At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.

Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”

Democrats talk a big game about “inclusion,” but as Buttigieg notes, they don’t produce a message that feels inclusive to most voters, because they’re too focused on appealing to the very nonrepresentative set of people who make up the party apparatus. Adam Frisch—a moderate Democrat who ran two strong campaigns for Congress in a red district in western Colorado but got little traction among DNC members when he sought to be elected as vice chair of the party—wrote about his own experience in the DNC campaign. He noted how just about the only people he’d encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were “the impressive delegates from the High School Democrats of America.” Frisch lost out to two candidates who were much better positioned to speak to the very highly educated, very left-wing electorate that is the DNC membership: State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, a “champion for social justice” who has lost multiple statewide campaigns in Pennsylvania by doing his best impression of Elizabeth Warren; and David Hogg, the dim-bulb gun-control advocate who still seems to think “Defund the Police” is good politics. Speaking of things that seem like they came out of Portlandia: Hogg believes that the gun-control movement was “started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and nonbinary people that never got on the news or in most history books.”

Yet Buttigieg pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road of being off-putting and unpopular.

[Read: The HR-ification of the Democratic party]

These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped. And although DEI-speak can and does make Democrats seem weird and out of touch, that’s not the main problem with it. The big problem with the approach Buttigieg rightly complains about—and that Kenyatta and Hogg exemplify—is that it entails a strong set of mistaken moral commitments. These have led the party to take unpopular positions on crime, immigration, and education, among other issues. Many nonwhite voters correctly perceive these positions as hostile to their substantive interests.

What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them according to how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are because of those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences of the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent. That is, they decide that some people are more important than others, and then they don’t even correctly assess the desires of the people they have decided are most important.

Let’s look, for example, at what progressive Democrats have to offer to Asian voters—or, as a DNC member might say, “AANHPI voters.” On higher education, Democrats advocate for race-conscious admission policies that favor “underrepresented” groups and disfavor “overrepresented” ones. In practice, those policies have meant that Asian applicants must clear higher academic bars than white applicants—and much higher bars than Black and Latino applicants—to win admission to top schools. Progressives have also responded to demographic imbalances at selective public K–12 education programs (which are disproportionately Asian) by fighting to change the admission systems. In New York, progressives sought to to abolish the admission exam, which Asian students have dominated; in San Francisco, where the city’s most prestigious magnet school has become majority-Asian, they actually did away with the exam for a time; in Fairfax County, Virginia, they changed admission rules to be less favorable to Asian applicants. Within schools, they have opposed tracking and fought to remove advanced math courses, “leveling” the playing field by reducing the level of rigor available to the highest-performing students.

Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, so they try to stack the deck against them. Not a great pitch to the Asian community.

Of course, I’m sure Democrats who favor affirmative action would say that framing is very unfair. But these are the same people who keep telling us we need to focus on the effects of actions rather than intentions. When Democrats get control of education policy, they make changes that hurt Asians. Is it any kind of surprise that, as Democrats have become ever more obsessed with racial “equity” as a policy driver, Asian voters have swung hard against the party? Is it surprising that Republicans—in spite of overt racism among some operatives and activists in the party—have made strong inroads among Asian voters? I don’t find it surprising, given that Democrats are the party of official discrimination against Asians.

[Read: Democrats deserved to lose]

Or consider Democrats’ approach to crime. Progressives’ insistence on using marginalization as a marker of moral worth has led them to prioritize the needs of people who are engaged in antisocial behavior over those of ordinary citizens who abide by the social contract. After all, few people are more marginalized than criminals, or the “justice-involved,” as a DNC member might call them. As progressives have grown skeptical of police and policing, they have made it more difficult to detain dangerous defendants ahead of trial, and they have de facto (and sometimes de jure) decriminalized nuisances such as public drug use. These policies, combined with the effects of COVID and the George Floyd protests, have led to an increase in crime and disorder in cities. This has been unpopular. And because major cities are disproportionately nonwhite, the negative effects of the disorder have fallen disproportionately on nonwhite voters. So it makes sense that diverse cities swung harder against Democrats than did whiter suburbs, where physical distance has insulated the electorate.

On immigration, similarly, Democrats are excessively focused on the interests of the most marginalized group in the policy equation—foreign migrants—even though these migrants are not citizens and not really stakeholders in our politics. The Biden administration presided over the entry of millions of migrants into the country in a way that was not in accordance with any intentionally enacted public policy. It did this with the enthusiastic support of progressive groups that purport to speak for the interests of Latinos. But the broader population of Latinos reacted—surprise!—quite negatively to the migration wave, as they watched migrants receive expensive government services, overwhelm institutions of local government, and in some cases produce crime and disorder. Some of the hardest-swinging counties against Democrats from 2020 to 2024 were overwhelmingly Latino counties on the U.S.-Mexico border. If you wanted to predict how the migration wave would affect the Hispanic American vote, you would have done better to focus on the “American” aspect of their identity rather than on the “Hispanic” part; as it turns out, long-settled Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans don’t necessarily put a high premium on ensuring that our government spends a ton of money to house and care for economic migrants from Central and South America.

