The Democratic Party is often described as a “big tent,” a coalition bound by the principle of inclusion. That tent today includes everyone from the Squad to Never Trump ex-Republicans, small farmers to Hollywood writers. The vision of an inclusive party committed to common ideals is a noble one. But in the arena of politics, and against the backdrop of a profoundly unfair and unequal economy, the big tent may need some bouncers at the door to preserve its legitimacy. A politics that includes everyone—the predatory landlord and the tenant, the cancer patient and the for-profit insurer, the grocery shopper and the price gouger, the taxpayer and the tax dodger—too often collides with the commonsense understanding that harm must come from somewhere. The unfairness begs for explanations, not just solutions. And done effectively, well-considered conflict can provide the explanatory power needed to help people make sense of their discontents.

Political combat is not just inevitable; it’s a skill that is elemental to the art of politics. In that way, politics is unlike corporate marketing or public relations, which often aim to reach the broadest possible swathe of people while pushing away no one. Good political stories have heroes with affirmative visions, yes, but also villains who represent the broken status quo. The Democratic Party has largely failed to clarify how an unfair world came to be and to speak to the disorientation that comes with rapid technological and economic change. The political right has been all too eager to fill this void in meaning-making with grotesque nativist stories that make enemies of the powerless to protect the powerful. To regain the legitimacy proffered by a widely accepted common sense, the Democrats must choose combat not just in the technocratic arenas of regulation or legislation, but in the broader arenas of culture and storytelling.

Perhaps one of the reasons Democrats can appear loath to pick salient political fights is that they would rather problem-solve than instigate. Why fixate on the pharmaceutical industry’s despotism, for example, when you have an excellent plan to lower drug prices? As Senator Chris Murphy said after the election: “We need to talk about power more. We are so in love with our solutions that we spend 80 percent of our time talking about the policy solution and only 20 percent of the time identifying with the way that people are getting screwed.” Indeed, between the problem of price-gouging and the solution of price-capping, there is an explanatory chasm that can only be bridged with politics. Too often, Democrats engage instead in a sort of anti-politics. Selling policy solutions without implicating the economic despots who degrade our lives is to participate in a risk aversion that sacrifices coherence and authenticity for the lighter fare of seemliness.

This is not to say that Democrats don’t pick fights at all. For nearly a decade, the Democratic Party positioned Trump as the central adversary in a cosmic struggle for the future of democracy, broadly defined. Distilled to its core, this was a story of institutional preservation sold to a public largely skeptical of traditional institutions. It should not surprise us, then, that it failed to gain traction: On the eve of the 2024 election, a survey from the Center for Working Class Politics showed that working-class Americans were not moved by the democracy preservation message.

The Democrats’ story also relied significantly on a personal aversion to Trump himself—a miscalculation that should not go unnoticed. Trump could seem a worthy adversary for a new Democratic politics premised on protecting the many from the domination of the few. After all, he orchestrated the plunder of public coffers to the tune of $1.3 trillion in the form of a massive tax cut for mega-corporations that provided little to no benefit to the typical family. But there are more numerous and resonant despots that most Americans encounter in their daily lives, especially those who tune out or don’t follow the political crises of the day. That same pre-election survey found that working-class Americans favored narratives that “combined progressive economic policy suggestions with a strong condemnation of ‘billionaires,’ ‘big corporations,’ and the ‘politicians in Washington who serve them.’”

The party’s failure to build a politics around tangible economic antagonists has left it adrift. To build momentum, it must name names: credit card issuers who charge usurious interest rates, corporate landlords who hike rents to record highs, big oil monopolists who manipulate energy markets, wage thieves who siphon billions from workers, and tech oligarchs who surveil and monetize our every waking moment. These are not faceless forces; they are people and companies with immense power, whose actions directly shape the material constraints of people’s lives and livelihoods.

So, who is in fact taking the good jobs away, or making them worse? Who is hiking rents and gouging grocery prices? There is no shortage of good answers. The tendency to strip the most emotive and narrative-rich fiber from policy stories is part of why Democrats have messages while Republicans have frameworks for understanding the world, however warped, bigoted, or dishonest those frameworks may be. Heather McGhee summed it up well in this publication last November: “Democrats have surrendered in the war to make meaning about why folks are struggling, who’s to blame, and who can fix it.”

The project of building an adversarial politics that authentically addresses economic grievance got a significant head start over the last four years. The Biden Administration’s turn away from market supremacy and embrace of a more active federal government was the culmination of a sea change in economic thinking that overturned what had once been considered gospel within public policy. This shift was long overdue, given what decades of deregulation and privatization had wrought on communities across the country. At the same time, the Administration marshalled its regulatory and investigatory powers to put harmful economic actors on notice. It appointed fierce regulators and consumer advocates at the Department of Justice (DOJ), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), National Labor Relations Board, and Federal Trade Commission. Let’s consider some of the villains that emerged from these efforts.

Take for example the DOJ’s lawsuit against RealPage, a company that sells price-maximizing software to landlords. According to the DOJ’s August 2024 complaint, which cited internal documents, RealPage touts its ability to help landlords seize “every possible opportunity to increase price.” By leveraging algorithms to recommend higher rents based on local data and encouraging property owners to follow its guidance, RealPage effectively acts as a cartel leader. Millions of renters have been affected. As Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time, “Americans should not have to pay more in rent because a company has found a new way to scheme with landlords to break the law.” This is economic despotism at an egregious scale, affecting the single most important cost-of-living item for most Americans. At the same time, the Administration used its bully pulpit to push rental housing platforms to transparently show the upfront costs of rentals in an industry rife with so-called junk fees that can drive up the sticker price of rentals by hundreds of dollars a month. These were important consumer protection actions. But they also provided an opening for Democrats to claim an all-too-familiar villain in American life—predatory landlords—as part of their meaning-making grist. It would have made for a quintessential system-is-rigged story about corporate power. Meanwhile, Trump predictably blamed the housing crisis on immigrants, filling the vacuum yet again despite having no plan for solving that crisis.

