Is the Democratic Party’s brand damaged beyond repair?
That’s one of the big questions on the table this Saturday as the Democratic National Committee holds an election to choose a successor to Jaime Harrison, who’s stepping down as chair in the wake of November’s losses.
The frontrunners — Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, Ken Martin, the chairman of the Minnesota Democrats, and Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland and commissioner of the Social Security Administration — are all longtime party insiders, but the race is far from settled.
Among the newer contenders is Faiz Shakir — former political director of the ACLU, the head of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, and current executive director of the media organization More Perfect Union. Shakir offers a very different vision, of a DNC chair who can refocus the position and the party, with a commitment to rebuilding the Democrats’ traditional working-class base, putting the donor class in its place, and educating its elected members about how to negotiate the media landscape to speak honestly to voters about their needs and dreams.
We talked to Shakir about how the Democratic Party damaged its brand in the first place, why the DNC is broken, how an activist chair could fix its structural problems and reenergize the party, what lessons on conviction and communication he’s learned from Bernie Sanders (and from Donald Trump), and how the party can begin to rebuild as an authentic working-class institution once again.
Below are selected text excerpts of the conversation. To watch and listen to the full conversation, and read a complete transcript, our supporting subscribers can click above. Or if you haven’t yet joined us, become a supporting subscriber of The Ink today.
Tell me to start how you decided to run for this very difficult, thankless, and essential job, and why you want to do it.
Well, I got in late, as you know, Anand. And I got in late because there's a couple of things. One is I felt — and you know me well enough — I'm pretty happy that there's a lot of people talking about it being a working-class party now. And there's a president of the United States talking about oligarchy. I'm like, this is great. I've been waiting for a decade for this kind of talk. OK, great. We've got more commonality across this Democratic Party of wanting to be a certain brand that we associate, actually, with our historical lineage of being a working-class party — what are you going to do about it, what's interesting, what's new, what's different?
And when I was listening to people talk about it I'm like, this this is status quo, this is the same. And so I'm not going to tell you I'm a magic elixir, but I am going to tell you I'm going to come in here and offer a vision of doing things quite differently. And then you could decide maybe that's just too radical and you don't want to do it. But I'm like, now is the moment, right?
And I felt like I would live with regret if we saw this moment converging of, well, we want to be a working-class party, appeal to working-class people. I'm like, this has been a cause of my life here. Let me suggest some things and throw them in. And I would live with regret if I never tried. So here we are.
You know, right when the election happened in November, one of the things that I felt very strongly, there was obviously just the familiar doom and despair that we all felt eight years ago also in similar and different ways. But I felt something different this time. I'm curious if you did also, which is that it was such a devastating loss and some of the gains in particular over last time that I started to feel like this creates the space for truth-telling and for introspection, of a kind that is never really convenient in politics, right?
In politics, it's always like, well, you'll damage this if you look inward or you'll damage that. There's always something around the corner that will be damaged through candor. I think a lot of well-meaning people didn't necessarily tell themselves the truth about what they thought about Joe Biden's capacity to do the job a second time. I think a lot of people maybe did not tell themselves or others the truth about how excited or not excited they were by Kamala Harris's actual vision.
I feel like the space that has been opened up in the wake of this Trump victory is actually a really big, broad space. So I want to invite you now to fill that space with some of your hardest truths. What are the things that you want to tell people are true now, hard truths about how the Democratic Party has shown up? What are the reasons it shows up that way? And how is it going to have to change?
There's a lot of them. So we could go, you know, a lot of different directions. The first one that popped into my mind because I'm running for this thing and I'm learning more about the entity of the Democratic National Committee is what the hell is it? You know, I am a DNC member. I got on there because Biden, after the Bernie election, as an overture, invited me onto it. So I got to learn about it.
And so when you join this body, the first thing you do is they say, which council or caucus would you like to be a part of? And they send you this list of like, I don't know, 16, 18 things. You mark two of them. And I'm like, as a working-class person fighting for working-class issues, I was like, I think labor and rural were the choices that I made. But in that list is every identity group under the sun and everything. And caucuses breed caucuses. This is the organization of the DNC.
My first reaction was, whoa, what the heck are these caucuses? Like, we’ve got to change this structure because very little purpose and meaning is going into this. We are telling people when they join the Democratic Party, “You worked hard, maybe you ran for something, you want it, and now you're a member of the DNC. Great. When you come to our winter meeting, summer meeting, whatever it might be, what do you do there?”
Nothing.
You actually go and join in a little group and you sit over there and you separate yourself out by skin color, or race, or identity, whatever it might be. And then you sit there and there's no mission or purpose.
I'm like, whoa, let's break this. How about mission and purpose? What are some? Well, obviously, you know, we're lacking for ambition there. So I'm going to offer a few.
That's so interesting because organizations have all kinds of issues, as you know, and you've been brought in in the course of your life to clean them up. But sometimes those issues are just organizational issues, like they're just legacy things, whatever. But sometimes an organizational issue is the very soul of a place externalized, right? And what you're describing now sounds to me as an outsider, like the latter. It sounds like the reason elections are lost. Can you talk about that connection of the mentality behind the structure?