So the problem here is not really the $10 words. Consider the term BIPOC. This (decreasingly?) fashionable buzzword—which means either “Black and Indigenous people of color” or “Black, Indigenous, and people of color,” depending on whom you ask—contains a clear message about how progressives view the hierarchy of marginalization: Black Americans and Native Americans outrank Latinos and Asians. It seems that the message has been received: In 2024, Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos and Asians. But the problem can’t be fixed by dropping BIPOC from the vocabulary. To stop the bleeding, Democrats need to abandon the toxic issue positions they took because they have the sort of worldview that caused them to say “BIPOC” in the first place.

[Read: How to move on from the worst of identity politics]

Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say that the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of U.S. citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason for being admitted to the United States and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say that the pullback from policing has been a mistake. They should say that they were wrong and they are sorry! After all, Democrats talk easily about how the party has gotten “out of touch,” but they don’t draw the obvious connection about what happens when you’re out of touch: You get things substantively wrong and alienate voters with your unpopular ideas. To fix that, you have to change more than how you talk—you have to change what you stand for, and stand up to those in the party who oppose that change.

Even better, you can nominate people who never took those toxic and unpopular issue positions in the first place.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.

Updated on February 1 at 10:06 ET

The Democrats are angry. Well, at least some of them.

For months, party activists have felt bitter about Kamala Harris’s election loss, and incensed at the leaders who first went along with Joe Biden’s decision to run again. They feel fresh outrage each time a new detail is revealed about the then-81-year-old’s enfeeblement and its concealment by the advisers in charge. But right now, what’s making these Democrats angriest is that many of their elected leaders don’t seem angry at all.

“I assumed that we would be prepared to meet the moment, and I was wrong,” Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun-control group Moms Demand Action, told me. “It’s like they’ve shown up to a knife fight with a cheese stick.”

For all the people in Watts’s camp, the party’s response to Donald Trump’s first 12 days in office has been maddening at best and demoralizing at worst. After Trump issued pardons or commutations for the January 6 rioters last week, including the ones who attacked police officers, no immediate chorus of anger came from what is supposed to be the next generation of Democratic talent, including Maryland Governor Wes Moore, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, another 2028 hopeful, who is on tour selling a young-adult version of her autobiography, has told interviewers, “I am not out looking for fights. I am always looking to collaborate.”

After Trump threatened Colombia with tariffs, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries attempted to reassure the confused and fearful rank and file with the reminder that “God is still on the throne,” which seemed a little like saying, “Jesus, take the wheel.” And people were baffled after the Democratic National Committee responded on X to Trump’s first week in office by channeling a quainter time in American politics and dusting off an Obama-era slogan to accuse him of being “focused on Wall Street—not Main Street.” “Get new material!” one person suggested in the replies, a succinct summary of the other 1,700 comments.

[Will Freeman: Strong-arming Latin America will work until it doesn’t]

The limp messaging continued this week, after Trump’s administration on Monday issued a federal-funding freeze, including for cancer research and programs such as Meals on Wheels. The next day, Jeffries called for an emergency caucus meeting to hammer out a forceful “three-pronged counter-offensive.” But that emergency meeting would not actually take place until the following afternoon. (By the time lawmakers were dialing in, the White House had already rescinded the order.) Jeffries’s Senate counterpart, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, scowling over his glasses, offered his own sleepy—and slightly unsettling—assessment of the moment: “I haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time.”

Some Democrats say they are hopeful that a new chair of the DNC, who will be elected today, will give the now-rudderless party a bit of direction—a way to harness all that arousal. The committee leads the party’s fundraising apparatus and coordinates with its sister organizations on Senate and House campaigns. But a chair can’t do much if the party’s own lawmakers aren’t willing to swap out the mozzarella for something a little sharper.

Part of the hurdle for Democrats is that they are afraid of sounding shrill. Few are eager for a return of the frantic and indiscriminate alarm-sounding that characterized the response to Trump 1.0, when Democrats clamored for the release of the supposed pee tapes and wore pink pussy hats in protest. There’s something cringey, these days, about reviving the capital-R Resistance—especially because Trump’s second win can’t be chalked up to some fluke; he won the popular vote, fair and square. Most Democrats acknowledge that, this time around, they should choose their targets carefully. “We’re not going to swing at every pitch,” Jeffries told reporters yesterday morning.

