The political story of the 2020s is half-written—two wildly unorthodox Trump Administrations bookending a single Biden term, all three breaking in significant ways from the bipartisan economic consensus of the previous five decades. People had stopped believing in that old markets-first approach, because the results it promised didn’t accord with the reality they experienced every day. They listened to policymakers tout ideas that were “good for the economy,” but over the decades they saw a long and precipitous erosion of job quality and the wholesale export of jobs overseas. They struggled to find any kind of job at all in the years after the Great Recession. They watched the stock market climb to new heights as their communities got hollowed out and their small businesses got decimated. They lived with the constant insecurity of knowing that a single emergency or health crisis could destroy their finances. Over and over, people have voiced frustrations with the way things are, and have rejected the institutions, corporations, and politicians who made them that way.

Now, we find ourselves in the midst of a contest for what will come next. Will this be the century of Trump? The President is more a destroyer than a builder, carrying out ill-conceived new policies without a clear ideology and throwing out populist crumbs even while signing the most regressive budget law in 40 years. But figures like JD Vance are attempting to stitch together more coherent versions of his template: a right-wing populism that channels people’s anger into an intolerant politics of revenge and nostalgia while consolidating authoritarian power.

Or will this be a more forward-looking era, one in which people can shape the economy they need and want? To secure that future, the left will need to solidify a new understanding of how the economy works, what makes it grow, and what drives shared prosperity. We will need to listen harder to people’s problems and aspirations and build our policies and our politics around them. In building this new agenda, we must not divorce the what from the how: The Biden Administration, though trying to break with the economic policies of the past, was stuck working with old and broken systems that are not built to respond to people’s experiences of the world. In some instances, that meant trying different approaches but using the same old tools, like tax credits and subsidies. In others, it meant putting money for transformative industrial policy through the same creaky old government pipes that move too slowly. To most people, these efforts didn’t look or feel different at a moment when they really needed to.

Put another way, Biden’s suite of policies was an agenda detached from politics. By politics, I don’t just mean the electoral kind. I mean the kind of energy that develops around a political project that activates and includes people. In a time of declining public trust, we missed an opportunity to create the virtuous cycle of democratic legitimacy and momentum that is needed to build toward something new.

The stakes going forward are high. People’s struggles to make ends meet and to share meaning with their families and communities are playing out in the context of seismic forces set to shape our economy no matter what we do. Climate change threatens everything from our homes to our financial system, and Trump’s recent reconciliation bill will only supercharge those risks. Meanwhile, technological development and deployment—currently in the hands of massive, democratically unaccountable companies—are set to reshape the nature of work. We will need an upwelling of both will and belief to wrestle these and other forces toward a sustainable and inclusive future.

To win the contest of ideas, we must invite people into the process of policymaking. That is how we can create the momentum needed to rebalance power, reforge the social compact, and fulfill the promise of economic security. As FDR showed us in his day, there is no better defense against authoritarianism than a democratic economy that empowers and works for everyone. We can build such an economy—but first, we need to understand how we got here.

The Long Road to Our Populist Moment

The unique trials of the 2020s have decisively undermined old economic ideas and norms. Across both the Trump 1.0 and Biden Administrations, the COVID pandemic spurred politicians to make massive public investments in vaccine development and mobilization, direct cash payments, and a brief expansion of the social safety net. The results, particularly those of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) in President Biden’s first year, showed us what we can achieve when we act with the boldness our moment demands—a record-fast jobs recovery, a halving of the child poverty rate (tragically temporary), and more.

Those years also showed us that the impact of big-picture macroeconomic wins is limited when we don’t take our cues from how people experience the economy. Inflation became a defining economic story of the COVID era. Even the most conservative estimates suggest that less than half of the 2021 surge in inflation can be attributed to the ARP, and most estimates put the figure much lower. (Of course, that didn’t stop the same policymakers who blew the last three recession recoveries from blaming the ARP or waving off the labor rebound and increases in worker power that it produced.) But the public wasn’t looking for economists’ rationales. They were resentful that their already unmanageable cost of living had gotten even worse, and that our institutions had failed to address it.

