Democrats find their voice in the protests against President Trump

Analysis Democrats find their voice in the protests against President Trump
Cathleen Decker Contact Reporter

The fight over the future of the Democratic Party has been decided in the streets.

The swelling crowds at women’s marches and the chanting airport cadres protesting President Trump’s new immigration plan have pushed the party to the left after years of mincing steps in that direction, most recently in the presidential contest.

“Trump has electrified the Democratic progressive base like nothing that has happened in the last 25 years,” said Ace Smith, a San Francisco-based Democratic strategist. “As depressing as what he’s doing is, he’s building an army that’s going to fight him.”

Democrats now are experiencing both an ideological and a generational upending not unlike the one that decades ago gave many of today’s Democratic leaders power they have been reluctant to cede. And it is one that some Democrats fear is too radical for the party as it looks toward 2018 Senate contests in swing states.

Howard Dean, the former party chairman, said Democrats must embrace the priorities of the street or risk demise.

“This is their Edmund Pettus Bridge, their Kent State,” he said, referring to sites of civil rights and antiwar struggles that propelled earlier activists into Democratic politics. “A party composed of all of the activists in the ’60s and ’70s — they changed the world, but they can’t figure out how to hand this off to the next generation. The time for that is at hand.”

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-democrats-analysis-20170205-story.html