I was raised in a family of Democrats. I have voted Democrat in almost every national election since I turned 18. I have never, however, been a Democratic Party loyalist. I am not registered as a Democrat and do not identify as one. What I am offering here are suggestions from a perspective that is outside the Party but is sympathetic to many of its stated aims. Such perspectives, whether mine or others’, are often, and sometimes desperately, needed after a major setback like Tuesday’s. They more readily acknowledge challenges that can be bitter pills to swallow. Here are the suggestions.

Regarding the Outcome:

Recognize that Donald Trump did not win the election because of the many things he said that aren’t true, but because of the few things he said that are true. The idea that the votes lost to Trump on the basis of racism, sexism, xenophobia and conspiracy theories were numerous enough to decide the election is inconsistent with years of public opinion polling, Barack Obama’s success in the last election, and his current popularity rating. The argument that the deciding votes were lost to third party candidates is weak and pointless to speculate on (if you want to speculate about third party voters, it’s more realistic that Bernie Sanders would have taken many of their votes if he’d been the nominee, in addition to almost all of the votes taken by Clinton). The truth is that the deciding votes were lost to Donald Trump’s exploitation of real public grievances and to the voter abstention (over 40% of eligible voters) that reflected widely-held public feeling that Hillary Clinton’s promises to address those grievances were not credible. That Trump was perceived as outside a political establishment trusted by almost no one and personified in Clinton was absolutely integral to his victory.

Going forward:

If you want the Party to be viable next time, the following things matter. If analysts and pollsters tell you otherwise, reflect on how badly they just failed everyone. I’ve divided these suggestions into two types, fundamental and tactical.

Fundamental.

Admit that you are not as progressive or populist as you say you are, and change your actions (not just your platform) to become so. No one except center or elite liberals really believes the Democratic Party meaningfully prioritizes the interests of poor and middle-class working people. This is because the Party’s actions demonstrate that it works overwhelmingly on behalf of the richest corporations and individuals, while taking liberal positions on social issues and directing a negligible amount of aid to the poor. The fact that your policies are less unjust than those of the Republican Party, which also serves the rich but takes conservative positions on social issues and refuses aid to the poor, does not make them just. The following deeply unpopular, regressive positions are bipartisan consensus:

needless war-making

corporate tax evasion

individual tax evasion (provided the evader is very wealthy)

the Patriot Act and concomitant violations of civil liberties

expanded unrestrainable power of the Executive branch

permitted extortion of the population by for-profit health services industries (if the word “extortion” seems extreme, consider the current rampant price-gouging on cheap medicines that people will literally die without).

If you are a Democrat and these policy positions are inconsistent with your values, tell the Democratic leadership, do whatever you can to rectify them, or leave the party and find one that actually reflects what you believe. Pretending the Democratic Party stands for principles it refuses to act upon helps no one.

Admit the mistakes everyone saw you make over the last decade. These are the major ones:

the decision to immunize from accountability the architects of the financial crisis, whose negligent and almost certainly criminal actions led directly to the ruination of millions of people

failure to pursue meaningful Wall St. reform despite widespread, totally justified fear of another crisis

failure to pursue universal health care, effectively ignoring the majority of the population

ongoing support for non-defensive overseas military intervention despite years of majority public opposition, including from military personnel.

Denying or rationalizing these decisions fools no one and hurts you. Everybody knows the financial giants were immunized because they are obscenely rich. Everybody knows universal health care is resisted because both parties prioritize the preferences of for-profit health services industries, especially pharmaceutical and insurance companies, over the needs of the population. Everybody knows wars are waged because they are highly profitable, materially and politically, and require no sacrifice on the part of the politicians who send other people’s children to fight, kill and die in them.

