Hakeem Jeffries is the leader of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives. He recently appeared on Jon Stewart’s podcast to discuss the party’s future after the devastating loss to Donald Trump. Stewart asked Jeffries why Democrats seem to think the party’s problem is its messaging, rather than its values and policies. Blaming bad messaging, Stewart said, implied to voters that “everything’s going right, you just don’t realize it yet.” 

Indeed, many in the Biden administration seemed to think that the central problem was not anything Biden was doing, but the public’s failure to grasp what a good president Biden was. This was delusional. As Eugene Ludwig writes for Politico, the government statistics that Democrats were using to convince themselves that Biden’s economy was great “paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground.” So Stewart wanted Jeffries to answer a simple set of questions: What are you going to do differently? What’s your plan? “Where is the Democrats' Project 2025?” Where is the promise for a return to “New Deal values”?  

Jeffries’ answer was disturbingly vacuous. He returned to the very analysis Stewart was criticizing, suggesting the problem was one of messaging: 

“Maya Angelou said it best — people won't remember what you say, they may not even remember what you do, but they will always remember how you make them feel. And I think what we have to do a better job of is making the American people feel that we understand the pain."

What is this, personal friendship advice? I would suggest something entirely different to Jeffries: most Americans don’t want their politicians to publicly perform empathy. They want to know how you’re going to address that pain. They want the answer to Stewart’s question: what are you actually going to do? After all, why should I support someone politically just because they “feel” my pain? What does that do for me? 

Donald Trump has come into office like a wrecking ball. He has done precisely what Democrats do not do in power, which is to push the limits of his authority as far as they can go in enacting his agenda. (None of this “I would, but the Senate Parliamentarian says no” nonsense for Trump.) Now, his agenda happens to be horrific. He has assigned Elon Musk to purge the federal government of “waste” and “fraud,” but because Musk is a far-right billionaire, for him this seems to not mean actual instances of waste and fraud (a big program to root those out would be great!) but rather killing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as well as life-saving humanitarian aid missions. Trump has appointed a dangerous crank, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to head his Department of Health and Human Services, an anti-Muslim bigot to head the Defense Department, a neoconservative warmonger as his Secretary of State, and stacked his cabinet with the kind of amoral billionaires who want to gut America’s (pitiful excuse for a) social safety net and give themselves giant tax breaks. (Joe Rogan, a naive and credulous man, said that Elon Musk couldn’t possibly be pursuing self-interest in his government role, because he is already extremely rich. Rogan does not know the limitless rapaciousness of the ruling class, for whom no amount of money is ever enough.) The Trump administration is pushing a horrifying ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza and trying to completely end our efforts to fight climate change, consigning humanity to a future of never-ending escalating catastrophe.

It should be easy to have a unified message against this. Do you want your children to inherit a livable planet? Do you enjoy not dying in pandemics? Are you glad you haven’t lost a loved one to polio or measles? Do you want to have a safe workplace and Social Security and be protected against fraud by financial institutions? Do you want large numbers of people in sub-Saharan Africa to be safe from HIV/AIDS? Or would you prefer to be ruled over by a small group of bigoted, ignorant billionaires who think Haitians eat pets and Muslims are plotting the overthrow of America? We know that a majority of Americans want a social democratic country. They want Medicare For All, robust climate action, a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, a foreign policy based on (actual, not pretend) respect for human rights, and protection from predatory financial institutions trying to suck every last penny out of us. So it should not be difficult for a political opposition to mobilize! 

But, my God, the Democrats. Jeffries not only said that the problem is one of “feelings,” but confessed that he thinks himself entirely powerless to do anything. “What leverage do we have? They control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency.” ” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer has encouraged Democrats to follow a strategy of waiting for Trump to screw up. Schumer said, “We’re not going to go after every single issue,” and that, instead, “We are picking the most important fights and lying down on the train tracks on those fights.” Now, picking your battles might sound smart, but it should be remembered that “lying down on the train tracks” is actually a terrible way to stop a train (especially the careening runaway locomotive that is the Trump Train). Schumer did not even encourage Democrats to vote against Trump’s nominees until he came under external pressure from members of the party who were wondering why Democrats were, for instance, voting to confirm Marco Rubio. 

There are worrying signs that the party has still learned nothing from its defeats in 2016 and 2024. The new DNC chair, Ken Martin, is conducting a review of why the party’s popularity is abysmal, but it is “largely focused on tactics and messaging.” In other words, there is no problem with what is on offer, just with how it is marketed. “The policies that we support and the message that we have is not wrong. [...] “It is a messaging problem and a brand problem.” (Martin’s words right out the gate are not encouraging. Mark my words, in four years we might be publishing another postmortem on why the party lost, again.)  Martin, with his more of the same message, easily defeated former Bernie Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir, whose call for fundamental change in the party got him exactly two votes at the DNC, to Martin’s 246. 

Some in the party actually think they should be even less effective in opposing Donald Trump. In fact, they shouldn’t even try! Dean Phillips, the former congressman who challenged Joe Biden in the 2024 primary, said that Democrats should celebrate Elon Musk’s gutting of the federal government and recognize Trump has a mandate:

“People want the government to work better. They believe that Mr. Musk, one of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs in human history, who does not fail at just about anything, they want him to do this, most Americans. They wanted Trump. They elected him.”

In fact, “most Americans” did not elect Trump, who did not crack 50 percent of the popular vote (and of course, over one-third of eligible voters didn’t vote). Musk is a bigoted fool who cannot be trusted to know the difference between pruning waste and destroying vital institutions outright, and the message that Democrats should obviously be sending is that letting billionaires destroy consumer financial protections is not the same thing as conducting a careful audit of government spending. 

Annoyingly, much of the debate within the Democratic Party appears to be over whether the party has gone “too far left” and needs to stop paying attention to pro-immigration groups and the ACLU, or abandon racial justice as a commitment. Some even say that the “resistance” is actually working, because liberal lawyers have successfully tied much of Trump’s agenda up in the courts. But this leaves aside the massive ongoing unpopularity of the Democratic Party, and the courts are both ineffectual barriers and offer no path back to power or the implementation of a positive agenda. 

But it’s pretty obvious what the party needs to do, and it doesn’t have anything to do with throwing marginalized groups under the bus. They just need, as Stewart said, a clear set of “New Deal” values and a clear agenda that can help people. That agenda includes a livable minimum wage, easy unionization, an end to homelessness, a robust fight to stop the climate crisis, Medicare For All, authentic public safety that reduces both imprisonment and violence, and a commitment to peace and global cooperation. Unfortunately, the party is structurally incapable of committing to these things because they conflict with the interests and priorities of its donors, even if they are broadly popular. 

The right in this country are ruthless. They are moving quickly to implement as much of their horrible agenda as possible, because as leading conservative activist Christoper Rufo says, “Every action creates permission for greater action in the future.” It should be easy, however, to mobilize the opposition around a clear message and vision. The message is that Trump and his cronies are building a world for them, not for you, and the vision is of a real social democracy that ensures economic security and freedom for all. But if Democrats are incapable of being an effective counter-force to Trumpism and promoting good policies that we actually need right now—which all evidence suggests is true—then there is no reason to support them anymore. Unsubscribe to those mailing lists. Stop giving money to their MLM-like schemes. Put your time and energy into a real resistance instead. Get involved in mutual aid, local organizations, and political groups that have a positive vision for the future of this country and the world.