The Rev. Frank C. Strasburger is a former Episcopal chaplain at Princeton University. He lives in Topsham.

Media pundits often get into a rut, echoing one another’s observations and even language about a particular candidate, movement or issue. For the last six months, it’s been hard to find anyone who isn’t saying, “The Democrats have no message” — and the Democrats have been hoodwinked by the press into believing that.

Despite what everyone’s saying about Democrats and Democrats are even saying about themselves, the party not only has a message, it has the message that created this country and continues to make us great: we’re all equal.

Now don’t misunderstand me — we’ve certainly not yet lived up to that vision. It’s aspirational, as it has been since Jefferson imagined it as the basis for the new nation. Even when Lincoln repeated it at Gettysburg, he acknowledged the achievement of equality as a “task lying before us.”

Tragically, though, the party that still has the temerity to call itself “the party of Lincoln” has abandoned that task in virtually everything it says and does in favor of the white male supremacy Lincoln fought a war to banish. Racism and misogyny have long hidden behind dog whistles, but now they’re right out in the open for all to see, and they disenfranchise the roughly 40% of Americans who aren’t white and 51% who aren’t men (let alone the rampant Christian nationalism that marginalizes the 38% who aren’t Christian).

Worse, the Republican Party of 2025, which is unrecognizable even from the party it was just two generations ago, is doing all it can to erase from America’s banner what has made us an inspiration for the world for the last two and a half centuries.

It’s long past time for Democrats — and Republicans who no longer feel at home in their own party — to get back to basics. The party of Lincoln is no more; for at least the last six decades, Democrats have been the party of equality. By what they say, what they do, the principles they uphold, and the way they legislate, it is the Democrats who confirm their belief that all of us are equal. That’s not just a moral tenet, it’s the foundation for good governance: that all of us are better off when all of us are better off.

In the wealthiest nation the world has ever known, no one — no one — should be ill-fed, ill-housed or ill-clothed. All of us should have the right to vote. No one is above the law and all of us are equal under it. All of us have the right to health care to maximize the utility of our bodies and education to fulfill the promise of our minds.

Access to opportunity must be afforded each of us not only to enjoy the fruits of our labor but also to contribute our energy and talent to the common good. No matter where we currently find ourselves in the economy, all of us have the right to dream and to a pathway for attempting to realize our dreams.

When we withhold those rights from anyone, we place our own rights in jeopardy. For the government that decides certain people are “less than” — non-whites, women, trans people, gays, immigrants, Indigenous Americans, you name the category — such a government will sooner or later target us.

Not since the darkest moments of the Civil War has everything we cherish most deeply as Americans been so clearly at risk, and the decisions we make in this moment may well turn out to be existential.

Either we turn our backs on the future and return to a past stained by the heritage of bigotry, injustice and inhumanity the current administration so frantically denies yet simultaneously replicates, or we rededicate ourselves to the proposition Jefferson, Lincoln, Dr. King and so many others have set before us: that all of us are equal; that the guarantee of that equality remains our noblest and most urgent purpose; and that no message is more critical to ensuring that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”