But the root of the problem, and of the anger and despair that define this uncertain moment, has been with us for far longer than this Trump-Biden-Trump era.

For decades, despite living in the world’s richest country, many Americans have not been able to live the lives they want. What they thought they were promised—a decent job and benefits, a roof over their heads, some predictability and agency in the course of their lives—has been eroding for a long time. For a lifetime. What they’ve experienced instead is exploitation in their workplaces and the gigification of their careers and industries. They have felt frustration in their interactions with an increasingly financialized corporate world that always wants to charge more for less, and is always finding new ways to box out upstarts. They’ve watched the glimmering promises of globalization translate into layoffs and shuttered storefronts in their communities, and they’ve lost loved ones to a parade of crises from meth to prescription opioids to fentanyl—compounding into a crisis of deaths of despair. And as I saw in the late aughts while organizing in Black, urban communities in places like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Orangeburg, South Carolina, these frustrations, though different in flavor, have run deep throughout the multiracial working class for a long time.

In the face of this discontent, high-profile government failures of the early 2000s—people stranded on roofs and clamoring for help after Hurricane Katrina, Wall Street firms bailed out as foreclosure signs peppered the nation’s streets—left Americans feeling not only that government was unrepresentative and incompetent, but that it was a negative force in their lives. Trump rose to power in part by speaking to this discontent. But rather than delivering the economic security and agency the public has demanded for decades, or the meaning and connection we all yearn for, his policies are wreaking chaos, instability, and pain.

This Administration’s actions have laid bare the dangers of corporate cronyism and corruption in ways that must be seen to be believed. Even more than in his first term, President Trump has unabashedly used the powers and perch of the presidency to enrich himself, his family, and his allies. At the micro level, we see the brazenness of the $Trump memecoin and the hawking of Tesla on the White House lawn. At the macro and far more damaging level, we have seen a neoliberalism on steroids: DOGE’s attempted dismantling of agencies that protect workers and consumers and hold companies accountable, a so-called “big, beautiful bill” that slashes essential services in the name of budget cuts while ballooning the national debt with tax cuts for billionaires. While posing as a kind of hero for the left-behind, President Trump is shamelessly hoarding more and more of the pie for himself, for those with the means to strike deals with him, and for the wealthy at large, who will benefit from the largest upward transfer of wealth we have ever seen.

These moves are, by and large, unpopular. Even previously vigorous supporters who have been directly hurt by these actions are waking up and taking exception. But without an alternative, that disaffection does nothing but simmer.

Working people are angrier than ever. And missing this populist moment, this fleeting window for persuasion, would be a grave mistake if we want to win the fight for what comes next.

Putting People at the Core of Economic Policy

As recent history teaches us, when working people say the economy isn’t serving them, policymakers need to listen—even when our standard top-line macro indicators seem sound. Pandemic-era economic policy got a lot right on the macro front, prioritizing emergency support and full employment and staving off deeper labor market scarring. But when inflation started to intensify the very precarity and uncertainty that had been plaguing people for decades, they didn’t see a policy agenda that matched the scale of their biggest daily problems: making rent, paying for groceries, finding affordable care for their families. Working people didn’t feel that their concerns were top of mind for their public servants, and no lamenting of congressional gridlock or trumpeting of Bidenomics could convince them otherwise.

As we set our agenda now, we must avoid making the same mistake. And I worry that we’re about to. Key movement allies are becoming disaffected from party politics while wealthy donors are flexing their power and trying to define what the left stands for in this moment with messaging plays that are sure to miss their mark. Worse, we can see in places like New York City, where mayoral primary winner Zohran Mamdani has faced furious opposition, that moneyed interests are keen to quash even the most innovative and popular of leaders out of financial self-interest. We are taking our cues from the moneyed elite and eating our own.

Instead, politicians and policymakers need to take our cues from what working people are most worried, upset, and frustrated about. We must have the humility to listen to how people experience their days and weeks, what makes their lives difficult, and what goals they wish were attainable. When people go to work or to the store, when they wait on the phone on hold, or when they try to make it home to rest or care for family: What makes them feel most powerless, or powerful?

