Program for a Democratic Renaissance

On order to take our country back, we need to effectively communicate in positive terms what we are FOR, and focus on the big things that we all agree on, rather than pick nits about sectarian fringe issues.

This is What Democrats Want for Our Country

In order to take our country back from the Trumpists, we need to explain in simple language why Democrats wil make our country better than the disaster that is the current Republican government. We need to do this in a way that cannot easily be caricatured. To make it simple, means we have to let go of some of the minor goals that are harder to explain, and which not all of us agree on. We also have to not fall into the trap of being against certain things because republicans are for them.

Here are some things that I think we should have in our program for what we will do if we manage to take back our government:

Things We need to Fix

We need to curb the deficit and start reducing the national debt

Republicans have made a lot of noise about how huge deficits are unsustainable, and leaving the debt to our children is really stealing from our future. We should agree tht they are right about that.

The disagreement is about what causes the problem, and how it should be addressed.

This is an area, where Democratic governments have a good track record. For decades, Republican governments have run large deficits and massively increased the debt, while Democratic governments have reduced the deficits, even if they rarely have gotten all the way to a fiscal surplus that reduced the debt.

There are two reasons to have deficits:

• Government spending to keep the economy moving and create employment is a recession - such as we did in the COVID crisis, and similar depression periods going back to FDR's New Deal. As Democrats, we are all for that.
• Reducing taxes (especially on rich and powerful people) while maintaining high levels of spending. This is what Republicans have been doing, and we are against that.

We need to have a consistent and morally defensible foreign policy

Our foreign policy used to be based on a few principles, and both of the major parties agreed on them. Even when the goverment swung between the major parties, these principles remained constant. There was a saying that "Politics stops at the water's edge". This meant that we could enter into agreements with other countries, and the parties to the agreement would be able to trust the both sides would live up to the agreement. Any changes to such agreements would be negotiated between the parties. From 1950 to about 2015, these were some of the steady pillars of our foreign policy:

• Democracy is good - dictators are bad.
  Communist countries such as the USSR (which we understood to be a Russian empire), China and Cuba were understood to be dictatorships gussied up with some populist propaganda, and thus they were to be opposed.
  We might even support some smaller dictators if they would help us fight the communists in their region.
• Our big companies should be helped to do business abroad.
  So we would support United Fruit Company and Big Oil, even when they did ugly things, such as overthrow a democratically elected leader who would fight the unfair trade practices by which these companies exploited their countries.
• We would try to defuse conflicts that looked prone to spark violent upheavals. This might take the form of alleviating poverty in African, Asian or South American nations.
• We would use "soft power" to win friends in other countries.

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