The numbers don’t lie. Trump’s approval rating: 48%. Democratic Party approval: 27%. A twice-impeached, convicted felon is more trusted than the party claiming to defend democracy. That’s not because Americans love criminals—it’s because they’ve lost faith in the alternative.

Ten years ago, I left Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign to start Brand New Congress with Zack Exley and Saikat Chakrabarti. Our goal was audacious: to recruit hundreds of candidates to run for all 535 congressional seats simultaneously, united behind a single vision to rebuild America’s infrastructure, economy, healthcare system, and industrial base.

Spoiler alert: we failed.

We did recruit and elect AOC, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman, but they became individual success stories rather than a unified movement. The Green New Deal morphed from an infrastructure and manufacturing revolution into a culture war talking point. The outsiders we helped elect got absorbed by the inside or beaten by AIPAC. There simply weren’t enough of them at once, nor was there a clear plan of action.

But I learned a lot traveling the country during Bernie’s campaigns and during my time in the political trenches. Serving as AOC’s communications director and as executive director for Justice Democrats was a decade-long education. At first, I thought I was an outlier. A political and economic extremist. Turns out I’m not. I’m more the norm than I would have imagined. What I learned is that we’ve been in a revolutionary moment for a very long time—I just hadn’t recognized it. My East Tennessee community—Appalachian born and raised—was fired up for either Bernie Sanders OR Donald Trump. That should have told us everything.

Americans have been desperately seeking radical transformation for decades. They thought they found it with Reagan. Then Howard Dean. Then Obama. Then Bernie. Then Trump. Then Trump again. And again. The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, MAGA, the George Floyd uprisings—all screaming for something radically different.

Yet our elected leadership, Democrat and Republican, works frantically to preserve the status quo. For them and their donors, things are working fine. They need to manage the debt, squash the populist uprisings, but otherwise everything is going according to plan—the plan developed by Chicago School economists who believed we could reap rather than sow indefinitely. That somehow we’d be the managers rather than the makers, and the world would go along doing the dirty work.

Even Bernie and AOC’s “rally against oligarchy” tour misses the point. They’re talking about redistribution—tax the billionaires, spread the wealth around. But you can’t redistribute your way out of a supply crisis. Healthcare and housing are great examples.

Money doesn’t fix bones. Money doesn’t cure cancer. Money doesn’t build houses or train doctors or manufacture insulin. The supply itself—hospital beds, medical equipment, skilled nurses, affordable housing units—that’s what actually solves problems.

Look at the math across every sector:

Healthcare: We’re projected to spend $7.7 trillion per year by 2032—more than today’s entire federal budget—just to produce mediocre health outcomes while other countries spend half as much and get better results.

Housing: We spend more per unit on construction than almost any developed nation, yet we’re building fewer homes than we need. The problem isn’t money—it’s that we’ve made building expensive and slow through a system designed to extract, not deliver.

Infrastructure: We’re spending three times what other countries pay per mile of rail or highway, and taking five times longer to complete projects. China has built entire new energy grids, hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, and transformed their manufacturing capacity while we debate permits for a single rail line.

Education: We outspend most developed nations per student but get worse results. We’re importing engineers and doctors while our own graduates struggle to find work that matches their debt load.

Manufacturing: We’ve outsourced production of everything from medicines to steel to computer chips, then act surprised when supply chains break or prices spike.

The pattern is everywhere: massive spending, massive debt, declining results, and monopolistic extraction replacing actual production.

Even the radical proposals or the once-in-a-generation investments fall woefully short. Medicare for All? That only changes who writes checks for our broken healthcare system. The Inflation Reduction Act just threw money at the same extractive energy companies and consultants. Infrastructure bills just funnel cash to the same contractors who’ve been failing for decades.