Tell the Democratic Party of the United States to adopt a platform based on Economic Democracy

The US Democratic Party needs to be transformed. For decades, its strategy has been to appeal to the middle — to target swing voters, while taking the votes of more progressive Americans for granted. In light of the Democrats’ most recent election defeat, it is time to admit that this strategy is a hopeless failure. The Democratic Party must completely reinvent itself in order to win back the working class and middle-class voters who feel ignored and abandoned by it.
One Republican commentator described Donald Trump’s 2024 victory as “revenge of just the regular old working-class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to”. While Trump clearly has no intentions of genuinely helping the working-class, it is true that his election has a lot to do with anger that political and economic power have become heavily entrenched in the hands of a few elites, with most Americans having no voice in the decisions that affect their lives.
To win back the majority of voters, the Democratic Party must forge a new identity. It must project a real plan for empowering working-class and middle-class Americans. Toward that end, I ask that everyone who reads this article call on the Democratic National Committee to adopt a new platform for the Democratic Party based on the principle of Economic Democracy.
Economic Democracy is a system in which businesses and banking institutions are owned and managed by employees and/or customers. This can be achieved through cooperative businesses, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), worker representation on corporate boards, and cooperative banks and credit unions. Research shows that cooperative ownership and management is a highly effective and successful business model. Worker-owned businesses are productive, profitable, resilient, have high levels of employee satisfaction, and do much to help their communities and protect the environment. Tell the Democratic Party to make Economic Democracy a key principle of its national platform, and to commit to promoting it by providing funding, technical assistance, tax incentives, and lending policies to support the creation and growth of cooperatives, ESOPs, and democratic banking institutions — as well as by promoting worker, consumer, and community representation on corporate boards.