The Vision Vacuum

To walk the path you’ve gotta see the path.

There’s a frantic energy in political circles right now. A flurry of new strategies, organizations, and editorials trying to figure out how to win again.

You have groups like “Deciding to Win” launching. You have New York Times editorials urging Democrats to move to the moderate center—which just means moving right. And let’s be clear about who’s pushing this: the elite. The people who want us back to “normal.” Back to when people still struggled to afford the basics, when the USA was still a weakening nation, when all the broken and corrupted institutions that served their interests were humming along just fine. They just want to get rid of the madman who screwed up the good time they were having.

Then you have people like Amanda Litman of “Run for Something,” who argues that the left/right/center debate is bullshit. She says the key is to find Democratic candidates who genuinely hold the values the party should have, and then help them win.

It sounds good. Find people who believe in the mission and put them in charge. And look, groups like Run for Something, Justice Democrats, and others like them are doing important work recruiting and supporting candidates. But there’s a fundamental problem with this approach, and it’s not their fault: What mission? What values? Without a coherent vision, there’s nothing to really rally behind. There’s no way to gauge success other than political wins—did we win the election or not? But winning an election to do what, exactly?

The Healthcare Example: Simple Solution, Missing Will

Let me show you what I mean with the clearest example we have: healthcare.

Right now, we’re spending a little over $5.25 trillion a year on healthcare. And that number is rising. Projected to near 8 trillion in just 7 years. This spending is unsustainable. But to add insult to injury, we’re spending this insane amount of money and we’re still not covering our entire population or getting amazing results.

The physical solution to this problem is actually straightforward. Not easy—but straightforward. We need to train a million new healthcare workers. Doctors, nurses, dentists, psychiatrist, addiction counselors, and so on.

We need to build hundred of new rural clinics and hospitals. We need to rebuild our medical school capacity. We need to create a payment system that removes the profit motive from life-and-death decisions, because profit in healthcare makes about as much sense as profit in your fire department.

The difficulty isn’t technical. We know how to train doctors and nurses. We know how to build hospitals. We know how to run payment systems—hell, we already run Medicare. The difficulty is political and organizational. It requires the will to do it and a vision big enough to organize around.

But that vision doesn’t exist in our political of business cultures right now. So when candidates talk about healthcare, they say they support Medicare for All and then immediately get trapped by the question: “How are we going to pay for it?”

They’re forced to accept this deceptive framing, to act like we’d be spending more money as a society. But we’re already paying $5.25 trillion a year. What we pay as a society would go down dramatically under a rational system. There’s money left on the table, extracted by middlemen, and we can get it back if we decide to.

And even when candidates understand the payment side, they rarely grasp the supply-side problem—that you can’t just create a payment system for healthcare capacity that doesn’t exist. You have to build it first. That’s the work. That’s the vision. Train the workers, build the facilities, create the infrastructure.

But nobody’s talking about that scale of work because our political culture has trained us to think it’s impossible.

You Have to See the Path to Walk the Path

So how do you recruit candidates to believe in something that isn’t even being discussed? How do you find people willing to fight for a vision that doesn’t exist yet?

I’ve got some experience with this. I helped co-found Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run, and then spent years working as her strategist. And what I learned is that without the imagination and solutions already articulated, you’re just asking people to be brave for nothing. You’re recruiting them to fight the same old fights with the same old limitations.

Think about the infrastructure that exists right now. You’ve got massive think tanks, policy shops, entire ecosystems dedicated to maintaining the status quo or getting us back to “normal.” Brookings, Third Way, the whole apparatus of centrist Democratic policy development. Billions of dollars, hundreds of people, all working to define the boundaries of what’s “realistic” and “pragmatic.”

And then you’ve got what—a handful of people thinking outside those boundaries? A few groups trying to imagine what actual transformation looks like? The imbalance is staggering.

So when a working-class person in their district decides to run for office because they’re pissed off about healthcare or housing or wages, where do they turn for answers? They get funneled into the existing infrastructure. They get the existing playbook. They get trained to think small because that’s all that’s on offer.

You can’t recruit people to believe in a vision that hasn’t been built yet. You have to see the path to walk the path.

The Pattern Repeats

And here’s the thing: what’s true for healthcare is true for everything else.

Manufacturing? We know what needs to be done. Rebuild our smelting capacity. Secure the copper, iron, and rare minerals necessary to be a productive economy. Train an army of robotics engineers. Treat this country as a developing nation, not a declining one.

The irony is profound: China is succeeding by using our old playbook. They studied the strategies America used during its ascent—from Alexander Hamilton through the New Deal—massive infrastructure investment, industrial planning, prioritizing production over finance. They utilized the very components we built, and then abandoned, to create an economy based in real productive capacity.

So we can see that process works. The process of looking around you, finding best practices, and then assembling an even better system. We could do that with healthcare. We could do that with manufacturing. We could do that with so many things.

But we’ve stopped looking at what’s possible. Everything just becomes this endless loop. It reminds me of those TV shows where nothing ever gets resolved, just more complications every season. Well, that’s not just our television anymore - that’s our government.

The problems we face aren’t mysteries. The solutions aren’t hidden. What’s missing is the political vision and will to actually pursue them.

Now, the work of designing the institutional mechanisms—how we use existing tools like the Army Corps of Engineers, how we finance through something like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, how we control commodity prices and supply chains, how we scale up training programs for nurses and engineers—that’s detailed work that needs to happen. But it can’t happen while we’re still debating whether it’s even possible to think this big.

The Rot and the Exploiter

This lack of vision leads to performative opposition rather than substantive alternatives.

Look at someone like Gavin Newsom. He’s out there talking about how Trump is destroying our system, how he’s corrupted our institutions, how the Supreme Court is failing to stand up to him.

But these are not new problems. The Supreme Court didn’t just become corrupted in the last few years. Congress didn’t just suddenly become weak. The rot has been there for decades.

Trump didn’t single-handedly infect our institutions. They were infected long ago. He’s just a selfish, narcissistic egotist who saw a weak government, weak institutions, a weak judiciary, and a weak opposition party, and took it over.

When Democrats focus all their energy on the exploiter rather than the rot that enabled him, they guarantee that nothing will change.

Vision Precedes Infrastructure

The current debates about moving left, right, or center are a distraction. The tactical arguments about finding better candidates are putting the cart before the horse.

The fundamental task is ideological. We have to articulate a vision of national rebuilding so compelling and so clear that it creates its own political infrastructure and equips its own leaders. Then groups like Run for Something and Justice Democrats have something real to rally behind. Then success isn’t just “did we win?” but “are we building toward the vision?”

We need to move beyond the constraints of “what is politically possible” and define what is necessary. We need to reject the idea that the market dictates our future and embrace the historical truth that we build our future through collective action and shared mission.

You know, my whole life I’ve heard about American exceptionalism. It’s largely based on propaganda and empty patriotism.

But we have a moment to actually live up to it. We could prove that America is exceptional, not because of some God-given superiority, but because we turned the ship around. Because we didn’t end up as just another failed empire. Because we bucked the traditional arc of history.

See, at this point in our history, we’re supposed to continue failing. Every empire at this stage goes the same way - Rome, Britain, all of them. Financialization, extraction, decline. That’s the pattern.

Or we can re-learn what led us to greatness. The New Deal. Unity. Building. Direct government action to mobilize our resources. Not the lone cowboy making his own way, but the community making their way together.

We don’t need better players for a rigged game. We need to define a new game entirely. Only then will we find the leaders capable of playing it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Corbin Trent