Kevin Ritchie is vice chair of the Lincoln Lakes Regional Democratic Committee, newly a member of the Maine Democratic Party Committee, a retired teacher and administrator at Lee Academy, small business owner and lifelong resident of rural Maine.

Since 2016, the Democratic Party has seemed to expend much of its energy shouting about how bad President Trump and Project 2025 are and trying to be “all things to all people,” as if doing so will rouse enough voters to turn the tide. It won’t.

As corrosive, warped and manipulated as our federal leadership now is — and most of us see this clearly — crying out in endless media loops will have no further impact.

At the national, state and county levels, Democratic leadership appears to look to a bright, shining past in ways that are tragically similar to the MAGA world’s own alternative view of the past. If MAGA wants a return to an imaginary 1950s, Dem leadership wants a return to an imaginary 2015.

The pre-2016 past and the Biden one-term presidency showed us the power of our economy at the macro level: stock and bond markets, good; corporate profits, good; entrepreneurship, good; shareholder earnings, good.

Below that sunny surface, however, a different story. Too few quality jobs; widening inequality; the luxury of “skating” if you were a big-time player (2008’s crash architects, tech-bro bailouts, rigged tax code, insider trading); burgeoning and unregulated social media and internet; the cuddly marriage of wealth and power slouching toward oligarchy (take Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, both in Maine and nationally). Add to that an ambitious-but-short-sighted state Legislature that couldn’t develop sustainable budgets? Not good.

We Dems were blitzed by 50-plus years of conservative organizing, our party’s complacency, and karmic-level bad luck, leading to MAGA.

Then, we watched Democratic leadership do remarkably little to prepare for the possibility of Trump 2.0 (kudos to the bar associations that actually did prepare; hence, there has been some independent legal success against the oligarchy and autocracy.)

My Democratic Party has been hapless. In part, that’s because the rising tide was lifting upper-middle class, wealthy and ultra-wealthy boats and the Democratic leadership and many operatives and media figures were — and still are — aboard a lot of those happy, elite boats.

As for the rest of us, especially in rural places? The mills closed, older working-class Dems died, others became disillusioned with culture wars and general political ineffectiveness, and the gap widened and widened.

We moderate (gasp!) Dems want the Democratic Party – at all levels – to address: the unfairness of the tax code (made more unfair by the MAGA movement), Citizen’s United and its ilk (to minimize PACs and dark money clout), housing and food costs (be creative), health care (affordable, efficient, and available to all – single-payer or private, we don’t care, just make it work), regulations (smart, efficient and only those necessary), accountability (no handouts — we all need skin in the game, and legal responsibility for the rigged actions of the wealthy).

Democratic Party, you got this. We’ve done it before – see “America, 1930s, 60s, 70s.” But we can’t drift away from labor and rural places.

Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Graham Platner, they’re part of us. We want their energy. However, we want also carefully crafted, fiscally sound, socialist programs (fire departments, social security, public schools, public utility commissions, Medicare are all applications of “socialist” ideas, don’t be scared).

We do not want socialism as an economic or political system. Capitalism and democracy — both well and poorly regulated, granted — have produced the world that most of us enjoy today. Capitalism and democracy have generated our comfort and our eco-crisis, our cynicism and our optimism, modern science and flourishing arts, more expansive freedoms for all Americans, and lives beyond mere survival.

Can we get to “effectively regulated capitalism” and “budgetary prudence” and work our way out of crisis? I believe so, Dems.

But, we can’t go backwards. Elitism isn’t democracy. America isn’t as good for the rest of us as it is for the upper-middle, wealthy and stratospherically wealthy economic classes. In fact, it’s been a struggle for 75% of Americans. Fix that, Democratic Party.

MAGA won’t do it; too many oligarchs to please. Dems can. Develop a message that gets wins. Show us the clear, relevant plan, the winning policies, words and passions. Find leaders who will herd us cats into a force. Break from “the old politics” or it will, indeed, be too late.