It’s been less than a week since Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat, and the obituaries for the Democratic Party are already being written. “The Democratic Party Deserved To Die,” Krystal Ball declared in The Huffington Post. “This is how a political party dies,” argued Paul Rosenberg at Salon. The sentiment is understandable. Having lost all three branches of government, Democrats are staring down the horror of a Donald Trump presidency and the myriad ways he can destroy President Barack Obama’s legacy. They are right to feel a certain amount of despair.

But this despair can be paralyzing, reinforcing a narrative of helplessness that says the country is on the brink of a complete breakdown. This despair also inspires pointless second-guessing about whether Democrats picked the wrong candidate. It doesn’t matter if Senator Bernie Sanders would have beaten Donald Trump. Laying blame on Clinton or the Democratic National Committee or FBI Director James Comey or the media or Facebook is an intellectual exercise that might make some feel better for a few hours, but it will not change the results of an election where the Democratic candidate, once again, lost despite handily winning the popular vote.

This is almost exactly the position the Republican Party faced eight years ago after Obama won the White House by motivating voters who had sat out previous elections—minus the popular vote discrepancy. In fact the GOP had it even worse with Democrats holding a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. There was a lot of soul-searching and angst among Republicans about the future of their party, but it took very little time for them to move from anxiety to grassroots action.

The left must now find inspiration from the right by starting their own Tea Party revolution.

Within months of the 2008 election, people dissatisfied with Republican politics as usual began to organize, and the Tea Party took hold. People took it upon themselves to demand that their leaders in Washington either resist Obama more forcefully or face primary challengers in their districts and states.