MANIFESTO FOR A RENEWED DEMOCRATIC PARTY

Reflections on what happens now

On February 1^st the 448 members of the Democratic National Committee will vote on their next Party Chairman. Democrats having lost the White House, and the House, and the Senate, all hopes now rest on the DNC to create a path forward for success in 2026, 2028 and beyond.

That’s why the election is so important. Project 2025 - which the President-elect had said he knew nothing about yet which he now touts as a banner platform - contains within it elements that are an assault on the underlying values that make America a free society. Americans must meet the challenge to counter that assault.

As the governing arm of the party, the Democratic National Committee is critically important. And not just what it does, but also how it does it, will go far towards determining electoral results for Democrats over the next four years. In politics it’s often said that the end justifies the means, but actually the opposite is true: as Gandhi said, the end is inherent in the means. If your process is tainted, then so will be your result.

Had the DNC not effectively suppressed, even prevented a real Democratic primary this year - had the democratic process been allowed to flourish untainted by such dictatorial behavior– we would be in a very different situation than the one we find ourselves in now. Turning the Democratic National Committee into a conduit for electoral victory in 2026 is going to take more than the selection of a new chairman; it’s going to require the creation of a new organizational culture. It’s going to take a reckoning with its past. It’s going to take repair of its moral compass.

The DNC is now charged with the task of creating an electoral phoenix out of the disaster of its ashes. The party’s turnaround will take a whole lot more than new messaging, however. It will take more than summoning the will to fight. It will take more than data analysis, field organizing, or fundraising. It will take a different kind of expertise than that associated with traditional politics. It will take a much deeper insight into people, much greater compassion for what Americans are going through, and expert insight into the emotional and psychological dynamics that have led literally millions of people to abandon the Democratic party.

If we want a new Congress, and a new kind of President next time, the Democrats are going to have to be a new party.

In essence, the Democratic party has lost its spiritual connection with the American people. Many who used to trust the Democratic party now feel cynical about it – and often for understandable reasons. The party has squandered its moral authority, its processes and policies having been corrupted by corporate influence. It has become increasingly disconnected from the values - particularly economic values - that have always been central to the party’s identity, resulting in a mass exodus of the working people of the United States away from it. This was a huge mistake and a tragic failure.

The DNC in large part is what got us into this mess, and only a transformed DNC will be able to get us out of it. It needs to be completely reformed from the inside out, and the selection of the next DNC chairman will send a very loud signal to the entire country whether the Democratic Party is up to the job.

The DNC needs more than to be better; it needs to be different. It will take way more than a traditional political skill set to match the collective adrenaline rush Donald Trump has created among his followers. He has created an age of political theatre, and we will not be going back.

His is a new political paradigm, and ours must be as well.

The delegates to the DNC have a very important decision to make: will we continue to do what we’ve done in the past and simply do it better? Or do we break with the past, rebuild our party from the inside out, create an entirely new culture and become a party that can win the future?

To become again a winning party, the Democratic party must reinvent itself.

The MAGA phenomenon now sweeping the country was generated by one man, Donald Trump, and there will be no rejuvenation of the Democratic party without coming to terms with his power. There have been few political figures in the history of the United States who have dominated American consciousness as has he. His influence now all pervasive within the Republican party, the Congressional elections in 2026 will in many ways be a referendum on him.

Trump is a political sorcerer of 21^st Century politics and we will not electorally defeat him – or those who align with him – using a 20^th Century tool kit. Being a political opponent the likes of which we have never seen in this country, Trump will only be checkmated using tools that we haven’t used before. He is not a traditional politician; he’s a phenomenon. And the Democratic party needs to become one too.

Trump is a street fighter, and he’s good at it. But if we get down into the dirt with him, he will win every time. We just did that, and it’s why we lost. Our power does not lie in going down into the mud of dirty politics, but in flying high into the ethers of the values we purport to believe in. The only way the Democratic party will survive as a major player in America is if its willing to come home to itself. The forces behind Project 2025 will not be defeated by degrading our own principles, but by upgrading them. The Democratic party must become a party led not by street fighters but by political visionaries.

Democratic victories in 2026 and 2028 will come about not only by fighting MAGA, but by inspiring the American people. That is the one and only way to match the emotional frequency of Donald Trump. The party has surrendered its own values and it needs to take them back. We will win by fiercely advocating on behalf of the average American in the face of the threatening juggernaut of economic royalism. The results of Trump’s agenda will be obvious soon enough; the work of the Democratic party is to create a compelling electoral alternative to the rampage he is about to unleash on the American people.

For over a year and a half, I said to anyone who would listen that the Democrats were headed for defeat. I said the Democratic party had swayed from its unabashed advocacy for the working people of the United States, without which it could not win. I said that an Economic Bill of Rights was an essential requirement for people living in economic survival. I said universal health care should be our rallying cry. I said saving our planet was the great moral challenge of our generation. I said that if the Democratic Party wouldn’t stand up for the people, then the people would not stand up for us. I said the American people were sick of war and were ready for our country to be a beacon of peace. I said the DNC’s suppression of candidates not named Biden or Harris was undemocratic and would come back to haunt us.