To be clear, we shouldn’t expect people to have the answers (though policymakers might be surprised at how often they do). And we should remember that people’s imaginations—like those of too many policymakers—can be bound by what they have experienced. Perhaps most of us can’t truly imagine a four-day workweek. But people are experts on what’s not working in their lives. And when so many say they don’t have the time to both care for their loved ones and make a living, policymakers need to take that cue, look to the structural roots of the challenge, and find clear, simple solutions that meet the concern expressed.

If one key outcome people want from this new world is a sense of agency, of mastery over the important aspects of their lives, then this work will necessarily be hard and messy. The answer cannot be a fully formed theory pulled out of a box, much as many of us are clamoring for immediate proposals on a political timeline. To be successful, solutions must be co-created with the people we ask to believe in our vision.

What we need is an organizer’s approach to agenda-setting—and in fact, the Biden Administration’s competition-focused agencies executed on just that to great effect. Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) were able to go beyond writing new rules. By bringing the public into the agenda-setting process and making bolder use of the tools they had, policymakers were able to build trust in their agencies and create momentum that became self-reinforcing.

How We Did It at the FTC

Let me give you a case study in democratic agenda-setting based on what I saw firsthand as chief of staff and head of policy at Lina Khan’s FTC. We built an ambitious populist agenda that racked up high-profile victories for workers, small businesses, and consumers. The work drew the ire of Big Tech, grocery megachains, and the like, but it also attracted a broad cross-section of vocal supporters ranging from Hasan Piker to Josh Hawley. Most importantly, we heard from thousands of Americans who told us how the FTC could make a positive impact in their lives.

Our charge at the FTC was to democratize the agency and our agenda, and an important focus was to create meaningful mechanisms for public input. That could take multiple forms, including open comment dockets asking for general information, like descriptions of contracts that felt unfair; open commission meetings that allowed anyone to come present a market concern, regardless of the official agenda; and listening on specific policy or litigation matters to ensure that we were getting input about how particular market structures or interventions worked in practice.

The stories we heard were the driving force of our work. They were accounts of the problems people faced in their transactions each day, described not in legalese but in plain language: I can’t turn a profit because I’m being squeezed. I can’t get out of this overwhelming and impenetrable contract. Many such stories came from workers who felt held back by the legal threat of noncompete agreements, contractual clauses that prevent workers from taking jobs in the same industry as their current one or starting a related business. These stories captured a reality faced by millions more Americans, nearly one in five of whom are subject to a noncompete.

In response, the FTC proposed a rule to ban noncompete clauses in labor contracts. I had the great privilege of leading the development of our proposed noncompete ban, and I believe its people-centered process offers a blueprint we can draw from in creating a broader populist agenda. While this is an example of just one tool—an executive branch rule-making—we can adapt the framework for different issues and for the legislative process as well.

One of our most important goals was to give the public meaningful ownership over the rules that shape their lives. That was crucial because people feel more positively about solutions they’re able to be a part of, which creates political buy-in. We often referred back to people’s firsthand accounts and experiences as we worked on the noncompete ban, and we created additional opportunities for participation throughout the policy development process. Intermediaries made the byzantine Federal Register accessible so that individual workers could tell the FTC what their unique experiences were in comments on the proposed rule. And that they did: The FTC received more than 26,000 comments on the ban, more than 25,000 of which supported it. We reflected people’s contributions back at them by using their stories in the final rule to illustrate the nature of coercion in the employment relationship. In that way, we were able to demystify some of the government-ese and literally put people back into the center of the story.

In addition to giving people a greater sense of agency in the policy process, the lived experiences those workers and others shared helped make the substance of our policymaking better, too. One big and meaty example: Whether we should place an income cap on the rule was both debated internally and asked about in the proposal. We got a huge response from higher-income workers that testified to their need to be included in this rule, in particular from workers in the health-care space, who described the effects of noncompetes not only on job quality but also, alarmingly, on patient care.

Lived experience also forced us to update our theoretical models. Our traditional economic models suggested that employers and workers entered into employment contracts on an equal playing field, that employers who struck these deals had legitimate business interests in doing so, and that the contracts had benefits important to economic growth. But the literature on labor markets suggested a very different bargaining environment—one rife with coercion and the exploitation of unequal bargaining power. In retrospect, this point is obvious: Anyone who has ever been faced with a stack of HR paperwork on their first day after quitting their previous job, moving to a new city, or otherwise rearranging their life knows that a worker is in no position to refuse a particular clause. That this was not our understanding to begin with points to the power of the status quo and of the prevailing “expert” wisdom.

