Americans came together this year to defeat Donald Trump.
But now, the real work begins.
Trump may be gone, but workers are dealing with the sky-rocketing costs of living,
as wages stagnate and billionaires become wealthier than ever before.
Joe Biden said, "We are in the fight for the soul of America." He's right.
But for the next several months, we’ll also be in a fight for the soul of the Biden presidency.
My name is Alexandra Rojas and I’m the executive director at Justice Democrats.
At Justice Democrats, we’re working to create a Democratic Party that fights back
and delivers for working people.
We helped build The Squad by recruiting and electing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush because we need a Democratic Party right now
that fights for voters, not corporate donors.
Communities of color face the crisis of systemic racism,
as Black and Latino Americans die at a rate nearly three times higher than white Americans.
And Americans of all backgrounds confront the entrenchment
of Republican minority rule, through gerrymandering, attacks on voting rights,
Mitch McConnell's obstructionism in the Senate,
and packing the courts with right-wing judges.
We're going to have to act on the outside and work with our allies on the inside
to make sure Biden meets this historic moment
and delivers on the mandate the American people provided him
by using every tool at his disposal.
So where do we go from here?
We need to ensure that Joe Biden fights
for the American people that delivered for him
and not allow Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party
to become his co-governing partner.
Democrats didn't turn out for Biden and defeat Trump by millions of votes
to then turn around and allow McConnell to rob our ability to govern or pick our cabinet.
In the face of a global health crisis, systemic racism and record economic fallout,
a Biden presidency must seize its mandate to govern on behalf of the majority that elected it.
The American majority wants to raise wages and end the climate crisis by creating
millions of high-wage, good-paying clean energy jobs,
by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and retrofitting every home and every building in America,
starting with the low-income communities on the frontline of this crisis.
The American majority wants to take on the insurance and pharmaceutical industry
by providing health care and low-cost prescription drugs for every single American
and hiring nurses all across the country.
The American majority wants to take on systemic racism by reducing our jail and prison populations;
creating new agencies of first-responders, like emergency medical services or firefighters,
to deal with issues related to addiction or mental illness that need to be remedied but do not need police;
and investing in communities disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs or mass incarceration.
Our strategy at Justice Democrats is to invest in diverse, progressive, working-class candidates
to better align the Democratic Party with its base.
While the establishment looks for people wealthy enough to run for office,
we’re focused on building the growing bloc of progressives in Congress
by recruiting grassroots leaders nominated by their own communities
and providing them with the resources to win.
We know generation-defining victories like the New Deal, the Civil and Voting Rights Act
don’t happen overnight.
In times of crisis, social movements help lead political parties out of the wilderness with bold vision.
Abolitionists gave Lincoln emancipation,
labor unions gave the New Deal to Roosevelt,
and civil and labor rights leaders gave the Great Society to Johnson.
Since the Reagan revolution, too many in the Democratic Party have capitulated to conservative ideology
and many mimicked Republican talking points.
New leaders aren’t hurting the Democratic Party — they’re bringing the party into the future.
Justice Democrats like AOC and Jamaal Bowman will win elections in the coming decade.
The constituencies now leading grassroots movements
will only become more essential to the Democratic Party’s future.
We have a chance to not just define the next four years, but to define the next 50.
Biden knows he's not governing with the Congress of 2009.
The Squad is here to stay, and it’s growing.