A year ago at this time we were all flying high, eagerly preparing to meet the challenges of “the middle-out moment.” Then came November’s brutal election.

But while our spirits may have crashed, the middle-out moment is still here. The challenges have merely grown larger, the timeline longer, and the consequences of failing grimmer.

The next four years may deliver crisis after crisis to our nation and our people, but they will also give us the time and the opportunity to lay a stronger foundation on which to build the middle-out future we want. We now have four more years to refine our economic theories and our political narratives and to assemble a middle-out policy agenda big and bold and compelling enough to win over a majority of voters. We have four more years to persuade those policymakers and pundits who are open to persuasion, and to push back hard on the power and reputation of those who are not. We have four more years to sow the seeds of our ideas on the fertile ground of an academic field enriched by the ashes of economic orthodoxy. We have four more years to cultivate the new generation of economists who will train and inspire generations to come.

The next four years aren’t about the next four years; they are about the four decades that will follow. Donald Trump’s victory notwithstanding, neoliberalism is dead, and something will replace it. What that something is—a middle-out consensus or the chaotic nonsense of a Trumpist cult—depends in part on what we accomplish now.

Nothing that happened in November should be mistaken as a sign of a neoliberal revival or as a repudiation of the middle-out alternative we put forth. Yes, a majority of voters rejected the Democratic ticket, but it was far from a landslide. Trump’s Electoral College margin ranked thirty-ninth out of the last 50 presidential elections, and his 1.5 percent popular vote margin ranked just forty-first—this in a historically bad year for incumbents worldwide on the left, right, and center. Largely due to voter discontent over the post-COVID economy, every governing party in every developed nation that held elections last year lost voter share, marking the first time this has happened in 120 years of record-keeping. There was absolutely nothing exceptional about America or its electorate.

Yes, in words and in deeds, Joe Biden was the most middle-out President of our lifetime, and Kamala Harris could not help but be perceived as a continuation of his economic legacy. But her defeat at the polls was not a rejection of their policies or their messaging. The economic proposals on which Harris campaigned proved broadly popular, and the swing states where she spent heavily to promote her message tended to shift less red than the uncontested states where she did not. Down ticket, too, middle-out performed well, with swing-district Democrats like Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Andrea Salinas of Oregon, who leaned into the narrative, outperforming those who timidly shied away. Thanks in part to the party’s middle-out message, Democrats actually picked up a seat in the House, leaving Republicans with a slim and ungovernable five-seat majority.

But Democrats have been shedding working-class voters for decades, and there wasn’t enough time for a middle-out message to reverse this trend. Few voters understood the extraordinary scope of Biden’s legislative accomplishments or thought much about them if they did. Assuming Trump doesn’t dismantle or sabotage them, the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will no doubt pay tangible benefits to millions of Americans for decades to come, yet they had little real impact on the lives of most voters in the here and now. By contrast, the dramatic spike in post-pandemic inflation did impact voters, as did the rapid rise in interest rates that followed. These higher costs caused real pain at the same time that many pandemic-era safety net expansions came to an end. The stimulus checks, the child tax credit, Medicaid and unemployment insurance expansions, the eviction and foreclosure bans, the student loan repayment pause, and other popular supports all expired during the Biden Administration, leading to higher rates of financial hardship during the economic recovery than during the COVID recession itself.

By almost every objective measure, Biden’s economy was the strongest in decades and the envy of the world—our GDP growth was faster, our jobless rate lower, our inflation more fleeting than those of many other rich nations. But subjectively, it just didn’t feel that way to the large plurality of voters who ranked “inflation and cost of living” as the most important issue the next President should address. During the final weeks of the campaign these voters broke heavily toward Trump, not on ideological grounds, but because they wanted something better for themselves and their families.

But this vote against Harris was most certainly not a vote for neoliberalism. In fact, Trump’s pro-tariff, anti-trade, anti-immigration platform was as much (if not more) a rejection of neoliberal orthodoxy as anything offered up by Democrats. And though the economic priorities of congressional Republicans may look neoliberal, this wildly unpopular, “same old, same old” agenda of tax cuts, entitlement cuts, and assaults on Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, and labor is more a sign of rigor mortis than of ideological rigor. If the modern GOP is driven by neoliberalism, it’s a neoliberalism in Full Self-Driving mode, careening off a cliff without thought or reason or animating purpose.

