The Democratic Party should be exactly what it is: a coalition of communities with diverse interests. Its program must necessarily be a compromise, as each community will have to yield on some issues to gain support on other issues.
What’s important for the moment is that the Trump Party — the so-called Republican, but increasingly nationalist and authoritarian — Party, still effectively controls the country’s agenda by virtue of its hold on the White House, the Senate, and the federal courts. In order to get anything done at all, we first must win back control of those institutions, so arguing among ourselves about whether to pursue single-payer health care, immigration reform, or new gun laws is pointless. We don’t have the power to achieve any of those while our enemies hold the White House and the Senate. They hold the steering wheel; their foot is on the gas pedal, and we have only the brakes to work with. We can slow them down and perhaps stop them completely, but any talk of changing directions is a waste of breath.
The argument, then, isn’t whether to move right or left, but how best to stop Trump and his party pursuing their agenda over the next two years, with a view to recapturing the Senate and White House in 2020. If Mitch McConnell famously said back in 2009 that his top priority was to limit Barack Obama to one term as President, ours must be more ambitious: to utterly discredit McConnell and his party, to make them impotent and irrelevant in a post-2020 political order which we must build.
Wherever corruption appears, we must expose it. Whenever self-interest trumps (pun intended) that of the American people, we must condemn it. If billionaires buy themselves tax cuts or special treatment, the whole world must see it. In the fight between patriots who love their country and traitriots — nationalists who love only their in-group and billionaires who love only themselves — we must be always in the patriots’ front line.
And we must prevail.