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, demonstrating the need for people-powered policymaking.

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. People-powered policymaking offers an alternative.

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.

Read the full article about people-powered policymaking by Elizabeth Wilkins at Democracy Journal.