These policies aren’t ideological. They’re muscle memory. They’re reflex. They’re the galvanic twitches of a dead idea.

And yet, ideas still matter, especially the big ones.

Trump, to his credit, has always had a knack for enthralling voters with his crazy big ideas—like invading Greenland, annexing Canada, and replacing the income tax with tariffs on Chinese imports. Instructively, it’s the bigness, not the craziness or even the ideas, that is the secret to Trump’s appeal. To borrow a quote about He Who Must Not Be Named, Trump promises to do great things: “Terrible, yes, but great.” That these things may not be advisable or popular or even possible misses the point. The cartoonish immensity of Trump’s ideas is a signal to voters that he understands the immensity of their dissatisfaction—and that he is willing to do great things, even terrible things, on their behalf.

If we want to win in four years, we must promise to do great things too. For example, a $25 per hour minimum wage; a $100,000 overtime threshold; a $500 per month child tax credit; an ambitious plan to construct not one million, not two million, but ten million affordable new homes—enough not only to eliminate our nation’s housing shortage but to replace millions of dilapidated homes as well. For every economic pain point in the lives of working- and middle-class Americans—for health care, child care, elder care, education, and more—we should be proposing big ideas with big round numbers that send a big signal to voters that we understand both the size of the problem and the need to address it at scale.

Would such big policies risk inflation? Maybe. If there’s one thing economists have proven, it’s that they have absolutely no idea. But we can’t win big in 2028 without promising to solve big problems, and we can’t solve big problems without taking a few risks.

And to be clear, the problem at the heart of the American economy is almost unimaginably big. The bottom 90 percent of working Americans lost $3.9 trillion to rising inequality in 2023. That is enough to give every full-time worker in the bottom nine deciles a $32,000 a year raise. If not for rising inequality, median incomes would be double what they are today. Over the past five decades, according to a recently updated report from the RAND Corporation, the cumulative gap between what most workers earned and what they would have earned had inequality remained at 1975 levels has widened to an astounding $79 trillion—mostly due to the ever-rising share of national income captured by those in the top 1 percent.

If you wonder why so many voters were so pessimistic about such an objectively strong economy, these new numbers offer 79 trillion good reasons why. The bottom 90 percent of Americans are now $79 trillion poorer, less secure, and less resilient than they would be if the top 1 percent had not monopolized the gains from the past half-century of economic growth. The overwhelming majority of Americans now have 79 trillion reasons (and counting) to believe that the economy is unfairly rigged by those at the top—and to bitterly resent them for it.

Unlike Republicans, Democrats actually take governance seriously, and serious people tend to dismiss big new proposals as unserious ideas. And sometimes they are. But the first rule of electoral politics is that you can’t be the grown-up in the room if you’re not in the room. If we are serious about rebuilding the middle class, we need to be serious about winning elections. And if we are serious about winning elections, we need to offer voters an agenda stuffed fat with big, bold new ideas.

Good policy makes for good politics. Big policy makes for even better politics when that’s what the moment demands. It also makes for better narrative by suckering the opposition into raising the question at the core of the middle-out message: “How will you pay for all these great things?” The answer is simple. A large and prosperous middle class is the primary cause of economic growth, not its consequence. And that means a policy that grows the middle class always pays for itself.

Prosperity grows from the middle out. That is the biggest new idea of them all.

Neoliberalism was once a big new idea too, and while Milton Friedman may have been dead wrong when it came to economic theory, that doesn’t mean we can’t look to him for inspiration when it comes to his theory of change. “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change,” Friedman wrote in the preface to the bible of neoliberalism, Capitalism and Freedom. “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

Trump’s reelection all but guarantees that a crisis is coming, and that it’s going to be big. The middle-out project over the next four years must be to advance ideas that are big enough to address that crisis when it comes.

“That, I believe, is our basic function,” wrote Friedman, “to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Friedman labored for decades on the fringe of respectability before his moment finally came. We can surely labor another four years.