Take Out the Trash: A Proposal to Clean Up the Democratic Party

President Joe Biden meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 13, 2024. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The leadership of the Democratic Party deserves significant blame for the return of Donald Trump to the White House. While there were multiple factors at play, it must be acknowledged that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their enablers engaged in vast levels of political malpractice despite countless warnings from many key voices and constituencies. 

Multiple governments worldwide, regardless of ideology, have suffered at the polls this year, suggesting that Harris faced an uphill battle no matter what.  But that fight was made even more difficult by the simple reality that Biden and Harris spent a solid year alienating core constituencies of the Democratic Party, supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and failing to assign clear blame for the individuals and interest groups responsible for the economic woes of the working class.

If we want a Democratic Party that can produce different outcomes, we will need to hold the current party accountable for its failures. That means matching our demands for change with the force and pressure of real accountability. The Democratic leadership must itself be targeted with campaigns that highlight the principles of electoral success while punishing those responsible for the party’s continued defeats. I’m building a campaign to do exactly that, and here’s how I think we can win.

Clean Up the Party Now

Democrats are in disarray, with many different voices and communities picking through the wreckage of 2024 to decide what can be learned and what should be done next. This is the time to name our adversaries and assert our demands. If we want to build a Democratic Party that has any shot of winning elections and advancing the human condition, we must model the very posture of aggressive accountability that we want future Democratic presidential candidates to adopt.

There are plenty of potential targets for accountability. We can directly challenge the culture of the Democratic Party right now by turning the looming internal elections for a new Democratic National Committee chair into a public battle for our core values. Leaning into 2026, the elections for the House and Senate can be leveraged to call out Democratic incumbents who continue to serve as vehicles for corporate interests. Pro-Israel hawks like Rep. Ritchie Torres should be directly challenged in both the 2026 primaries and general election.  

Looking to 2028, leading Democratic contenders for the presidential race should be held accountable now for their failings. One such example is California Gov. Gavin Newsom.  When Uber launched its successful war against California state-mandated benefits for drivers, Newsom stayed neutral. He should be called out for this silence. Another important target is Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is also being talked up as a presidential contender. Shapiro’s record of support for Israeli apartheid and genocide is well documented, and a grassroots campaign to oppose him as president should begin now.  

Even Biden’s eventual groundbreaking ceremony for his future presidential library should be made into a target for principled criticisms and protests. Biden destroyed the Democrats’ prospects in 2024 by supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and arrogantly refusing to drop out of the presidential race until it was too late to hold a real primary. By making an example out of Biden himself, we can “punch up” into the highest levels of the party and build our power to hold the party accountable.

Name the Enemy: Corporate Elites

When it comes to the fundamental unfairness of the U.S. economy, Democrats often speak in soft surrogate terms: cutting taxes on the middle class, forgiving student loans, increasing funding for college, etc. But Democrats’ core silence on corporate greed has allowed Trump to step into the vacuum with a very different explanation of who is to blame. Trump’s false explanations often focus on racial resentments, culture conflict, or issues related to gender and sexuality. But blaming undocumented immigrants, DEI, “critical race theory,” or transgender equality will not address the fundamental unfairness of an economy in which workers are squeezed under the diktat of economic elites.  

The American working class has long been undermined by those who represent the interests of concentrated wealth. America’s corporate elites block unions, outsource U.S. jobs, cut benefits, and squeeze as much profit as they can out of America’s workers. But Democratic presidential candidates rarely run campaigns that bluntly name and shame these elites for the damage that they do to working-class lives.  The simple reason why is that many state- and national-level Democrats depend on these same financial elites for the cash that fuels politicians’  expensive campaigns.

When Democrats create a “blame vacuum” for why working-class voters are suffering, other political opportunists are more than happy to step in.

As president, Biden brought into his administration a range of people and policies from the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wing of the party, which resulted in policies and actions that have been pro-union, anti-inflation, and anti-monopoly. But unlike Sanders and Warren, Biden has done a very poor job of using his bully pulpit to bluntly name and blame the individuals and interest groups who are often most responsible for working-class woes. Biden had some of the right policies, but for reasons that likely included age-related fatigue and ideological predisposition, he got the politics wrong.

When Democrats create a “blame vacuum” for why working-class voters are suffering, other political opportunists are more than happy to step in. Thanks to the seduction of Trump, the white working class had already largely abandoned the Democratic Party. Now nonwhite working-class voters are starting to do the same. To reverse these trends, Democrats must start assigning blame accurately for the high prices, long workdays, and stagnant wages that harm so many workers in our country. 

Kick Out the Sellouts

Not only is the senior leadership of the Democratic Party unwilling to accurately name the enemy, but in many cases, the Democratic Party is actually run and advised by the same corporate elites who benefit from the exploitation of the American working class. The current chair of the DNC is Jaime Harrison, a former lobbyist for Walmart, Bank of America, Lockheed Martin, the coal industry, and many other corporate interests. 

Another toxic example of the pervasive corporate control of the Democratic Party is Tony West, the brother-in-law of Kamala Harris. In 2024, West took a leave of absence from his role as senior vice president and chief legal officer for Uber to advise Harris on her presidential campaign. During West’s time at Uber, the company waged an all-out war against working-class interests by using a California ballot proposition to successfully gut state-mandated benefits for overworked and underpaid Uber drivers. And before West came to Uber, he served as general counsel at PepsiCo, a company that has profited heavily from price inflation.

