We Can’t Beat Trump with Marches; We Need an Alternative Plan

Corbin Trent — America’s Undoing on substack — Apr 01, 2025 — This post is public so feel free to share it — Corbin

Naming enemies and broken systems isn’t enough — Americans are craving a concrete vision of what comes next.

https://www.americasundoing.com/p/we-cant-beat-trump-without-an-alternative

The War We’re Not Fighting
The American Dream has been stripped for parts, and the people who dismantled it now expect us to defend what’s left. They’ve got it backward. We don’t need to save a broken system — we need to build something better.

Here’s the hard truth: For 50 years, we’ve been fed the lie that markets solve everything. That government should step back and let corporations run the show. That prosperity would trickle down if we just got out of the way.

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That experiment has failed. Spectacularly.

While Democrats and Republicans argued over social issues, they agreed on one thing: hand economic power to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and multinational corporations. Now those corporations answer to shareholders, not citizens. They chase quarterly profits, not national prosperity. And they’ve hollowed out the middle class in the process.

There’s a war happening right now, and almost no one on our side seems willing to admit it. Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ro Khanna, and Chris Murphy are doing a great job naming what’s broken. They’re showing us there’s real energy for something different. They’ve called out the American oligarchs — Elon Musk’s corruption, BlackRock’s power grabs, and the creeping authoritarianism under Trump.

But what they’re not doing — and what we absolutely must — is articulate what we’re fighting for. There’s no serious pushback against unchecked capitalism. No plan to return power to the American people from international corporations. And without that, we’re just playing defense while they systematically dismantle everything.

Holding Ground Requires an Ideology
Think about Ukraine and Russia. When Russia invades a town, or when Ukraine pushes them back, we all understand it as movement in a war. It’s territory you can hold. That kind of war is visible and visceral. But ideas work the same way. You either hold ideological territory or you lose it.

Right now, the right is holding territory. Not just with armed state power, but with an ideology — however incoherent — that says: break the system, empower the rich, blame the weak.

And what do we have on our side?

A series of protest tours. Speeches. AOC and Bernie can still draw crowds. There’s rage out there. But rage with no roadmap is just emotional catharsis. We need an ideological occupying force. A vision of what comes next.

I’m not pro-war. I don’t think military occupations have worked out well for us in the past. This is a metaphor, not a call to arms. But the power vacuum created by a lack of clear ideological alternative is leading to violence and frustration that won’t help our cause.

As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “Riots are the language of the unheard.” When political discourse reaches the point where both sides describe each other as fascists, violence becomes a logical conclusion. We’re seeing this already — firebombings of Republican Party offices, Teslas set on fire.

That violence is the result of anger without direction, rage without a vision. People aren’t feeling heard because there’s no alternative being offered. When both parties fundamentally agree that corporations should run the economy and that the government should just referee from the sidelines, millions of Americans are effectively silenced.

The Democrats Unspoken Confusion
Too many Democrats — good ones and bad ones alike — have fallen into a weird kind of ideological amnesia. Chuck Schumer thinks the old Republican Party might re-emerge if we’re polite enough. Kamala Harris disappeared into a fog of PR consultants. Even the so-called fighters seem more interested in drawing lines around Trump’s criminality than articulating what the alternative is.

And why the hell would we even want the party of Reagan or Newt Gingrich to “re-emerge” in the first place? These people were never on our side. They fought against social programs, against social unity, against government involvement in the market. They were the architects of the ideology that’s destroying us now. Wanting the “reasonable Republicans” back is like asking for a milder version of the poison that’s killing us.

If we actually believed in our ideas, in our solutions, we’d be fighting for supermajorities — in the House, in the Senate, in state legislatures. We’d be fighting to implement our vision, not compromise it away. The goal isn’t bipartisanship with people trying to screw us over — it’s having enough power to make our vision reality.

The fear of being labeled “communist” for simply wanting government to compete with corporations has paralyzed Democrats since the McCarthy era. They’d rather be ineffective than risk sounding like they’re challenging capitalism itself. But this fear has led them to abandon the very ideology that made them dominant for decades under FDR — the belief that government should be a builder, not just a regulator or banker.

Let me be clear: this isn’t about policy details. It’s about power. The kind of power that comes from having a coherent worldview — something people can live inside, something they can believe in. Right now, America is being stripped for parts by people who absolutely know what they want: deregulated markets, asset inflation, corporate consolidation, and a government too broken to stop any of it.

We don’t counter that by marching and saying “Protect democracy” over and over. If the thing we’re protecting doesn’t work for working families, what are we really defending?

We Need to Be Builders Again
What we need is a vision of government as a builder, not just a regulator. Citizenship as co-ownership, not just voter ID. Production over extraction. Shared prosperity as a form of national security.

And it’s not theoretical. We’ve done it before. We built the Hoover Dam in five years. The Interstate Highway System. The TVA. NASA. We created public universities that cost 4–6 weeks of wages, not 20+ weeks. We trained doctors. We sent people to the moon.