But Democrats can’t just stand idly by the plate, several frustrated progressive activists and movement leaders told me. They should be communicating to voters that Trump “is shutting down the government, and stripping it for parts to sell to billionaires,” April Glick Pulito, a progressive communications strategist, said. But Democrats aren’t getting it across, a reality that is disheartening, she told me, but also symbolic. “It’s part of why we fuckin’ lost,” she said. “It’s why people stayed home.” She and others I spoke with are demanding that Democrats be louder and more forceful—using resolutions and press conferences, sure, but also creative social-media campaigns and stunts for the cameras. “Speak like normal people, on platforms that normal people access,” Watts said. “I am not reading your press release. Get on every platform I’m on—talk to me on an Instagram reel, or a Substack live. Tweet things that explain what’s happening and how I can help or what you’re going to do to fix it.”

Some Democratic lawmakers have been doing this. People I talked with pointed to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has regularly gone live on Instagram to spell out the consequences of Trump’s actions. They also pointed to Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker’s vow to thwart unlawful deportation efforts and his new directive blocking any pardoned January 6 rioters from serving in the state government.

But Democrats across the ideological spectrum say they want more from their leaders. Dullness in political messaging is death, they say, and bland consultant-speak is plaguing the party, which right now seems totally incapable of grabbing any voter’s attention. A clear example of this was when Democratic leaders chose 74-year-old Gerry Connolly, who is not exactly a fiery communicator, to head up the House Oversight Committee over Ocasio-Cortez, Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the grassroots group Indivisible, told me. That choice indicates “a failure to recognize the political and media moment that we’re in.”

A party that is in the minority in both chambers of Congress usually doesn’t have a prayer of blocking legislation, but it can gum up the works. Dozens of Democratic senators have so far voted in support of Trump’s Cabinet nominees when they should be opposing them at every turn, these frustrated activists argue, along with rejecting unanimous consent agreements, voting against cloture, and requesting quorum calls. “They should be slowing everything to a halt,” Amanda Litman, a co-founder of the organization Run for Something, told me.

Glick Pulito compared the Democrats’ situation to a sketch from the Netflix comedy show I Think You Should Leave, in which a man wearing a hot-dog suit crashes a hot-dog-shaped car into a store and proceeds to look around wildly for the culprit. “I don’t want to see Chuck Schumer saying Congress should act,” Glick Pulito said. “Bro, you are Congress!”

Some signs have emerged that Democrats are developing a wartime footing. A group of 23 attorneys general from across the country sued the Trump administration this week over its funding freeze. The former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz came out of election-loss-induced retirement to go on a cable-news rampage about it. (“They defrosted him!” Glick Pulito said.) And when the White House rescinded its funding block, Democrats claimed a grassroots victory. “FAFO,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “I am more optimistic now than I was 48 hours ago,” Levin told me. “I am seeing some green shoots. I would like those to bloom into full-fledged flowers.”

[Elaine Godfrey: The resistance almost missed impeachment]

A new DNC chair, activists and progressives leaders hope, could at least be the Miracle-Gro for that process. Since Harris lost and Biden left, Democrats have been leaderless and agenda-free. Any conversations about the party’s brand troubles or its plan for handling the next four years have been haphazard and localized. Ken Martin and Ben Wikler, the two top candidates for the DNC chair job, both have the confidence of the activists I spoke with, not least because both have led political operations from outside the D.C. Beltway. Both men say they understand that people are frustrated. “If we don’t stand up now,” Martin, head of the Minnesota Democrats, told me, “then how in the hell are people going to believe that we’re going to fight for them and their families when we’re back in power?” This is a period of transition, Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin state party, told me: “Very soon, the battle will be well and truly joined.”

But the cavalry’s arrival may not mean much. The DNC has always occupied an amorphous role in the Democratic Party; it holds little sway with congressional leadership, and won't exactly shape the party's ideological future. That reality was on display this week during a chaotic DNC candidate forum characterized by a fixation on diversity issues, constant interruptions from climate-change activists, and frustrated outbursts from the audience.

The scene was indicative of a party not only struggling to fill a leadership vacuum but also stumbling beneath the weight of a tarnished brand, an unhappy base, and a growing reputation for fecklessness.

This article originally misstated the DNC's role in the Democratic Party.

Speaking to the Democratic National Committee, which met to select its new leadership this weekend, the outgoing chair, Jaime Harrison, attempted to explain a point about its rules concerning gender balance for its vice-chair race. “The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced,” Harrison announced.

As the explanation became increasingly intricate, Harrison’s elucidation grew more labored. “To ensure our process accounts for male, female, and nonbinary candidates, we conferred with our [Rules and Bylaws Committee] co-chair, our LGBT Caucus co-chair, and others to ensure that the process is inclusive and meets the gender-balance requirements in our rules,” he added. “To do this, our process will be slightly different than the one outlined to you earlier this week, but I hope you will see that in practice, it is simple and transparent.”