And while some of the things people said should have been obvious, others were more surprising. For example, some workers felt noncompetes undermined not only their wages, but also their religious liberty, as they found themselves bound to workplaces that required them to violate their principles or take COVID shots they did not want. Some small businesses said noncompetes were actually a significant barrier to talent acquisition in ways that undermined business dynamism. While ordinary people may not have technical expertise on complex economic policy matters, their actual experience in market interactions can tell us where our models are wrong and what might be closer to right. It was incumbent upon us as policymakers to bend or break the existing framework until it could accommodate these actual dynamics, ensuring that our legal standards could take account of coercion as a salient analytical factor.

Another benefit of this more call-and-response style of policymaking is that it compelled us to develop solutions bold enough to meet the urgency people were conveying when they shared their problems with us. The depth of these kinds of frustrations cannot be met by incrementalism, or by solutions so complex they cannot be understood or felt. What we learned is that we have to flip our risk profile: Instead of preserving the legitimacy and authority of our institutions by carefully coloring within the lines, we must use all available tools to meet the moment. For us at the FTC, this looked like clear, simple bans: a ban on noncompete clauses, a ban on certain junk fees, a ban on certain types of opaque subscription cancellation processes. Our solutions must be felt by the people asking for them, clearly and immediately.

In directly seeing those solutions come into being, people can start to gain trust in their public servants and feel empowered by them. At the FTC, we aimed to do our work in plain daylight, in ways that centered people’s agency as core to our success. And it worked. Deborah Brantley, a bartender who faced sexual harassment at her old job and was then sued under a noncompete when she took a bartending job somewhere else, was one of the people who submitted a comment to the FTC. “I really felt hopeless, that the only chance I had, essentially, at not being homeless was the FTC,” she told Bloomberg Businessweek. After we announced our noncompete ban, Brantley reached a settlement and opened her own kava bar. “Reading some of the stuff Ms. Khan said made me show up and feel like I have a shot at changing things in my community and in my society.”

Prioritizing Agency in All of Our Policymaking

Brantley’s story captures the journey we want people to take: from feeling exploited by their workplace and powerless to do anything about it, to experiencing the security and agency needed to choose their own path. It’s a policymaking that can look seriously at power in our economy and rebalance it accordingly—in this case, from the employers who used their greater leverage to hold employees hostage to the workers who deserve the freedom and opportunity to work where they choose, start businesses, and innovate.

The FTC’s noncompete rule is one example of how we can do this. There are others, mostly at the state and local level. One example is our efforts when I was at the Washington, D.C. attorney general’s office to use our enforcement powers not only to enforce the law as written but to build power for tenants. We used the leverage of our enforcement actions to bring slumlords to the bargaining table with tenant organizations, helping to facilitate long-term solutions like purchases by nonprofit buyers who would fix up the housing and maintain it as affordable.

Some efforts can be people- and organizer-initiated, like the wildly successful “excluded workers” campaign by the Fund Excluded Workers Coalition in New York. After much hard work and an extended hunger strike, that campaign led to the creation of a $2.1 billion fund for workers otherwise excluded from pandemic relief programs. After passage, grassroots organizations helped develop the regulations governing the program to ensure maximum reach and uptake.

Efforts can also be spurred by advocacy steeped in real people’s concerns. The American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), a research and advocacy organization, has not only done the intellectual work of rethinking antitrust, but has also taken on campaigns against corporate power that mobilize and popularize the antimonopoly movement. For example, after some rents for multifamily housing rose by as much as 30 percent over just five years in cities across the country, AELP launched a campaign to support state and local lawmakers seeking to ban algorithmic collusion between landlords. The organization provided policy advice and communications support to tenant organizers, consumer groups, student groups, and workers across states and several municipalities, resulting in new city ordinances in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and other places. AELP had a view about how markets worked, but they understood that their solution was only worthwhile if it fit the problem people were experiencing—and that the solution’s success would depend on the willingness of organizations on the ground to fight for it themselves.

