The Hill: To stop Trump, Democrats must reinvent themselves

POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Saturday, February 22, 2025 23:59
VIEWED: 262
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6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, February 22, 2025 11:59 PM

Impossible. You will never change.

You would die before you let that happen.

So be it.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5155065-to-stop-trump-democrats-m
ust-reinvent-themselves/

Quote:

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As President Trump and Congressional Republicans use their slim majorities to try to foist a radical regime change on America, Democrats need to reckon with why they’re watching helplessly from the sidelines.

Having lost control of both the White House and Congress, and with Republicans marching in lockstep, there is little they can do to stop Trump’s drive to monopolize political power and rule by diktat. Only the courts are putting speed bumps in his way.

Democrats, yoked to the status quo, are extraordinarily unpopular. Less than a third of Americans view the party favorably, while 57 percent disapprove. Independents are even more likely to express negative views. During the Biden years, Republicans also erased the Democrats’ longstanding advantage in party registration.

Progressive activists nonetheless are pressuring party leaders to make a show of resisting the Trump-Elon Musk blitzkrieg on the federal government. This is tricky: Democrats are duty-bound to speak out against Trump’s unconstitutional usurpation of legislative power. But they must also avoid falling into the trap of defending a federal bureaucracy most Americans believe is badly broken.

The same risk applies to other key issues voters trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle — what to do about the economy, immigration, crime, energy and climate, schools and cultural friction around race and gender.

The Democrats’ challenge isn’t simply to fight the Trump cult’s hostile takeover of U.S. governing institutions but to offer a credible agenda of their own for political change and public sector reform.

That won’t be easy, because party leaders have yet to come to grips with the blunt message voters delivered last November: Democrats are on the wrong side of the new class divide that’s reshaping U.S. and center-left politics elsewhere.

The 2024 election confirmed the continued erosion of Democratic support among non-college Latino, Black and Asian-American voters. That’s severing the party’s last arterial link to working-class America and cementing its new identity as the party of highly educated professionals and cosmopolitan elites.

Non-college voters far outnumber college grads. That’s why the Democratic coalition is shrinking and retracting into its urban bastions, conceding vast swaths of the country to Trump and the Republicans. Trump won 31 states last year, to Kamala Harris’s 19.

To compete nationally, Democrats must rebuild a cross-class coalition. They won’t do that by consulting the same progressive voices that led the party into today’s electoral cul-de-sac. Nor can they rely on so-called centrist groups that cheered on the Biden White House as it pursued policies that deeply alienated working-class voters.

To win a new hearing among those voters, Democrats will need new ideas and new leaders unafraid to challenge the party’s Washington establishment.

It’s also time for Democrats to stop aping populists on both the left and the right and instead rediscover the tough-minded and pragmatic liberalism that has animated their party at its best, from Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman to Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

These leaders believed America stands for equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. They embraced economic freedom and individual initiative, not the top-down dictates of democratic socialism. They stood firmly against protectionism and isolationism, and for social security and fiscal responsibility.

They weren’t for open borders, insisting instead that America is both a country of laws and a country of immigrants. They wanted equal justice for excluded and marginalized minorities, not group preferences. They believed America should be a beacon of freedom and democracy to oppressed people everywhere, and they were unreservedly pat

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