Derek Shearer and Jane Fonda during Fonda’s husband Tom Hayden’s Senate campaign, 1976

Derek Shearer is Diplomat in Residence at Occidental College and Director of the McKinnon Center for Global Affairs. He is the former U.S. ambassador to Finland. He has contributed articles on international affairs and American politics to Inroads in past issues.

American political parties typically run on campaign platforms but seldom pay much attention to them once in power. Sometimes they disown them during the campaign. Mostly, candidates have focused on catchy slogans like a New Deal, a Fair Deal, a New Frontier or a Great Society. As a candidate in 2024, Donald Trump said that he had not read the Heritage Foundation report Project 2025, but once in office he appointed its authors to positions of power and let them loose to implement its detailed policy initiatives. He broke his promise not to start wars of regime change with attacks on Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. Meanwhile, he doubled down on his campaign promises to go after his political enemies, deport immigrants and abolish a large swath of the federal government.

It is more important than ever for those who seek to replace the Trump administration and repair the damage that he’s done to say what we are for, not just against. It is not enough to organize national days of protest like the No Kings effort. It is not enough simply to run against Trump and what he is doing at home and abroad. Trump won’t be on the ballot again, but the emotions he’s stirred and the policies the Republican Party has embraced won’t disappear. I and many colleagues are gearing up for the 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 race for president by advocating a comprehensive program of economic reform.

Learning from a lifetime of political involvement

Having been involved in politics for more than 50 years, I’ve always been concerned about the purpose of political action: what are the goals to be accomplished? It’s a belief that I’ve had since my teenage years when I ran for student office at Culver City High School on a campus reform program.

As an undergraduate at Yale from 1964 to 1968 I was elected the equivalent of student body president and organized fellow students to produce an educational reform program. We advocated allowing women to attend Yale, as well as abolishing the 100–60 numerical grading system, the wearing of coats and ties at dinners and the requirement to swim the length of the Yale pool. We were successful with all our proposals, although coeducation was not adopted until after we had graduated. We also organized peaceful protests and teach-ins against the war in Vietnam, but overall we were focused on what we were for, trying to make Yale a better, less elitist educational institution.

In 1976, I was the chief policy adviser to former antiwar activist Tom Hayden in his primary challenge to California Senator John Tunney. Along with friends, including University of California professors Richard Flacks and Bill Domhoff and another antiwar activist, Fred Branfman, we produced a detailed campaign program titled Make the Future Ours. We highlighted the need for national health insurance and the creation of jobs around solar energy.

In the 1980s, with former activists Jim Rowen and Lee Webb among others, I helped to establish the Conference on Alternative State and Local Public Policies. I had the job of compiling a policy reader for our annual gatherings in which we shared the content of the programs on which progressives had been elected or were proposing if elected to office. In a 1981 article for The Nation magazine on industrial policy and economic reform, I called for a Green New Deal.

These ideas found their way into a grassroots political coalition in Santa Monica, California, of which I became campaign manager for the city elections in 1981. Our program, A City Where People Come First, included community-based policing (not defunding the police), affordable housing, rent regulation, farmers’ markets, curbside recycling and development agreements to provide on-site childcare and better urban design. We won the election and enacted most of our program, winning national attention and influencing other urban reform movements. The Guardian in the U.K. ran a headline “Revolution in Reagan’s Backyard,” and the Los Angeles Times labelled the city the People’s Republic of Santa Monica. Many of our policies were adopted by other cities, notably Burlington, Vermont, when Bernie Sanders was mayor. (I met with Bernie and sampled the ice cream at the first Ben and Jerry’s shop, located in a former gas station across the street from Burlington City Hall.)

During the Carter administration, I served on the founding board of the National Consumer Coop Bank, a reform effort which passed Congress with the support of the labour movement and Ralph Nader. In 1980, I coauthored a book with Stanford economist Martin Carnoy which examined economic policies in Canada, Europe and the United States (primarily the New Deal) and how they might apply to the United States now. I chose the title Economic Democracy for the book, based on the use of the term by the Swedish Social Democrats.

