Mrs. Clinton, this is why Democrats are struggling

First, you’re going to have to fight your party’s materialistic mind-set.

This is 2016, not 1992. Over the past few years, economic and social anxiety has metastasized into something spiritual and existential.

Americans are no longer confident in their national project. They no longer trust their institutions or have faith in their common destiny. This is a crisis of national purpose. It’s about personal identity and the basic health of communal life. Americans’ anger and pessimism are more fundamental than anything that can be explained by GDP statistics.

Many Democrats have trouble thinking in these terms. When asked to explain any complex phenomenon, they instinctively reduce it to a materialist cause. If there’s terrorism there must be lack of economic opportunity. If marriage is declining it must be because of joblessness.

To stand a chance, Secretary Clinton, you’re probably going to have to talk as adeptly about threats to personal dignity as you do about day care. You’re probably going to have to talk bluntly about the American civic religion. You’re going to have to show you understand the way members of your class have slighted people who are less educated and less cosmopolitan.

Second, you’re going to have to fight the Sanders tide, which on Day 1 of this convention was astoundingly strong. Many Democrats have grown hostile to capitalism. Sixty percent of Democrats are friendly to socialism, according to a poll by OnMessage Inc. and the American Action Network.

Of course, this is general election suicide. If you want a perfect way to turn off suburban service economy office park workers who will decide this election, then the Bernie Sanders route is it! The economic nostalgia of the left is as futile as the demographic nostalgia of the right.

Somehow you’re going to have to come up with an updated muscular Clintonism.

For 30 years your name has stood for a Democratic governing style that is internationalist in foreign affairs, socially moderate and pro-global integration (while softening its edges). That open, optimistic approach has to be combined with a more aggressive and radical effort to help people compete in the new economy.

Third, you’re going to have to answer hatred with love.

Your tendency so far in your career has been to answer hostility with distrust, and secretiveness.