For its own survival and that of our republic—and the success of our 2028 candidate for president—the Democratic Party must now reject the neoliberals within its own ranks and makes a forceful argument for returning to the systems of Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society that protected and enriched working class people in the previous cycles.

If Democrats again embrace neoliberals like Rahm Emmanuel (who’s pretty much openly campaigning for the 2028 presidential election), they’ll fail at this critical work and messaging: that could well doom our American experiment in liberal democracy.