Tom Hayden adopted the title for his post-campaign organization, calling it the Campaign for Economic Democracy. I didn’t join the organization. With Hayden, who was married to Jane Fonda at the time, capitalizing on the phrase economic democracy, very few mainstream Democrats would adopt the phrase. When President Bill Clinton nominated me in 1993 to be Ambassador to Finland, Republicans who opposed my nomination attacked me for having written the book. They claimed that I would bring “socialism” to Finland, which amused many Finns. (In Finland the fine you pay for committing traffic offences is proportional to your income.)

Martin Carnoy and I followed up Economic Democracy a few years later with A New Social Contract: The Economy and Government After Reagan, which offered a reform program for Democrats. Unfortunately, Vice President George H.W. Bush won the 1988 election, the first after Reagan, defeating a decent but lacklustre Democratic candidate, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, who was not a good political communicator and had no clear message or program.

Derek Shearer (L) with Sidney Blumenthal, senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, in the Oval Office during the Clinton presidency

In 1992, we had better luck with the messenger – the candidate was Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, the greatest natural politician of my generation. As a longtime friend of Clinton’s, I was involved in the campaign from the beginning as a political jack of all trades: senior policy adviser, speechwriter and fundraiser. I agreed with campaign consultant James Carville that a focus on the economy was paramount. Together with Ira Magaziner, Rob Reich and others, we produced a document for which I provided the title Putting People First, an adaptation of the slogan from Santa Monica. The program included a call for national health insurance (as we had in the Hayden campaign), establishment of a national economic council and creation of a national infrastructure bank as well as a more progressive tax system. The program was published in paperback, got good press and helped to highlight the seriousness of Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore, as post–New Deal/Great Society reformers. (President Clinton kept the slogan Putting People First and to this day uses it for his foundation.)

After my term as U.S. Ambassador to Finland, and after Al Gore lost the 2000 election to my Yale classmate George W. Bush, I accepted a chair in diplomacy at Occidental College in Los Angeles. I’ve spent most of the 21st century teaching diplomacy and travelling abroad as a public diplomacy lecturer for the State Department, with only brief forays into national politics.

In 2008, the last year of the Bush administration, students in my senior seminar produced a detailed report titled Rebranding America on how the United States could reestablish its international standing after the disastrous foreign policy of Bush and Dick Cheney. Student coauthors discussed the report on NPR and a copy was given to the Secretary of State in the new Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, but to little effect. President Obama continued many of the ill-considered War on Terror policies of the Bush administration, although he won the Nobel Peace Prize in his first year. I explained in a talk at Oxford that really the prize was meant for the American voters who elected Obama, rejecting the more bellicose Senator John McCain.

As newly released oral history tapes make clear, Obama and his team ignored the threat of Donald Trump and the Tea Party attack on his government bailouts of the banking and auto industries. Obama ignored James Carville’s advice to “put a few bankers in jail.” He governed too much as a rationalist and not enough as a popular economist. Had Obama run on a detailed campaign program like Putting People First, he might have been held to a higher standard for what he tried to accomplish and how he tried to fight for it.

President Obama relied on mainstream economic advisers like Larry Summers and Robert Rubin and didn’t make use of more creative appointees like Cass Sunstein who had written The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever. During the campaign, I recommended that Congress pass an Economic Bill of Rights resolution. I advised the Obama team that Sunstein could lead the economic reform effort, but instead he was appointed to a post in the White House to study government bureaucracy – a waste of his talents and poor politics. The Obama team, which had built a national network of activists to support his election, unfortunately let that network whither when he took office. Obama himself showed little interest in strengthening and extending the Democratic Party’s electoral reach.

During the Obama years I wrote regularly for the Huffington Post, offering analysis and commentary on international and domestic politics. Martin Carnoy and I organized letters of support from leading economists for Hillary Clinton’s presidential race in 2016 and for Joe Biden’s in 2020, but I was not closely involved in either campaign. Much to his credit, President Biden enacted industrial policy and appointed progressives to economic posts in his administration, but he too underestimated the appeal of Trump and the anger of many working-class voters. The White House messaging about Biden’s industrial and economic policies was weak and ineffective. Unlike FDR and the New Deal, he took little credit for his accomplishments. More importantly, he did not enact immediate reforms such as raising the minimum wage.