Recognize that you cannot serve both the financial elite and the rest of the population. The attempt to reconcile these disparate objectives has not been successful because it is impossible. The interests of the financial elite and the rest of the country are by and large opposed to each other, and policy that works in the interest of one necessarily works against the interest of the other. There is an entire enterprise of Chicago school, trickle-down, Reaganite economists who argue the opposite, but their arguments can and should be refuted. It takes a small investment of time and energy to read economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and Amartya Sen, who are non-radical, well-respected and world-renowned experts in what makes and keeps people poorer than they should be, and incorporate their analyses into an argument against Reaganomics and in favor of policies that serve the working majority. Most voters trust what they see over what experts say anyway, and what they see is the financial elite prosper while millions of the poor and middle-class suffer, despite working or wanting to work but being unable to.

Recognize that people chose to ease economic suffering over social justice, and always will. It has been well-documented that financial hardship and the inability to find meaningful work cause deep psychological and emotional, as well as physical, suffering. People suffering in this way are not in a position to care whether gay people are allowed to marry, women have access to safe abortions, Muslims are unfairly targeted, or unarmed black men are shot in far-away cities, regardless of the very real importance of those issues. Additionally, financial instability and deprivation often inspire or exacerbate the worst human impulses toward bigotry, and are interwoven with feelings of resentment toward groups perceived — accurately or not — to be enjoying unfair advantages.

Recognize that corporate-owned media outlets will not make it easy for you to adopt a truly progressive platform. This is an enormous obstacle: you cannot continue to serve the financial elite and survive, but the financial elite own the media, and you can’t survive without the media. I don’t know. Take it seriously, gather your energy and intelligence, and figure something out.​

Tactical.

If you embrace the suggestions above, here are some ways to communicate to voters that you actually serve their interests.

Re-frame New Deal regulatory policies from being “pro-big government” to being “pro-competition.” The essence of New Deal regulation was not to cripple the market, but to ensure the proper functioning of the market by preventing monopoly power, which destroys competition and as such is fundamentally anti-market.

Expose the lie that the richest corporations believe in a free market system. Many of them receive government subsidies, public research and development funding from the military, and huge tax advantages. They lobby for tariff regulations to protect them from foreign competition. They lobby for labor regulations restricting workers’ rights to unionize. They lobby for excessive patent and intellectual property regulations, regardless of whether these hinder innovation, while simultaneously insisting that their version of the market is what drives innovation. The truth is that they have no interest in a deregulated market, but rather in a market heavily regulated in their favor.

Expose the lie that cutting taxes on the rich creates jobs and grows the economy. It doesn’t. The rich don’t invest the money they are allowed to keep. They save it, bet it on Wall St., or invest it overseas. If the cuts are massive enough it can spur short-term growth, but that growth is not sustainable and it explodes the deficit.

Explain why tax cuts for the middle-class and poor grow the economy, then work toward them. The middle-class and poor don’t have savings or capital earnings to live on, so they spend their money. People spending money is what spurs investment and grows the economy. By growing the economy you eventually broaden the tax base, which increases tax revenue to pay for social programs, education, etc. The mechanisms are more nuanced, of course, but nuance is often not necessary or desirable in campaign talking points (refer to Tuesday’s outcome). The only reason sections of the public won’t accept this idea or the one above, even in the face of how much they stand to benefit from it, is that they have been inundated for decades by the right-wing chorus that it isn’t true. They are almost certainly open to being convinced otherwise. The readiness of people to believe things they would like to be true isn’t always a bad thing, and can work here in your favor.

Expose the lie that the rich earned their money all on their own and therefore shouldn’t pay higher tax rates. Most of the rich were born rich or with opportunities that are causally linked to their success and unavailable to most Americans. On top of that, they benefit, as we all do, from publicly funded infrastructure, like schools, roads, health regulations, the legal system, and law enforcement. Without public infrastructure, their employees and the employees of the companies whose stock they own or trade — the people doing the physical and administrative work that generates their wealth — would be too uneducated, stranded, sick or dead to perform their jobs. That doesn’t mean the rich don’t have the right to earn more than anyone else, but they owe a debt to the society that supports the conditions for their massive personal fortunes. Moreover, they do not have the right to make the society worse, and high levels of wealth inequality do exactly that. Some inequality is good, but high inequality is damaging and not justifiable. Most people already agree with this. It is only hard to say if you are beholden to the rich.

