Before dropping out of the race in July, President Joe Biden faced few direct challengers to his 2024 presidential nomination. Among the few longshot contenders was Brown alum and Rep. Dean Phillips ’91 (D-M.N.), who cited the need for a new generation of Democratic leadership when announcing his campaign last fall.
A year and a Trump win later, Phillips spoke about the future of American democracy in a Monday night conversation hosted by the Brown Political Union. He addressed a campus community where approximately 90% of eligible undergraduate students planned to vote for Harris.
Upon introducing himself, Phillips made two requests of the audience: “to leave here a little bit more optimistic than you came in” and to “be a participant in public service.”
He described his bid for the presidential nomination as “a mission of principle” and one of “the most painful few months” of his life, but also as a joyful period. “It wasn’t necessarily about winning. It was about doing what I asked all of you to do, what I expect my daughters to do. It’s being a participant, not an observer.”
Phillips also emphasized the importance of empathy and acceptance of diverging viewpoints for future success within the Democratic Party. “Condemnation is the root of Democrats’ problems,” he said. “When you cancel somebody, when you tell them they don’t have the right education, or you tell them that they’re not the right color, or they’re not the right religion, or that their socioeconomic status doesn’t qualify them for the conversation, you’re basically just pushing them to some other party.”
“People will vote against their self interest in the spirit of being part of a tribe,” he said. “That’s all we care about as human beings: being heard and then congregating with people who accept you.”
Audience member Carson Bauer ’26 said that Phillips’s talk made him “more optimistic about the future.”
“In the past I had thought that Dean Phillips did a bad thing running against Biden in the presidency because I thought that we should keep a united Democratic Party,” Bauer said. “But I realize now that it was a very courageous thing that he did.”
“I feel like we need more people like Dean Phillips in the political space,” Sohali Vaddula ’27 said. Vaddula, who followed Phillips’s presidential campaign closely last year, added that she believes that Democrats “need to start getting back to (its) working class roots.”
Erin Ozyurek ’27 praised Phillips’s ideas for the future of the Democratic Party as “accurate” and “strategic.” But she also said that certain suggestions, such as the suggestion that Democrats need to “cater to young white men more,” might be “hard to swallow for a lot of people.”
Former U.S. Representative David Cicilline ’83, a former colleague of Phillips who was also recently appointed to Brown’s Corporation, also attended the talk.
“I think his remarks tonight reflected what a thoughtful public servant he has been and how much he’s learned during the course of his time in elected office,” he said.
“He has always been very open to listening to people who have different views than he does,” Cicilline added.
Malcolm Furman ’27, who moderated the talk, said that Phillips “made a strong case for
for Americans and Democrats to think more deeply” about “why people vote the way they do, even if you disagree with them.”
“We need more empathy,” Furman added. “We need more understanding.”
Grace Hu is a senior staff writer covering graduate student life. She is a sophomore from Massachusetts studying English and Neuroscience.
