How do we rebuild the Democratic Party?

[JDPriestly]

2. It sounds goofy, but it is a question of the heart and of the soul, not of numbers and policies.

If your heart and soul are in the right place, you will attract people.
You will attract voters, and you will be able to move others toward positive, constructive, inclusive programs. That's the only way to build a healthy society.

I recently read a statement from a Montessori school that said, and I paraphrase, that children's "behavioral problems" arise from feeling that they are not accepted and included in their social group.

More serious even than the financial toll that the recession took on American families (and families in other countries) was the sense of failure and loss that the recession caused. Even now, getting and keeping a job, the job that feeds your family and provides you security, is very difficult. Our working population, that is nearly all people of working age, is scared. Unemployment, financial loss are just a small mistake often a mistake at the corporate level or a corporate decision over which the working person has no control away.

And losing a job or having to take a pay cut for a working person places their entire family's life style, security, dreams, hopes, future -- their diet, the family car, the gas to go to work, medical care, everything on the line.

Yet in our capitalist society, the wealthy are oblivious to the terror and pain that the loss of a job, lack of a pay raise, living on minimum wage cause to the psyche, the families, and the societies that we all live in.

The role of the Democratic Party is to bring awareness of the contribution that labor (and that includes professional people, small business owners and all who work for a living, not just manual laborers) makes to our prosperity and our society and to defend labor from the greed of those who think that only capital matters.

Jesus spoke of the lilies of the field, how they toil not nor sow, yet are so well clad and cared for. But as my very Christian mother reminds me, the lilies of the field do not grow out of rocks. They do not thrive without at least a little water. And so with people, we all need to be nurtured. And the only way to provide that nurture is to nurture each other. That's what being a Democrat is about. It is about nurture. Republicans can have their survival of the fittest, their exclusive view about how only the best and brightest deserve a really good life, about how wealth is the result of having made "the right choices," whatever that means.

We Democrats value all lives. And we recognize that if you are pro-life in the sense that I am talking about, you have to be pro-environment, pro-fairness, pro encouraging your brothers and sisters who are, just like you, struggling to lead good lives.

Anyway, being a Democrat is not about a specific policy other than being for all working people and their interests rather than about the corporate bottom line. Being a Democrat is about building a good society that is loving and nurturing and supportive -- and doing it together. It is not a socialist view. It is a view that values what humans are and that we are all human.