I had strong feelings about all of that, and I have strong feelings now. The only way to defeat the Big Lies that our President-elect is too willing to tell, is to tell some Big Truths – the whole truth and nothing but the truth - to ourselves, and about ourselves. We must acknowledge our complicity in creating the oligarchy that runs this country today. We need to make a deep and meaningful commitment to being once again the party of the people, not simply a party of the players.

Donald Trump is not our problem. He has never been our problem. The problem is the space Democrats left open, which he simply walked into. Leaving far too many people desperate even when we had the power to help them - people without healthcare, without economic opportunities, without justice, without hope - we created the inevitable phenomenon that the most cursory reading of history predicts: people’s attraction to a political strongman. Donald Trump didn’t so much succeed as the Democratic party failed.

The greatest resistance to change will come from inside the party. Some of the most powerful forces within it are more afraid of the Democratic party changing than of it failing. They’re attached to the game that they’re used to playing. Their lack of psychological astuteness regarding the underlying factors in American politics today render them completely incapable of winning this game, however. In a very real way, they’re not even on the court. They bring with them a sponge and hope it will absorb the flood.

During the presidential primary I talked to people all over the country, from New York to Nevada, from New Hampshire to California, from Wisconsin to Kentucky. I talked to them, and more importantly I listened. I heard from single mothers struggling to make it, and from college students who worry they’ll have no place in a future economy; from people who desperately need yet lacked healthcare, and from people burdened with debt they can’t imagine wiping out in their lifetime. Not once did I hear someone say, “It’s okay, though. I know the Democrats have my back.”

How do we repair our relationship with the millions of former Democrats who voted Republican for the first time in their lives this November? And with tens of millions of people who didn’t vote at all in November because they honestly didn’t believe it could make a difference in their lives? It’s going to take work to show the American people that Democrats aren’t just a party of technocrats and corporatists, more interested in our donors than in our voters. It will take contrition and humility and the willingness to change. The party has to look in the mirror and honestly recognize where it got off track.

Do we even know our voters? Because Republicans know theirs.

As Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral train made its way from Warm Springs, Georgia, to his burial place in New York, a famous photograph was taken of Chief Petty Officer Graham Jackson, whose cheeks were streaked with tears as he watched the President’s train roll by. When asked by someone, “Oh, did you know the President?” he responded, “No, but he knew me.”

Does the leadership of the Democratic party know the tens of millions of Americans who choose each day between paying the rent and feeding their children three meals, or Americans who cannot make a living at just one job, or Americans who are living with too much medical debt yet not enough medicine. Does the Democratic elite have any idea how depressed these people are? Or Americans angry about the poisoning of their food supply, the toxicity of their environment, the destruction of the planet, and the stranglehold of monied forces over every aspect of their lives?

It's not enough to understand that we need to be talking to people more about kitchen table issues. We need to understand – to truly understand - how many Americans can’t afford a kitchen table.

These problems are far bigger than Donald Trump and existed long before he rose to power. They stem from a rot that has been festering for far too long, and it is a rot we must address with unwavering determination. It’s the $50T transfer of wealth over the last fifty years from the bottom 90 per cent of Americans. It’s the devastation of the public sector in favor of an orgy of privatization. It’s the creation of oligarchy at the expense of our democracy. And yes, the Republicans started it. But no Democrat has stopped it.

For those who have given up on the Democratic party and feel that only a consortium of third party efforts can present an unequivocal challenge to the corporate tyranny now destroying our democracy – you might be right. My loyalty is not to my party but to my country. Yet given the incredibly tight time frame we have in which to save our democracy and our planet from overwhelming forces of corporate authoritarianism, it is undeniably true that there must an institutional counterforce to Project 2025 - one with serious political heft that already exists - if we’re going to challenge him effectively over the next four years. We don’t have time for the Democratic Party to fail.

The next chairman of the DNC would be wise to do three things I have listed below. (I hope the next chairman will not be Ben Wikler, since it is he who kicked both Dean Phillips and myself off the Wisconsin primary ballot. That is the exact opposite of the kind of behavior that will fundamentally change things. A man who presided over the near-death of our democracy will not preside over its rebirth.)

1) The first thing the new chairman should do is to go on a listening tour. Do not be there to tell Democratic voters that the Democratic Party needs their help. Rather, offer help to them. The Democratic Party should not apologize for the fact it thinks the levers of government should be used to help people thrive. The new chairman should ask voters why they believe the party failed, and what they believe we need to do to change.

Genuine contrition would go a long way.

