I’m tired of being angry. Democrats blast Americans who “elected crazy Donald Trump,” and Republicans blast liberals who “ruined the economy under Joe Biden.”

I’m a Democrat because my top issue is human rights – the freedom for everyone to be who they are and live without fear, which includes some groups I don’t particularly care for. But our party lost the last election, and it’s time to take a lesson from AA: The first step in healing is to admit you have a problem.

I want to fix the Democratic party so it can win future elections and save America from the radical rich. News stories say “The Democrats are still trying to figure out what happened in the last election,” but deep down we know. It might take a year or so of therapy to wrap our head around it. But we know.

Today, a two-parent household can’t afford a home. In the 1970s, they could because both parents worked. In the 1950s, they could even if only one spouse held a job. If Democrats – theoretically a defender of the working class – are doing something wrong, they’ve been doing it wrong for a while.

So … I’m going to criticize my own party and hope someone listens. Constantly regurgitating hate for Trump and the Republican party didn’t win the last election, and it won’t win future elections. We’re fools if we bank a future on winning yet another future election with: “Surely the populace has learned its lesson and will never grant Trump power again.” (And yes, he’s term limited – but is he?)

The problem with most voters

We’re polarized, left vs. right, because we pick our editors. That’s true for both Democrats and Republicans (Ability to pick-an-editor polarizes Americans). We’ve always been somewhat polarized, but now we access our personal echo chambers and become more so.

During Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, I asked a Republican friend how he could vote for someone who spewed so much hate. He made an “erasing the blackboard” gesture and said, “Don’t pay attention to his Tweets (before X), just look at what he’ll do.” He brushed Trump’s many, many sins away as “just Trump being Trump.”

It was a Republican rationalizing a vote for his candidate. If nothing else, Trump does the crazy stuff he says on social media.

But turn the mirror around. Do Democrats do the same thing? Did Biden do anything that we rationalized away, perhaps holding on to some obscure explanation because we wanted it to make sense? Did we spin any news that, deep down, we knew was a loser’s issue?

Note: This is politics, not people, and only tangentially about issues. Biden’s focus on strengthening the middle class runs in lockstep with what I think government needs to do. However, you can’t focus on the middle class (or anything else) if you don’t win elections.

Instead of wasting energy hating the voters who put Trump back into office, identify things that made you wince – confusing things that you researched to try to understand or simply ignored.

Personal examples:

Joe Biden’s debate performance. Joe Biden had a terrible debate. Maybe he had a cold, but surely that’s not his first illness. Surely he showed the same hesitation in meetings at some point. Surely his close staff saw a red flag or two before debate night. I even wonder now if his staff didn’t push for an early debate knowing it was better to lose before the convention – a way to convince Biden himself that he would serve the country best by stepping down.

In any case, making excuses for his debate performance is rationalization, not reality. And it appears that no higher-ups in the Democratic party have the power or ability to speak truth to power.

Biden’s push to forgive college loans. Graduates deserve relief. College costs too much, and this bunch of traditional first-time homebuyers can’t make ends meet. As a Democrat, I agree, but as a top issue the president kept pushing and pushing even after court losses?

Consider the take-away political message to blue-collar workers: The head Democrat is bending over backwards to help educated families – but what about working class families? “Joe Biden forgot about us,” they think.

Of course it didn’t play well. “Democrats have lost their hold on the working class and even some blacks and Hispanics,” news pundits have been saying ever since Obama’s term in office ended. At face value, Biden looked as if he was bound and determined to prove them right.

The immigration crisis. A huge number of Americans care about immigration, even if they don’t believe Trump’s “criminals and drug dealers” lies. Most immigrants are hard-working families that want better lives. However, “crowds walking toward the border” made news for years, and, based on appearances, the Biden Administration ignored it.

The immigration issue was bound to follow Joe Biden into the 2024, regardless of the Republican candidate because it worked so well in 2020. He had four years to do something, but a bipartisan bill appeared only at the last minute, so close to the election that candidate Trump asked fellow Republicans to kill it. A small percentage of voters saw that as a political move; a larger percentage don’t even know it happened and saw only a president who did nothing about immigration until the clock was running out.

Running for office with an “I grew up in a working-class family” byline doesn’t cut it in the age of social media. Trump’s “I’m talking as if I’m one of you” worked. Some Democrat’s “I’m talking like I’m smarter than you” didn’t.

What the majority of Americans want

In my Pennsylvania hometown, the four major factories of my youth are gone. Those all paid union workers middle-class wages and almost everyone owned at least a small home. Now distribution warehouses, including Amazon, provide a lot of those working-class jobs, but pay something as close to minimum wage as they can. Many U.S. small towns that lost manufacturing jobs don’t even have that.

Biden was upset that his people didn’t do enough to tell Americans about the great economy, but his people wouldn’t have to do that if the economy was actually good for working-class Americans. A majority of Americans don’t care if the GDP is strong or that stocks hit a record high. A “good economy” to them is freedom, a job, homeownership, a bit of extra spending money, and family nearby.

In electing Trump, a convicted felon, many voters thought they had nothing to lose. I get that, and I now understand the part my Democratic party played in making it happen.

We need to look in the mirror and save our party because we have a big job ahead: We need to stop the radical rich from pushing middle-class families away from the American dream.

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