Building a New Democratic Party

February 22, 2025

This is the start of a working paper.

This is not so much about politics…but is more about how the conservatives have taken a big jump forward on their philosophical agenda and the Democrats need to generate a Radical Response for a new agenda…

First, I don’t think this is about addressing or complaining about what MAGA is doing.

What needs to happen is for either a New Democratic Party to arise or if they cannot get it together, for a New Republican Party to arise.

Media that tells the Truth is central to the issue because it is the people who decide who is in power, and that is based on what they think they know.

The Bannon/Heritage/MAGA/Trump movement that we are currently seeing is tied into the part of America that was not happy.

Ironically, much of the unhappiness can be tied to the inequality that grew out of the Reagan Supply/Side trickle-down economics that started back in 1980.

The Democrats did not do a good job of explaining the cause / effect story.

An important aspect to the big picture is that America is by nature a greedy nation, not a nation that coalesces around fairness and peacefulness.

They are not going to change, but the majority of the people need to understand that there is a better way.

It is key for Democrats to understand why they lost a close election. We are at a tipping point unless we look deep into the macro drivers and formulate a deep response.

It is all about the message, not more politics.

It is apparent where the Trump opening began, the ill fated Nation Building in Irag, by Bush-Cheney. This left a Republican Party without wheels.

The Democratic Party had its own come to Jesus moment when the Biden administration thought creating jobs through legislation and government deficits would seal the deal. Part of the Democrat failure was tied to the reality that they had no young person with the authority and knowledge to articulate the Bidenomics Macro View in both 2020 and 2024. They had the person, Pete Buttigieg except they had him tied up in the Transportation Dept.

What jumps out at me is how closely Trump is coat tailing on the Bannon big picture agenda, yet is letting his anger and ignorant staff move some very dumb ideas into place.

Democrats should not ignore Ro Khanna of California. He has a love / hate relationship with Bannon. Bannon says Ro is stealing the lyrics to his, Bannon’s, song. Ro seems to understand Bannon, and he for his own reasons strongly feels globalization did not work or produce desired results.

The following comments are pulled from a 2024 Atlantic article and provide good input towards putting together the 2026-2028 plan..

There are Democrats who understand the problems with the Imperial system. Ben Rhodes, a top former Obama foreign affairs officer says “I guess where I differ with the right is that I think we could evolve the system while keeping it roughly in place.” He’d just published a piece in Foreign Affairs arguing for a new global arrangement that would acknowledge an emerging multipolar order while leaving in place America’s system of alliances and the basic plumbing. “I don’t believe in just pulling the plug.”
Rhodes goes on to say “I think the innovation of the Bannon and Vance project,” he said, “is that it’s forced the left to become defenders of the very institutions they’re supposed to be skeptical of, like the CIA, like the broader intelligence community, like NATO.”
“The Social Democratic government in Germany or the Labour government in the UK,” he said, are now propping up structures that “your own constituencies are skeptical of. It’s an uncomfortable place to be.”
He talked about reading as a teenager about CIA-backed death squads in Latin America. “And now suddenly I’m in a party that is the vocal defender of the nobility of the US intelligence apparatus,” he said. “And it’s not just the geopolitical sense. It’s bankers too. We are now defending global capitalism and NATO and the entire enterprise of neoliberalism.”
He gave an anecdote from when he was reporting his book, titled After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We’ve Made. “I remember I was sitting with this guy who was in the Hong Kong opposition—in a shopping mall—and I was feeling very sympathetic to him. And I remember realizing, today in 2019, I have more in common with this guy than with most of America.”
“There’s something new about that,” he said. “When I was growing up, I would’ve just had massively more shared reference points with my family in Texas. That’s something that is a challenge to people, to liberals, because I like the idea that we’re all the same, we’re all equal. I’m just as curious about and value as much the humanity of some guy in Hong Kong as somebody in Texas. Isn’t that where this is all supposed to evolve?”
Global leaders, he said, need to reckon with a world that can never truly be flat, as the optimistic liberal phrasing once envisioned it would be. “Otherwise we’re ultimately going to lose everything—because then Bannon is going to capture that pushback,” he said. “We need to have a national identity that ties this all together,” he said. “And everyone agrees that there is a problem here. We all see it.”
The divide is between people who want to try to bring things down to a soft landing and people who want to blow it up. “The challenge,” he said, is that “nobody has shown me you can blow it up absent a war and a mass disruptive event.”

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Here is more input for the Revolution Project pulled from a Matthew Iglesias substack piece on 2-8-25

It is titled Should Democrats be left-wing economic populists?

