These are anxious times for our country. We are assailed hourly by a belligerent president who treats America’s laws, courts and civil liberties with utter contempt and imagines he can rule a free people by royal decree.

Are Democrats fighting hard enough against President Trump’s malicious policies and rampant abuses of power? Progressive activists say no, and they’re even threatening to unseat Democrats they claim are afraid to mix it up.

This is asinine — a return to the politics of subtraction that has locked the party out of power, effectively disarming it in the struggle with a rogue president.

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There will be, and should be, public fights over changing party doctrine and governing priorities. Otherwise, voters won’t believe Democrats are really changing. Party renewal requires making some hard political choices.

They’ve done it before. In the early 1990s, the Democratic Leadership Council (which I helped start) arose to challenge what Bill Clinton called the “braindead politics of left and right” and offer an array of innovative “New Democrat” ideas for tackling stubborn national problems.  

Then, as now, fresh thinking and new voices are more likely to come from outside Washington. The party’s D.C. establishment consists of entrenched interest groups, ideologues, strategists and donors that have grown too comfortable with the status quo.  

That’s why Democrats are gathering in Denver this week to launch New Directions for Democrats, a series of regional conversations aimed at renewing the party’s ability to compete and win everywhere in America.

Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation about the future of the Democratic Party with four veteran strategists and reformers who spearheaded the New Democrat movement that helped elect Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992.

Will Marshall: Everything was mediated through the desires and demands of 100 worthy interest groups. What we said was: Look, we were not winning these elections for a reason. So the first thing is to let the public know you’ve heard their message. Then: What are the new ideas?

Marshall: Through four years of President Joe Biden, we spoke to white college graduates incessantly on almost every dimension: economic, cultural, foreign policy. We stopped talking to the 62 percent of the electorate that doesn’t have a college degree. I think this is the hardest cultural challenge for the party right now. We don’t know how to address their economic aspirations in a way that doesn’t sort of throw government benefits at them. We’re terrified if we do we’ll somehow be crossing the line, becoming racist or nativist or xenophobic. We are now in this class configuration that was mercilessly revealed by this election. We have lost the knack of hearing, listening, going to working-class people and speaking the language that they understand. So you see the party retracting geographically, demographically. We’re a shrunken party now.