Time for the Democrats to be born again.
The Democratic Party of our grandparents and great-grandparents is trying to be reborn.
For more than 40 years it has lain dormant. After the defeat by Reagan, the Democrats stopped fighting the world he built and started managing it. Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and sent the factories south. He signed the crime bill Joe Biden wrote and helped fill the prisons. He ended welfare for the poor and kept it for the rich. Clinton tore down the wall between the banks and our money, and a few years later the banks lost it all and got bailed out. Obama bailed them out, let the houses go, deported people by the millions, and kept the drone war and the surveillance state running without missing a step. On the things that decide who holds power—money, war, the police, or the spying—our party and theirs were one party. Those weren’t the battles this Democratic Party chose to fight.
Instead, they fought over the rest of it. The right to choose, the right to love and marry whomever you like, basic human rights. Even there, they did the least they could get away with, because anything real would be dangerous. Too fast. They told us things were getting better and better. The Obamas, the Clintons, the Bidens all told us they were on our side and they were fighting for us. Need proof? They put out a statement for women and Black people and immigrants and Latinos every time one was due, and then they went back to managing our decline. And every couple of years they came back and told us this was the most important election of our lifetimes, so hold your nose and vote, and we did, and the bills went up.
Then Trump came down that escalator. He told us the whole thing was a fraud and that our country was a wreck. Media talking heads were appalled. They laughed at him. But he connected, because it rang true. We’d been told for 30 years that we’d never had it so good while the ground gave out under us, and here was a man calling out the lie. The trouble was where he pointed. Trump took the truth of our condition and aimed it straight down, at the immigrant and the poor and the weak and the despised, the people with the least power in the whole arrangement. He found the real anger and fed it to the worst part of us.
The left is connecting now because it tells the same truth and points it the right way. America is falling apart, and it didn’t fall by accident, and the people who broke it are not the busboy or the kid at the border. We’ve been unjust. We’ve been immoral, paying for a genocide in Gaza with our own tax money while we couldn’t house our own people. We are failing, and we need to be redeemed. Trump never offers that last part, because his whole act runs on it being someone else’s fault. The left says it plain. We did this, and we can undo it, and we can make this country great, the real kind, not the hat.
So this is a fight about which future we get. One is the future the war party keeps selling, a trillion-dollar arsenal standing guard over a pile of money while the killing goes on. The other one has to be built, and it starts by telling the truth about where we’re standing. The whole question is which one we choose.
Current Issue
Tuesday, we got our first real look in a while at people choosing the hard path. Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York, and he spent his political capital backing primary challengers against sitting Democrats. All three of the House candidates he backed won, two of them democratic socialists. They ran against the party that signed the checks for Gaza, and they won anyway. Krystal Ball put it as plain as anybody, that the real radicals are the politicians who back the killing of children. Jaime Harrison, who used to run the party machine, told people like Mamdani that if they hate the Democratic Party they should stop using its name and go build their own. We’re not going anywhere. The party was never Harrison’s to hand out, and the people who actually built it just voted for the truth.
We’ve been here before, and the last time we got it right. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Democrats and socialists fought over the future and then they built one. They passed Social Security and the right to a union into law. They strung electric lines out to farms that had never seen a light bulb. They sent a generation to college on the GI Bill and gave the old and the poor a doctor with Medicare and Medicaid. They put us on the road to the moon. They built the biggest middle class the world had ever seen and pulled millions out of poverty doing it. They argued the whole way, and the country came out stronger for the fight.
But we forgot the other half of the job, which was the building. A roof you can afford. A doctor you can see. A job that holds a family together. We handed all of it to the market, and the market handed us back rent we can’t pay and care we can’t afford and kids who don’t believe they’ll ever own a home. The rights we won, for Black people and women and immigrants and gay and trans people, were real and worth every fight, but they can’t pay the rent, and the party that told us to clap never wanted to talk about the rent.
The Democratic Party needs a rebirth, not a rebrand.
We’ve done it before, so we know it’s not a dream. We need a politics, an economy, a democracy, and a country that works for all of us, and not for the shrinking few. We can build that. And the thing they have left to stop us with is fear.
Jesse Watters went on television and said the New York socialists aren’t even socialists but communists, and you can’t reason with them; you have to crush them. That’s the same move Trump makes, the powerful turning your fear on someone weaker than you. Be scared of your neighbor, and keep trusting the people who paid for a genocide and couldn’t fix a thing here at home. We’re done taking that.
So the party is trying to get born again. It’ll be loud and it’ll be ugly, and men like Jaime Harrison will keep telling us to leave. We’re staying, because the country is worth saving and we’re the ones who’ll do it. We tell the truth about how far we’ve fallen, and then we build our way back up. We make it great for real, or it won’t be.
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
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