Joe Biden, in the end, chose an honorable exit, wrapping up his tenure as among the the most consequential presidents of modern times and giving his endorsement and blessing to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Whatever process remains ahead, the overriding strategic imperative is clear: defeating Donald Trump, Trumpism, MAGA extremism, and the anti-democratic, autocratic future those forces represent.
Much of the day-to-day press coverage will inevitably focus on the horse-race questions at this moment. We at The Ink have been interested in a different question in recent months, which is how a pro-democracy movement can win the era.
We’ve been asking some of the smartest people around, people with the ability to step back and draw on history and scholarship and first-hand experience to provide a bigger vision for a progressive future contending with authoritarian demagoguery.
Today, we bring you ten vital strategic imperatives for the newly minted Harris campaign, drawn from these conversations.
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How Harris crushes Trump, in ten steps
1. Build an actual, IRL movement
As Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has told us, Americans are lonely, and longing to be part of something. The campaign needs to build a movement that addresses the head and the heart. It isn’t enough to just build physical bridges; emotional bridges are just as important, and harder to build.
Yes, there are material concerns that people have in their lives around the economy, around safety, around other challenges like a housing crisis, but there is also a deeper spiritual crisis that's taking place in many of our communities, in our country and in the world more broadly, a crisis that's marked by people feeling a greater sense of disconnection from one another, feeling unmoored or disconnected from sources of meaning and purpose in their lives.
So this is a place where policy matters, but policy alone is not enough to address the deeper pain in people's lives. We've got to listen, we've got to understand and address both the pragmatic and the deeper emotional spiritual crisis that people are going through right now. Otherwise we leave people feeling like we're not seeing them, we're not hearing them, we're not understanding what's really going on in their lives.
Democrats cannot afford to be a mostly online movement. Now is the moment to translate the present energy into physical-world organizing that gives people purpose and connection and even spiritual fulfillment. Give people a tribal identity — but a creedal tribe of believing in multiracial democracy and a bigger American “we.”
For more on that:
2. Save democracy — AND explain what you’ll do for people’s lives if it is saved
It’s not enough to ask people to “save democracy.” People are less motivated to mitigate harms than to create something great. Therefore, the pro-democracy movement needs to argue that it is saving democracy for its own sake, yes, but also saving it to make your life better in tangible ways. It’s what political scientist Daniel Ziblatt calls the “bank shot to save democracy”:
Institutional change is something that not everybody cares about. Or it's like a bank shot to get to what you want; it's an indirect route. If you're not happy with your life, the idea that we need to introduce, say, proportional representation is an abstraction. So how do you get people to think in institutional terms?
The way to do that is to link institutional reform to the issues that people really care about in their daily lives. Whether that's abortion rights or gun control; it could be economic policy.
3. Fill the vacuum after neoliberalism
Neoliberalism, the growth-fixated, market-fundamentalist economic order that’s been at the heart of policymaking for the last half-century, has failed in the eyes of analysts on the left and right. To counter the right’s populist “answer” to the economic problems that plague working people, a renewed Democratic campaign and movement needs to build on the work the Biden administration has done and present a real alternative that actually lifts people up.
Economist Joseph Stiglitz recently told us about his own efforts
to fill the gap, the vacuum that's been created by the death of neoliberalism. And what I try to say is, you ought to begin by thinking about what kind of society you want, and then think about what kind of economy will deliver that. And, clearly, it has to be human-centric. How can we let the most individuals have the greatest freedom? Freedom defined as their opportunities, what they can do. How can we have most people live up to their potential?
4. Actively inoculate voters against disinformation
Manipulation of public opinion remains a threat, and with some of the most important sources of information online in the hands of bad actors, the Democrats must be prepared for attacks — with a real plan to prebunk (not retroactively debunk) disinformation. There’s some precedent already, but the preparation needs to continue.
Disinformation researcher Sander van der Linden told us:
The best example is from the Biden administration, which prebunked the Russian invasion of Ukraine by telling the American public and NATO that there were going to be fake videos of Ukrainian soldiers on Russian soil, and it's going to be a pretext for a potential invasion, but you should know that these are actors, and this is all fake. And this is Russia trying to come up with a reason to invade Ukraine. And I think that was one of the most effective real-world examples of prebunking that we've seen. We didn't design this inoculation, but it followed the format.
5. Use American power to get to peace in Israel and Palestine
As Senator Brian Schatz and author and activist Naomi Klein (among many others) have told us, the time for real action to end the war in Gaza has been upon us for too long now. To really make a difference, Democrats need to make good on U.S. policy promises and put real, material pressure on the Netanyahu government to end the conflict. It’s time to take seriously what campus protestors and the leaders of the Uncommitted efforts in Michigan and elsewhere have been saying all year.
I don't think that requiring that weapons are used consistent with our laws and with international law and with our values is a radical departure from United States foreign policy. It is only in the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Israel that defines the annual defense commitment that the language about “no conditions” exists.
Whenever we do appropriations, whether it's domestic or defense, we have conditions on the expenditure of those funds. This idea that you put conditions on the resources we provide a small non-profit in the state of Hawaii, but not on those we provide to a defense force in the middle of a hot war, just defies common sense.
