The Party of the People Must Return to the People

Somewhere along the way, we lost the plot.

The Democratic Party—the party that once marched beside laborers on picket lines, that stood boldly in the face of corporate greed, that declared poverty a moral failure of society and not the individual—has turned its gaze upward. Upward toward the wealthiest donors. Upward toward Wall Street. Upward toward comfort and access and self-preservation.

Meanwhile, working people have been left to scrape by at the bottom. Our wages have stagnated. Our healthcare is a privilege, not a right. The cost of housing is untenable. Our government, at all levels, brags of “balanced budgets” and a “growing, prosperous economy” while children sleep in cars and families ration insulin.

We are not victims of some invisible force. We are complicit in a political project that has, for decades, chosen half-measures and polite press releases over transformation. In that vacuum of courage, fascism has found fertile ground.

Let us be clear: the rise of fascism in America is not an accident. It is not a meteor that struck us at random. it is a response to the abandonment of the working class, for decades, at the hands of politicians, including Democrats. When people cry out for help and are met with empty words, when communities are gutted by disinvestment, and when economic despair goes ignored, resentment festers.

We only have ourselves to blame.

But blaming isn’t enough. We must act. We must demand more from each other. We must hold our own accountable. Because, as Frederick Douglass told us, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

We need to be the party of the people again. The party of workers, renters, immigrants, the poor, the criminalized, and the forgotten. We can no longer accept a party that props up the illusion of progress while keeping its boot gently on the neck of the working class. We must be willing to agitate. We must be willing to struggle. Not for status, but for justice. Not for comfort, but for liberation.

“While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” —Eugene V Debs, trade unionist and political prisoner (1855-1926)

As Franklin Roosevelt reminded us in a time not so unlike our own, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

If we are to be the party of progress, then we must progress. 

Not just in language, but in deed. That means legislation that puts people before profits. That means standing up to corporations, not cozying up to them. That means listening to the poor, not silencing them in polished talking points.

We can do better. We must do better. And it starts by telling the truth—especially to ourselves.

- Ian Coggins, Captain HD7B