The Democratic Party is in need of a thorough overhaul. Democrats clearly lost trust on the key issues voters care most about, yet instead of getting back to basics and earning back voters’ confidence, the Democratic party leadership in D.C. has been riddled for six months with infighting and knotted into a blame game around the party’s failure in 2024.
This is not surprising. Too many party leaders have been content to ride the two-party pendulum into office every two, four, six or eight years, taking increasing amounts of campaign funding from interests who are perfectly fine propping up a system that has failed to deliver the American dream for more than a generation of regular folks.
We have each worked in and around the Democratic Party for much of our careers. We’ve seen firsthand the party’s lack of focus on macroeconomics and national security. We’ve seen the lack of curiosity and courage to solve big problems that require tough conversations for the benefit of the average Joe or Jane on Main Street.
Well, Main Street spoke in 2024, and we are going to listen.
Our starting point is the Constitution. Based on the first five months of executive orders and their one big outrageous bill, today’s Republican Party is opposed to America’s sacred statement of purpose, alienating patriotic Republicans and independents who have voted, served, and died in support of its timeless articulation of American values.
What is that common purpose? It’s the Constitution’s preamble and its promise to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity …”
Even as Trump’s faction actively undermines each promise, the Democrats’ standing with Americans struggling to stay in the middle class, let alone climb higher, keeps slipping. The party seems oblivious that the general welfare is poor, and the blessings of liberty don’t feel like blessings anymore. For average Americans, it all feels like walking a tightrope without a net.
That’s why we believe that it is time to build a new wing of the Democratic Party. Only a new wing — beholden to no special interests — can forge a durable new direction for the country to deliver the prosperity and security voters demand while embracing all who respect the Constitution.
The U.S. has done this before.
In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower was faced with a similar crisis: Neither party understood how to steer the nation through what would become a decades-long struggle between freedom and communist dictatorship. So Eisenhower jumped in the race, won in a landslide, and spent the next eight years building a bipartisan consensus on a “grand strategy” to guide that mid-century struggle.
It is now 34 years since Eisenhower’s grand strategy defeated the Soviets, and neither party has offered a coherent replacement calibrated to the fundamentally different existential challenges we face today.
It’s not a surprise. From President Kennedy on, Washington forgot how to do grand strategy. China and Russia, however, have not forgotten and are celebrating (and stoking) our confusion.
But grand strategy is not that hard to understand; it’s just big. Grand strategy realigns domestic and foreign policy together, knowing that America always wins when we let our economic engine do the heavy lifting.
And once we think like Ike and use the lens of grand strategy, a new direction is revealed. Today, the pieces of a powerful new economic engine are ready to assemble.
There are massive pools of pent-up economic demand in housing, transportation, agriculture, energy and materials. There is plenty of private capital needing long-term certainty. And, there is more than enough fiscal space to get started without stoking inflation.
In other words, a real full-employment, high-wage, high-return economy is just waiting for us to get our act together.
To unleash that economic potential, this new wing of the party will have to cast aside ideology, myths and disinformation for what works in practice and at scale. We like to call this approach radical centrism.
Radical centrism recognizes that good economic ideas are good if they deliver consistently for hard-working regular folks, not just the exceptional or exceptionally privileged. With a strong economic foundation, we’ll earn back the tough America that deterred nuclear war, and the principled America that embraced its allies to stop two 20th-century authoritarian empires while improving lives around the world.
The contrast is clear. The House GOP just revealed their know-nothing economic promises were yet another con and Trump’s foreign policy is founded on corruption. Under MAGA supporting Republicans, the economy will only get worse between now and 2028, weakening American families and weakening us against Russia and China.
Democrats have two election cycles left to get this right. That’s why we’ll be working to build a new wing of the party to reestablish that only Democrats can deliver for all Americans and meet our responsibilities to the world.
At the end of the day, what’s so radical about radical centrism? The only thing is that we want to actually get stuff done.
Patrick Doherty is the former deputy director of the National Security Studies Program at New America. Rich Pelletier is the former deputy campaign manager for the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign. Peter Brown is a former aide to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. The authors are the co-founders of the Center for the Constitution and Grand Strategy.
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