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During the 2024 election, a critique of the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party began to form. When the party was swept from power, that critique exploded across the post-election discourse. The Democrats lost the election because they weren’t sufficiently economically left-wing.

Proponents of this thought argued that Harris doomed the Democratic Party by campaigning with icons of big business, failing to articulate a bracing critique of corporate power in America, and rejecting certain left-wing economic policies. If you look down-ballot, they argued, the Democrats who performed the best were the true left-wing economic populists.

Opponents argued that this framing was a bit simplistic and that the election was decided by a multitude of other factors: the global incumbency backlash, the country’s rightward turn on immigration and social issues, and of course, inflation. They also pointed to data showing that standard bearers of left economic populism, such as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, actually underperformed the Vice President in their respective states. Either their economic populism wasn’t all that popular, or it was outweighed by the fact that voters moved to the right on other issues.

A problem with the post-election discourse is that peak audience interest occurs in the days following the election, which is also when election data analysts are able to provide the least information about what exactly happened. It takes time to run the numbers, compare a congressional candidate’s performance against the top of the ticket, and really determine what worked and what didn’t.

Now that we have some good post-election data, I think it’s time to interrogate this a bit. The best performing Democrats were almost universally moderate on immigration and social issues, and while the role that played in their electability is important, it’s also separate from today’s question: Were the over-performers left-wing economic populists?

The many shades of economic populism

The term “left-wing economic populism” is amorphous and used in reference to all sorts of policies. These range from the agenda most strongly associated with Bernie Sanders— Medicare for All, significantly higher marginal tax rates on the rich, and national rent control — to a political agenda grounded in a disdain for large corporations (think Google and Amazon, and the role they play in cannibalizing markets). Virtually all Democrats who embrace the Sanders agenda also embrace the corporate power agenda, but the reverse is not always true.

But here’s the most important thing to understand about the candidates who over- performed expectations this election cycle: There isn’t a single left-wing economic stance that tied them all together. Instead, their economic arguments sprang from a wide variety of ideological forms, some that fall under that great umbrella of left-wing economic populism and others that did not.

The best data I’ve come across to evaluate the top performing down-ballot candidates comes from the election analysis organization Split Ticket. They developed a formula to calculate a candidate’s “Wins Above Replacement” (WAR), which controls for certain race fundamentals (seat partisanship, incumbency, demographics, and money) to determine how the average candidate would have performed in the election. Then, they compare that expected performance with the actual candidate’s performance.

The result is a score that quantifies the electoral boost generated by the quality of the candidate.

Freshman Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet’s campaign in Michigan’s 8th congressional district is an instructive place to begin. Her primarily working class constituency stretches from Flint to the tri-cities of Saginaw, Midland, and Bay City.

Trump won those voters by two points, but they also supported Rivet by a margin of nearly seven. She earned those votes by deploying messages like this:

This is an old political lesson, but I think it’s somewhat ignored in our contemporary economic populism debate. Americans tend to be skeptical about how their tax dollars are spent. Individual proposals for stronger public services often poll favorably, but the corresponding tax increases needed to fund them typically do not command the same level of support. In an election that was dominated by rising consumer prices, tax cuts functioned as a direct promise to put more money in voters’ pockets.

That doesn’t tell Representative Rivet’s full campaign story. She also pledged to fight corporate price gouging, take on big drug companies, and “make the uber wealthy pay their fair share.” In short, all language that sounds like it could’ve been ripped from a Bernie Sanders speech.

These shades of economic populism were adopted by other top-performing candidates too. Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez got extensive attention for winning her rural, Trump-voting district in Washington. Her campaign focused on attacking big companies like John Deere, which prevented customers from fixing their tractors outside of authorized dealerships. She called out this refusal to let people exercise “their right to repair” as clear evidence of corporations infringing on the rights of blue-collar Americans.

But then she extended her critique from big corporations to big government by recounting how a daycare center was unable to serve fresh produce due to a government regulation that mandated a certain number of sinks for food preparation. Several left-wing writers tried to debunk this story, and in turn, argued that attacking government regulation should be off-limits to Democrats. But as Jennifer Pahlka noted, that criticism really misses the point. Wagging your finger at voters and telling them to read government regulations better is bad politics. And Pahlka, an expert at reading such regulations, said they could have been interpreted to prohibit fruit and vegetable preparation in certain daycare centers.

Look at the ads and read the campaign websites of the top WAR candidates, and you’ll see rhetoric that stretches across the ideological spectrum. In a predominately rural New York farm district, Representative Josh Riley called for middle-class tax cuts, while also attacking his opponent’s tight relationship with big agriculture companies. In Maine’s second Congressional District, Jared Golden was the most prominent Democrat to back Trump’s universal tariff policy, but he also criticized the expanded child tax credit for being poorly targeted.

