Transforming the party: Democrats have failed us — it’s time to rebuild from the ground up

Would it not be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?— Bertolt Brecht 

It took just over three weeks for top aides on the Kamala Harris campaign to appear on “Pod Save America” and, as a HuffPost writer put it, suggest they’d been doomed all along by a fossilized sense “that there just wasn’t much else Harris could have done to beat Donald Trump,” even after a record fundraising surge. That raises an obvious question: If you couldn’t see a way to win it, why not bring in someone who could? That’s the problem in a nutshell, not just for the 2024 Harris campaign, but for the Democratic Party over the past two generations, the neoliberal world order and liberal democracy as a whole. 

Some have called Harris “the female Obama,” and that reflects the problem on three different levels: As with Barack Obama, her emotional but hazy promise of transformation was betrayed by insider faux-realism. Obama mobilized a two-million-strong grassroots army, then disbanded it once elected, as Tim Dickinson and Micah Sifry explained after two electoral debacles: the loss of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in 2010 and Donald Trump’s first election in 2016. Similarly, Harris launched with a series of unprecedented grassroots Zoom sessions, but squandered her momentum with a Wall Street-friendly economic message, while her massively-funded field operation in Pennsylvania was riddled with problems reported in The Nation, The American Prospect and Politico, capped off by the post-election revelation that thousands of Black and Latino voters in Philadelphia were ignored until a handful of staffers went rogue in the last few days.

Second, both Obama and Harris exemplified personality-focused politics, which have been dominant since the Reagan era and inherently favors performative splash over solving fundamental problems and party-building as the necessary path to doing that. Third, elite leadership has inherent limitations, and can’t restrain itself from undermining the common good in the long run — as the climate crisis so vividly demonstrates. As a result, the worldwide resurgence of authoritarianism threatens humanity’s future, feeding off the failure of liberal democracy to deliver on its promises.  

So the problem is not a single electoral defeat, or even a party facing a string of them. It is the problem of how to fundamentally transform our politics. Realistically, any possible solutions must be developed and advanced within, and around, the Democratic Party.

In my article on “Why Kamala Harris lost,” I argued that the neoliberal world order crumbling in the aftermath of the pandemic set the stage for worldwide incumbent losses this year. Democrats might have avoided that fate had they passed a robust package of reforms exemplifying a “politics of care,” which enjoyed supermajority popular support, but they were thwarted by Republicans and corporate Democrats in the Senate. This specific example reflected a more general problem: Our political system and structures are not set up “to promote the general welfare,” as the preamble to the Constitution promises. 

To realign our system with that promise, we must refocus our politics around solving major policy questions through public deliberation, or a “politics of care and deliberation.” In my follow-up article on strengthening democracy, I outlined four ways to do just that: citizens’ assemblies, public interest polling, a citizens’ agenda for political journalism, and reforming social media to promote deliberation. I now want to look at realistic efforts to reform the Democratic Party, which in turn can help lead to deeper systemic transformation.

Party reform — and space for deliberation

A model for those efforts was recently laid out by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which issued a memo with a roadmap for rebuilding and reorienting the party, proposing “four core principles” for the next Democratic National Committee chair: 

Reform, restructure and rebrand the party from the ground up and commit to a 50-state strategy that builds power through state parties;
Embrace grassroots donors and reject special interest and dark money, reinstating the DNC’s 2008 ban on corporate PAC donations, and pushing to prohibit super PAC spending in state primaries;
Rebuild the party’s multiracial, working-class base by uplifting poor, low-, and middle-income voices and concerns;
Highlight recent electoral successes while working to build broad coalitions to win elections. 

Within this framework, there’s a specific, bullet-point breakdown of each item — and a long-overdue proposal to grapple with the information ecosystem. One bullet point calls for creating “an authentic Democratic brand that offers a clear alternative and inclusive vision for how we will make life better for the 90% who are struggling in this economy,” as well as fighting those who have rigged the system. Politics of care is a natural part of that brand, with historic examples like Social Security, Medicare and environmental, worker and consumer protections. Although it’s a bit more hidden, the politics of deliberation can be found there too.

Within the third principle one bullet point urges “rebuilding our multiracial poor and working-class base” as a “top priority by launching new efforts to engage with multiracial low-income and working-class voters in all 50 states.”

