The War for America's Future Is Here.

If Americans are angry enough for authoritarianism, they're angry enough for supermajorities. It's time to start building a better America.

Last week I laid out a plan for how we build our way out of this crisis—working title Builders Pledge, the idea is to lay out a concrete strategy to rebuild what’s broken in the US and win supermajorities to implement the plan. I thought I oughta pause and make the case for why now. Is this the time for a transformative vision?

I’d reckon that we are now in the middle of a war for America's future. Lots of folks don't either don’t realize that or don’t want to talk about it. They refuse to see the the battlefield. Yet, the fight is happening—everywhere around us. America is being transformed. The question is into what?

The Battlefield Most Ignore

Ever had a conversation with a Trump supporter? They cling to hope that Trump is on their side. They are so desperate for change they're embracing authoritarianism. Many of them cheering as democratic norms get shredded. They're applauding as federal troops patrol D.C. streets. (With good results as it happens)

All the while, Democrats anre insisting Trump is THE problem. Defeat him, they say, and we're on the path to normal. They refuse to acknowledge the poison and decline that created him in the first place. They won’t admit that our institutions have failed so badly that Americans are choosing fascism over democracy.

Trump isnt the Alpha or Omega of the crisis in America. He's is the first to exploit the crisis is such a bold and open way. But, treating him as THE problem is like treating the 2008 crash as just about bad mortgages—patch it up, bail it out, all good. It’s true that Trump is shattering every norm of democracy, but that genie can't easily be put back in the bottle. A full reimagining of our system is called for now.

The evidence is mounting that our system is incapable of defending against this type of authoritarianism. Not just because we lack guardrails or separation of powers, but because of the desperation of the American people. When enough people are drowning, they'll grab onto anything—even if it pulls them under.

What can be defeated in 2026 is MAGA's monopoly on transformation. Right now, they're the only movement that acknowledges the structural rot, the only ones who seem to see the pain of the American people and promise to do what needs to be done to fix it. But we can break that monopoly by offering real transformation within our democratic system—through supermajorities that can actually change laws, restructure institutions, and cut out the rot.

Until Democrats can admit these failures and offer transformation as bold as the authoritarians—but through democratic means—people will keep choosing the strongman. The poison remains. The next strongman is already watching, learning, preparing.

Meanwhile, establishment Democrats still don't understand why they keep losing this fight. The party leadership, the consultants, the corporate wing—they're trapped in a worldview that can't see the revolution happening around them.

It's not just the generals we keep sending—it's the generals, the colonels, and the privates. Presidents, senators, House members, even mayors—from top to bottom, the Democratic Party sends people we think are going to fight for us, only to watch them turn into folks who think there isn't really a fight to be fought.

They go to Washington or city hall ready to fight the oligarchy, ready to battle the system. Then they get hit with spreadsheets and experts who convince them there is no war to wage. Worse—they get convinced things are actually getting better. The emergency isn't an emergency, it's just a management challenge. The decline isn't decline, it's a recovery that needs messaging.

They've internalized decline so thoroughly they can't even see the emergency. When Democrats cite inflation-adjusted wages and real household income from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, telling us we've never had it so good, they're trapped in their own statistics. The American people's voting and behavior scream that something is deeply wrong. But rather than question whether the statistics measure the right things, Democrats conclude people are too stupid to understand how well they have it. Must be a messaging problem.

To be fair, I didn't even know what the hell a "technocratic liberal" was until I read Evelyn Quartz's piece about the DC emergency. But after looking at it, I couldn't agree more. She nailed it: technocratic liberals have so internalized austerity and scarcity that they see poverty and homelessness as "sad but inevitable features of a system you are tasked with maintaining" rather than emergencies demanding transformation. When half a million Americans are homeless, they cite statistics showing we're 10% better than last year. When 54% of Americans read below a 6th grade level, they propose budget tweaks.

Both ideologies work to suppress our basic human recognition that this shouldn't be happening. Technocracy reassures us the system is slowly improving. Authoritarianism redirects our horror into rage at scapegoats. But that first gut reaction when you see someone dying on the street—that flicker of "this is wrong"—that's what we need to reclaim. That's what the Builder Movement is built on: the simple recognition that a functioning society doesn't let people die while debating marginal improvements.

The Oligarchy's Arsenal

The oligarchy has been perfecting their weapons for decades:

Division: Their Favorite Weapon

Racism and bigotry have always been the sharpest tools in the oligarchy's arsenal. They incite white anger by coding "crime" as Black or brown people. They paint immigrants as invaders. They whisper that undocumented workers are stealing what you deserve. These are weapons designed to keep us fighting each other instead of them.

And here's the hardest part to admit: even white supremacy itself—the system that has inflicted violence and economic exclusion on Black people, immigrants, Jews, Latinos, Asians—is also a weapon in their hands. It's real. It has caused generations of pain and oppression. But it's also useful to the oligarchy, because it divides us permanently if we let it.

White supremacy is both a structure and a strategy. A structure because it exists in housing, healthcare, policing, and education. A strategy because the oligarchy wields it like a knife—convincing poor and working-class white people that their struggles aren't caused by the billionaire class, but by their neighbors of a different color.

The effect is devastating: Black and brown communities live under systemic attack, while white working-class communities are told to blame them instead of seeing they're being squeezed by the same debt, the same extraction, the same rigged game.

