Take a look at this photo from Sunday’s New York Times, a white supremacist group that attempted to start a riot over a Gay Pride event in Idaho last week. Focus on the t-shirt in the middle, and ponder the fact that the group seems to have included people from Texas, Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, Illinois, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon and Virginia, all of whom traveled to get in on the carefully planned and promoted action. 

This is not about politics, and we need to get that out of our head. This is a war over values. This is about our basic sense of who we are. What does it mean to be American? What is “the American way”? What is acceptable behavior, and who defines it? What, for that matter, defines good and evil? Dark forces are at work here, forces the Republican Party and the unseen money behind them have been stoking for decades. And now it’s here. Now it’s real. Now values are up for grabs. 

A fork in the road

This is a true moment in American history, a literal fork in the road, and we need to stand up. We keep treating this as some sort of political problem, something we can fix with the next election. We keep acting like all we need to do is fight a little harder, find better messaging, just keep slugging away like we always have and everything will be fine. 

Of course we need to win the next election. We need to win all of them, and by a lot bigger margins than we have in the past. We need to become a supermajority. But if we want to actually do that, we need to start by finally recognizing what's really going on, and that means changing our thinking. 

Unite the party around core values

The very first thing we need to do is unite our party. And there’s only one way to do that. The only thing every Democrat in America agrees on is our core values. That’s where we have to start. We have to make our core values our public identity. And then we need to make people see that those values are actually America’s values … and match that with a vision of the future that people can hold on to. We need to become the party of hope, the party that stands for making the future work for people. We need to be seen as the party that explains and guides Americans through all the uncertainty and noise and confusion we are faced with. Policy doesn’t do that, values do. 

People ask me why Democrats 101 was written. This is the reason, and this is the reason this entire campaign is underway. If we want to right the ship, set America back on the path towards a just society, then it's now we have to act. Now, and for a long time to come.

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