All four ways I’ve outlined for strengthening deliberative democracy can be integrated into this, although only the first two can be done by the party and its allies alone. But successfully implementing those could help lay the foundations for the others. A combination of public interest polling and a citizens’ assembly process could play a vital role in doing this. Focus groups with voters could help shape the polling questions, which would be intended to surface areas of hidden consensus, as well as to identify points of genuine conflict. Those results could then inform the citizens’ assembly process — identifying core subjects to discuss, as well as the kinds of information needed to answer the most important questions. In this way, voters will be listened to and heard, in a process designed to produce a clear picture of their real-world priorities are — and that’s driven by them, rather than being marketed to them. 

It’s equally important that this deliberative process, driven by voter concerns, help bring clarity and coherence to those concerns. That’s the power of public deliberation in a nutshell: It’s not just about listening — which is essential — but about facilitating a conversational process, so that what people want can be clarified, made coherent and translated into specific policy ideas. 

While the party and its allies can do public interest polling and stage citizens assemblies on their own initiative — working with nonpartisan partners to assure fairness and objectivity — these processes can help drive the development of the other deliberative forms mentioned above. First comes the citizens’ agenda model for media campaign coverage, which is entirely centered on voters and issues — just like the process involving focus groups, public interest polling and citizens’ assemblies. And while the party has no direct control over social media, and shouldn’t exert any, it can certainly take advantage of existing social media forums to bring people into the deliberative process. 

Other facets of the CPC roadmap suggest further connections. Under its fourth principle, one bullet point urges investing in and coordinating with “rank-and-file Democrats and grassroots organizations who lead party-building efforts and campaigns in communities across the United States.” Focus groups, public interest polling and citizens’ assemblies are ideally suited to help there.

It’s the 50-state strategy, stupid!

Everything I’ve just said presumes a fundamental commitment to the CPC memo’s first principle, and its first bullet point: a commitment to “rebuild our party from the ground up, committing to a 50-state strategy that builds power through the state parties, is year-round rather than transactional, and that respects all voters within our big tent.”

The need for a 50-state strategy should be obvious, given Democrats’ worsening weakness virtually everywhere outside the battleground states, where they managed to keep things relatively close. Elsewhere, they lost ground far more dramatically — losing the key Senate races in Montana and Ohio even as progressive ballot measures passed. The party’s well-known failure to invest in rural red states is only one side of this story, since it lost ground in blue states and major cities as well. But it’s clearly important, and addressed at length in “Harvest the Vote: How Democrats Can Win Again in Rural America” by Nebraska Democratic chair Jane Fleming Kleeb (Salon interviews here and here). So I sought out Kleeb’s perspective once again.

“We have to break out of the D.C.-centric thinking and model that concentrates messaging into talking points which often have no relevance and concentrates funding into a handful of states,” she told me. “We aren’t running a national party. We are running a battleground-state party focused on the White House rather than fighting for voters and securing wins up and down the ballot in every single state and territory.

“The vast majority of resources should be going to the states to make critical messaging and party-building investments so we can win elections everywhere, year after year,” she continued. “This sets us up as a stronger party to then win the White House.” To do that, she added, “We’ve gotta get out of our heads and get back into communities, so our leaders are talking like our base again, rather than like a robot using a message box and white paper.”

Anyway, it’s not as if the battleground-state focus is working all that well. A New York Times postmortem on the Pennsylvania campaign cited Lancaster County as a relative bright spot, where Democrats held Trump close to his 2020 margin (which was 16 points!). “Hundreds of Democratic volunteers knocked on thousands of doors in the county,” the paper reported. while county Democratic chair Tom O’Brien claimed, “The Republicans, they really didn’t have a ground game.” 

That just doesn’t square with what I heard from a pseudonymous activist known as Lancaster Examiner, as I reported here. So I reached out again for a second opinion. “To assert that the GOP didn’t have a ‘ground game’ is uninformed, at best,” the Examiner replied by email. “The GOP ground game has been the long game. Creating a national and then state-level infrastructure for organizing the vote via churches has been happening in plain view since the 1970s, but too few have been willing to take it seriously.” 

