The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.

Forty-four years ago, Senator Ted Kennedy ended his speech to the 1980 Democratic National Convention, and his campaign for the party's nomination, with those inspirational words. The Democratic nominee, the President Jimmy Carter, would ultimately lose reelection that fall.

If you've never watched his speech, you really should do so. Senator Kennedy lays out the values we hold as Democrats and the significant contrast of Republicans' varying degrees of indifference to straight out hostility to the challenges facing Americans.

Republicans have recently put on the mask of populism in order to convince voters that shoveling the benefits of massive tax cuts to the very rich will later benefit the average American. In the same campaign, Republican hopeful George H. W. Bush called Ronald Reagan's supply-side economic plans as 'voodoo economics'. Ultimately, Reagan's plans never produced the increases in wages and consumer spending that he promised while at the same time he ballooned the deficit and national debt.

Similarly, Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts did not pay for themselves as promised, nor did it create the promised increase in wages of $4,000 to $9,000 per worker. Just like Reagan, Trump's tax cuts increased the deficit and massively increased national debt.

While history has shown time and time again that Republican economic theory doesn't pan out as promised, Republicans have pivoted to populist fear-mongering. No amount of dehumanizing LGBTQ individuals is going to change the fact that tax cuts for the rich don't lead to a significant increase in wages. Similarly, there isn't a magic number of undocumented immigrants deported that will pay down the national debt. Cutting SNAP (food stamp) benefits isn't going to help a struggling family pay their bills and phasing out Social Security and Medicare won't reduce unemployment.

The reality is that Donald Trump and Republicans don't have solutions to the problems that Americans all over the country face. They just hope that you'll stay mad at people who are different than you and don't notice your pocket being picked.