The 2026 and 2028 elections can and should be the beginning of something transformational.

We’ve got tailwinds like you wouldn’t believe. A president whose approval rating has dropped below 35%, rivaling Nixon during Watergate. The man said, on camera, at an Easter lunch at the White House, that we can’t afford daycare because “we’re fighting wars.” That same week he asked Congress for a $1.5 trillion military budget. A 44% increase. The largest in American history.

The same guy who wants $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as a prison while we’re spending roughly $2 billion a day bombing Iran in a war nobody asked for, a war that’s woefully unpopular even with the MAGA base.

But daycare? Too expensive, folks. Can’t swing it. Trump really doesn’t give a f…

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Fox host turned Secretary of War, is out there at the podium in the Pentagon asking Americans to pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, for “overwhelming violence” against Iran. The Pope rightly sees it differently, calling the war immoral.

Oh, and let’s not forget that these people aren’t just inept, they’re largely insane, like the dude running FEMA who’s been on podcasts claiming he was teleported to a Waffle House.

So, we’ve got a historic opportunity staring us in the face. But here’s the sad part. The really upsetting part.

The question is whether we’re going to back these people or keep doing what we’ve always done. Listening to party leaders and pundits and establishment political hacks tell us who to pick.

Even in the face of all this, our party is still less popular. Even amongst ourselves. 55% of us say the party has the wrong priorities. 71% of Democratic-aligned voters say the party’s been ineffective at opposing Republican policies. Why? Because it has been. This isn’t a messaging problem. This isn’t voters failing to appreciate how good the Democratic Party is. This is us finally starting to understand how bad it is. How far our party has drifted from the people it claims to represent. How captured it’s become by Wall Street, big pharma, big tech, big oil, the military industrial complex, and every other industry that’s learned to write checks to both sides and win no matter who’s in power. Our leadership has failed us. We see it. We know it.

Last Saturday, 8 million of us were in the streets. All 50 states. More than 3,300 events. The largest single-day demonstration in American history. Nearly half of those events were in red states and rural communities. People who never march for anything marched.

But we marched against stuff, not for stuff. Against Trump. Against kings. Against war. There’s this energy out there and it’s real and it’s righteous, but right now it’s anger without a goal, and anger without a goal can’t build power. A goal, a vision, hope, that’s what you build a supermajority around. Our party is really good at channeling anger into “Trump bad” but that won’t do it. These millions of us, not just the 8 million in the streets but the tens of millions more who weren’t, could be a burning light hot enough to set this country’s rot ablaze if a party would just hold the magnifying glass.

But you’ve got to understand how we got here.

Trump’s first election was a warning sign so loud that half the country covered its ears. Then Covid hit and nearly buckled a healthcare system already on life support. We lost jobs, lost coverage, lost family members, and discovered that basically every system we’d been told to trust, healthcare, housing, childcare, the supply chain, was one crisis away from collapse. Then we elected Biden, who passed trillions in spending bills. For a moment it felt like something was changing.

It wasn’t. The systems that caused this mess stayed intact.

We need to accept that America doesn’t just have a spending problem. We have a system problem. Every time Democrats get into power they pump money into broken systems without rebuilding them. Obama did it. Biden did it. The money goes in and disappears, absorbed by corporate middlemen, diluted by bureaucracy, leaving barely a trace in the lives of the people who needed it most.

And then we get Trump again. Twice elected.

If that doesn’t convince you that Americans are screaming for transformation I don’t know what will. People aren’t electing Donald Trump because they love Donald Trump. They’re electing him because they’re done with the........

© Common Dreams