Propose meaningful tax hikes on the rich and explain them clearly. Although it was largely her speaking style and ties to Wall St. that made Hillary Clinton’s promise to substantially raise taxes on the rich unconvincing to many people, it’s worth considering that in reality her proposal was not substantial. Her proposed tax increase of $100 billion per year would have amounted to an increase of around 0.5% percent of GDP, and after negotiations with Republicans would likely have ended up closer to an increase of .25% of GDP, which is not sufficient to fulfill the plan’s stated goal of paying for meaningful infrastructure reform. It’s true that few voters were aware of that, but plans like this — mild proposals passed off as bold ones — are difficult to sell convincingly because they limit how specifically you can talk about them without revealing that they are insufficient for dealing with the problems they promise to solve. It’s better to propose a plan that is actually transformative. You’ll alienate the rich minority, but gain the voting majority.

Re-frame taxation and social programs as being rooted in self-interest, not altruism. There is plenty of evidence from American history showing that social programs and greater equality of opportunity lead to more prosperity and a better life for people across all social strata, not just the poor.

Start rebuilding the labor movement. The decimation of private-sector labor unions is a major reason why so many workers cannot earn enough to live comfortably, and, consequently, distrust and resent national leaders. Widespread ideological resistance to unions is the result of a decades-long campaign to malign them by the richest businesses and their political representatives, and is reversible. Again, you’ll alienate the rich, so this requires actually being committed to helping working people.

Work toward replacing your corporate donor base with a larger base of middle-class donors. Ask Bernie Sanders how he did it.

Direct anger away from imaginary right-wing scapegoats and toward the actual perpetrators of injustice. Neoliberal economic policy, not immigrants, is the primary reason there are so few jobs for working class whites. American violence in the Muslim world, not the fantasy that Islam is inherently violent, is the primary cause for growing radical Islamic terrorism against the United States. Failure to educate and provide opportunities for the working class, not their inherent inferiority or the advent of high technology, are the primary reasons they cannot participate in the modern economy. Democrats are often ineffective at invalidating Republican scapegoats because they themselves are unable to acknowledge the actual causes of the injustices being discussed. You cannot acknowledge the failure of policies — noeliberal economic policy, insufficient social and infrastructure spending, and American military violence in the Middle East — that you are devoted to protecting.

Find groups who are actually pernicious, talk about them a lot, and use numbers to quantify the harm they do. Corporate tax evaders have an estimated $2.4 trillion in taxable profits in offshore tax havens. They owe those taxes to you, me, and all Americans. Saying that over and over (much more than it’s said now) and credibly vowing to rectify it will probably get you somewhere.

Put a few white collar felons in jail. Not fines. Jail.

Stop mocking socialists. The number of young people interested in socialism and open to its principles informing how we organize our economy is growing. Marx’s critique of capitalism, which far exceeds in scope, rigor and influence almost any subsequent critique, especially those offered by contemporary American politicians and media pundits, argues that as an economic system, capitalism is inherently unstable, subject to recurring booms, busts and crashes, and will inevitably lead to greater and greater wealth and income inequality with those at the bottom increasingly exploited. To be in the United States today and argue that these observations are not accurate requires near-total blindness or Olympic-level selective reasoning. When you roll your eyes at someone for suggesting that an alternative system is worth considering, you look foolish or cynical.

In sum, the gist of these suggestions is simple: stop prioritizing the wants of the very rich and start prioritizing the needs of the population. When you prioritize the rich, everyone sees it. When you prioritize the population, in meaningful action rather than in rhetoric, everyone will see that too.

I personally don’t care if the Democratic Party survives or not. I have no interest in it as an institution. I support it insofar as it is less flawed than the Republican Party, but I will support it less and less as the objectives of the two parties converge toward the abandonment of the vast majority of the population. The election outcome indicates that others probably feel the same way. I don’t know if the Party is taking advice, but I would hope so. The fact that the election culminated in an M. Night Shyamalan twist, wherein the party that appeared to have self-destructed took the White House and both houses of Congress, while the other, secure enough in its wisdom to undermine the electorate by tampering with its own primary, collapsed under its hubris, might give the latter party pause.