Under any circumstances, nominating a presidential candidate and drafting a party platform are considered direction-shifting and momentous for a political party. Yet the Democrats' choices in 2016 will lay bare the true character of our party- and reveal the true extent of its commitment to progressive values.
What makes this particular election so telling of the Dems' direction is its timing. 2016's will be a far more complex debate than both its predecessors, and here's why. In 2008 and 2012, the most important economic issue on the minds of the country was the financial crisis and the recession that followed. As a party, the Democrats were unified in presenting a solution: the Recovery Act, a stimulus package compatible with mainstream liberal ideology.
As the immediate aftermath of the crash fades from public memory, the country's attention (and general disgust) has been shifted to income inequality, among other issues. Although the shift has been put in place by Democratic leadership in an attempt to boost turnout in the immediate midterm elections, the issue will carry weight with voters far beyond 2014.
Which brings us to 2016.
Without a strong populist economic program and a tough stand against the Wall Street executives who caused the crisis in the first place, the Democratic Party will remain stuck in the 90's, hung up on outdated deregulatory, pro-business economic prescriptions. We will have lost the battle for the populist soul of our party, and abandoned the liberal legacy of statesmen like JFK and LBJ.
Such a denial of economic realities is not only stupid and bad policy, but also unlikely to resonate with Democratic voters, who sure as hell don't want THEIR party, the party of Medicare, Social Security and the New Deal, to continue to line the pockets of the very rich at the expense of everyone else.
But this denial doesn't have to guide Democratic policy. It's time to take back our party. It's time for the Dems, who once busted trusts and fought for fair working conditions, to take a unified stand against corporate welfare, outsourcing, and the outsized influence of Big Business in our political system. It's time for the Dems, who once fought against Reagan-era trickle down economics, to do so again, and in doing so reverse a decades-long trend of increasing inequality that threatens to dismantle the American Dream and return us to the Gilded Age.
2016 offers a choice between two versions of our party. There's the Democratic Party WE want: the one that attacks pervasive inequality like it's an invader on American soil, the one that puts the people before "corporate people." Then there's the Democratic Party that progressives may have to abandon: the one that reuses the same old policies that don't work anymore.
In two years, we as a party will choose one of the two. I only hope that the choice is as obvious to them as it is to us.