What Should Democrats Actually Stand For in 2025? I Have Some Suggestions.

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There appears to still be some indecisiveness within the Democratic Party, despite its extensive work on the subject, about what it should be doing to improve its dismal standing with American voters, who currently hold it in roughly the same esteem as the experience of food poisoning.

First, in March, Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego held a donor retreat at a luxury resort in Arizona during which guests including centrist pundit Matt Yglesias discussed how to win back the working class. In May, Democratic members of Congress gathered for an “issues” retreat headlined by message consultant David Shor. In June, a high-profile electoral strategy conference at D.C.’s high-end Hamilton Hotel drew Yglesias and Shor in a sort of Traveling Wilburys of centrism supergroup situation. But having still not yet cracked the case, Axios reports, the party just finished up another message-focused donor retreat, hosted at a luxury “lodge” in California wine country by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, featuring an appearance by none other than David Shor.

“Yuk it up all you want,” you might be saying, “but we don’t see you proposing a Democratic message that will somehow satisfy both the blue-collar voters who’ve been gravitating away from the party and the liberal, well-educated suburbanites who now constitute its base.”

Fair enough. But I would argue—and have argued, at tedious length—that the Democratic fixation on precise issue positioning and wording is itself misguided. What Democrats have in abundance is people who can fine-tune messaging and read voter sentiment in the months before elections. What they lack is a higher-level sense of what they are working toward and how those things should be accomplished when they do win elections and take power. A message works in a 30-second advertisement. A purpose is what fills a three-hour podcast and gets people to volunteer for your campaign and motivates you to continue working, in office, to get things done such that voters will think, “Hmm, maybe I will consider voting for this party again.”

One idea in circulation about how this could be accomplished is that the Democrats should try things from the ground up. That their candidates should spring forth from local communities of party members who hold picnics and throw karaoke nights at the Elks Hall and so forth, and that they should guide themselves toward whatever issues come up organically in these settings, in their interactions with their neighbors. Zohran Mamdani’s successful sidewalk-based cost-of-living campaign is a kind of proof of concept. Sure, the specific appeal of his familiarity with various ethnic food carts might have to be retooled for a campaign in Iowa. (Or maybe not! It’s 2025.) But can you fund a strong network of local parties and meet once a month with David Shor at a hotel whose Google listing has four dollar signs under its name? I mean, probably. There’s lots of money out there. But they’re not going to do that, so let’s stick for now with dictating stuff from the top down.

What do Democrats want America to be like? What are the pillars around which the big tent can be built, all the way from Mamdani to centrist Marines in Arizona? Here are some suggestions.

• Everyone has constitutional rights and you shouldn’t get beaten up or sent to prison without due process because you look Hispanic.

• We have laws and democracy and not a king. If the democratic government passes a law, it needs to be followed, and the president can’t just cancel it because it’s contrary to his party’s interest. When it comes to enforcing this principle, the correct weapon to have at a knife fight is a knife.

• People and institutions have the right to free speech. It is not illegal to run an institution whose influence skews liberal (or conservative).

• If you are in charge of a major institution you need to act like you understand the previous two entries. Defending an institution means defending its values, not its budget or your career.

• Bribing the president so that he gives your company special favors and lets it have a monopoly is not “free-market capitalism.”

• People, especially representatives of the public, should try to be honest and decent with each other.

But not everything has to be a direct reaction to Donald Trump. How about also:

• Health care, child care, education, and housing should not be so expensive that you spend your life in debt even when you have a job.

• Smart and hardworking people should want to come to the United States. The system for allowing this to happen should not funnel the vast majority of potential candidates for citizenship into a precarious quasi-legal status that lasts decades.

• It’s good that people from different cultures can come to the United States and live together. It makes our lives more interesting and has been a notably successful way to outcompete other countries since roughly 1776.

• Companies should have to treat both their customers and workers like human beings.

• Vaccines, medicine, and science are important even if pharmaceutical companies sometimes behave in unethical ways.

• Not wanting to fry to death in a global warming hellscape or get shot with a machine gun by some weirdo who was radicalized by an algorithm are basic kitchen-table qualify-of-life issues.

• Schools, libraries, parks, medical care: These are things that everyone should have access to, not only because people need them and it’s good to have public institutions, but also because having a diverse population that is healthy and educated is better economically, in contrast with the sort of feudal-serfdom-under-a-white-ruling-class situation envisioned by the current regime, for advancing material conditions and creating the kind of generation-over-generation improvements that make human beings (or more to the point, human voters) feel like life is worth living. (On this point, see also “not making science illegal.”)

• The United States should make progress as a society and have functioning institutions, and the overriding goal of the Democratic Party for both electoral and idealistic reasons should not just be winning elections—which is one of those things that is necessary but not sufficient—but getting things to actually work.

OK! That ought to do it. We’re taking the rest of the week off!

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