The Democratic Party is still reeling after a shocking upset by Donald Trump and the Republican Party in all three branches of government. Their win is partially attributed to Trump’s “silent majority,” whom the Democrats didn’t think existed.

A movement against the political establishment was inevitable, and Donald Trump was able to become a populist figure of working class white Americans and win states in the Rust Belt, all states Hillary Clinton lost in the Democratic primary – Wisconsin and Michigan were immense blows to the entire Democratic base.

What begins now is an era that will turn back twenty years of progressive achievements, from the Affordable Care Act to the beginning of the fight against climate change. In the four years, Donald Trump will serve as President, the Democratic Party and progressives across will need to fight tooth and nail to stop the destruction of the environment, an administration of sterilized ethnic cleansing and a foreign policy that may destroy the world.

But in that time, it’s also high time that the Democratic Party come to terms with itself.

Since Bill Clinton took office in 1993, the Democratic Party has shifted its core beliefs away from the New Deal of FDR and towards the center, in order to reach more voters. That worked for the Democrats in 1992, and it certainly proved successful in the Clinton Administration – it later gave progressives some outstanding gains during the Obama Administration.

But were we paying attention as President Obama swept the Democratic primary in 2008?

President Obama ran as a grassroots candidate of modest achievement and on a platform of hope and change, shocking the world as he breezed past Hillary Clinton in the primary and sweeping through John McCain in the general. He did this by generating excitement, not merely through his public persona, but because of the ideas he promoted – the promise of change that was so desperately needed. (now, this is nothing new, I merely point to President Obama’s campaign as our most modern example.)

But were we paying attention during the 2016 Democratic primary?

The DNC, under the leadership of the infamous Debbie Wassermann Schultz, has become more and more reliant on Wall Street and big oil donations. Democrats themselves are too scared to truly be a party that stands up for the working class, for fear of losing their major donors. But, as Bernie Sanders proved by staying in the race until the end and still out-raising Hillary Clinton, progressives do not need big money donors when they have a bold vision.

Sanders, an underdog running on a platform of rebuilding the American middle class and making the billionaires pay their fair share, won 46% of the vote in the Democratic primary against sure-thing Hillary Clinton. Her nomination was met with protest from the Sanders base and a mass exodus of young Democratic voters to the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, and the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson.

This is not to say that Sanders or his supporters are to blame. Nor are Clinton and her supporters. But we saw Trump sweep the Republican establishment candidates, including Republican superstar Jeb Bush, with his massive populist movement. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, of course, but in an era in which so many people were fed up with the elites, it is now, in retrospect, unthinkable that the Democratic Party could have gained the vote of an increasingly anti-establishment populous with the very pillar of the Democratic establishment.

What needs to happen now is a major reformation of the Democratic Party into a party that will save and rebuild the American middle and working class. They can’t do that with another establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton, qualified and excellent as she is. And when a populist candidate nobody has heard of calling for a political revolution can win 46% of the party’s vote against a Clinton, maybe we should stop and listen to the half of our base that doesn’t seem to trust the other.

So how do we mobilize a political revolution within the Democratic Party? Brand New Congress, a splinter group of the Sanders movement designed to find and elect progressive candidates, and Our Revolution, an official organization from the Sanders campaign designed to help candidates whose campaigns are already in motion, are good places for grassroots Democrats to start, and establishment Democrats would be wise to support and endorse the candidates that rise from the Sanders movement.

We need to play the new game of populism, and only when the Democratic Party stands united behind a real progressive agenda can love truly trump hate.