The Democratic Party, at least in theory, is an organization dedicated to winning political power through elected office, though this might seem hard to believe on the evidence provided by its official proceedings. The DNC’s meetings included a land acknowledgment, multiple shrieking interruptions by angry protesters, and a general affirmation that its strategy had been sound, except perhaps insufficiently committed to legalistic race and gender essentialism.

The good news about the DNC, for those who prefer that the country have a politically viable alternative to the authoritarian personality cult currently running it, is that the official Democratic Party has little power. The DNC does not set the party’s message, nor will it determine its next presidential candidate.

The bad news is that the official party’s influence is so meager, in part because the party has largely ceded it to a collection of progressive activist groups. These groups, funded by liberal donors, seldom have a broad base of support among the voting public but have managed to amass enormous influence over the party. They’ve done so by monopolizing the brand value of various causes. Climate groups, for instance, define what good climate policy means, and then they judge candidates based on how well they affirm those positions. The same holds true for abortion, racial justice, and other issues that many Democrats deem important. The groups are particularly effective at spreading their ideas through the media, especially (but not exclusively) through the work of progressive-leaning journalists, who lean on both the expertise that groups provide and their ability to drive news (by, say, scolding Democratic candidates who fall short of their standards of ideological purity).

The 2020 Democratic primary represented the apogee, to that point, of the groups’ influence. The gigantic field of candidates slogged through a series of debates and interviews in which journalists asked if they would affirm various positions demanded by the groups. That is how large chunks of the field wound up endorsing decriminalization of the border, reparations, and other causes that are hardly consensus positions within the Democratic Party, let alone the broader electorate. It is also how Kamala Harris came out for providing free gender-reassignment surgery to prisoners and migrant detainees, which became the basis of the Trump campaign’s most effective ad against her.

The ongoing influence of the groups can be seen in a new New York Times poll. Asked to list their top priorities, respondents cited, in order, the economy, health care, immigration, taxes, and crime. Asked what they believed Democrats’ priorities were, they cited abortion, LGBTQ policy, climate change, the state of democracy, and health care. That perception of the party’s priorities may not be an accurate description of the views of its elected officials. But it is absolutely an accurate description of the priorities of progressive activist groups.

The poll is a testament to how well the groups have done their job. They have set out to raise public awareness of a series of issues their donors care about, and to commit the party to prioritizing them, and they have done so. Democrats in public office may be mostly engaged in fighting about the economy, health care, and other issues, but they lack the communications apparatus controlled by the groups, which have blotted out their poll-tested messages in favor of donor-approved ones.

Over the past year or so, and especially since Harris’s defeat, some centrist commentators have begun to question the groups’ influence. But the DNC meetings offered no evidence that their thinking has gone out of style.

If Democrats learned from Harris’s campaign that they should try to stop holding events that are easily repurposed as viral Republican attack ads, they showed no sign of it over the weekend. When activists repeatedly interrupted speakers, they were met supportively. “Rather than rebuff the interruptions,” observed the Wall Street Journal reporter Molly Ball, “those onstage largely celebrated them, straining to assure the activists they were actually on the same side and eagerly giving them the platform they broke the rules to demand.”

Neither Harrison nor his successor, Ken Martin, has questioned Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term, nor any of the messaging or policy that contributed to his dismal approval ratings. When MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart asked one panel of candidates if they believed racism and misogyny contributed to Harris’s defeat, every panelist agreed. “That’s good, you all pass,” he said. (Note that this diagnosis of the election result has no actionable takeaway other than that perhaps the party should refrain from nominating a woman or person of color.)

The most sadly revealing outcome of the meeting may be the elevation of David Hogg as vice chair. Hogg, a 24-year-old activist, rose to prominence as a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, and then quickly assimilated the full range of progressive stances—defund ICE, abolish the police, etc.—into his heavily online persona. And despite the horrific experience he endured, he does not seem to be notably wise beyond his years. After the far-right activist and pillow peddler Mike Lindell gained prominence as an election denier, I joked online that progressives needed their own pillow company. (The joke, of course, is that there is obviously no need for your pillow company to endorse your political views.) The next month, Hogg went ahead and turned this joke into reality, founding Good Pillow before resigning a few months later.

Hogg’s takeaway from the 2024 presidential race is that Democrats lost because they failed to rally the youth vote with a rousing message on guns, climate, and other issues favored by progressive activists. Polling, in fact, showed that young voters had similar issue priorities as older voters, but Hogg’s elevation was a tribute to the wish masquerading as calculation that Democrats can gain vote share without compromising with the electorate.

Some Democrats observed the events of the weekend with wry fatalism. At one point, a protester in a Sunrise Movement T-shirt interrupted by shouting, “I am terrified!”

She was not alone.