The Democratic Party’s decision to double down on checks and balances as the best response to the Trump administration is only the latest reflection of its paucity of political vision. Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris decried Trump as a dire threat to democracy last year—Harris going so far as to call him a fascist at a town hall in October—yet the Harris campaign did not offer a bold, transformative agenda equal to the reality of the moment.

For just one measure of this failure, look no further than the fact that nearly half of American adults lack adequate health insurance, yet the Democratic presidential candidate said virtually nothing of substance about health care during her campaign. Instead of presenting a program bold enough to compete with Trump’s hateful politics of fear, Biden and Harris told voters that democracy was on the ballot.

Lisa Miller’s devastating argument explains why this milquetoast proceduralism—masked as a campaign slogan and now governing strategy—was always doomed to fail. She recognizes Americans’ disillusionment, rightly noting that they aren’t interested in business as usual. She shows why courts can’t substitute for politics, documenting how our constitutional system rewards the wealthy few at the expense of the many. And she rightly contends we do not have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to better political strategy. We have plenty of successful models. What’s standing in the way is the modern Democratic Party itself.

Miller is less clear about the sources of this impasse, but here too the answer is not a mystery. The key problem is that the party has become utterly beholden to the professional class, not just in its electoral base but in its entire governing philosophy. Reviving the mass democratic politics that Miller rightly calls for will require breaking the iron grip that professional-class liberals—especially political consultants and strategists—maintain over the party’s rhetoric, actions, and outlook.

This situation has a long history. From staffers and consultants to politicians themselves, people with professional training, especially in law and social science, began to dominate the party’s ranks beginning in the 1960s. This background has suffused its whole sensibility. Going back at least to the Watergate Babies and extending through the Clinton, Obama, and Biden years, fealty to legal norms and procedural reforms has driven the party’s pursuit of technocratic, small-bore solutions to crises in the economy and democracy itself. This is a sharp contrast from the version of bold New Deal politics that Miller evokes.

This approach hasn’t stopped Democrats from winning elections and capturing the presidency over the past fifty years. But, especially recently, they have done so primarily by stressing how bad Republicans are, not by offering and delivering an ambitious agenda of their own. When they do wield power, they are always wary of going too far or looking too radical—too much, say, like Bernie Sanders. From Cass Sunstein’s paeans to cost-benefit analysis and “nudging” to Obama’s tepid pragmatism, the vague promise of hope and change is always subordinated to incrementalist faith in the system and the supposed virtues of bipartisan compromise. However different it seemed to some, Biden’s late-stage bid to break with the neoliberal economic policies of his predecessors was too little, too late, ultimately succumbing to the same constrained politics. The pattern is stark: while Democrats have stubbornly hewed to professional-class respectability, the GOP has grown more and more extreme—courting ever more voters who used to vote blue while doing so.

It’s not just the party’s vision that has narrowed as a result; its electoral coalition has too. The liberal and left factions in the party have grown further apart, and it has come to rely ever more on affluent suburbs and dense urban centers—losing a broad base of support throughout the country.

Despite Biden and Harris’s campaign messaging in 2024, professional-class liberals have shown a longstanding anxiety about populism and mass democracy. Writing off huge segments of society, they have adopted ever more complex strategies for “sculpting the electorate,” as historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann puts it. The rise of a new class of data-oriented campaign staffers and strategists in the 1990s played a critical role in shifting Democrats’ electoral outreach away from the multiracial working class as a whole to hyper-targeted groups of swing voters. The effect has been to give up on trying to mobilize new constituencies, particularly from underrepresented groups—exactly what New Democrat strategists William Galston and Elaine Kamarck called for in the early years of the Democratic Leadership Council.

All the while, tactics like polling, focus-grouping, and direct-mail and email outreach have focused on identifying and connecting with voters as individuals. This approach might have short-term political benefits, but it is directly at odds with building the organized collectives required for mass mobilization. Moving away from it is essential to achieving the kind of fundamental change and mobilization that Miller calls for.

It’s also essential for any hope of structural reform, since the only road to constitutional change runs through states that are not Democratic bastions. Yet over the last thirty years, professional-class politicians and operatives have pushed the Democratic Party to abandon much of the country, concentrating money and messaging on a few swing states in presidential and congressional races. During his tenure as chair of the Democratic National Committee between 2005 and 2009, Howard Dean tried to stem this tide, proposing that the party adopt a fifty-state strategy. Rahm Emanuel, Chuck Schumer, and their allies sharply dismissed the idea, which strategist Paul Begala famously derided as “hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.” The critics won: since then, the party’s outreach to “red” regions has only eroded further. But it’s precisely this small-bore, elitist attitude that has to go.

There are signs that party leaders might finally be learning this lesson as they come to terms with their colossal loss in November. As I write, the Democratic National Committee has announced plans to boost funding to every state across the country. That is a step in the right direction, but it is just the beginning of the much larger populist correction the party needs to make in order to break the professional-class stranglehold.

That means articulating and following through on a transformative vision, not serving up another tepid defense of the system. It means creating infrastructure and launching mobilization campaigns in places like Utah and Mississippi, not just Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It means building a more expansive and durable coalition rather than trying to engineer razor-thin victories with microtargeted appeals during election season. And it means connecting with ordinary people and changing policy at the state and local levels, not just gaming a narrative every four years to win the presidency.