Local Democratic Party: Here is our platform

The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer.

Lawmakers will continue making policy whether or not we are engaged. Those policies and laws profoundly impact all our lives, as the global COVID-19 pandemic has shown. When the leaders we elect spread misinformation and make decisions based on greed and power, more of us realize that politics is indeed a matter of life and death.

Nothing has highlighted our country’s vulnerability — or contrasts the two major parties’ values — like the Republican leadership’s mishandling of the pandemic we face. The Pima County Democratic Party’s guiding document, our newly adopted platform, highlights those values.

After 2016, shocked voters joined the PCDP in droves to resist the Trump administration’s most dangerous policies. Attacks on immigrants, environmental protections, fair taxation, workplace protection and public education brought renewed focus to our Democratic values and the issues we are committed to protect. New faces answered the call to serve, many of them younger; some coming from communities that have never had representation at the county level.

Conversations started evolving from “What can we do to get under-represented people to vote?” to “In order to create a space where all who share our values can see themselves in this party, who do we need to be?”

Because we lacked a clear statement of local values, the PCDP appointed a platform committee. In drafting planks and in policy, we focused on issues that the party had not meaningfully addressed and on historically neglected populations. Because representatives of those populations led conversations on the committee, we created a document that states our inclusive local values, sharply contrasting with Republicans’ vision, policies, and priorities. The process took a year to draft, perform outreach to the community and incorporate that feedback. It was adopted unanimously by the county Democratic committee.

Our country is reckoning with the undeniable reality that after decades of prioritizing profits over people, so many of us are financially vulnerable. We are addressing that poverty is not a failing of the individual, but the systems set up to favor the 1%. More than one in 10 Americans has applied for unemployment benefits. While we confront Democrats’ contributions to the inequity, only one party is talking about addressing these inequities.

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With the GOP controlling the U.S. Senate, the White House and state Legislature, aid packages exclude whole sectors of vulnerable people, while allowing those not at risk to profit. Corporations find loopholes while mom-and-pops fold.

Our most vulnerable, struggling through no fault of their own, have no safety net. Our stockpiles are gone, and our health-care system is broken. Systemic inequities in health-care, workplace vulnerability, and lack of access to services are disproportionately killing people in black, indigenous and brown communities.

In early 2019, the Platform Committee began by studying these inequities. The following context informed us as we brainstormed issues in each plank: “If the most vulnerable among us are able to live, work, attend school and raise families in healthy communities, then we all thrive.”

We addressed a history of broken treaties with our Native American tribes, racist lending practices like redlining, school resource disparities, for-profit health care, and how environmental crises and poverty intersect. We addressed mass incarceration and our inhumane immigration system, both which violate internationally recognized human rights norms.

Progress means adapting to the current needs of our time. We took bold stands for universal health care, the Green New Deal, legalizing marijuana and naturalizing all who have lived and worked here for at least five years. We committed to fully funded free public education, protecting workers’ rights to organize, same-day and automatic voter registration and ridding politics of dark money.

But these are just words. Words only have power when we act on them. This document can become the principles that guide all that we do as Democrats, including asking those we elect to uphold those principles. Only then can we create the healthy, thriving community we envision for all in Pima County.