Dear Democrats,
Trump has shown a willingness to smash all our American traditions, junk all our rules, and defy the law in a way that moves us all outside of American political history. In fact, outside of being a Western democracy, as we used to understand that term.
He will warp the system and rig the game for himself and the tech bros enriching themselves so that the only context now is his will and his movement’s anti-democratic oligarchical fervor. Trump won’t stop until American values are no more than a crypto-type charade.
Trump’s 300 executive orders are just a start.
How did we allow this?
We have become experts at allowing our fanatical fringe to provide the Republicans with a numberless amount of quotes and clips to use against us Democrats in every single recent election cycle.
We don’t realize how profoundly out of touch this makes us Democrats seem to most Americans.
Most Democrats don’t identify themselves through a collection of coded letters and coded words—BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, AAPI, and the ‘unhoused’ and the ‘undocumented,’ etc.
Put it this way: My gay married friends are being called fascists by some of our fringe leftists because even they won’t agree there are 100 or more genders.
And Trump is now saying we’ll move 1.8 million Palestinians and ethnically cleanse them because idiots were screaming Genocide Joe in Democratic meetings when Democrats wouldn’t agree to see Hamas’s point of view.
We have lost ourselves in forms of identity politics that divide Americans into categories most of us don’t recognize and from which even most liberals feel excluded.
Who is sticking up for most Democrats who just want a good and fair quality of life for everyone?
So why did we lose?
Here’s a hint: Ask most Hispanics what they think of the term Latinx, a nonsensical term in gendered language, and you might begin to grasp why more than 40% of Hispanic men voted for Trump.
Or privately ask most liberal feminist friends what they think of the term birthing people or persons with vaginas, and you might risk a well-deserved kick in the shins.
And that’s what average American voters, including many sensible Democrats, dislike.
A party whose leaders lacked—and still lack—the nerve or sense to resist the dumb progressive tide that lives mostly in a university and liberal media bubble, and, sorry to say, in a lot of progressive religious leadership as well, that is proudly out of touch and inhabits an anti-science bubble.
The result is that Democrats and our political leaders can’t figure out where we are, who we are, or how we got there—and the route back out of this wilderness.
So we’re frozen in time screaming Trump is a fascist! or Who elected Musk? and waiting for Trump to overreach.
But none of that is a policy.
Saying, We did really well this cycle. It wasn’t a wipeout is not a plan.
Democrats are and were politically unprepared for this moment. Admit it.
More Americans identify with the GOP now than with Democrats.
The Democratic brand is so tarnished with misplaced, badly expressed ideals right now that the only way for a Democrat to win is to run against our virtue-signaling brand.
Democrats who say the hole we are in isn’t that deep are kidding themselves.
What they are trying to avoid is two things: introspection and humility.
Democrats are still discussing how to maintain gender balance, and that is not what working Americans are worrying about.
We’ve allowed our activist coalitions to push us to places no one wants to go.
In fact, our real issues—like a minimum wage—are very popular. So are sensible gun laws.
And we aren’t the only people wondering why Elon Musk is invading our government.
We aren’t the only people worried about how this is going to spill over into Social Security and Medicare—programs that Trump has promised he won’t touch.
We need to stand up loudly on all this.
Let’s rebrand as a sane, patriotic party.
We don’t pledge allegiance to billionaires or the 18-to-20-year-olds working for Musk.
In Musk, we have a billionaire foil taking food from starving kids. Say so.
The way back to winning again starts with a clear rebuke of the Trump scam, but also a rebuke of our own far-left fanatics that took us down.
Time to turn the page and take back our party from the mindless virtue-signalers inventing their own private languages that helped hand Trump our country and are ironically turning the Republicans into the actual multiracial, multiethnic party of the future.
What matters is not that the leaders of the Democrats in Congress need to figure out Democrats’ new media strategy or talk about the economy.
Our party needs to first decide who it stands for.
Let’s hope we have the humility and ability to be introspective enough to find the answer we actually need, which is this, pure and simple:
We stand for and with most Americans.
We need to hold the Republicans accountable, too.
The Republicans used our own words against us. They used them and they won.
Now they must account for Trump and Musk’s actions.
So we Democrats need to find messengers who don’t speak in clichés and legalistic talking points and can defend our ideas in hostile territory while speaking the language of most Americans.
For instance, Pete Buttigieg does this very well, but too few Democrats do the same even now.
Meanwhile, I call on my old friends in the Republican Party, of which I once was a member, to also be as introspective as I have been here and to ask these questions:
What happened to us that we went from talking about getting out of Afghanistan to calling for starting a new Middle East war of ethnic cleansing that will make Iraq and Afghanistan—where, by the way, my Marine son honorably served—seem like a rehearsal?
When did we start putting unelected billionaires in charge of our government?
And how did the GOP leaders create so many Republicans that seemed so ready to be taken over by the new tech oligarchy without a whimper?
I mean, in 20 years, we went from so-called freedom fries to Elon saying jump, and Republicans all saying, how high?
Meanwhile, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought has been confirmed by the Senate to become the next head of the Office of Management and Budget despite Democrats’ tepid, quote-unquote, objections.
I said this before and I’ll say it again:
We have the correct pronouns.
They have the White House, the courts, and the two houses of Congress.
How is this working out for you?
All the best,
Frank Schaeffer
P.S. Want a new watchword? Well, here’s mine:
No More Fanatics.
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