Democrats face two enormous challenges in light of their disastrous 2024 election showing. The first is to defend democracy as President-elect Donald Trump, the most authoritarian figure ever elected president, takes power with a much broader mandate than in his first term. The second is to restore the faith of working-class voters in a party that has utterly lost touch with them.
Normally, these two priorities are viewed as contradictory. After all, working people by necessity focus on kitchen table economic concerns.
But Democrats can take one important step that would simultaneously move them to the center culturally and affirm democratic norms: create a robust program of “liberal patriotic education” that would merge a love of country with a recognition that the U.S. still needs to do much more to widen opportunity to those left behind.
Such a project would appeal to working-class voters, 69 percent of whom say America is the greatest country in the world (compared with only 28 percent of progressive activists). And a program that educates young Americans about the genius of liberal democracy is critical to the long-term success of America’s system as several Donald Trump wannabes line up for 2028 and beyond.
To be sure, in the immediate term, the best checks against abusive behavior by Trump will be found elsewhere: the press, state governors and, on their best days, the federal courts and the U.S. Congress.
But ultimately, the founders knew that education was the key to safeguarding American liberty. Thomas Jefferson championed general education in order to “enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.” So too, at a time of rising dictatorships in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt recognized that education is “the real safeguard of democracy.”
Every generation must be taught anew, and right now, young people are not especially enamored of democracy. Whereas only 5 percent of those over 65 say they believe that “Democracy is no longer a viable system, and Americans should explore alternative forms of government,” an astonishing 31 percent of youth ages 18-29 agree.
A program of liberal patriotic education would devote more time, resources and accountability for students to learn their civic inheritance and shared American history. It would educate students more fully about what it is like to live in non-democratic societies, where there is no right to criticize the government. It would provide an honest and hopeful account of American history, which frankly acknowledges America’s sins but also the ways in which liberal democratic norms make redemption possible.
A liberal patriotic education would recognize diversity as a strength, affirm universal human values, and dismantle the worse elements of diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies and programs that neatly divide the world into oppressed and oppressors. It would teach what is distinctive and exceptional about America, and explain why people continue to flock here from all across the world.
It would forge social cohesion through racial and economic school integration programs that employ voluntary public school choice rather than compulsory busing. It would promote national and community service to instill in young people a sense of purpose and patriotism. And it would teach the art of civil discourse that is essential in a democracy.
Embracing this program will require Democrats to engage in some uncomfortable clashes with left-leaning advocates of the kind Joe Biden and Kamala Harris failed to engage in.
A good place to begin would be for Democrats to reject the New York Times’s grossly inaccurate 1619 Project which claimed that 1619 rather than 1776 represented America’s “true founding” because the importation of enslaved people provided “the seed of so much of what has made us unique.”
In fact, as the New York Times Book Review’s own analysis of the 1619 Project noted, the book could leave readers “with the impression that the heritage of slavery is uniquely American. It is not…From ancient Egypt to czarist Russia, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Aztecs, forms of slavery have blighted nearly every continent.”
Despite devastating critiques from liberal as well as conservative historians, the Biden-Harris administration actually endorsed the 1619 Project in 2021, until it was forced to back down under political pressure.
Who might lead the charge on the Democratic side for a mainstream patriotic education? A variety of up-and-coming Democratic governors such as Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan could get behind such a vision. Likewise, Maryland’s Gov. Wes Moore has championed a service year option for recent high school graduates to devote a year to paid public service.
Moore said that when he was in the Army, “We were all under a common bond, and it didn’t matter whether or not we went to college, or voted as Democrats or Republicans, we had a shared mission. We had a common purpose.” (Disclosure: one of my daughters works in the Moore administration.)
The patriotic education that Democrats champion could be very different and much more politically popular than that offered up by conservatives. It wouldn’t ban books or banish the discussion of slavery and segregation, positions that even conservative voters reject.
And it would champion public district and charter schools as the best vehicles for patriotic education, a position that is likely to resonate with the public. In 2024, voters in the deep red states of Kentucky and Nebraska soundly rejected private school voucher efforts.
Patriotic education is not a silver bullet. To come out of the political wilderness, Democrats will need to shift to the mainstream on a variety of cultural issues, from crime to illegal immigration. And they need to make clear through their policies that they honor the dignity of a hard day’s work.
But offering a liberal patriotic education is an essential part of the package because it fuses two issues working Americans care about passionately: their children and their country. Getting this issue right will help Democrats politically in the near term, and will, in the long haul, strengthen our democracy immeasurably.
Richard D. Kahlenberg is director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and author of “Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges.”
