Tuesday was a great day for democracy. Millions of Americans voted against war, corruption and a broken economy.
Tens of millions of Americans have been struggling to pay for basics — healthcare, housing, childcare, food and energy. Millions more have lost hope for a better future. And while so many Americans are struggling to get by, the wealth of the country’s 935 billionaires — the top 0.001% of households –– rose 21% in 2025.
While the midterm results provide much to celebrate, they also present a big question: Where do Democrats lead from here?
President Donald Trump’s policies have worsened our inequality, and the current direction of artificial intelligence is deepening our economic divisions. But this destructive inequality predates the current corrupt administration and emerging technologies. This path traces back more than four decades, to the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act, through the gutting of antitrust enforcement and Nafta, and the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The midterm outcomes present an opportunity for a new direction guided by an affirmative agenda.
That reaffirmation begins with a common national purpose. To close the economic gulf, Democrats need to develop an ambitious economic project with the same “bold, persistent experimentation” that guided Franklin D. Roosevelt through the New Deal. Business, workers, universities and government need to join together to foster economic development and revitalization.
The economic patriotism I’m talking about is not a gauzy slogan. But it is America’s Next New Deal.
Let’s start with public investment. We need to create a National Industrial Bank to invest in the industries defining the future: semiconductors, rare earth minerals, advanced manufacturing, key starting materials for drugs, medical innovation, modern steel, robotics, shipbuilding and AI. The AI we invest in must be safe, human-centered and focused on our most fundamental challenges in science, health and climate.
The CHIPS and Science Act showed that this works. We need to do the same across all these industries, building factories in places like Lorain, Ohio, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that suffered deindustrialization.
Next, the mission for business leaders: If Trump can bully tech billionaires into investing in his ballroom, the next Democratic administration must make them invest in our classrooms. Private capital should be mobilized for public benefit, not personal enrichment. Let’s start by convening the leaders of the 200 largest business and tech entities to invest in schools, jobs, apprenticeships and entrepreneurs in deindustrialized towns, the Black South and the Southwest. We should create 10-year commitments for 100,000 new Black technology jobs annually, for innovation hubs in the Midwest and for a new capital fund for rural communities and factory towns. Our party needs to show visible action and results, getting business leaders to deliver for Americans who have been left out of modern wealth generation.
Next, jobs: We need a Work for America program modeled on the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, which employed 8.5 million people. Every young person should have a chance to do work that is personally meaningful and socially beneficial: rebuilding communities, providing care services, working on technological projects, making government agencies user-friendly or training in industries of the future.
With a few years of service, they would have skills that translate into private sector careers. Work for America could become a civic equivalent of military service, valued by employers and offering a pathway to opportunity.
Investment, good jobs and worker stakes in ownership are essential. But creating an inclusive economy requires a new social compact. We need to secure the basics — healthcare, education, housing and family care — that make the American dream of equal opportunity real.
On healthcare, we need Medicare for All, not excuses or half measures. It is past time to guarantee healthcare as a fundamental right, free and universal for every American.
A country that tells young people to work hard and play by the rules, only to price them out of homeownership, is breaking its own bargain.
Economic democracy also depends on public education. The Progressive Era made high school free, giving young people a fair shot at economic success. The same logic applies today, when high school is no longer enough. That means fully funded public schools, free public college and a nationwide system of trade schools and tech institutes, including 1,000 new trade schools for jobs such as HVAC technician, robotics technician, electrician, cosmetologist and drone operator.
A country that tells young people to work hard and play by the rules, only to price them out of homeownership, is breaking its own bargain. That is why I am working on legislation to guarantee zero downpayment and low-interest loans for a home by 35 for those who have worked seven years and paid rent. It is modeled on the promise we have long made to veterans.
Family care also is critical. Childcare and eldercare are the backbone of a decent society. They are also major sources of good jobs that cannot be outsourced or handed to robots. We need to make care free for millions of families, ensure that care workers earn a living wage and provide $1,000 a month for parents who stay home.
How to pay for these essential initiatives? We can start by raising more than $4 trillion over a decade with the federal tax on billionaires I have sponsored with Sen. Bernie Sanders. Critics claim this tax is anti-business and anti-innovation. They are wrong. It is pro-fairness. And with a Democratic Congress, we can also stop wasting hundreds of billions on needless weapons and destructive wars.
This project of economic patriotism is ambitious. It must be. Undoing decades of damage will take hard work. But it is what this moment demands of us. Together, we can make America what Langston Hughes dreamed it could be: “the land that never has been yet — / And yet must be,” a land where “opportunity is real, and life is free, / Equality is in the air we breathe.”
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