Representative Ro Khanna delivered the following remarks on August 15th, 2026 at the Summer 2026 DNC Meeting in Austin.

I am a proud Democrat. But I did not come here just to celebrate the Democratic Party. I came to speak from my heart about living up to our values.

Our strongest tradition is the fight for economic democracy against oligarchy. It runs from Jefferson’s distrust of concentrated financial power, through Bryan’s defense of producers against Eastern capital, to FDR’s New Deal. It lives in Johnson’s Medicare and Medicaid. It lives in Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

This is the tradition that says our party fights for an economy that works for people who work, not just those who own the capital.

In the 1960s that tradition still had force. A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Dr. King built on FDR’s Four Freedoms with the Freedom Budget — a plan for full employment, decent wages, housing, and healthcare.

But the Freedom Budget was never enacted. Civil rights advanced. Economic rights were postponed.

Our party began losing its way in the 1970s, right around the time I was born. Stagflation fueled an anti-government fervor, and too many of us decided the only way to survive politically was to accommodate it — to accept the ideological overcorrection that government itself was the problem.

And accommodate we did.

We supported financial deregulation and backed free-trade deals that led to deindustrialization.

We urged people to leave their hometown for financial and tech centers.

Our economic center of gravity shifted toward affluent coastal professionals and away from the industrial and small-town working class.

We stopped being the party of main street and became the party of Wall Street.

We kept the language of justice while abandoning the project of economic democracy that Randolph and King put on the table.

A lot of people now say our party needs to be bold again. I agree. But calling for boldness without an agenda is just branding.

I am tired of the platitudes.

I am tired of the consultant crafted, focus-group-tested phrases about “affordability” and “renewing the American Dream,” delivered without the specific policies to make them real.

I did not come to Washington to do messaging. I came to fight for a real agenda.

Medicare for All.

Tax the billionaires.

No foreign wars.

When we fight on policy instead of platitudes, Trump’s coalition can crack. We saw it with the Epstein Files Act. I stood with survivors and worked with Thomas Massie to pass the most consequential legislation a Democrat has passed in Trump’s second term. It is the moment when Trump’s presidency began to unravel.

That is the kind of substantive politics I believe in.

I am from the economic patriotism wing of the Democratic Party — the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party.

We believe a national economic project is our path back from the wilderness years.

We see that America is at a breaking point, and that if we do not offer a new economic bargain, we will break.

We understand that those who have lost two elections to Trump are no experts on electability and have no standing to tell a new generation of Democrats that their ideas for justice are too radical.

We are for the working class over the Epstein class.

Our vision for this party is to deliver America’s next New Deal.

It means Medicare for All. No more excuses, no more half measures — free, universal health care for every American. Now.

It means free childcare for Americans. The $80 billion we have spent in Iran could have paid for it.

A decent life requires good jobs in the communities people actually live in. That is why we need a national industrial development bank that rebuilds places hollowed out — Johnstown, Milwaukee, Bessemer, and towns across the steel and textile corridors. If China can invest $1.5 trillion through its development banks, America can invest here at home. Let’s build a thousand trade schools and tech centers so families in every region can build modern wealth.

Here is another simple idea. Hard working Americans should be able to buy a home. That’s why I’ve proposed A Home by 35. Work seven years and you earn the right to buy a house with zero down payment and a low-interest loan, the same promise we’ve long made to veterans.

How do we pay for all this? Tax the billionaires. All 989 of them!

That’s not the 1 percent or the .1 percent or even the .01 percent. It’s the .001 percent. They have a net worth equal to roughly 22 percent of our GDP. A 5 percent tax on them would raise 4 trillion dollars!

Some say that my call to tax billionaires is class warfare.

I have news for them: The billionaires have already been waging a class war.

They are decimating unions, outsourcing jobs, and putting the cost of homes out of reach. America is in a five-decade class war. It is time to get off the sidelines and show whose side we are on.

I should not be one of the only federally elected California Democrats supporting a ballot measure to tax billionaires so poor people have healthcare. We should be fighting for poor kids, not billionaires.

Nearly 100 billionaires live in or near my district. They ran a million-dollar candidate against me because I supported the tax. I won 63 to 6.

If I can be for a billionaire tax in the heart of Silicon Valley, how is this a hard vote for 434 other members?

The same class fight is now playing out with artificial intelligence. This is not complicated. We must be on the side of workers. A party against oligarchy stands with Teamsters over Tesla, truck drivers over Big Tech.

Just like planes have pilots, trucks should have drivers.

Tax agentic AI and robots more than human workers. Stop data centers in residential communities. Protect workers from being fired with collective bargaining rights. Democrats must put workers first in the age of AI.

And when we say we stand with workers, that includes our friends and neighbors who prepare our food, build our homes, and care for our children.

That is why we must abolish ICE. It is a cruel, rogue agency that murdered Lorenzo Salgado. Replace ICE with an immigration agency grounded in justice. When they shot at Lorenzo, a construction worker, a 52-year-old father with three polite, well-raised children, they shot the American dream.

The skeptics will say we cannot pass this agenda because of money in politics. They have a point. Our party must lead the fight to get money out of politics. No super PAC spending in Democratic primaries, none, not now, not in 2028.

We also cannot rebuild an economy for the many while the powerful remain unaccountable.

There is no reconciliation in America without accountability. The bankers who caused the great financial crash in 2008 belonged in jail. The officials who lied us into the Iraq war needed investigation. The Justice Department should never have delayed the January 6 cases that let Trump return to power. When we take back the House and Senate, we subpoena, we investigate, and we prosecute. We hold accountable the powerful who stole from this nation, who DOGEd this nation, and who killed innocent people on the streets of this nation.

Accountability does not stop at our borders. October 7 was a horrific terrorist attack and must be condemned unequivocally. But Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza, and we should have the courage to say so. I saw the apartheid system in the West Bank when I was detained there. Zero aid to Israel. No military sales of weapons used to kill civilians. If our party cannot stand for these principles, it will never convince a generation that watched the horrors of Gaza on their phones that we mean what we say about justice.

Fortunately, America has a remarkable capacity for self-correction.

I believe in this country. My grandfather fought for justice and went to jail twice as part of Gandhi’s independence movement. Today his grandson serves in Congress, representing the most economically consequential district in the world.

I was born in Philadelphia in our bicentennial year. Teachers and little league coaches believed in me. My mother believed so much in America that she would stay up late into the night with notecards making sure I learned every word of the English language. My father would rise before dawn to work, and still be present at every game, even though I could barely hit the ball. All they asked of me was hard work and that I show up. This country gave me and my family a chance to succeed. I want a country where every American has the same chances this country gave me.

That requires a Democratic Party ready to reclaim its moral purpose and to stand against oligarchy and for economic democracy. A party ready to lead the future with America’s next New Deal.

Let us be the party that calls on Americans to be bigger. Let us build an agenda that heals the divides — between those who own capital and those who live by their labor, between the coasts and the factory towns, between the America that feels seen and the America that feels forgotten.

This is the time for our generation of Democrats to answer history’s call. You and I have our moment to write this next chapter so that one day they will say we saved the country and did our part to build a more perfect union.

Published by Ro Khanna.