown from the first dozen die-hards to more than 450 people last Saturday, lining both sides of Lancaster Avenue.

If you build it, they will come.

» READ MORE: Outside Tesla in the Philly suburbs, the green shoots of an American uprising | Will Bunch

This Saturday, Americans who want to rewrite history — who want 2025 to be remembered not as the year the United States succumbed to tyranny, but the year people fought back and won — will get another chance to follow Booker’s lead.

Hundreds of “Hands Off!” protests against the Trump regime are slated across America, including rallies at Philadelphia’s City Hall and in suburban Media and West Chester. You can speak out against the rise of a secret police state, the senseless firing of federal workers, unfathomable tariffs, and so much more — and you won’t have to stand on your feet for 1,505 minutes.

We’ve been crying out for leaders to stand up for a moral America, and one senator finally heard us. There’ll be plenty of opportunity for negativity about Booker’s past, or his motives on the 2028 debate stage, where, yes, he’s shown there’s a place for him if he wants it.

But today, the only word this lifelong cynic can summon for Cory Booker is: bravo.

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter