But there were down notes too. Elizabeth Warren’s keynote speech reminded the crowd that 16 Democrats, including the 2016 vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine, were crossing the aisle to vote with Republicans on a bill that would deregulate banks. “When I saw a handful of my Democratic colleagues vote for it, it felt like a stab in the heart, not for me, for all the people who bailed out the banks,” Warren said from the stage. “It’s worse when some of our teammates don’t even show up for the fight.” Organizer Ady Barkan of the Center for Popular Democracy, honored at the summit for his work fighting for health care, acidly noted, “We have a lot of house cleaning to do.”

Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee and former CPC co-chair, told me that Warren was right to call those Democrats out. “Here’s why we don’t have a message. Because the message turns out to be relationship, program, and follow-through. We’ve got the second one. We don’t have the first one or the third one,” he said. Too many Democrats, he noted, are quick to drop their principles when a PAC check comes waving their way. “It’s not that people don’t know what we say we stand for, they don’t know what we stand for.”

To help them puzzle through some of these challenges, the CPC had invited for the first time a delegation from European left parties: U.K. Labour’s Diane Abbott (who drew cheers from the crowd when she introduced herself in her keynote as being from “one of the oldest socialist parties in Europe”), as well as Sevim Dagdelen of Germany’s Die Linke (Left Party), Eduardo Maura of Spain’s Podemos, and Yiannis Bournous of Greece’s governing Syriza party. Abbott advised that Democrats would do well to focus not on Trump the personality and his phony populism, but on the interests he represents—which became crystal clear after the corporate tax cut bill, which also hobbled the country’s health care system. That, she said, would allow the opposition to build its identity on not being beholden to those interests (which would, presumably, entail not voting to gut Dodd-Frank).

But being not the other guy is not enough. Anat Shenker-Osorio, communications researcher and adviser with ASO Communications, told me, “People feel incredibly and rightfully disillusioned and cynical about the political process at all. When we run as ‘not Trump,’ when we run as ‘not that other guy’ but nothing positive, then what we are saying to them is that their cynicism is well placed. We’re not actually offering to do something, we’re not offering to create something, we’re not offering a beautiful tomorrow, we’re offering them a whole bunch of problems and the best that we can do is some amelioration of those harms.”