It’s impossible to neatly fit these positions into any particular economic paradigm. But they work because they match the particular politics of the representative’s districts. This obvious, yet frequently overlooked, fact is critical for people on the left and center-left to understand.

Clearly, calling for a Green New Deal would kill Jared Golden’s re-election attempt in Northern Maine. But it also wouldn’t be very effective for him to sit down with workers in the state’s lumber industry and tell them to quit crying about imports and embrace the sweet life of free trade. Trump’s protectionist policies, if enacted, might ultimately make life more expensive for Mainers. But we shouldn’t wag our fingers at one of the best performing elected officials in the country — the policy merits of a proposal must, to an extent, be separated from the political merits.

The tricky politics of left-wing economic populism

Bernie Sanders has been preaching the gospel of left economic populism for years, but one of his recently converted disciples is Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut.

Murphy thinks Democrats lost the working-class, in part, because of their failure to move to the left on economic policy. As proof, he shared a post-election memo that highlighted a statement that polled exceptionally well across the political spectrum: “a handful of corporations and economic elites have too much power, and the government is doing too little about it.”

I think this quote underscores some of the misconceptions in the post-election economic populism conversation. As we saw from the top-performing candidates this cycle, this kind of rhetoric was actually fairly common. But notice it didn’t go much further. There were no sweeping condemnations of American capitalism, nor did it veer into the anti-business dogma so common among left-leaning economic populist thought leaders. Not every plank from Bernie Sanders’ economic wishlist appeared; in fact, some of the winning messages—like tax cuts or reduced government regulation—were nowhere to be found on his list.

There’s a reason for this.

Although guaranteeing health insurance for everyone is popular, abolishing private health insurance is not, largely because most Americans are satisfied with their current providers. Free childcare and paid family leave also command popular support, but voters have signaled discomfort with the substantial increases in government spending that would be necessary to fund those programs.

Another core element of the economic populist project is capitalizing on the public’s supposed disdain for big business and wealthy elites. But here, too, the politics are a bit tricky. Voters believe wealth inequality is a serious issue, but they’re also more than likely to say that billionaires are good for the economy and increase the rate of innovation. Large corporations are generally perceived not to have a net benefit on society, with the exception of technology companies — Americans trust Amazon and Google more than they trust the federal government.

Recent polling on Elon Musk from the progressive PAC House Majority Forward really underscores this point. He doesn’t poll negatively because of DOGE or his obscene wealth, but rather because voters are worried that he’ll cut safety net programs to enrich himself. It’s neither new nor particularly exciting, but Democrats best economic argument is still being the party that protects Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

This brings us to another overlooked aspect of this debate. When people claim, with absolute certainty, that Bernie Sandersism would have been the antidote to Trumpism, they rarely reckon with the economic impact of Sanders’s environmental agenda. A fracking ban and higher taxes on fossil fuels are unpopular and, if enacted, would inevitably have driven up energy prices.

Regardless of one’s policy position on decarbonization efforts, it’s important to realize that voters have made it clear they’re unwilling to incur a financial cost to reduce carbon emissions.

Seeing the full populist picture

I’m not discounting the political benefits of certain forms of left economic populism. There’s a reason why Chris Murphy’s quote commanded such high levels of public support, and there’s a reason why some of these high-performing candidates leaned into similar rhetoric. Rather, this is an attempt to add some texture to a conversation that too frequently assumes every Democratic candidate has a big “do left-wing economic populism” button on their desk, and if only they pressed it, the party would finally achieve a durable governing majority.

There’s a reason why people who are obsessed with electing Democrats in red states are obsessed with former Senator Joe Manchin. In each of his two elections in West Virginia, he achieved a far better electoral performance than any other Democrat in his state, and he accomplished this with a relatively moderate economic platform. However, his former primary opponent, Paula Jean Swearengin, ran as the Democratic candidate for the state’s other senate seat in 2020 on an economically left populist agenda. She won 38% of the vote. She checked all the relevant boxes — Medicare for All, a fifteen dollar minimum wage, free public college tuition — yet, Swearengin fared 10 points worse than Manchin did in his last general.

It’s a truly glaring piece of evidence. And it shows that there are other necessary ingredients to being a successful candidate than just being economically left-wing.

