n normal circumstances, the men and women who chair the Democratic and Republican National Committees labor in a rather just obscurity. As the state and local party organizations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries withered and dissolved before a host of challenges—a national welfare state, television advertising, the rise of primaries and the fall of conventions—the role of the national party chairperson shrank to that of exalted fundraiser. Prominent chairs are now the exception, not the rule. It took hacked emails to give Debby Wasserman Schultz her 15 minutes of notoriety, while Reince Priebus emerged from some dank hole only because he was one of the few Republican officials last spring to stand by Donald Trump. Closer to the norm of anonymity is Preibus’s new replacement at the RNC, Ronna Romney McDaniel.  

That there is now a hotly contested race for the post of chair of the DNC is only further evidence that the Democratic Party is in an odd kind of crisis—soon to be in the minority in all three branches of the federal government, and in control of the government of just six states. What makes the crisis odd, however, is not just the breadth of the party’s powerlessness but, at the same time, the majority it commands in the national popular vote, the popularity of its more progressive tenets, and the intense commitment to liberal values that millions of its activists and other progressives have demonstrated since Trump took power.

The main challenge before the Democrats just now is to deserve, and thereby win, the sustained commitment of all those who’ve taken to the streets, the malls, the civic centers, and airports over the past few weeks. Unlike the nations of Europe, where parties matter more, America is a land of social movements—abolitionist, populist, isolationist, labor, black, feminist, antiwar, conservative, Tea Party—that now and then infuse one of the parties with their energy and propel it into power to legislate their goals. Such a movement, however inchoate and hydra-headed, is the one that has pushed back against Trump and the Republicans over the past three weeks. The Democrats are nothing without its energy, foot soldiers, and ideas.

That’s why the Democrats should elect Keith Ellison to chair the DNC. Ellison—since 2007, the first African American congressman from Minnesota, as well as the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Congress’s first Muslim member—boasts a stellar liberal record, but that’s not what sets him apart from some of his fellow DNC candidates. His leading opponent, Tom Perez, led the Civil Rights Division of President Obama’s Justice Department, and during Obama’s second term, became the most successful and innovative secretary of Labor since Frances Perkins, enacting regulations to extend overtime pay to millions of workers who’d worked extra hours without it, and to require federal employers to offer better pay and benefits to their employees.