Millions of Americans approve of the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate supposedly wasteful federal spending by any means necessary. That puts my party in a bind. But Democrats must do more than just confront the cuts. We must also break free from a stale, conventional platform.
We have to acknowledge what we spectacularly failed to recognize in the last election — that the status quo is broken and Americans are feeling a righteous anger about the real damage that the governing class has done to their lives over the past few decades.
With the establishment of both parties defeated, we are, as you may have heard, at a fork in the road. Either the country will continue to succumb to a burn-it-all-down political nihilism and disillusionment, or Democrats can use this moment of crisis to reframe the terms of the debate. We must persuade people that transformative government is capable of improving their lives by reversing what many have experienced as decades of stagnation and decline.
What is saddest to me about the rise of President Trump — and his elevation of those fixated on dismantling our institutions, such as Russell Vought and Stephen Miller — is that it reflects the deep disdain that many Americans have for politicians and politics. They think we roll out poll-tested policies for votes. They think we spend too much time raising money and catering to wealthy donors. They think we prioritize procedure over action.
As a result, many would rather have Elon Musk and nearly a dozen other brash billionaires disrupt bureaucracy and just get the government out of the way. They have responded to a simple but bygone vision of American expansionism led by business tycoons who see the federal project as a relic oppressing private enterprise and believe deregulation is the answer to America’s problems.
It was not always this way. Perhaps, more than any nation in the world, we take pride in self-government. I remember the exhilaration I felt when I spoke up as a high school student at a school board meeting in the early 1990s, published an opinion essay in my suburban Philadelphia paper, The Bucks County Courier Times, and mustered the courage to ask my congressman, Peter Kostmayer, a Democrat, a question.
As a young Indian American in Pennsylvania, I grew up with the quiet confidence that this government was as much mine as anyone else’s. It is this spirit, which I inherited as a birthright, along with my American citizenship, that allowed us not just to come together to mobilize for war, but also to pass Social Security, a minimum wage and Medicare.
How do we begin, then, to build a transformational instead of a transactional politics? For one, we need to see and hear people. It is rough out there. Over 23 percent of Americans cannot find full-time work or make over a $25,000 poverty wage. Instead of talking about joy, Democratic representatives like Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, Delia Ramirez of Illinois and Pat Ryan of New York are out in their communities hearing directly from those who have been shafted. They are going to factories, restaurants and sporting events to build their platforms, not relying on a network of donor-funded NGOs, think tanks or focus groups conducted by inside-the-Beltway consultants.
Actually listening can help heal divisions in a nation that, despite appearances to the contrary, is longing for reconciliation. For this to happen, the first step is for my party not to look down on people who have differing viewpoints on social or cultural issues. “Canceling” needs to stop, as does policing language and lecturing people on exactly how they must express themselves. Without giving up on our values as a party, we should respect different ways of life across our vast nation and show humility about our own prejudices and imperfections.
Even those Americans who are deeply skeptical about the distant federal government will acknowledge the importance of investing in manufacturing and innovation. In 2023, Chinese banks lent about $670 billion to industries in mainland China. They are investing in industries of the future including semiconductors, advanced steel and biotech.
In order to compete, the U.S. government must work with dynamic business leaders and facilitate bank lending to build new steel and pill factories, prepare next-generation tradespeople and A.I. analysts, and set up advanced credentialing centers that enhance skills and bargaining in caregiving, marketing and food services, which will lift wages for millions.
When the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was still a senator, he and I put together a bipartisan bill to make this vision a reality. It would create a National Development Council to tap into all the expertise and genius in America to rebuild places like Johnstown, Pa., and Milwaukee. The bill would unlock financing over 10 years to position America for a complete reconstruction of our industrial base, to become, once again, a modern manufacturing superpower, bringing wealth into towns that is spent locally and leading to new high-paying jobs that last. We must be a nation of producers as well as consumers and erase our staggering trade deficit.
The Biden administration took steps toward smart industrial policy, but got little credit because it failed to make an effective case that these policies marked a radical departure from neoliberalism. They also failed to set clear benchmarks for putting those policies into effect and for operational excellence. Execution matters.