Co-creating policy with people can look like regulation, like enforcement, like benefit delivery. It can be at the federal, state, or local level. The key is that wherever practicable, the process itself creates agency and meaningful participation, in addition to ensuring that the results actually solve core problems. Where not practicable—where the policy is too technical or the process too arcane, as in, say, rate-setting at the Federal Reserve—policymaking can still be transparent enough to allow for innovative approaches to public involvement. And where policy is complex, as in banking or health care, we can still look for the points at which the current structures create the most friction for people and are most likely to incite anger and action. Then it is our responsibility to invite people into policymaking by telling the story of how the system works and how it could work better.

We also have to make sure that everyone can see themselves in these stories and in the “how” of this work. That means understanding the ways our economic and political structures fall differently on different groups and crafting solutions that break down rather than reinforce stratification by race, gender, and ability.

And there’s another reason to make sure we are bringing everyone along. To get to a more equitable and democratic future, we will need to dislodge a set of entrenched moneyed interests from their position of power. Being populist isn’t cheap. It means taking on the power structures that underlie our politics, our philanthropy, and so much more. And The Empire Always Strikes Back. We saw that in the persistent calls by megadonors for Kamala Harris to commit to firing Lina Khan from the FTC once in office. But picking fights, in addition to being the right thing to do, also serves a public purpose. The costs we are willing to bear also define us. They demonstrate that we are on the side of workers and help energize people into a movement to take back control of their lives. The best protection against the wrath of powerful interests is the unmistakable popularity of the agenda we create. While at the time of this writing the FTC appears poised to decline to defend the noncompete rule in court, the fact that even some of Khan’s agenda has survived into the current Administration demonstrates its staying power.

A “Good Life” Agenda

We need a set of policies and politics—co-created and developed with the people—that speak to our collective yearning for a good life. That said, we’re not starting with a blank slate. People have been consistent and clear in identifying today’s most deeply felt problems. Many of us can’t afford the essentials of life—housing, child care, health care. We have limited choices on everything from where we live, to when we work, to whether we can start a business of our own. We feel powerless in our workplaces and in our government, and at the mercy of more powerful people. We have little control over the important things in our lives.

A “good life” agenda has to start with changing the structures, seen and unseen, that inhibit or fail to enable that life. At the broadest level, that will require reining in corporate power, building worker power and agency, creating economic security for all, and designing truly democratic institutions.

If some of this feels familiar, it should: Much of it is as old as FDR’s New Deal, but updated for today’s economy and the ways in which people experience it. These are the bones, the building blocks. The meat and flesh will be the product of the work we do with people to make our agenda responsive to the current day.

Rein in Corporate Power

The widespread sense that the economy is rigged isn’t just a feeling people have. For five decades, policymakers allowed corporations to get bigger, more powerful, and more able not just to flout the rules but to rewrite them in their self-interest. Extraction and coercion became a viable business model. Meanwhile, outsized political spending and outright corruption became tools of the trade, eliminating potential political paths to curbing this power. That amassing and wielding of corporate power came at the expense of workers, small business owners, and budding entrepreneurs, constraining their opportunities in life and eroding their sense of agency.

People feel the effects of concentrated power every day, in ways big and small. They feel it when they pay more in rent and for groceries, for their health care and child care, for tickets to a concert. They feel it in noncompete and binding arbitration contracts that sap their leverage, and when their small business gets pushed further and further down Google and Amazon search results. If we want to restore people’s agency, we need to deconstruct that power, make our economy more competitive, and create marketplaces where everyone is free to contribute.

The Biden era saw any number of antimonopoly policies shot through with meaningful public participation, from the noncompete example described above to the involvement of independent pharmacies in the FTC’s efforts to constrain the anticompetitive behavior of pharmacy benefits managers and the role of independent grocers in shaping the FTC and Department of Justice’s updated merger guidelines. It became incredibly clear that people’s expertise as participants in markets was invaluable for coming to the right conclusions about the nature of competition in those markets, and their involvement in developing solutions lent urgency to the cause.