The chairman should ask people who voted for Democrats in the past but then voted for President-elect Trump, what the party did and did not do to lose their trust – and what it would take to win them back. Apologize on behalf of the party for anything that made them feel less important than big donors. In the final analysis, the Democrats didn’t lose because they didn’t have enough rich people’s money; they lost because they didn’t have enough poor people’s votes.

2. The campaign for 2026 should be waged far beyond the usual Democratic haunts. The goal is to win back the trust of people who have felt, and too often rightfully so, that their minds and hearts were not as important as their wallets. People who have felt powerless, un-listened to, and unseen. Traditional activism alone will not inspire them. People have seen to much and are too exhausted at this point to buy it. What they want is hope, and what we saw in November tells an important truth: people will go for false hope before they’ll go for no hope at all.

The new chairman should look beyond traditional political activists; widen the circle to include non-traditional storytellers. Use new media to connect this generation of Americans with the great American story and the value of a civic heart. Americans are hardwired to respond - positively or negatively - to the history of this country. We can both celebrate our history and deal honestly with its contradictions. Republicans snatched away from Democrats words like patriotism, morality, and faith and for only one reason: Democrats thought they were too cool to use them. Such concepts are diamonds that Democrats were dumb enough to let drop in the sand, while Republicans were smart enough to pick them up. Republicans want to post the Ten Commandments on the wall in schools? Well, we want to put up the basic tenets of the Declaration of Independence! Never was there a more radical vision statement, a more impassioned call to equality and justice, a more specific direction to government to serve its people and not the other way around.

The Democratic Party should not be reticent to discuss our history. Obviously there have been evils in America’s past; 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration were slaveowners, establishing a dichotomy that has been with us from the beginning and lives with us to this day. Every generation has reiterated the struggle between those whose hearts were ablaze with the possibility of an equitable society, and those who found such an ideal inconvenient for their own ideological or financial purposes. Their assaults on our freedom have always been with us; the larger point is how we responded to them in the past and how we respond to them now.

Americans responded to slavery with abolition, to the institutional suppression of women with the Women’s Suffragist movement, to the Gilded Age with the establishment of organized labor, and to segregation with the Civil Rights movement. Now it’s our turn, and the Democratic party should inherit the mantle of that tradition. We should identify the problems in our past, but we should identify with its problem-solvers! The way Democrats will become again the triumphant party in American politics is by becoming the indisputable inheritors of the great American legacy of pushing back and prevailing against systems of injustice. The injustice this time isn’t one particular institution, but rather an economic paradigm: that the profits of a few are more important than the wellbeing of the many.

But how does the Democratic party claim such stature, if we’re simultaneously taking money from big insurance companies, Big Food companies, Big Ag, big chemical companies, Big Oil, big banks, and the military industrial complex? The Democratic party beginning to take corporate PAC money in the 1970’s was the beginning of its moral decline. That matrix of corporate tyrants represents the forces that in his time Franklin Roosevelt called the “economic royalists.” When such same forces came after him, his response was that he “welcomed their hatred.” Yet the party today does not come across as the inheritor of a great vision, whether Roosevelt’s or anyone else’s. It comes across as a dry and technocratic business, far from the people it purports to represent. Until that changes, its political star will continue to fade.

3 Lastly, and significantly, the next chairman of the DNC must be willing to purge from its operation its far too cozy relationship with bad actors. There are ethical and operational malfunctions that now permeate the working of the Democratic party and they must be torn out at their roots. No state party chairs kicking people off primary ballots, no de- amplifying candidates, no smearing candidates, or infiltrating campaigns. No one, whether a Party chair or a local activist, should ever feel permission, much less invitation, to put the interests of the party before the interest of the voters or the ethical principles by which the party must abide. The party should protect, not transgress against, the right of all rightful candidates to debates, fair competition, and adequate media exposure. It does not do that now.

When the American people can feel in their guts an alignment between what the Democrats say and what they do, then a new chapter will begin not only for the party but for the United States. In order to help repair the frayed bonds of affection between the Democratic party and millions of people who now feel politically homeless, the party must become purpose driven and mission driven. It must once again become a place people can turn to in the hour of their economic despair.

We need an institutional counterforce to the draconian policies that lay within Project 2025 and other policies being promoted by our President-elect. Where President Trump does things we can support, we should do so without hesitation. But when he promotes his interests or the interests of a new gilded class over the rights and needs of the American people, we must be brilliant in our capacity to counter him. It will not be enough to simply have a more populist message; we need a more populist soul.

Some people are afraid of change, but what we should be afraid of now, is not changing. If it continues as it is, then no matter how good its organizing or how much money it raises, the Democratic party will not meet the energy of the Trump phenomenon. But we can meet it – and we can meet it spectacularly –if we are courageous and pure of heart and audacious. Reconnecting with our ancestors, we will begin that process. Reconnecting with our hearts, we will complete it.

Then we will win.