The one thing vital to countering a GOP bent on vast cruelty has been shunned by Dems

The past year has completely discredited any claim that choosing between the Democratic and Republican parties would be merely a matter of “pick your poison” with the same end result. In countless terrible ways, the last 12 months have shown that Donald Trump’s party is bent on methodically inflicting vast cruelty and injustice while aiming to crush what’s left of democracy and the rule of law.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s leadership persists with the kind of elitist political approach that helped Trump win in 2024. Hidebound and unimaginative, Senate leader Chuck Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries have been incapable of inspiring the people whose high-turnout votes will be essential to ending Republican control of Congress and the White House.

The Democratic establishment shuns the progressive populism that’s vital to effectively counter bogus right-wing populism. And so, the fight to defeat the fascistic GOP and the fight to overcome the power of corporate Democrats are largely the same fight.

Advocates for progressive change will remain on the defensive as long as the Trump party is in power. With the entire future at stake, social movements on the left should have a focus on organizing to oust Republicans from control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections.

The point isn’t that Democrats deserve to win — it’s that people certainly don’t deserve to live under Republican rule, and ending it is the first electoral step toward a federal government that serves the broad public instead of powerfully destructive and violent elites. Like it or not, in almost every case the only candidates in a position to defeat Republicans for the House and Senate this year will have a “D” after their name.

Democratic leaders have dodged coming to terms with reasons why their party lost the White House in 2024, preferring to make a protracted show of scratching their chins and puzzling over the steep falloff of support from working-class voters of all colors. The Democratic National Committee’s refusal to release its autopsy report, assessing what went wrong in the election, underscores the party’s aversion to serious introspection.

Cogent answers are readily available, but top Democrats like Schumer and Jeffries refuse to heed them. If the party wants to regain and expand support from working-class voters, it must fight for programs that they clearly want.

Extensive polling shows strong public support for major progressive reforms, such as raising taxes on big corporations and the wealthy, lifting the Social Security tax cap, boosting the federal minimum wage, and greatly expanding Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing coverage.

The multifaceted tyranny that Trump and his toady lieutenants want to impose is both abrupt and gradual. Relying on “big lie” techniques, they strive to turn this month’s shocks into next month’s old hat.

Yet counting on denunciations of Trump to win elections is a very bad strategy. It didn’t work in 2016, it barely worked in 2020, and it failed miserably in 2024.

Democrats on ballots this fall will need to be offering plausible relief to voters in economic distress. But it’s hard for Democratic leaders to come across as aligned with the working class when evidence is profuse that they aren’t.

In essence, Schumer and Jeffries — and the majority of Democratic officeholders who keep those two in the party’s top positions — represent the Biden-era status quo that was unpopular enough to return Trump to the White House. A key reason is a reality that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) described soon after Trump’s 2016 win: “Certainly there are some people in the Democratic Party who want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”

Democratic leaders should be removed from seats of party power or bypassed as relics of bygone eras. Their ongoing refusals to distance from corporate power, rich elites and militarism have alienated much of the party’s base.

As I wrote in my free new bookThe Blue Road to Trump Hell, “The Democratic Party enabled Donald Trump to become president twice because of repetition compulsions that still plague the top echelons of the party.” To eject Republicans from power – and to advance a strong progressive agenda – true leadership must come from grassroots mobilization.

• Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine includes an afterword about the Gaza war.