It has been widely reported that West advised Harris to embrace wealthy corporate elites instead of blaming them for America’s economic woes. This disastrous advice led Harris to cater to high-net-worth interests and muddle her message. This may have helped Harris attract the $1.6 billion in contributions that backed her campaign, but her lack of a clear message on the economy left her with millions fewer votes than Biden received in 2020. She failed to energize the Democratic Party base, including working-class voters, and she lost her campaign. 

Say Goodbye to Bill, Hillary, and Barack

Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama all have a long history of undermining progressive and populist movements in the Democratic Party. All three should be greeted by Democrats with the same deep skepticism that Trump supporters have shown George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Instead, they are still showered with deference and reverence by many.

Obama and the Clintons should be greeted by Democrats with the same deep skepticism that Trump supporters have shown George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

In different ways, all three have aligned with the very corporate and financial elites who should be named as our political enemies. Bill Clinton brought us NAFTA, the job-destroying free-trade agreement that was opposed by labor unions. Hillary Clinton served on the board of Walmart and voted for Bush’s disastrous Iraq War. Obama avoided naming and shaming the Wall Street elites most responsible for the recession that brought him into power. And while in power, Obama bailed out financial institutions instead of focusing on working people. 

Once out of office, these three senior Democratic Party voices have continued to undermine the possibility of a successful Democratic Party that can mobilize its base and appeal to the working class. In 2020, Obama intervened behind the scenes to block Sanders’s campaign for president and put the aging, arrogant, and politically inept Biden in the Oval Office, an intervention that essentially set the stage for Trump’s return to power. Obama also wrote the script for bragging about America’s increased oil and gas production, a posture that both Biden and Harris would later adopt as they, too, alienated climate voters. And this year, the Clintons and Obama all gaslit the Democratic voters most concerned about Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Hillary Clinton heaped scorn upon Gaza activists, Bill Clinton personally justified Israel’s slaughter, and Obama tried to defend Biden by implying that Trump’s Muslim ban would be worse.

Ultimately, the former leaders of the Democratic Party are given far too much credit for their political successes. It is worth remembering that every Democrat who has been successfully elected president in the last 50 years came into office with the benefit of a massive disaster that undermined the Republican incumbent. Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in 1992 thanks to a recession. Obama defeated the successor to George W. Bush, John McCain, thanks to another recession. And Biden defeated Trump with the help of the 2020 global pandemic. Even Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976 in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and Ford’s unpopular pardon of Richard Nixon.

Expel the Pro-Israel Lobby

As Israel accelerates its ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Democratic Party support for Israel’s military will continue to splinter and break apart the Democratic base. It will take time to more deeply investigate the question of why as many as 10 or 11 million of Biden’s 2020 voters didn’t show up to support Kamala Harris in 2024. But it is likely that some percentage of those voters were deeply anguished by Biden and Harris’s full-fledged support for U.S. military funding for Israel. Despite the misrepresentation of mainstream media, this anguish is not limited to Arab and Muslim voters, nor is it limited to voters in Michigan.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other pro-Israel campaign and advocacy organizations all care little about the prospects of the Democratic Party. They are single-issue organizations that are happy to reward or defeat any elected official who stands with or against them. By keeping a home for single-issue pro-Israel networks in the Democratic Party, the party hollows itself out by allowing those same networks to push out prominent progressive and populist legislators, along with the voters who back them. 

One ugly result of this is the emergence of an extraordinarily hollow form of representational politics. While anti-worker Black voices like Harrison and West take on informal and formal leadership roles in the party, populist and progressive Black members of Congress like Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman are targeted for defeat by the very pro-Israel networks who back Biden and Harris. Even the supposedly “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J-Street contributed to Bowman’s defeat.

Embrace the Permanent Battle

Until Citizens United is overturned and public financing is embraced, the Democratic Party will face a perpetual tension between populist aspirations and the interests of corporate wealth. And even if major reforms were somehow implemented, they would pose such a threat to the interests of concentrated wealth that there would be a well-funded backlash. 

This means that advocates for a more effective Democratic Party should embrace a permanent battle for the soul of the party. The Democratic Party needs a permanent watchdog community that is armed with sweeping campaigns for reform in order to combat the party’s perpetual slouch toward the interests of concentrated wealth. If you agree, consider joining me by signing on to this platform.

Many networks both inside and outside the Democratic Party are well-poised to help lead calls for reform. Disgruntled Democrats, climate voters, progressives, opponents of Israel’s genocide, and even Green Party and Democratic Socialists of America members can all help push the Democratic Party away from its corporate moorings and pro-Israel litmus tests. 

Beyond 2024

Without strong and sustained public pressure, the Democratic Party is likely to remain trapped in its culture of defeat. We shouldn’t expect any real changes from the current stewards of a broken political party. If we want a Democratic Party that wins elections and advances the public interest, we will have to start fighting for it. That fight needs to begin now.

The post Take Out the Trash: A Proposal to Clean Up the Democratic Party appeared first on The Intercept.