“America is already great.”

On the third day of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, President Obama delivered what was considered the ‘primetime’ speech of the evening, congratulating the Democratic Party on the progress of the nation during his second term while making the case for Hillary’s qualifications. Pundits almost immediately lauded the speech as representative of the hope that defined his 2008 ‘Yes We Can’ message; many also noted that the President would serve as a valuable asset on the campaign trail for Clinton moving forward. His message of optimism moving forward, which has been articulated effectively and consistently since his breakthrough 2004 DNC speech, is now the Democratic Party’s response to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again!”

In his speech, after railing against Donald Trump’s ineptitude, President Obama made this statement in response to the businessman’s slogan:

“America is already great. America is already strong. And I promise you, our strength, our greatness does not depend on Donald Trump.”

If you look at demographic polling, Hillary Clinton is doing well with a diverse range of voters: her numbers among the Latinx population remain strong, her opponent is widely viewed by Black voters as unfavorable, and in a recent Bloomberg online poll, she bests Trump with college-educated white voters, a category that has historically gone red. The one demographic that has eluded Clinton are white voters without a college degree. That category, as Nate Cohn details in the New York Times, “Mr. Trump leads … by a margin of 58 percent to 30 percent.”

It’s been explored why this is true before, and why Trump’s campaign so perfectly articulates a message to white folks who feel forgotten by rising trends of globalization and increasing diversity. Rather than boast of the current might of the United States, Trump’s rhetoric lambasts the current political establishment for making us weak. Under President Obama, Trump remarks, we have grown weak, puny, pathetic. We are no longer strong, no longer great. There was a time when we were great — although when that exactly was is not so certain — but now we’re not. Yesterday, Trump tweeted out this message:

“Our country does not feel ‘great already’ to the millions of wonderful people living in poverty, violence and despair.”

Trump has no plan that would actually help, and he doesn’t care about working-class people. He’s terrifying in every sense of the word. But his message has resonated with a lot of Americans, because in their everyday lives, they see some truth to Trump’s diagnosis. The failure of the Democratic Party has been an unwillingness to recognize that truth — an unwillingness to channel the anger of white working folks towards a plan which seeks to dismantle systems of oppression and economic inequality. Instead, President Obama, presidential nominee Clinton, and the Democratic Party have decided to assert in their 2016 campaign for the White House that we as a nation are already great, and that we have always been great.

Politically, this is the conventional argument to be made. American exceptionalism as an ideology remains vastly influential in the current two-party system, and it dictates that rhetoric surrounding ‘America’s greatness’ should never be questioned, even when viewed from a historical standpoint. Exceptionalism’s place in Democratic politics and rhetoric is unlikely to change in this election, but it will hamper the Democrats’ efforts to reach out to white voters without college educations. In a non-conventional election year, there must be a willingness to be frank with the current condition of the United States. The United States is not “already great.” For too many people, we’re actually doing quite poorly.

Despite significant US economic growth in the past 20 years, household incomes have stagnated. The US does little to address market-driven income inequality, and so we rank as one of the most unequal wealthy nations in the world. Over a quarter of Black and Latinx families are living in poverty. Five million US manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000. The white suicide rate has skyrocketed. As a result of their tone-deaf rebuttal, Hillary Clinton and the DNC appear out of touch, bolstered by celebrity advocates and career politicians who insist that the Republicans are too focused on the country’s ‘doom and gloom.’ Conversely, the Clinton campaign has turned off die-hard Sanders supporters, who saw the Vermont senator’s campaign message as more reflective and honest in its condemnation of the nation’s wrongdoings, by both Democrats and Republicans.

The Democratic Party must respond unapologetically to the war waged against the forgotten: those who do not see a great America, but one that is crumbling. If instead, the Clinton campaign determines that the nation will benefit from a platform of minor reforms which offend no one, we will only see a greater number of people flocking to right-wing populists like Trump.