Consider another villain: credit card companies. Over the last decade, credit card APRs have nearly doubled from 12.9 percent in late 2013 to 22.8 percent in 2023, according to the CFPB. These rates are historically high, and while inflation has slowed substantially, predatory issuers—rather than lowering their rates accordingly­—continue to take a larger and larger cut of struggling families’ paychecks through unjustifiably high interest. Today, it is not uncommon for the largest issuers to charge usury-level interest rates exceeding 30 percent. With outstanding credit card debt surpassing $1 trillion and half of cardholders carrying a balance from month to month, the industry is notorious for extractive practices like late fees and overdraft charges.

The greed and exploitation of the credit card industry is a salient economic story that Democrats must own at the level of policy, but also by villainizing these companies’ business practices and connecting them to the cost-of-living crisis. The CFPB’s scrutiny of these practices—for example, its move to cap predatory credit card late fees at $8—was an example of government intervening to protect ordinary people from the worst corporate exploitation. Yet the Democratic Party undersold the adversarial nature of these efforts, focusing instead on the estimated savings these actions would have produced if allowed to go through by the courts ($10 billion annually, an extraordinary sum to be sure). But who the Administration took on in order to accomplish this is a hugely important part of the story: a well-heeled financial industry hellbent on maximizing profits by taking advantage of people struggling to make ends meet. People don’t just want to know their fees were capped. They might also want to know that their government squared up with some of the meanest and most powerful bullies in our economy to make it happen.

The insurance industry in the United States is basically a misery multiplier, preying on vulnerabilities and turning essential services into sources of profit. In the auto insurance sector, companies monetize customers’ personal data, installing surveillance devices to track driving behavior under the guise of offering “discounts” while profiting from the sale of this data to third parties. Health insurance providers are even more notorious, routinely denying claims for necessary medical procedures and forcing doctors to prescribe medications based not on medical efficacy but on what maximizes insurer profits. Democrats have made strides in addressing some of these abuses—for instance, by capping out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs under Medicare—but the party often shies away from framing these interventions as victories over a predatory industry. Naming insurance companies as villains would resonate deeply with Americans who experience their greed firsthand, whether through inflated premiums, denied claims, extractive surveillance practices, or manipulative pricing schemes.

Finally, a villain-centric politics might be the missing link for Democrats to reclaim cultural traction in the arena of tax policy. For decades, the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations have exploited a chronically underfunded Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to evade taxes, leaving ordinary families to shoulder the burden. With increased enforcement beginning in the fall of 2023, the IRS under Biden recovered more than $1 billion from high-net-worth individuals employing aggressive and often illegal tax avoidance schemes. This crackdown generated substantial additional revenue. But more importantly, it was a rare moment of accountability for economic elites who often operate with impunity. Democrats currently speak of forcing the wealthy to pay their “fair share,” which is but one piece of a broader story. The fair share framework fails to fully convey the civic gulf between how the rich experience the tax code—as a system to be gamed for personal gain—and how everyone else experiences it: as a mandatory sacrifice or duty.

Several individual Democrats have no doubt challenged corporate power in these arenas and others. But the party has not foregrounded these challenges in its overall message and sensibility. To secure a future where democracy can flourish, Democrats must fight to preserve not just the features of the system itself—institutions, norms, and processes—but the belief among working-class people that Democrats are willing to fight for them.

The Democratic Party is blessed with an abundance of narrative-rich stories about economic despotism, fertile ground for a new politics fit for an age of disillusionment, where working full-time no longer guarantees a rising station and billionaires like Elon Musk openly gut public institutions for personal gain. In a December interview, my Roosevelt Institute colleague Felicia Wong argued that the future of Democratic politics hinges not on new slogans or star politicians, but on building a new common sense about what government can do to support people’s ability to earn a living and care for their families. Importantly, this project is bigger than tweaking individual messages. I believe it must include an adversarial sensibility that authentically sells the Democratic platform not just through the politics of aspiration, but through a politics of righteous combat that coheres with people’s frustrations with the despots in their own lives.

The policy wins of the last four years, especially those achieved through legal or technocratic channels, cannot build this politics on their own. The voices of workers—of people who have had their wages stolen, or who have been targeted unfairly for trying to organize their workplaces—should be more central to the party’s storytelling. And Democrats should not go around lamenting people’s economic “pain” without being clear about who’s hurting them. The stakes are too high to continue relying on abstractions like “unity” or nods to “freedom” without providing the narrative mortar that constructs cause and effect, using real actors whose actions resonate in people’s lives. Put differently: The Democrats must do politics again.

The road ahead will not be easy. Naming economic despots and challenging their power will invite fierce resistance from the entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo. But it will also energize a new generation of voters and activists who are hungry for a politics that speaks to their lived experiences and aspirations. It will give people a sense of agency and a belief that change is possible. And it will lay the groundwork for a political movement that is capable of not just resisting injustice but building a better future. By adopting a more adversarial politics, the Democrats can reclaim their identity as a party that stands with the many against the few, that fights for economic justice and democracy in equal measure.