In Nebraska, Dan Osborn’s independent 2024 Senate campaign captured the attention of many in the left-populism camp when he nearly beat his Republican opponent. They pointed to his anti-corporate rhetoric as proof that their preferred message could potentially win in a deep red state. But it’s important to note that he also called for reduced government spending and ran an ad calling himself “the only real conservative in the race.” Osborn’s blue-collar background as an industrial mechanic and union leader were also critical to boosting his outsider populist bonafides.

This is the final critical point: Don’t mistake the aesthetics of the populist with the ideology of left-wing populism. Neither are a guarantee of electoral over performance, but some of the candidates who most effectively deployed some left economic arguments were also people with genuine outsider personas. Chris Murphy will likely run for president in 2028 on a platform of “big tent” populism. But it’s worth asking if the lawyer and two-term Senator from Connecticut has the profile to authentically deploy the populist message that can win back the working-class.

The simple answer to that question is likely no. But there is no simple affirmative answer to the question of how Democrats can win back working-class voters either. There are obviously broad principles that the party should subscribe to, but as the results from Split Ticket show, there is not a single economic agenda that has been proven to have all of the answers.

Maybe Trump’s presidency and the rise of the tech-right will sufficiently alienate voters to the point where they’re ready to declare war on the “bro-ligarchs.” But more likely, voters’ nuanced, and at times paradoxical, relationship with left-economic populism will remain the same four years from now. It might be a part of the answer, but only a part of it.

Here are more comments to add to the discussion from a prominent rural based progressive Jim Hightower on 2-8-25

This is Bizarre: Today’s Politicians Celebrate Jerks and Ignore Grassroots Genius

Corporate chieftains are giants, even geniuses – right?

Years ago, laissez-faire ideologue Ayn Rand hailed them as society’s supermen, comparing them to Atlas, the mythological Greek god who “holds the world on his shoulders.”

But look, here comes one of her modern-day gods now – Timothy Wentworth! He stands astride Walgreens, the multibillion-dollar drug store conglomerate. Last month, Wentworth demonstrated his corporate prowess by offering a stunning insight. He noted that, with shoplifting on the rise, chains like his had reacted by moving much of their merchandise into locked display cases. But the ever-alert Big Boss has now deduced that this impacts sales, “because when you lock things up, for example, you don’t sell as many of them.” Wow… pure genius!

Did I mention that Walgreens pays Timothy $13 million a year? Or, that his monopolistic chain is closing some 1,200 of its “less-profitable” stores, which will leave entire communities with no pharmacies to meet their crucial needs?

My point is not to disparage one silly corporate boss, but simply to say: Hey, why are the so-called “leaders” of both of our political parties kowtowing to the painful ignorance, arrogance, and avarice of the most self-serving group of egos in the world: Billionaires! Look at them – Elon Musk is a jabbering jerk, Mark Zuckerberg is a pathetic whiner, and Jeff Bezos cluelessly floats around on a garish yacht he financed by underpaying and mistreating his workers.

These are our giants? What about schoolteachers, family farmers, mechanics, cooks – and other everyday people who really make things work? America needs to start listening to them… and reinvesting in their genuine genius.

More points from Jim Hightower 1-25-25

For more than 30 years, our state Democratic Party has relied on high-dollar donors and high-dollar consultants to “win Texas.”

It’s time to face up to the obvious: We haven’t. In fact, we’ve lost whole areas and communities that we grassroots Democrats used to win again and again. So here’s a thought: Let’s take our Party back to the grassroots!

• REFOCUS on year-round outreach to local people and community networks that are our natural strength.

• REINVEST in grassroots organizing and party-building all across Texas, including in long-abandoned rural areas.

• REINVIGORATE and REACTIVATE “little-d” democrats by delivering a clear “on your side” message of progressive populism, taking on the GOP plutocrats and billionaire oligarchs.

The time to start reempowering a winning grassroots party is now—by choosing Kendall Scudder to be our Chair of the Texas Democratic Party. He has the know-how, the working-class passion, and even the money-raising ability to rally and organize us at the ground level (the human level of politics) to restore democratic values and policies in our state.

I hope you’ll join in this effort so we Democrats can really start to “win Texas” for the workaday people of our state.

Here are some of my thoughts as of today 2-14-25

Democrats are facing a big readjustment

The core need is for Democrats to develop a concept and story that a majority of Americans will agree to.

Need to recognize 30 % of Americans are driven by greed and power.

Need to recognize that conservative media takes that core 30 % explodes and projects it as being 60%.

Liberal think tanks are weighted towards being fair and equal rather than developing operating methods.

We need Less woke, the basic laws were set up to address all of the population, we don’t need special laws for special groups.

We need to address deficits at the same time that we increase allocations to critical programs.

