Don't Turn Your Back on the Party

Avoiding the Road to Perdition - Don't Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater

By Steve Schear

“I hate the Democratic Party,” one of my son’s very progressive friends told me a couple of weeks ago. A lot of folks share similar views. An experienced, highly competent organizer wrote me recently that it would be hard to raise money for the Democratic Party “given how mad we are at them right now.”

Like plenty of other grassroots activists, I've been unhappy with the Dems' leadership for years. The DNC, DCCC and DSCC waste a ton of money and fail to support field operations until way too late, and then not very well. Their consultants and campaign managers are mostly media folks who prefer spending money on ads, mailers and themselves rather than on field. (The DLCC is better but not great.) Last week’s article by Robbin Warner In Search of Bold Changes from the Democratic Party in The Grassroots Connector provided steps the leadership should take to overhaul the Party.

But we can’t simply wait for the Democratic leadership to act while MAGA is moving fast to expand its power and destroy the most effective programs of the federal government.

The Democratic Party’s reputation has been so damaged by the right-wing propaganda machine, our loss to Trump, and the Party’s leadership failures that many progressives and other activists don't want to be associated with it. However, any idea that we should not support local Democratic parties because of past failures or problems is a self-destructive position that could help MAGA stay in power for a decade or decades. Like it or not, the entire US electoral mechanism is set up for a two-party system. If we ourselves do not move to strengthen the Party, the opposition to fascism will only weaken.

That's why we need to start strengthening the Party from the bottom up, by supporting local committees and state Democratic parties with competent leaders organizing for change. We cannot solely attack MAGA positions that harm the community. We must also show that the Democratic Party is fighting to help and protect people. Given the DNC’s history, we can’t count on newly-elected DNC Chair Ken Martin (above) to make good on his campaign promises to support year-round organizing, state parties and a 50-state strategy.

It is wrong to blame the Democratic Party in its entirety because of the failures or problems of its leadership. Last year, millions of Democrats helped the party win state and local elections, demonstrating strong party identity in spite of the national party’s weaknesses. When people reject the Democratic Party, they are abandoning all of us who are working to defeat MAGA through the Party. Anger directed at “the Party” as a whole, rather than at its national leadership, only further weakens us and damages the Party’s reputation. That’s playing into MAGA’s greedy hands. If we turn our backs on the Democratic Party, there will be hell to pay.

We need to come together to both strengthen the Democratic Party infrastructure at the local level, and to rebuild the Democratic Party brand as the party of the working and middle classes.

The best vehicle for doing that is local Democratic parties. Because the national Democratic leadership has failed to support local organizing, many grassroots organizations have chosen to fund local non-profits instead, viewing them as a more effective alternative. But those groups cannot be effective at rebuilding the Democratic party and restoring its reputation, because that is not their mission.

Now is the perfect time to begin reforming the Party from the ground up. MAGA’s billionaire leaders are flaunting their power. They believe that since they control the government and the information sources for a majority of the population, they can get away with anything. Trump announcing that he is now the “King” shows just how confident he has become.

Well, we know from history that hubris can lead to a monarch’s downfall. Just ask Elon Musk’s hero Napoleon, who died at the age of 51, depressed and isolated in exile on St. Helena, a remote Atlantic island.

MAGA actions are already harming our communities, and it’s only going to get worse. We must use the damage done to regain support of voters who have been misled by the RWPM to think MAGA will help them more than the Democrats.

As Robert Hubbell wrote in a recent column, we need to tell the stories of MAGA’s victims. But we need to do more than tell their stories. If you are angry, channel that emotion against the Republicans who are enabling MAGA authoritarian excesses. We need to organize maximum pressure on GOP House members in purple districts to vote against cuts in Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and Medicare that will directly harm their constituents. We should emphasize that MAGA is cutting these programs to pay for tax cuts for billionaires like Elon Musk. Best case, we apply enough pressure so that three of them vote against the healthcare cuts and we stop them from going into effect. Worst case, we show people how their representatives have betrayed them, helping us to defeat MAGA in 2026 and retake the House. Either way, local Democratic parties can demonstrate that they are on the side of the working and middle classes and MAGA is not.

Chinese philosophy recognized long ago that a crisis can provide opportunities. We now have an opportunity to support local Democrat organizations so that they can recruit volunteers and spread the word in their communities, showing how MAGA billionaires are lying to them, screwing them and taking away their healthcare. And if we do that well, we just might avoid the road to perdition.