The B-word
Newsletter #70 / December, 16 2024
Branding as a way to fix our problems is a dangerous idea. Focusing on branding is fine if you want to go back to where we were in 2020. Branding alone is fine is you’re content with where we’ve been for decades, trading power back and forth as the public becomes more and more cynical. But if we want to actually fix things, if we want to go forward to a place where MAGA doesn’t exist, then focusing on “branding” is truly dangerous. It confuses things, because our real problem is identity.
Identity is what an organization actually is. You can’t create it [or recreate it], identity just is. And people know. If your identity is strong, people recognize it. If it’s strong enough, then that identity becomes a brand all by itself. If your identity is fractured or tired, people recognize that too. They move away from it, and all the branding in the world won’t fix it.
Trump isn’t back in the White House because of a hat, he’s there because he projected an underlying emotional identity, one that has sucked in a lot of people. And we haven’t been losing people because of our brand, we’ve been losing people because of the terrible state of our identity.
Democrats 101 isn’t a campaign organization. We’re not even a political organization. Our sole purpose is to resurrect our universal Democratic identity, to take back our very real, very powerful heritage. Our common emotional threads of identity go straight back through Obamacare and the Civil Rights Movement and the New Deal, right on back through the vote for women and Abraham Lincoln and the fight against slavery, all the way back to the Declaration of Independence itself. Dems 101 exists for one reason: to pull these threads together and make people believe again.
But first we need to understand what identity really is. Our core Democratic identity isn’t about focusing on labor, or farmers, or any particular group, it’s about the underlying values and vision that causes those groups to support us in the first place. Core identity is the exact opposite of focusing on a particular group and their needs. Core identity is about uniting behind the vision of a just society, once and for all, for all of us. Core identity is about inspiring. It’s about creating the universal, emotional power that great branding is built upon. Going on to build that great brand, then using it to engage various groups at election time, that is campaigning ... and that is the domain of the Democratic Party. Identity, resurrecting our powerful heritage, that belongs to all of us.
Be clear: our identity, our power as Democrats, rests with our beliefs. As Democrats, we very much are what we believe, and those core beliefs … the ones that unite us across every issue we face … are the ones first outlined in the Declaration of Independence. We’ve recited those words endlessly, most Americans have, but no one has ever stopped to put them down in modern English. No one has ever said: “This is what those words actually mean. For us. In real life.” Now someone has. The Democratic Creed exists for that one purpose: to unite, and to inspire. So do the specific Definitions of Freedom, Justice, and Opportunity.
These things … these core values … lie at the center of everything, all of our problems, and all of our solutions. They are Basic Truths, universal value statements, things that will be just as true twenty years from now as they are today. They are the gateway to resurrecting a Democratic Identity that speaks to more and more Americans, enough over time to achieve the supermajority we need to truly fix this country. Promoting these ideas is why Democrats 101 exists. It is the only reason: to help establish our core identity, to base it on Truth.
And this is why the obsessive focus on branding is so dangerous. If our sense of identity, the universal truth of our core values, is seen as branding, as marketing of the moment, that very real power will evaporate. But if these things are seen as universal American truths … and we are seen as their champion … then everything changes.
Identity is about Purpose. Identity is about why we’re in politics in the first place. All people are created equal is a basic American value. It has near universal appeal. Messaging to farmers for their vote is politics. Messaging to farmers is one of the incredibly important things we have to do during an election campaign. Creating an underlying emotional connection between farmers and us … an inclination to “pull the D” no matter which election comes up … is identity, and that has to be established long before the election. Both are needed to win, but identity is the source for everything else.
J.M. Purvis
Author and Founder of Dems101