Moving forward, some issue areas are already alight with public anger and ripe for change. Groups like AELP are running popular campaigns around health care, and the sheer number of campaigns over housing policy targeting private equity and institutional investors tells us there’s more to be done in housing finance to ensure affordability, stability, and quality. In places like Michigan, we’re seeing campaigns like Taking Back Our Power organize to combat corporations’ political influence, targeting contributions from regulated monopolies and large government contractors.

We need more work like this. We can and should engage people on, for example, the impact of banking and financial consolidation on their costs, their choices, and their jobs. We should listen to how they wish their lives worked and craft solutions that can deliver for them. And we should put a premium on simplicity and visibility in our policy design to help people engage with how government is working for them. In areas like tax policy, it’s imperative that people can understand what’s happening, who’s benefiting, and who isn’t.

Build Worker Power and Agency

If one half of the answer to the cost of living is lowering costs, the other is raising wages. That means reimagining minimum wage and overtime laws for twenty-first century work, putting more money in people’s pockets, and incentivizing employers to provide the kind of predictability and personal time people look for.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. People don’t just want a job. They want the kind of job that enables dignity and agency—a job that provides social status and the ability to spend time with and care for loved ones, pursue hobbies, and drink with friends.

The last decade has seen an overwhelming focus on the manufacturing economy from both sides of the aisle, and a nostalgia for the “single-income household” that factory jobs—mostly for men—once provided. But while defining “the working class” is a fraught endeavor, any attempt at it shows that the majority of the working class works in service industry jobs (indeed, that has been true for decades, just more so now). Those industries are increasingly “fissured,” meaning they offer more contract work and less direct employment with benefits, and more and more service and care jobs are becoming gig-ified.

Rather than conflating 1950s factory work with the benefits and security that the unions and pensions linked to that work once delivered, we should focus instead on how we attach those benefits and security to all work now and in the future.

Unions are perhaps the original engines of policymaking powered by people. Unions give workers power in their workplaces; they are also organizations that can listen to their members, develop policy agendas based on those members’ needs, and involve members in the fights to make those policies real. That’s why organized labor’s demands for policies to better enable organizing—like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act—are so particularly crucial to any effort to create a truly democratic economy.

To build worker power at scale and transform whole industries, we need to not only strengthen existing collective bargaining rights but also explore broader shifts, like sectoral bargaining. We’ve already seen that incipient efforts in this direction can come from the ground up. SEIU’s Fight for $15 was born of people’s lived experience of what actually constitutes a living wage. Part of the effort developed into what became California’s sectoral wage council for fast food workers, where employers, workers, and unions have a seat at the table in setting wages for the whole sector. With empowered workers, such innovations continue to evolve.

And we need to update our rules more holistically for the industries of the future—an era in which algorithmic decision-making will enable mass surveillance of workers and could easily be abused in the wrong hands, and in which generative AI threatens vast disruptions to the nature of work. It is within our power to ensure that productivity gains from technology are equitably shared, as the labor movement was able to do a century ago. If labor has a say today, AI-driven innovation could translate into greater security, shorter workweeks, and more time with loved ones rather than concentrated profits for Big Tech executives and shareholders.

Lastly, as we saw in the Biden years, a macroeconomic commitment to full employment also pays dividends for worker pay and power. And industrial policy still offers ample opportunity to raise job quality across sectors, including care. Initiatives like the now dormant Fed Up campaign can democratize information about even the inner workings of the Federal Reserve, while union involvement can help ensure industrial policy actually results in better jobs and healthier communities.

Create Economic Security for All

If one of FDR’s central goals was to provide a measure of security from the “vicissitudes of life,” we need to take a hard look at what unavoidable life risks look like today. The need to care for our loved ones rises to the top of the list, so our social safety net must evolve to include paid leave, child care, and long-term care benefits.

