David Hogg Wants Democrats To Hear Uncomfortable Truths

David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting, who became a vaunted progressive activist, announced plans Monday to run for vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.

And Hogg, who is currently president of Leaders We Deserve, a group backing Gen Z progressive candidates for office, is not seeking the position to make friends.

The Harvard graduate and co-founder of the gun control group March for Our Lives is running partly out of frustration that his warnings that Democrats had a problem with young men went unheeded before Election Day, and wants to make sure the party doesn’t make the same mistake twice. That means not just taking seriously the party’s waning traction with young men, but also being generally more encouraging of honest feedback from good-faith critics, according to Hogg.

“Part of the issue is that we’re surrounding ourselves with people who tell us what we want to hear instead of what we need to hear,” Hogg said. “I get that it’s uncomfortable to be told what you don’t want to hear, but we need to build that culture as a party.”

Hogg is still struck by the “ridicule” with which his warnings were met at a brunch held by the DNC Finance Committee during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, including follow-up messages from prominent Democrats admonishing him to stop publicly discussing the topic.

Hogg, who is 24, is also running because he thinks it’s important for Democrats to take age diversity seriously. He recalled how dramatically he would bring down the median age while attending the DNC’s executive council and rules and bylaws committee meetings.

“If we’re a party that claims to champion diversity, we need to have diversity of age as well at the table, and not in just a symbolic way, but in a real way that gives us the authority to speak out and be in these meetings,” Hogg said.

The DNC has a vice chair for civic engagement and voter participation, and three general vice chair positions. The party’s convening arm will assemble to elect a new chair, vice chairs, secretary, treasurer and finance chair on Feb. 1.

When there is a Democratic president, it has been customary for the DNC members to quietly approve the president’s picks for chair as well as vice chairs.

But this year, with the party out of power, the vice chair contests are expected to be competitive.

In addition to Hogg, James Zogby, founder of the Arab-American Institute and a longtime DNC member, officially announced his run for vice chair on Friday.

This year’s leading contenders to chair the DNC have largely focused on how they would improve the DNC’s operations.

But many Democrats remain hungry for a conversation about the party’s strategic missteps in 2024, and Hogg is clearly one of them. He intends to make use of the bully pulpit to amplify — and act upon — his analysis of Democrats’ loss of power in Washington.

For example, he sees the debate over Vice President Kamala Harris’ decision not to do an interview with Joe Rogan, a right-leaning podcaster with a massive and disproportionately male audience, as a symptom of the same tendency to avoid grappling with uncomfortable truths that led Democrats not to confront their youth problem until it was too late.

“I don’t think her going on Joe Rogan necessarily would have decided the election, by any means,” he said. “But I think it speaks to a broader problem within the party where we’re choosing to live in a comfortable delusion a lot of the time of where the country actually is, rather than an uncomfortable reality of where it is.”

As for the podcaster himself, Hogg added, “The reality is, Joe Rogan cannot give an adversarial interview to save his life.”

Hogg also faults Democrats for failing to express more empathy for people experiencing economic hardship, and for sometimes proposing policy reforms with eligibility requirements that make people’s heads spin.

“We’re overcomplicating things when we talk about our policies a lot of the time,” he said. “An example of that is it seems like a lot of the time we have all these rules around who can actually get different support for things.”