Democrats face two enormous challenges in light of their disastrous 2024 election showing. The first is to defend democracy as President-elect Donald Trump, the most authoritarian figure ever elected president, takes power with a much broader mandate than in his first term. The second is to restore the faith of working-class voters in a party that has utterly lost touch with them.
Normally, these two priorities are viewed as contradictory. After all, working people by necessity focus on kitchen table economic concerns.
But Democrats can take one important step that would simultaneously move them to the center culturally and affirm democratic norms: create a robust program of “liberal patriotic education” that would merge a love of country with a recognition that the U.S. still needs to do much more to widen opportunity to those left behind.
