Under Donald Trump’s direction, the army approved on Tuesday a bid from Energy Transfer Partners to move ahead with construction of the 1,170-mile Dakota Access pipeline. Last year, that pipeline’s route became the site of one of the country’s largest-ever anti-extraction demonstrations, a thousands-strong, indigenous-led encampment on Standing Rock Sioux land that galvanized national support.

Polling from October suggests that a majority of Americans believe the pipeline project was not properly reviewed. Among Democrats, a full 70% believe more study is needed – a study unlikely to come now that the army has called off its earlier demand for a thorough environmental impact study.

Democratic leaders, meanwhile, remain largely silent. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton never came out against the project during her candidacy, and collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry in last year’s campaign cycle.

Outside of a handful of progressive leaders like Keith Ellison and Bernie Sanders, the rest have stayed mum. Now, the corporate-friendly wing of the Democratic party – its ruling force since her husband’s administration – is in crisis. For elected Democrats, then, coming out firmly against the Dakota Access pipeline isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s the strategic one, too.

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That might look something like what happened on Tuesday, when Senate Democrats closed ranks against Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos. Though she was eventually appointed thanks to Vice-President Mike Pence’s tie-break, the vote showed the kind of oppositional unity that should be the party’s new status quo.

And the party’s base is going to hold them to it. Organizers with groups like Indivisible and the Working Families party are showing up to the home offices of Democratic and Republican representatives alike, demanding they reject Trump’s agenda. In Brooklyn, hundreds of disgruntled constituents brought plastic spines to Schumer’s posh Park Slope home with a simple message: grow one.

Democrats around the country are running to catch up with their base, who are demanding they vote against cabinet nominees and attend airport rallies against Trump’s draconian travel ban. That’s because it’s been ordinary people – not party heads – leading the resistance against Trump in 2017.

Like the rest of the country, that rebellious base also happens to be more progressive than ever. Majorities of Americans believe the rich pay too little in taxes, want to tackle inequality and take issue with how black people are treated by police. More than half of young voters no longer support capitalism. Worth remembering, too, is that over 12 million Americans recently voted for an avowed socialist.

With populist energy rising on the left and the right, Democrats will remain the party of Davos at their own risk. Yet the message seems lost on leadership.

Pelosi balked recently at NYU student Trevor Hill’s suggestion that the party may need to move to the left on economic issues. Responding to Hill’s question, she launched off into an explanation of so-called stakeholder and shareholder capitalism, a framework lifted from the head of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. In 1972, that company changed its name to Exxon.

The fossil fuel industry has never been a stranger bedfellow for Pelosi’s party, or a better one to excise. Perhaps no industry is more aligned with Republicans, and oil executives seem to have found a particularly generous friend in Trump. Aside from the pipelines and slew of anti-regulatory orders he has already pushed through, Trump also appointed a career oil man – longtime ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson – as secretary of state.

“For the oil industry,” one energy analyst wrote in an industry trade publication, “Tillerson’s appointment went beyond their wildest dreams. With this single act, Trump has established that his administration may be one of the most oil industry friendly in history.”

If they want to keep their seats come primary season, Democrats need to declare war not just on Trump’s agenda, but on the industries in his corner. Right now, the most public face of that fight is the one against the Dakota Access pipeline.

Democrats can get on board by supporting efforts to divest state and municipal funds from the banks backing Energy Transfer Partners. They might also show up to any number of the actions being called around the country by the groups that have led the resistance at Standing Rock, including the Native Nations March in Washington DC on 10 March.

The future of the Democratic party has no room for fossil fuel executives. It will be built by pipeline fighters, by people like Trevor Hill, those taking to the streets for the Women’s March and the ones who pushed the Seattle city council to pull $3bn this week out of one of the Dakota Access pipeline’s main financial backers.

If it’s going to survive, the Democratic party needs to be a party by and for water protecters – not the people they’re going up against.

