Saikat Chakrabarti is running for Congress in my old hometown, San Francisco. Nancy Pelosi has had the seat since 1987 and she hasn’t said whether or not she’s running for reelection next year. Whether she does or doesn’t, the district needs a dynamic new representative. I’ve known Saikat since 2018 when he was AOC’s campaign manager, helping her to beat Joe “the next speaker” Crowley. Before that though, Saikat was the director of organizing technology on the 2016 Bernie campaign and then one of the founders of Justice Democrats. Once AOC was elected, he went to DC with her as chief of staff, infuriating Republicans and lobbyists by writing and launching the Green New Deal. Since then, he’s led a policy think tank devoted to developing comprehensive plans for how the government can deliver prosperity and economic security for all Americans through an economic mobilization to build a clean economy.
Saikat was only 1 year old when Pelosi was first elected to Congress. These days he’s doing Zoom calls with San Francisco voters everyday and with non-San Francisco people every week. You can sign up for one on his website. The first candidate endorsed by Blue America for the 2026 congressional cycle, you can contribute to his campaign here.
To Defeat The Rise Of The Authoritarian Right For Good, Democrats Should Look Back To Our History
-by Saikat Chakrabarti
The American Dream rests on two core promises: if you work hard, you’ll have a good life, and your children will be better off than you. But today, even dual-income families struggle to afford the essentials. The number of years you have to work to buy a house has more than doubled since 1965. It’s the same story for cars, healthcare, education and childcare. These aren’t just luxuries— affording to have a roof over your head, raise a family, get a good education, go to the doctor— these are the building blocks of the life Americans grew up expecting. That’s why most Americans have lost faith that their children’s lives will be better than their own.Americans feel stuck.
But it’s not just Americans who are stuck— America itself is stuck. People see our roads and train lines crumbling with projects to fix them taking forever. People know we are unhealthy— we have the worst life expectancy among rich nations— but our health and food systems don’t address the root causes of this. People have watched as the Ford factory paying $50 / hr to workers with only a high school degree got replaced by a Wal-Mart with minimum wage jobs. They’ve watched their once vibrant downtowns become full of shuttered shops. They’ve watched while we spend almost $150 billion and over 15 years to try to build 500 miles of high speed rail in California, while China builds 30,000 miles of HSR in 25 years. And all the while, our gridlocked government seems completely unable to even muster a fight against the decline.
Politicians in both parties have done nothing for decades while this decline took place. They did it because they believed in the ideology that America doesn’t need to make things of value anymore— that we can simply sell our currency to China to buy everything from them. This was a convenient ideology to believe in— it meant they didn’t have to try to figure out what to do while millions of Americans lost their high wage jobs. And of course, it didn’t hurt that the bankers and CEOs funding their campaigns loved this ideology too.
So it should be no surprise to anyone that, over the last several decades, whenever Americans got the chance to vote for change they’ve taken it. They did it in 2008 even though the candidate was a black man with the middle name Hussein. And they did it again in 2016 and 2024, even though Trump led an insurrection into the Capitol, spent years spewing vile racism, and most Americans believed Trump would enact a national abortion ban (which is incredibly unpopular). People in America want change, and while they are open to what form that change may take, they are sure business as usual isn’t cutting it.
But unfortunately for us, the change vote this time is leading us straight down the path to an oligarchy and possible autocratic takeover of our government. And while Democrats seem content to “play dead,” as James Carville put it, and wait for the pendulum to swing back their way as backlash to Trump builds up, I believe we can’t rely on that. For one, there is a good chance Republicans will attempt to deny any losses in 2026 and 2028— after all, why would they change their behavior from what they’ve already been doing for the past several years? The GOP has been systematically trying to take over county election boards across the country so they can deny certifying elections where it matters. Elon Musk has been busy illegally dismantling whole swaths of our government. Democrats campaigned in 2024 saying that Trump returning to power would be a grave threat to our democracy. It’s time they started acting like they believe it.
But Democrats need to do more than just stop the coup. It won’t be enough to just rely on the backlash to Trump. True, the pendulum may swing back to the Democrats this time, but if people’s lives are not significantly improved, then it will just swing back right the next time— and it might swing even harder.
To defeat the rise of the authoritarian right for good, Democrats should look back to our history. While the far right movements rising today aren’t exactly the same as the fascist movements of the 1930s, there are many similarities. Back then, we had our own fascist movement in America that was filling Madison Square Garden with huge rallies. It was threatening to grow in power, but we were able to defeat it— not just for one election cycle, but for decades— with the election of FDR.