As a representative from Silicon Valley, I serve what is arguably the most financially muscular congressional district in history and understand what it will take for the federal government to get major initiatives done. There is a difference between the techno-libertarians in the Trump administration, who see government as an obstacle that needs to be torn down, and business statesmen like Intel’s Andy Grove. Mr. Grove, who died in 2016, and others like him understood government’s strategic value and championed the best management practices.
Government agencies must emphasize measurable results and fast cycles of iteration. We should simplify approval processes with a kind of fast pass for important projects, make government procurement more competitive, and make sure investments are sustainable. We should take on the sacred cows of wasteful Pentagon spending and Medicare Advantage fraud while firmly protecting federal benefits for our people and upholding the constitutional role of Congress.
Democrats must ensure that workers, not just executives, benefit in the new industrial age. With 10 percent of Americans owning 93 percent of stock market wealth, workers need real stakes in the businesses they help build.
Our government should encourage broad-based stock ownership, profit-sharing and worker seats on corporate boards. As A.I. and robotics rapidly redefine industries, workers deserve not just higher wages but a share of the wealth they create and the dignity of shaping their own workplaces. Mr. Biden and our party showed a lack of fight and misplaced deference to arcane procedure when we failed to call for the firing of the Senate parliamentarian when she kept us from delivering a minimum-wage increase as part of a budget-reconciliation package in 2021.
While anti-system political appointees are working to take away funding for cancer research and decent schools in working-class neighborhoods, we need to offer a counter vision that government is a force for good.
Many working-class Americans worn out from decades of physical labor suffer the added indignity of being denied the health care they need. Our government should provide every American with Medicare so that their treatments are covered by their local private doctors and hospitals. As a first step, we must have regulations that forbid insurance companies to refuse to pay for medically necessary care. And for a generation in which many parents are juggling work and kids, our government can facilitate a wide choice of $10 a day child care in communities and require higher pay for child care workers. This investment in toddlers and preschoolers, when their minds are primed for learning, is perhaps the single best bet we can make on our nation’s future.
We can quibble about this or that policy or program, but what it comes down to is that instead of a politics of deconstruction, we must make the case for mobilizing federal and local governments, the private sector and the civic sector around a common mission of economic independence for all Americans. Economic empowerment is not just one of many issues Democrats are interested in, but our defining cause. Amid the overlapping waves of the Trump crisis, we must stand for a new economic patriotism.
Inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrats can win the public’s confidence by enlisting technologists, financiers, labor and business leaders and academics — not to dismiss civil servants, but to reassert government’s role in confronting inequality and driving economic growth in struggling communities. The scale and urgency of our national ambition, as people sense a palpable fear of being eclipsed by China, can sweep away bureaucratic foot-dragging and inspire spectacular achievements.
That is not all. We must be crusaders against corruption because right now only politicians with independence, who dare to call out the status quo, will get a hearing from the public. This has to mean more than lofty promises about getting money out of politics or overturning Citizens United, which people may doubt will come to pass anytime soon.
We should lead with concrete initiatives such as replicating, nationally and in the other 49 states, Maine’s referendum that limited the contributions the wealthy can make to super PACs (which passed with more than 70 percent of the vote). We should refuse PAC money, bar members of Congress from becoming lobbyists once they leave office, and call for term limits for ourselves and Supreme Court justices.
I know some may dismiss this as a long wish list of new Democratic initiatives. But taken together, looked at as a program to counter the assaults on the public sphere by Mr. Trump and Mr. Vought and Mr. Musk, it’s much more than that. We need a new generation unafraid to overhaul our broken politics, overcoming entrenched party sclerosis, and our unequal economy, which has snatched livelihoods and agency from too many.
The alternative to Mr. Trump cannot be a defense of institutions as they are. We need to stand for national renewal driven not by nostalgia for some golden past or simplistic anti-system slogans, but by offering transformative solutions to deliver future prosperity for all Americans, rekindling our bonds as citizens and healing our divides in the process.
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