Hey, John,

This has been an exhausting week. The Atlanta Federal Reserve has predicted a 2.8% decline in our national GDP over this quarter as Elon Musk’s DOGE slashes and burns its way through our federal government; the White House announced that yes, we really are going to stumble blindly into a trade war with one of our closest allies (but maybe not for a few more weeks); and in Tuesday’s Joint Address, the President once again repeated false claims about Social Security fraud, clearly to tee up major cuts to the program.

And that was just Monday and Tuesday.

But to hear the Republicans talk, you’d think the most important issues facing our country right now are woke, transgender DEI, annexing Greenland, and what to call the Gulf of Mexico America Mexico.

I’m not going to brush off the very real, damaging attacks this administration has launched on marginalized people. But we have to remember that fundamentally, they’re targeting vulnerable minorities as a distraction from their wildly unpopular, dangerous economic policies. Polling consistently shows that the average American’s position on transgender people is that they deserve the same rights and protections as anyone else—but by targeting specific wedge issues, the GOP is able to kick up a lot of dust that leaves us trying to defend positions where Americans already agree with us while they rob our country blind.

That’s Fascism 101: drum up a good enough scapegoat and people will forget about everything else.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s shortsighted economic policies will have real impacts that will devastate the global economy if allowed to continue. If you’ve been getting my emails for a while, you know that I’ve literally spent years talking about how Republican fiscal policy is going to drive us off a fiscal cliff, and right now the White House is actually strapping us to a rocket like Wile E. Coyote in preparation to hurtle off that cliff at mach speed.

Live footage of the United States government.

We can’t let ourselves be distracted from those harms. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the Republican Party want us to be confused and scared so that they can further consolidate their power and further erode our democracy. They want us to get caught up in their flashiest antics so we’ll waste our energy there instead of making sure Americans know how we’re getting screwed over.

Because as long as Democrats are on the defensive and don’t look like a more competent alternative, they’re pretty sure they can get away with it.

So what do we do about it? I thought that UNC Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom had an insightful take in the New York Times (a vanishingly rare group of words) a few weeks ago:

“Acknowledge that the chaos is smoke, but the heist is the fire. Don’t look away from the smoke. Look through it for what is being taken, redefined and reallocated.”

Our party is in a major period of soul-searching right now. All of us are struggling to figure out how to respond to our losses in 2024 and how to rebuild and start winning again. I’m here to tell you that we win by keeping our eyes on the prize, looking through the distractions, and giving voice to the issues that really matter to people. That doesn’t mean we abandon the vulnerable—but it does mean we have to have a more coherent response to all of this than wagging our fingers and shouting “now, you stop that, Mister Trump!”

When people are asking what you’ll do to fix a broken system, you don’t win by yelling that the other guy is making it worse. People don’t care about whose fault something is, or the process we used to get somewhere, or even democracy in the abstract—they care about what you are going to do about it. They care about outcomes and impacts before anything else.

Until we can present a coherent vision for a democracy that actually works to improve people’s lives and give them the opportunity to succeed, we aren’t going to get the folks who have tuned us out to tune back in.

Yes, we have to stand up and vehemently disagree with everything the Republicans are doing right now, but we also have to present Americans with a coherent message and vision for what the country looks like with Democrats in charge besides just “not the Republicans.”

We need to give voice to everyone who is scared or hurt or anxious right now and give them a real reason to trust that we’re listening to their concerns. We need to stop centering ourselves, start centering the issues that our voters say matter, and then show up in our communities and fight like hell for our neighbors.

That’s our path forward.

Eyes on the prize,
Wesley Harris

P.S. If this email looks a little different than normal, it’s because I’m in the process of switching to a new email provider now that my Treasurer campaign is over! Switching providers is always a little dicey, so if you enjoy getting my emails, can I ask you to please reply and let me know? That will go a long way toward making sure I keep landing in your inbox.