The key insight that we’ve forgotten: Corporations exist to maximize profit, not to build nations or solve social problems. They are not designed to address national challenges or secure a prosperous future for all citizens. That’s what government is for. When we delegated these responsibilities to the private sector in the 1970s and 80s, we guaranteed the decline we’re experiencing today.

What would a government that builds again actually do?

Create a public healthcare system that competes directly with private insurers, setting pricing standards and ensuring universal access

Build housing directly, establishing a Federal Construction Corps creating 500,000 units annually

Launch a Tennessee Valley Authority for the 21st century, building clean energy and broadband infrastructure

Open government-owned factories to produce essential medicines, breaking Big Pharma’s stranglehold on pricing

Build a high-speed rail network that connects every major city, just like we did with the Interstate Highway System

Today, we can’t build a subway line without taking 20 years and going billions over budget. China built 22,000 miles of high-speed rail in 15 years. We can’t build a system because we no longer believe in one.

The right is selling nostalgia. We need to sell capability.

Since 1970, median income has gone up about 911 percent. Great, right? Not even close.

In that same time, housing prices have jumped nearly 1,700 percent. Rent? Up more than 1,200 percent. A public college degree that used to cost around $1,500 now runs nearly $40,000 — a 2,400 percent increase. And healthcare? It’s exploded by more than 4,000 percent.

It’s not just how incomes are stagnant. In terms of purchasing power, they’re in free fall.

People are mad about inflation, and it ain’t just eggs. They’re angry about an economy that’s been re-engineered to make them work harder and get less. A society that once promised stability and upward mobility now demands more and gives back less.

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A Government Working to improve quality of life for the 99% Is Radical Now
It should not be radical to say the government should directly build housing, healthcare infrastructure, and industry. Yet it is. Why? Wall Street Dems haven’t fought the ideological war to make it common sense.

Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex. His vision was for it to be a wartime construct which needed to be reabsorbed into society. Instead, it became the blueprint for how we run everything: private profit, public subsidy, minimal accountability. That same logic now runs our schools, our hospitals, our housing, our economy.

Wall Street ad men conflate our economic system (capitalism) with a system of governance (democracy). We’ve allowed markets to dominate civic life, corporations to hold power over citizens. Our collective capacity to build, maintain, and improve public goods has dramatically deteriorated.

Q: What about government inefficiency?
A: This common objection misses the point entirely. Yes, government of teh last 25 years struggles to execute. Why? Because its deliberately been hollowed out. Regressives replaced civil servants with contractors. We’ve cut training. We’ve inserted layers of consultants. Then we wonder why nothing gets done.

This isn’t the natural state of government — it’s the deliberate result of a fifty-year campaign to make government fail. The solution isn’t more privatization; it’s rebuilding our capacity to execute. The American government put a man on the moon in less than a decade. It can build affordable housing, efficient healthcare, and clean energy if we demand it.

Now we’re supposed to just fight for “democracy” while watching billionaires loot the Treasury and call it innovation?

Moving Beyond the Presidential Frame
Every four years, we pretend our only option is to find the perfect candidate. Yet ideology doesn’t live in a person — it lives in a movement. In projects. In institutions. In media. In language. We need to stop waiting for the next FDR or Obama. We need to become a force with a worldview so complete, any candidate who runs outside of it sounds ridiculous.

Economic populism can do that. But only if it has structure, clarity, and a destination.

No More Left-Right Center Labels
The media loves to ask, “Should Democrats go left or center?” The question remains meaningless to most voters. What matters is: can you deliver? Can you lower my rent? Can you fix the hospital? Can my kid go to college without a mortgage? Can you build public structures which make my life better?

This vision isn’t left or right — it’s real. It’s about measuring success not in GDP points or Dow Jones averages, but in years of work required to live a decent life. It’s about replacing consulting firms with public agencies that actually build things. It’s about using government not to prop up broken markets, but to compete directly with them.

Consider these battlefield metrics:

In 1965: Government built Medicare in 11 months

In 2025: It takes 14 years to rebuild a single rail tunnel

The Interstate Highway System: 41,000 miles in 35 years

California High-Speed Rail: 15+ years, billions over budget, still incomplete

FDR didn’t defeat fascism with “Stop Hitler” ads — he built the Arsenal of Democracy. We need our own version of that — not just storming beaches, but holding ground through concrete alternative systems that make corporate extraction obsolete.

This Is the Ideological Front
So yes, keep rallying. Keep drawing crowds. But let’s start holding territory. Let’s define what the world looks like after we win.

I see this struggle every day in East Tennessee, where I’m swinging hammers as a contractor. My grandfather was a union organizer who rose from sharecropping to owning a 40-acre farm in a single generation. That transformation wasn’t just personal grit — it was made possible by an America focussed on building things, creating systems to allow working people to rise.

We need to stop being the opposition to Trumpism and start being the proposition. That means rebuilding belief — in each other, in institutions, and in the idea that collective power can still change the direction of this country.

If we want to protect democracy, we need to build a new one that works.

That’s the war. Let’s fight it.

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