The message: Trump (and the presidency as a whole) is the end point of elite criminal rot and must be cleaned up and out…as a means to make way for the actual work of delivering with and for the American people an actual agenda that serves their practical, popular interests.

(2) A super concrete materialist populist agenda — wages, benefits, vacation, childcare costs, medical costs, housing costs, corporate oppression, etc. — that directly helps people, while hammering at the contradictions between the GOP’s populist rhetoric and oligarchic results.

The major social media presence of the party should be the social media accounts of each local chapter — and the vast majority of their content should be information about the next opportunities to meet up in person with the chapter!

(Of course, you can care about specific issue positions for governing reasons or just because you think they're good for your side to take up — but I'm just pointing out that if you're making it your whole strategy for winning converts, it might be a misread of how this works.)

The same is true with issue positions—you can't just pluck one out of the other side's constellation of meaning and bring it into yours in the hopes of achieving the same success as the other side does with it. You need to cultivate your own constellation of meaning holistically.

A crown or a rose or a heart in one particular constellation of meaning might mean something different than it does in another. So you can't really analyze what people think about crowns, roses, or hearts independent of these particular wholes.

Would love that!

Would love to hear @kenmartin.bsky.social, @davidhogg.bsky.social, and others put together a serious plan for structurally changing the party's relationship to community organizing. It’s one thing to say it’s important every so often; it’s another to start building meeting halls around the country.

Perhaps you could design this meeting hall fund like the Rosenwald Schools fund was — big donor gives a lot, but the local party has to raise some money for the meeting hall too, fostering a sense of ownership over the hall.

The community-based path forward works in two directions. It not only gets the message of the party out to the people better — much more importantly, it gets the message of the people in to the party better, disciplining the party into being a better vehicle of the public interest.

Wrote about the community-based path forward for the Dems in @thenation.com back in November: www.thenation.com/article/poli...

To answer this, we need to bring people together to flesh out what we want—and as we flesh out what we want, we gather more people around those ideals and proposals. Gathering and visioning—a dance back and forth, that eventually generates power for advocacy.

Roberto Unger reminds us of a good first step: “Before we convince the others, we must convince ourselves.” When we are in reaction mode for too long, we lose track of our vision. To find it again, we need to ask things like: “What do we want? What do we think would be good?”