Open up the Republican Party Web site and you’ll quickly see an article called “Principles for American Renewal” with 11 broad statements of principle such as this one under immigration: “We need an immigration system that secures our borders, upholds the law, and boosts our economy.”

Scroll down the Democrats’ home page and you’ll find a dull party platform with 93 bullet points and a list of links entitled “People.” Each link leads to a subgroup: Women. Hispanics. LGBT people. “Ethnic Americans.” There are 17 different groups, and a different message tailored for each.

Republicans offer a vision to unite America. Democrats offer to break it down into pieces.

The liberal focus on using coalition politics to get to 50.1 percent in presidential elections has led to historic losses at the state and local levels, with Republicans now standing in total control in 26 states (as against six for the Democrats) and having shifted the House and Senate right. In “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics,” author Mark Lilla suggests a unifying theme that picks up on Bernie Sanders’ central insight — that the big political question today is what you earn (not enough) rather than who you are (black, gay, female, Muslim, Latino or, ideally, all five).

The Democrats are all about divide-and-conquer tactics when what they need is a vision of our shared destiny and the things we all hold in common as Americans. “Liberals have become America’s ideological third party, lagging behind self-declared independents and conservatives,” writes Lilla, a Columbia humanities professor and committed liberal who believes the single most important issue is on-demand access to abortion for women.

“Donald Trump the man is, frankly, not the greatest of our worries,” Lilla continues. “And if we don’t look beyond him there is very little hope for us.” The Democrats can’t do much for sexual and ethnic minorities, the book states, unless they win elections, all the way down to the ones for judges and district attorneys that could make all the difference when it comes to, say, justice for blacks involved in disputes with police.

Yet the Democratic Party creates revulsion among voters in huge swathes of the country. If Republicans have persuaded voters they are the party of Joe Sixpack, the author writes, the face of the Democrats is Jessica Yogamat. The liberal way of speaking to the country “has been misguided and counterproductive,” says Lilla. Their naked contempt for Trump voters, people of faith, pro-life Americans and rural residents has cost them dearly. Today in every presidential election the party writes off nearly half of the country, sometimes even calling them “enemies,” and assumes that nearly everyone else will vote Democrat, while ignoring how much damage the White House candidates are doing to fellow party members fighting down-ballot races.

Their naked contempt for Trump voters, people of faith, pro-life Americans and rural residents has cost them dearly.

The Democrats derided Ronald Reagan as a brainless cowboy, but he genuinely attracted voters with a hopeful message of individualism. Democrats should have countered with “a vision of what we share as Americans and what we might accomplish together.” Instead, “the focus of attention was less on the relation between our identification with the United States as democratic citizens and our identification with different social groups within it.”

The new motto was: The personal is political. Liberal activists, who used to come from farms and the working class, instead came from colleges and professions such as law, journalism and education. Average Americans find these groups condescending if not outright antagonistic toward them. They find campus identity politics demented, and then that campus mind-set becomes increasingly influential in the Democratic party.

What are Lilla’s proposed solutions? Prosaic ones. He suggests Democrats come in from their street marches and return to boring old organizational retail politics. This means patient, painstaking work within institutions, not mass demonstrations (much less rioting). Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts were noble ones, but what cemented his ideas was the deal-making and arm-twisting of Lyndon Johnson in the Senate. Today’s Washington Democrats no longer even try to work with Republicans to get things done, as Johnson did. Instead, Lilla writes, liberals treat “every issue as one of inviolable right, leaving no room for negotiations, and inevitably cast opponents as immoral monsters.”

The party, says Lilla, must also recognize that democratic persuasion — winning over centrist voters — is more important than simply ranting about your obsessions. “Elections are not prayer meetings,” he says, “and no one is interested in your personal testimony.” (Take that, America Ferrera and Sandra Fluke.) American citizenship must be placed ahead of any subgroup’s interests. Democrats should also reemphasize civic education, the nuts and bolts of how lasting change is made, instead of simply parading one’s awakening to the plight of minorities or transgenders.

If Democrats really want to effect lasting change, they’ll realize the word that matters most is not “woke” but “work.”

Kyle Smith is Critic-at-large at National Review