I also believe that they have to get over this idea that they can message their way out of this or symbol their way out of it. Do some symbolic act, which as we know, the Democrats love a symbol. But I think something like actually cutting off all offensive weapons to Israel. A weapons embargo to Israel would be incredibly significant. And I know that it's just like, well, I think the response is that that is not realistic, but I think that that's the kind of policy — that's the kind of serious policy change that I think would potentially get people's attention.
6. Embrace patriotism
Too often the political left looks at patriotic displays as frightening or cringe — but that’s leaving the field to forces that are against everything the American flag should stand for. Instead, a real Democratic movement needs to reclaim patriotism itself.
As Congressman Ro Khanna told us:
I think that we shouldn't shy away from but rather embrace the narrative of patriotism. Great leaders, when you look in our country at Dr. King and John Lewis or in other countries at Gandhi and Mandela, they grounded their calls in a deeply held patriotism and in religious conviction. I don't understand why we cede that to the Republicans.
7. Close the meaning-making gap
When we talked to writer and policy wonk Heather McGhee recently, she warned us that Biden simply didn’t tell the kind of story Donald Trump could — the crucial kind of narrative that lets voters make meaning of their own lives. A renewed Democratic movement needs to get this right and tell the story that lets people make meaning:
So Biden is nowhere in our daily and cultural lives, which is, actually, I think, even worse than him being this caricature of a doddering old man. He is not an avatar for anything we either are or want to be. He is not a brand. He is not a style. He is not a storyteller. He’s not a cultural icon or a logic, and he doesn’t knit together different things that we experience on a daily basis into a story.
The Biden administration started down this path when it sent actor Robert DeNiro to downtown Manhattan to address the crowds gathered for Donald Trump’s criminal trial. It’s a place to start.
On behalf of the Biden-Harris campaign, De Niro was making meaning out of the narrative fragments of the Trump trial, telling a story that people might tell themselves, the kind of story about Trump the penny-ante grifter that New Yorkers certainly know in their bones.
By putting De Niro out there, the Biden campaign is acknowledging publicly what it presumably knows privately: that it has not participated adequately in the cultural process that a modern campaign demands.
8. Get into the culture; Or, Make hats
The forces of the right have dug deeply into the culture — slogans, red MAGA caps, and bumper stickers are political currency, and Democrats have simply not even begun to play the game. A serious effort means embracing the things that don’t seem serious — and, as messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio has told us, that even means swag.
The thing is, people need to see, “Oh, that's what my kind of a person thinks.” Humans are social creatures. We’re tribal. We want to find cues in our environment that tell us what our category subscribes to.
So while I think there is some symbology on the movement side of the left, there isn’t enough. On the Democratic side, I think it’s very hard to maintain. You just can’t maintain symbology when the movement won’t carry it — like they literally will not wear a Democratic Party hat, won't do it.
9. Get smart about emotion
When Anand addressed a gathering of members of Indivisible, his message was about how difficult it’s been for Americans to manage change in our moment — changes in the economy, in gender roles, in racial equality, in the very meaning of what it means to be in America. The right has filled the gap for many men, especially, with easy answers. But a real pro-democracy movement needs to help all Americans with the deep emotional struggle to deal with the impacts of change, regardless of whether those changes are positive or negative:
[T]his, to me, is the central undertaking for a pro-democracy movement in this country, if we are to have one worthy of the name: to be deeply, persistently engaged in the psychological process through which millions of Americans are trying to figure out these changes, figure out the era, find new identities in a changing country, and ultimately come to see themselves in a way they like to see on the far side of change.
10. Paint the beautiful tomorrow
As writer and activist George Monbiot told us, it’s not enough to diagnose problems. A real movement needs to paint a portrait of tomorrow, to motivate people with a sense of possibility that lets them connect the task of politics with change that actually matters. As he reminded us, things only seem impossible until they become possible — and that is what the Democrats need to argue.
If we were to imagine that transformative political change took place in a linear, gradual, and granular fashion, there would be nothing to hope for, and we might as well give up and go home. But it doesn’t work this way. It proceeds by means of sudden ruptures: flips between equilibrium states in a complex system. The first step is to decide what we want. The second is to explain it clearly, with the help of a new restoration story. The third, using this new story, is to build our concentric circles of consent for a new dispensation, outwards until they reach the social tipping point and are accepted as a new status quo.
Fabulous way to respond to the opportunity in this moment--thank you! I'm remembering Brene Brown's aphorism: strong backs, soft fronts, wild hearts.
I think we would be wise to look for ways to build an independent pro-democracy movement that can assist Dems this cycle, AND that will outlast the next few elections. I am looking for inspiration to the long-term plan the state Dem party has used in Wisconsin (big picture with awareness of distant timelines), and also the Serbian pro-democracy movement Otpor! that ousted Slobodan Milosevic (creative organizing with youth, humor, non-violence, music and drama used with skill). https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/bringing-dictator-english/
We can do this!
Great article and references. Now please, forward it to the Democratic Party leaders for then to advise Kamala .......