When you go to working-class people, we all have our assumptions of what are the problems currently facing the Democratic brand that we need to rehabilitate? In my view, working-class people hold us in higher regard. They have a higher bar for us than they do for Republicans. They think of our historical lineage: You fight for the common person. That is what you are.
So I will penalize you greater if I don't feel like you are going to stick your necks out for me in a rigged economy in which I think I'm getting screwed over. And you’re the people who fought for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, I'm expecting you to bring it right now because we're swimming in a sea of selfishness and greed here. So you bring me your passion because I need you now. And when we don't meet it, they penalize us greater. They stay home. They say, hey, I'm out.
I often think of it as that the Democratic Party has a kind of choice about who its core institutional relationship is. Is it unions and labor or is it academia? And right now it feels much more like an academia-adjacent party in its affect, the way it shows up, these kinds of institutional habits.
Maybe I'll get more philosophical because I'm agreeing with you on this. But the idea that what breeds, I feel like, is a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness. That when you built this structure, this thing you call the DNC, the Democratic Party, I don't think it can do anything. I don't think it can actually accomplish anything.
I sense and feel that a lot. And I think part of what is happening is that we've dissipated mission and purpose. And I would argue — you know this world very well because you've written on it cogently for a long period of time — when you have the devolution of power from institutional structures that are supposed to fight for the common person, and you say, OK, this institution, call it the Democratic National Committee, whatever you want to say, labor union. When you have the devolution of power and it goes away from that to super PAC, campus group, whatever you want to call it, some outside nonprofit organizing group, OK, what happens?
Well, it means that the influence of wealth has largely increased because it probably now is running your super PAC. It is probably now running whatever special nonprofit group that is now splintered off of this thing that we had initially wanted to build, an institutional structure that fights for working people. When that kind of broke and the lethargy built into it and the people felt hopelessness about it, boom. Great gain for wealthy people to come in and say, I got an opportunity for you. We'll be quicker, we'll be faster, we'll be smarter because we're so good. This super PAC will replace the DNC.
Given that you've been in this kind of attention-oriented business with video making and other things recently, but have also managed these campaigns, how do you see this question of a Democratic Party that could actually win the attention game by truly changing what it's willing to do, what candidates are willing to do, how it's willing to come across?
One of the challenges of the brand, in my view, is the unwillingness to engage in hard conversations. You started this with, let's talk about some hard truths. And in a lot of forums that I go to Anand — and I don't know if you feel this way — sometimes when I introduce myself and I'm in a room and talk to people, I say, hey, I'm Faiz Shakir. I want to introduce myself. And I want to let you know that if you disagree with me — and I'm going to say some things — I would welcome you expressing your disagreement.
And I have to almost like intentionally and purposefully welcome it because there's a lot of places where everyone’s walking on eggshells and one either doesn't say anything that is provocative or interesting or compelling. Or if they do, they’ll be like, oh, I'm going to get, you know, I'm not allowed to talk about it. We're all very polite in society here.
We have to have a conviction-oriented conversation. So our brand is lacking it right now. It is a sense that the Democratic Party, very polite, very nice, but, you know, very slow, very lethargic, doesn't want to have honest conversations around the things that they truly believe. So I'm not sure what you truly believe, when I see you agree on the Green New Deal here, now you're not, or you're interested in trans issues at this point, now you're seemingly not as interested.
In my mind, these are all easy to deal with if you have conviction and talk about it. But when they see you not talking about them, you're going to get penalized. So my view is that the things you're talking about — of not winning online with some of these forums — is downstream of the fact that upstream, decisions were made that we can not talk about these five things right now. Can we not discuss the challenge of immigration, the border crossings, and what they're doing in Chicago, and how they're hurting the social safety net there in schools and healthcare systems? So it's dicey. It's very difficult. I don't know what you'd have to say. Why don't we not say anything?
Well, people aren't dumb. They're watching. They're seeing that. And my view is that we can solve the downstream things of you being interesting online. But you're going to go on Joe Rogan (or Anand’s show), right? And you're going to get asked, “Hey, so a lot of people are interested in what's your view on border crossings? Has your view changed on that? It seems like back in the day you thought this thing, and now, maybe, do you still think that?”
You gotta answer that one. In my view — this is where I might feel differently than a lot of Democratic operatives — I'm like, I think people out there in the world have different ideologies and they're all over the map. What they're hunting for is, do you know where you stand with any degree of conviction and can you tell me that you believe that?
Like if Donald Trump was reading a poll, he's not gonna keep saying the election is rigged. Like Mr. President, that's a 30 percent issue. Why are you going out with that? He's like, sorry, I believe it. I'm gonna keep saying it. And then he gets rewarded by people who say, well, I don't agree with him, but he believes what he's saying. So he thinks the election was rigged, but I'm going to look past that and I'm going to look at some other things.
This is why I think a lot of people get too scared of talking, but just give me your orientation. Wherever. On Gaza, Gaza is a great example. Just give me your orientation. You can be John Fetterman, you can be AOC, you can be Bernie Sanders.
Just tell me what you believe and say it.
The above are excerpts from our conversation with Faiz Shakir. To watch the full video, to get access to a complete transcript of this discussion, and to read and comment on this and all of our posts, sign up as a paid subscriber. We’d love it if you’d join us today.
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The.Ink to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
