Missing Pieces: DSA, Abundance, MAGA, and Status Quo Democrats

There's a lot of talk about the future, but one piece is missing.

Who’s Going to Build It

The New York Times ran a piece this morning about China and oil. While the rest of the world came out of the war with Iran low on oil, China’s tanks are full. For years it bought oil when the price was low and stored it. It built refining capacity until it passed us in 2024 and became the biggest refiner on earth. It put its spare money into stockpiles of real things, not just Treasury bonds, after it watched the West freeze Russia’s accounts. When the war came and the strait closed, China cut its imports by a third and barely felt it, because the tanks were already full and the refineries kept running on what it had set aside.

The whole piece is about how prepared China is. It never compares China to us. It reports the full tanks like a fact about the oil market. It never says the obvious thing, which is that one country kept building and the other coasted. That blind spot is sitting right there in the country’s paper of record, and it’s the same blind spot that runs through all of our politics.

China didn’t believe the myth America bought into. The myth is that you get rich once and then you’re rich, the work is over, and all that’s left is managing the money. America’s leaders believe it to their core. We’re told constantly that we’re the greatest, richest, most deserving nation in history. We believed it, and so we quit building and started dividing. Every fight in our politics now is a fight over how to split the inheritance. Nobody’s bothering to check how much is left.

MAGA wants to split it one way. The Democrats want to split it another. The DSA wants to split it a third way. They disagree about almost everything. The one thing they agree on is the one thing that’s wrong. All three assume there’s still something there to divide. That the economy still works. That the country still functions. That the real wealth is sitting in the ground and the fields and the factories where we left it. So the whole fight is about fairness. Fairness through the free market. Fairness through socialism. Fairness through the third way, the technocratic governance the restoration Democrats keep promising. Three formulas for dividing the same inheritance.

The socialists are having a moment. They earned part of it, because they’re the only ones who’ll say the word ownership and mean it. The rest is just how far we’ve fallen. Life’s gotten so unlivable and the economy so unfair and accountability so far gone that people are willing to look at socialism, an idea this country spent a hundred years teaching them to fear. The Democrats left the door wide open. Their whole offer is restoration. Get rid of Trump, hire back the competent people, fix some permitting, subsidize a few things, and ease the country back toward the nineties. People can tell that’s nothing. So they go looking, and the socialists are the only ones offering anything else.

So I read the DSA program. They are closer than the Democrats. They name class. They name ownership. There’s a plank that calls for public ownership of energy and transit and natural resources, and the Democrats won’t go near a sentence like that. Credit where it’s due.

But their ownership is ownership of things that already exist. Take over the grid. Own the resources in the ground. Put the big firms under public control. Even their housing plank is public money to build social housing, and it assumes the capacity to build it already exists. That capacity is the thing we don’t have. Read the verbs in the program. Guarantee. Establish. Cancel. Tax. Abolish. It’s a list of what working people are owed. There is almost nothing in it about making the things, about who pours the concrete and trains the electricians and builds the capacity to deliver a single item on the list.

We are short on almost everything but money. Short on the mills, the trades, the engineers. Short on the capacity to build the housing and the power and the care that all of these futures keep promising. Guarantee every American a home and fund it all the way, and if the capacity to build at scale isn’t there, the money does what it did after Covid. It goes into the houses that already exist and comes back out as price.

The most left program in the country has the same hole as the abundance crowd it hates and the Democrats it ran from. They all talk about building. MAGA wants steel and ships. The abundance people want transmission lines and nuclear. The DSA wants public power and industrial policy. But not one of them builds the whole politics around it. They treat the capacity to make things as one line to fund or deregulate, then go back to the real fight, which is who owns what already exists and who gets a share. We aren’t running out of money. We’re running out of the capacity to make the things that keep people alive, and we’re using it up faster than we build it back. Housing. The grid. The trades. Shipbuilding. The people who staff the hospitals. Not one of them will say so.

China has bubbles and debt of its own. So do we. The difference that matters is what the debt bought. China’s debt turned into rail and grid and factories. Ours largely turned into asset prices and inflation. Even China’s famous mess, the ghost cities and the empty towers, is too many houses. Our mess is too few.

China never stopped building the real things. The oil is one piece of it. Copper and aluminum and rare earths. The machines that make machines. Power plants and rail and transmission lines to move it all across the country. A country can survive bad finance if its production is real. It can’t survive good finance if its production is gone. We’re on the wrong side of that.

And China plays the money game too. It holds our Treasuries. It buys gold. It made itself necessary to us as both the factory that fills our shelves and the creditor that funds our debt, and it used our hunger for borrowing to pay for the real buildout at home. China ends up with the things and the paper. We end up with the paper. Money is just the accounting for all of it, and the accounts get settled eventually.

What China’s running isn’t even Chinese. It’s the American system. It’s the hand that built the interstates and turned Detroit into the arsenal that won the war. We wrote that playbook and we ran it through a democracy, an unequal and half-finished one, but a democracy, which is more than Beijing can say. The method is still ours. We could run it better than they ever will. We’ve just stopped trying.

The abundance crowd says deregulate so we can build. The socialists want the public to own whatever gets built. The question we’re not reckoning with is how to restart our capacity to build at all, the ability to do the things that must be done. That’s a fight worth having. Rebuilding that capacity and owning it go together. We do it so what gets built belongs to the people who need it instead of a billionaire or a trillionaire or Beijing. That’s the work, and too few in our politics are doing it. Instead, we’re fighting over how to divide an inheritance that’s been dwindling for half a century.

Corbin Trent