A first word in economic reform

As I enter my 80th year, I’m back at the policy game and engaged in national politics. In what might be a Last Hurrah, a group of friends, mostly economists, and I have produced what we call A Bold Economic Program for America. We’ve published it online and have begun circulating it to members of Congress, potential national candidates, political consultants and activists. With my economist coauthors, Michael Reich at UC Berkeley and my longtime coauthor Martin Carnoy at Stanford, we have produced a set of economic proposals that are practical and paid for by tax reforms.

Leading progressive economists, including Dani Rodrik, Joe Stiglitz and Richard Parker among others, have contributed to the effort. My old Clinton campaign colleagues Paul Begala, James Carville and Stan Greenberg have given the program a thumbs-up. Members of Congress are studying it, and prospective national candidates have asked for copies. We’ve shared it with progressive groups in Washington like the Center for American Progress and the Economic Policy Institute as well as with Demos and the Roosevelt Institute in New York. It’s not meant to be the last word in a reform program; rather, it’s the first word designed to spark a debate and discussion on what we are for. Off-year elections with winning Democratic candidates in New Jersey, Virginia and New York running on affordability are strong evidence that economic issues have salience with voters.

The restoration of American democracy from the onslaught of authoritarian actions by President Trump requires a strong economic message from Democrats. James Carville, among others, made this case in the New York Times as did former Obama campaign adviser David Plouffe. We need both an economic program to run on as well as our own 2029 detailed program of repair and restoration of government services and programs which Trump is decimating. As Michael Tomasky argued in the New Republic, we need Fighting Liberals to stand up and fight for progressive economic reforms, and not to be afraid of taking on big corporations and other special interests as well as criticizing the Trump administration.

Of course, a political message requires a national messenger. We will see who among the potential national candidates has the Right Stuff and whether they understand the importance of telling the citizens what they will do if they come to power. As for a compelling slogan, I’m confident a young campaign adviser will find the inspiration to top Putting People First, but for now affordability will do.

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From the authors’ summary of A Bold Economic Program for America

Our current political crisis is rooted largely in our political system’s failure to respond adequately to the vast economic transformations of the past half-century. These transformations include the enormous increase in economic inequality and major job displacements resulting from new technologies and from increased competition from new economic powerhouses, such as China and India. As a result, many Americans feel increasingly insecure. Younger generations are especially pessimistic about their futures.

The crisis provides an opportunity for Democrats to develop and communicate a new clear economic vision for our country: one that is realistic and resonates with a broad swath of the American public. This vision, rooted in democratic institutions, could harness our vast economic potential for the good of all, not just a small group of billionaire monopolists and financial investors.

We have therefore developed a package of economic recommendations that flesh out this vision. Our program would:

• Raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage and enhance the rights, working conditions, and dignity of our workers
• Increase the capacity of our educational and workforce training systems to upgrade the skills of incumbent, displaced, and new workers
• Lower living costs by building more housing, expanding and subsidizing childcare, reforming health care provision and upgrading our energy infrastructure
• Provide more support for our nation’s families and invest more in our children’s futures, by providing highly subsidized childcare for all low- and middle-income households, free universal early childhood education, and expanded support for elder care
• Assure solvency for Social Security and expand benefits to low-income recipients
• Increase economic growth and maintain our strengths in technological innovation
• Roll back Trump’s deficits

Importantly, we include the costs of the program and how we pay for it by restoring fairness to America’s tax system. The total cost of the program equals about $850 billion, or about 2.7 per cent of our GDP! Almost one-half that total ($380 billion) goes to making Social Security solvent for the next 75 years. The total revenue brought in by our tax proposals – restricted largely to the very rich – would more than pay for these programs, allowing for debt reduction of more than $300 billion annually.