Those decades of GOP work paid off handsomely this year, the Examiner continued: “Pennsylvania Family Institute’s Church Ambassador Network, for example, tirelessly crisscrossed the state organizing churches and pastors,” they said, focused on a message of “‘We are voting for the Cabinet positions that will be filled after the election. We are voting for the platform.’ That was a continued refrain from church networking leaders and was echoed clearly from the pulpit. Assuming that the GOP ground game didn’t exist because it didn’t resemble the Democrats’ efforts is a mistake, and one that needs to be learned from in short order.”

Making meaning — and the politics of care

But it’s not just the get-out-the-vote power that Democrats should be worried about, as explained by sociologist Jessica Calarco, author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net” (author interview here). There’s a deeper and more fundamental worry: the shaping of meaning that is enforced by the lack of a strong social safety net. That takes us back to the importance of a politics of care.

“In our current, DIY system, the absence of solidarity has left many people feeling not only isolated but adrift, identity-wise,” Calarco told me. That “opens the door for right-wing radicalization, through groups that promise support and a place to belong,” as in conservative churches like those described by the Lancaster Examiner.

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“Child care costs, for example, can push mothers not only out of the workforce but also, maybe ironically, into political conservatism,” Calarco said. “Moms pushed out of paid work often struggle with loss of identity, and conservative Christian moms’ groups often step in to fill that void.” she said. She cited the case of Kara, a woman with a masters degree profiled in her book who left her job as a mental health counselor after giving birth, because she couldn’t find affordable, high-quality child care. “Kara struggled with the isolation and loss of identity and social connection that came with stay-at-home motherhood,” Calarco said, and resented that her husband didn’t help more with housework and child care.

“Then a friend urged Kara to join an evangelical Christian moms’ group, which offered instrumental support like hand-me-downs, meal trains and babysitting swaps, a community for emotional support around the challenges of parenting, and a newfound sense of purpose and identity in stay-at-home motherhood. Before joining the group, Kara would ask herself: ‘Why can’t my life be the way I want it? I could go change the world and I’m stuck here at home!’ The moms’ group taught her instead, ‘We are changing the world with the kids we’re raising, and it’s, like, really important work.”

Such church groups may claim they’re teaching timeless truths, but in reality they’re exploiting a historically contingent situation. As Calarco explains in her book, America created a national child care system in record time during World War II, only to dismantle it afterwards. Now it’s time to remake what we’ve thrown away, and we came achingly close to doing that with Joe Biden’s original Build Back Better plan.

Four days before Joe Manchin killed that plan in December 2021, Data for Progress released polling showing greater than two-to-one support for a full suite of care-oriented policies: universal pre-K, paid family and medical leave, investments in child care to limit costs, long-term care for seniors and people with disabilities. While Manchin later supported a much-diminished bill (the so-called Inflation Reduction Act), those care-oriented policies were not just abandoned but virtually forgotten. Returning them to the center of our politics should be a top priority for Democrats, integrated into whatever else they do. The process of focus groups, public interest polling and citizens assemblies could help make that happen. 

Public health: Taking a stand 

More than three years ago, I proposed that “public health” could be understood as the key to saving democracy from fascism. It could “serve as a long-term, overarching framework to reframe our politics, to provide us with new common sense in addressing a wide range of diverse issues by highlighting common themes and connecting what works.” 

The fact that our entire health care system is under attack, with the crown jewel of vaccination squarely in the crosshairs, doesn’t mean we should shy away from that potential. If anything, the frontal assault on public health should help us understand the central role it can play in unifying us politically, just as it plays a central role in protecting us.  

In that frame of mind, we can look at all the attacks that Donald Trump and his followers are prepared to unleash — on immigrants, on the trans community, on women seeking abortion care, on freedom of expression and so on — as attacks on our collective public health that require a public health response — that is, not a response focused on protecting isolated individuals, but on protecting all of us as members of the human community, who share a profound a interest in protecting our bodies, our environment and our future. 

Threats to jail Democratic mayors or governors who defy or oppose Trump’s deportation plans, for instance, would provide the perfect occasion to convene a citizens assembly on the topic. It’s one thing to witness a high-stakes political drama between high-profile public officials. It’s quite another if that can become an occasion for prolonged and thoughtful public deliberation. The entire nature of the confrontation could be changed by doing that. Fascism feeds on spectacle, after all, particularly spectacles of domination and cruelty. Democracy feeds on deliberation, on openness, on building community. We should give the public much more of those things. That’s the key to transforming and rebuilding the Democratic Party, and creating a better future for everyone.