We need to use anti-trust to Lower prices and establish reasons for the populous to believe it will work..
In the hot economy Biden had built he should have been much more involved in the deficit/cost/benefit aspects.
We are in the Shock stage of Trump’s Shock and Awe and Implosion scenario
My analysis points to a high probability of an economic implosion starting in the second half of 2025.
That would imply that Democrats need to model 2026-2028 economic responses for an economy that will more resemble the 1930’s than the 2020’s.
This is much bigger than Tariffs. The World is waking up to a new paradigm.
America is not what it was after winning WWII.
It is now a second-rate nation that no longer is in a leadership role, pick your area, health, educations, finances, this history is strong, the direction is weak.
The world, not us, will be different, maybe better for it, as it moves forward ignoring the move towards Isolation by the US.
This in reality is a watch of MAGA stomp this country back into the 1830 Trail of Tears era.

Here is a subpart to our research on a key part of the Progressive message. Equalty. I admit to having been drawn into the discussion many years ago as an economist analyzing markets, Joseph Stiglitz being maybe one of my first mentors through the reading of his many books.

Inequality is tricky, it is different for each culture and subculture. What is found in studies is that inequality is part of the human condition.

2. The ground breaking equality work by Per Molder outlines the following.

3. Hunter-gatherer societies lived to survive, so there was limited room for inequality.

4. Inequality increases as societies become settled and start accumulating assets.

5. In summary we see a tendency toward rising inequality, moving towards the level that the current stage of development allows, the inequality possibility frontier.

6. There is no natural force that can return society to its previous equilibrium level.

7. For a majority of history, a majority of people lived near the subsistence level.

8. Fundamentally, knowledge skepticism characterizes conservatism.

9. A unifying conservative factor is the emphasis on human ignorance and the idea that a reform based social contract is dangerous.

10. Conservatives like to reduce the political equality debate to between the individual and the state.

11. Ownership of assets is based upon a complex mixture of inheritance, luck, and effort.

12. Liberalism arose in part in opposition to inherited rights and privileges.

13. A key conclusion, prevailing patterns of distribution constitute a serious threat to legitimacy, per the liberal definition.

14. Among conscientious liberals there is a tendency towards equality.

15. There is consensus on religion playing a role in equality and stability though opinions vary on the truth of the relationship.

16. Some believe religion to be true and natural, while some view it as more of utilitarian function.

17. The view that equality is a bargaining game and that there is no stable equilibrium is central to conservative thought.

18. If one disregards democracy as a means of achieving legitimate equality then those in power achieve their version through what they do or what they are.

19. The most attractive option in this case is to base authority on the achievements of past generations and to connect it with some transfer mechanism.

20. Historically and globally the most significant solution between the liberal and conservative solution to equality has been to use religion as support.

21. The basis for many alliances between secular and religious leaders are where the latter are invited to share power in exchange for legitimizing the former.

22. Moving on to a review of various religions and cultures we find the following:

23. Hinduism uses The Laws of Manu, a type of political philosophy that defines an ideal society down to the very last detail. The overall suggestion is that all people get what they deserve as a result of their actions in a previous life. In operation a caste system is used to try and maintain equality at a number of levels.

24. Both Hinduism and Buddhism were originally compatible with the caste system. In Buddhism this was mainly achieved by shifting the focus away from this world. Today the reality is that the quest for a sacred social order seems to be negotiable and mixed with the caste system.

25. Christianity originally cultivated a different relationship to secular power than that cultivated by Hinduism. Hinduism evolved to legitimate a power structure, while Christianity initially took a disempowered position careful not to provoke the Romans. The statement “my kingdom is not of this world “is a good example.

26. In effect Christianity was established from the top and has refrained from how a society should be organized and governed, leaving the unstable equilibrium between spiritual and secular power continuing to this day.

27. Islam sits between the poles of Hinduism’s detailed regulation of social life and Christianity’s more abstract legitimation of reigning power structures. Unlike Christianity, Islam evolved from a powerful position and did not need to compromise with secular powers over governance of society.

28. Religion, state, and society were entwined from the start in the Muslim nation.

29. In Islam the social order is thought to be of divine origin and is spelled out in the Koran. Society is believed to be ruled by God, rather than by people.

30. In the end, the politics of the conservative right is to weaken government and increase the power of the individual in the equality fight.

Is it any wonder that Bernie Sanders has such a difficult job in presenting a concept of equality as a Progressive message.

Maybe the two simple conclusions in the Inflation/Fat Cat debate in America that the populous can accept are:

Large companies are viewed as good, a stabilizing force in the economy and community.

Monopoly based inflation is bad, a situation where government anti-trust regulations are good.