To do it, FDR didn’t just return us back to a pre-Great Depression America. FDR came in with a whole new movement that built a new government and economy. Through the New Deal and the mobilization up to World War 2, FDR didn’t just build the modern day social safety net— he built the industrial base that was the source of wealth for the middle class. Millions of people’s wages and quality of life were improved drastically. He transformed American life, and by doing so, he put the nail in the coffin of fascism by showing that American democracy, when used correctly, could be the greatest engine for growth and prosperity in the world.
This kind of transformative economic vision is what Democrats should be aiming for today. It requires a new kind of leadership driven by a mission to actually tackle the biggest problems we have. We don’t have, nor do we want, World War 3 to put us on a mission, but we know that to tackle climate change, we will need to build billions of clean machines to replace the dirty ones all across the world. There is far greater support for taking action on climate change today than there was for entering World War II before Pearl Harbor, when Roosevelt had already begun building the arsenal of democracy. And, unfortunately, many “Pearl Harbor moments” for climate are coming. At the same time, a $100+ trillion dollar global green transition is already happening— with or without us. We have an opportunity staring us right in the face to build up our economy to create the kind of massive increase in quality of life that FDR accomplished through the mobilization up to World War 2. I have spent the last several years working with my colleague Zack Exley at New Consensus on the details of what that kind of mobilization could look like— and you can read about it on my think tank’s website here: Mission for America. The Mission for America is like the Green New Deal with the details filled in. It is a big bold plan, but entirely practical— but to do it, we need a Democratic party that has the guts to be bold enough to call America to a mission.
Beyond building a new high-wage economy, Americans are demanding we get our completely broken healthcare system under control. We should do that by creating a universal healthcare system like every other developed nation in the world - as well as many developing nations. It’s completely inexcusable for millions of Americans to be going into debt just to take care of their health. In America, I believe the easiest way for us to get there is to expand Medicare to guarantee coverage for all— but we should be clear that even this will not be enough. We will need a national mission to train up new doctors and nurses and build clinics and hospitals all over this country. We can’t afford to replace one broken system with another— we must acknowledge that our healthcare system must be expanded greatly to truly take care of everyone who needs care in this country.
We must also get the cost of housing under control in this country. We are millions of units of housing short in this nation, and it will take a national mission to build these. We must use every tool at our disposal to do this. At my think tank, we have worked on a plan for recreating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was the main financing and planning organization during the New Deal and World War 2. The RFC can be used to finance millions of units of new housing by providing low-interest construction loans, equity investments, and even spinning off social housing development agencies to build all the housing we need.
I also believe we should get the cost of childcare under control by moving towards a universal childcare system. We should also be calling for tuition-free college and community colleges (which would cost less than the annual INCREASE in defense spending we keep approving) while also expanding the number of educational opportunities available to people. We need more trade schools, apprenticeship programs, and also opportunities for those with just a high school degree. Of course, it is not enough for people to just be getting an education if the economic opportunities aren’t there when they are done— so this must be combined with the kind of transformative economic agenda I outlined above.
We must also get the costs of goods and groceries under control. To that effect, I believe we should be creating strategic reserves to stockpile goods when we have abundant supply, and release them when prices start going up. We currently have a couple strategic reserves in this country but we only use them in emergencies. Instead, imagine us stockpiling lumber, steel, aluminum and also foodstuffs like beef, pork, chicken, and grains into strategic reserves when prices are low. Then, when prices start going up, we release from these reserves to bring prices back down. This is exactly how China kept from having the same inflation other countries saw after COVID, and I believe this would also be the best way to go after price gouging— the government would just undercut the price gougers!
And finally, we need to get rid of the corrupting influence of money in politics. I spent a year in Congress where I saw how politicians were constantly afraid of upsetting their donors and this, ultimately, held them back from pushing for any kind of change. The corrupting influence of money in politics is the #1 issue Americans care about. We must be calling for radical solutions here to restore Americans’ faith in our democratic system. We must go beyond repealing Citizens’ United to moving towards a fully publicly financed system. We cannot allow billionaires like Elon Musk to hold our entire democratic system hostage.
Now, I realize a lot of what I’m advocating for will be difficult for a single member of Congress to accomplish, but that is why I’m calling on people all across the country to run with me. We need a movement with hundreds of candidates running across the country to make this happen. The entire Democratic Party needs to change to be one that stands against corruption and for drastically improving the lives of working and middle class people in this country. That isn’t possible with who we have in there now— the leaders today don’t believe it’s possible, and the voters wouldn’t believe them even if they said it. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez got elected to Congress as part of a movement like this in 2018, but we never succeeded in making the movement big enough to bring about the transformative change we need. But right now, the country is ready for change and is looking for a vision that isn’t just anti-Trump, but FOR something else. And after 4 years of destruction under Trump, that vision should be one of creation. It is 1000 times harder to build than destroy, but that is the job in front of us. Who’s with me?
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