In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s electoral defeat and the Democrats’ loss of major political power, there has emerged a fierce debate over how the party is to recover and regain political power. One faction insists that Democrats should focus on forging a new political coalition with emerging minorities by focusing on identity politics and trusting that demographic shifts will deliver inevitable victory.

The other major faction wants to woo back the white working class with economic populism like in the olden days and drop troublesome identity politics that frighten away voters. Both sides of this debate are wrong and represent the kind of idiotic thinking that got the party into this mess in the first place. The fact is that you can have identity politics and economic populism and to prove it I’m going to invoke one of its most ardent and eloquent defenders, Martin Luther King.

For the average American, King is a man frozen in time right at the height of his advocacy in August 1963 when he gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The next five years of his life are ignored until his death in April 1968. It’s the biographical equivalent of watching a movie until the climax then walking out and only returning to see the end credits. This ignorance misses what are arguably some of the most interesting years of his life and work. Contained within this period is one of the perfect attempts at a synthesis of identity politics and economic liberalism.

Consider for starters King’s principled and unpopular condemnation against the Vietnam War. The speeches he gave against the war remain as damning and insightful today as they did 50 years ago. He identified the war effort as stealing money, manpower, and time better spent on tackling domestic issues and improving our own country, rather than destroying a foreign one. He identified the diplomatic damage the war caused by alienating longtime allies and mocking international institutions meant to stop senseless violence.

And he identified the moral damage done to the country by betraying its founding ideals and making its citizens callous to suffering and violence. His concern was focused specifically on how the war would affect his own civil rights goals, but he included the effects on everyone. Considering our own long-running and futile wars and the cost they incur, it’s a sentiment to consider carefully.

It is during this time he signed on to a plan with a coalition of activists of all political stripes to end poverty within a decade without raising taxes. The plan, called the Freedom Budget, proposed using economic growth to fund federal jobs, education, healthcare, and housing program, which would, in turn, generate even more economic growth to pay for itself.

The plan was laid out in a simple no-nonsense manner; free from technobabble, professional jargon, and trendy buzzwords to make it comprehensible to the very people it was trying to help. King endorsed the plan with an eye to how it would help African Americans, but he fully realized how it would help all Americans black or white.

But perhaps the greatest undertaking he embarked on during this time, and one he would tragically never see was the Poor People’s Campaign. The campaign aimed to make the proposals of the Freedom Budget a reality by organizing a massive million-person march on the capitol to demand government action on poverty.

King knew that poverty and racism were linked and that inaction on one meant no change in the other, the only way blacks would get equal rights would be to get economic justice. This was the message that King died for 50 years ago, that identity politics and economic justice can work together and must work together to succeed.

I cannot say why modern liberals seem to have forgotten this lesson, whether it is supreme arrogance that their mastery of quantitative data gives them or profound ignorance that their neglect of political history and philosophy grants them. Whatever the reason, it only serves as a detriment to Democrats and liberals everywhere that they ignore these lessons despite their overwhelming usefulness.

King may be gone, but his ideas are still just as potent as they were when he was alive and we are fools if we do not use them to our full ability. After all, what better way could we honor a man who spent his life-fighting racism than to use his ideas to drive racists out of office.