Extraction through debt. Making us think we own homes and degrees when all we really own is a lifetime of payments. They turned housing, healthcare, and education into debt traps. We possess things we'll never actually own.

False hope. Just work harder. Vote smarter. Pull yourself up by bootstraps that don't exist. If things seem bad, just wait—they're about to turn around. Any day now.

Personal responsibility. When you can't afford insulin, it's your fault, not theirs for charging $300 for something that costs $3 to make. When your factory closes, you should have learned to code. When you can't afford rent, you should have made better choices. Never mind that the majority of Americans are drowning—look at that one person doing well! See? The system works!

These aren't random failures. They're weapons, deployed strategically to keep us paralyzed while working families watch their wealth evaporate upward. Since the 1970s, we've lived through the greatest transfer of wealth in human history—from those who work for a living to those who own for a living. Every year harder than the last, every generation poorer than their parents.

Democrats don't even realize they're in a war. They think they're in a debate club. While the oligarchy wages total war with these weapons, Democrats write position papers and beg for bipartisanship.

Fifty Years of Searching for a Savior

This didn't start with Trump. Americans have been screaming for transformation since the late 70s.

Reagan promised a revolution—government was the problem, he'd fix it. People believed him. Then came Gingrich's Contract with America. Ross Perot's charts and plain talk. Howard Dean's outsider energy. Obama's hope and change. The Tea Party's rage. Bernie's political revolution. And now Trump—nominated three fucking times.

Each time, people thought they were getting transformation. Each time, they got disappointment and looked for someone new. Someone more extreme.

Reagan blamed government. Perot blamed the deficit. Obama blamed gridlock. Bernie blamed billionaires. Trump blames immigrants. They're all channeling the same rage at a rigged system, just pointing at different enemies. The pressure's been building for 50 years. Each betrayal, each factory closure, each medical bankruptcy just cranks it higher.

And now Trump has shown us something terrifying: Americans will tolerate almost anything if they think it'll bring real change. Shattered norms, ignored courts, troops in the streets—there's no limit anymore. That's what makes this moment so dangerous. And maybe, if we're smart about it, so full of possibility.

People know the system is rigged. Trump supporters blame the wrong riggers—immigrants, Black and brown people. Democrats pretend it's not rigged at all, just threatened by Trump. Both are wrong.

Why Authoritarianism Is Winning

When your choice is between a broken system that actively makes your life worse, and someone strong enough to smash that system—even for the wrong reasons—people choose the strongman.

They understand there are only two forces powerful enough to break the cycle:

1. Authoritarianism: One person's vision plus everyone else's capitulation. Simple. Direct. Happening right now.

2. Democratic Supermajorities: Hundreds of representatives aligned toward common goals, with the power to remove corrupt judges, transform agencies, and rebuild the economy. Harder. Requires work. But actually solves the problems.

When people see Trump deploy troops and ignore courts, they think: "At least someone's doing SOMETHING." They know it won't solve the underlying problems. But action—even destructive action—feels better than paralysis.

This is why incrementalism fails. This is why "return to normal" fails. Normal is what created this rage. You can't fight a revolution with moderation.

If you want something done right…

The ideas I outlined last week are one potential path. At it’s core the idea rejects broken institutions and goes about replacing them with ones that actually work:

• Instead of begging private developers to build affordable housing, we build it ourselves

• Instead of letting pharma companies price-gouge insulin, we manufacture it at cost

• Instead of hoping the market delivers healthcare to rural areas, we train a million providers and build clinics everywhere

Pragmatism, not ideology. When markets fail to deliver essentials at reasonable prices, we compete. We build. We deliver.

We're building a new system, not tweaking the broken one.

The Choice Before Us

Last week's post about building our way out got over 190 comments. We're in the process of putting together a new Contract for America based on your feedback.

We keep acting shocked when the impossible happens—Trump wins, democracy crumbles, people cheer for dictators. But we only believe in impossible disasters, never impossible solutions.

The battlefield is clear. The weapons are obvious. The Democrats we keep sending to fight don't even know they're in a war.

What we need isn't just to stop authoritarianism—we need to build something equally transformational to compete with it. The Democratic Party is our only vehicle to fight this, and as it exists today, it cannot win. The establishment cannot fight back because it cannot admit the depth of our problems. It offers incrementalism against revolution. That's not a fair fight.

MAGA understood the revolutionary moment and took over their party. It's time we do the same. We need Democrats who believe in our ideals strongly enough to convince our neighbors we share their concerns—not dismiss them. Who understand that when people are desperate for change, telling them everything's fine is a losing strategy.

If Americans are angry enough to embrace authoritarianism, they're angry enough to embrace transformation. But only if we stop defending broken institutions and start building new ones.

2026 is approaching fast—425 days to the election. Maybe 200 days until primaries start determining who the Democratic Party will be. Then we have until 2028 to build a movement capable of delivering the supermajorities needed for real transformation. Not to win them—that would take an insane sweep. But to build the infrastructure, the unity, the power that can eventually deliver them.

The revolution is here. Authoritarianism is winning because it's the option. The other side refuses to admit the system is broken and therefore offers no radical change. Until Democrats can build a party that sees the pain—and offer a transformative alternative—people will keep choosing the strongman over the status quo.

Time is running out. Time to build something that can compete with fascism's false promises.