We also need to consider how the choice to shift risks onto individuals and away from the state over the last 50 years has worked out—poorly—and imagine policies that move that responsibility back in a collective direction. Take retirement as an example. In the private sector, we have pushed people from the safety of pensions to the relative insecurity or unavailability of 401(k)s, and even the latter solution is being further financialized and risked as individuals are pushed into private equity. On the public side, increasing inequality has been a factor in the erosion of the financial base of Social Security to the point where it faces insolvency. Reversing this shifting of risk to the individual will mean not only confronting Social Security’s financial and operational struggles head-on, but also building on and modernizing it for the twenty-first century. This is a priority for the vast majority of Americans, 85 percent of whom believe either “that we should ensure benefits are not reduced” or “that we should increase benefits, even if it means raising taxes on some or all Americans.” The same analysis goes for the privatization of Medicaid administration, which has hindered access to health care while padding the bottom lines of private insurers rather than helping states. Ditto education, where tech companies see students as potential consumers rather than pupils. Or the “Trump accounts” for babies—once the idea of a wealth investment for every child, now just an option to invest in the market, where those who would benefit from building wealth the most have no money to do so. And on, and on.

Here’s one example of how we can approach economic security differently. People know that child care costs too much, and private equity is waiting in the wings to consolidate practices as providers go out of business. The Roosevelt Institute, the think tank I lead, has been listening to parents and providers to understand how they articulate these worries and testing out solutions that can shift the underlying structural dynamics in a way that solves the problems as people express them. Working alongside Community Change, we have engaged with members of people-powered efforts like Minnesota’s Kids Count on Us to battle test creative solutions.

Design Truly Democratic Institutions

Finally, we need government institutions strong enough to deliver for people. As FDR said in his Constitution Day address in 1937, “The resources of the nation can be made to produce a far higher standard of living for the masses of the people if only government is intelligent and energetic in giving the right direction to economic life.” That of course applies to Congress and the courts, which have been warped by a combination of design flaws and bad-faith norm violation. The most foundational changes we need to make will not be possible if we don’t transform these institutions to better translate the will of the people.

Reforming Congress and the courts will be a long, arduous process. What is more immediately possible is reshaping the executive branch to be more accountable to the public—to be nimbler, more risk-tolerant, and more outcome-oriented, effectuating policy in ways that shift power.

The erosion of state capacity began long before Elon Musk entered the picture. Our executive branch agencies are not those we had for most of the post-New Deal twentieth century, which were capable of creating a national highway system, facilitating massive housing supply, and shaping markets to be more competitive and serve the people. Decades of bipartisan neglect and disinvestment under a political order skeptical of the state and enamored of market supremacy hollowed out our capacity to deliver for people in the ways they need and expect.

Defending the anemic institutions that frustrate the public is not a viable strategy for the left. And after the Trump Administration’s slash-and-burn destruction, we’ll have no choice but to build these institutions anew. We should take the opportunity to be bold in those efforts. This is a time to reimagine with urgency. Such a reimagining must happen around some core principles, including building in public agenda setting that is geared toward regular people rather than moneyed interests; eliminating internal veto points that slow down processes without sufficient upside; and adopting human-centered design methods to increase efficiency and customer experience. Here we must be clear: In a public context, “efficiency” does not mean cutting costs; it means delivering effectively on the public purposes to which government is set, including shaping markets, investing in infrastructure both physical and human, and providing an economic floor for people. We can design a government built to deliver abundance of the right goods, to the right people, with the right supports to ensure a truly inclusive economy.

What might this feel like? Well, like Lina Khan’s FTC. This is where the “how” of policy matters most. Developing policy alongside people while out of power ensures we know what to fight for; doing it in government changes the relationship of the state to its people. Setting a policy agenda that resonates with people’s concerns, being willing to take on powerful interests, and delivering swiftly demonstrates to people that government really is on their side and will show up in the parts of their lives that matter most.

For the People, With the People

If we want to win this battle of ideas, we cannot look backward to the old market-first economic order, the anemic governing institutions that allowed such an economy to run rampant, or the politics that shut all but a favored few out. We must meet this anti-institutional moment and answer people’s frustrations with boldness and urgency.

Our utmost goal right now is to channel the public’s energy into results they can see and feel. And we must do this not only for people, but also with people. We need to design an agenda that rebalances power—one that starts from lived experience, draws our ambition from the scale of our challenges, and delivers the big, impactful policies people rightfully expect. That’s how we build trust and enduring momentum to shape the people-centered economy we need.