We are losing the future
We need more than progressive values - we need progress. Innovation can help us get there.
America is stuck. But there is a path forward.
Even before President Trump took office for a second term, many Americans, including me, felt a sense of national stagnation. So many of the problems we faced a generation ago are still with us, new ones are piling up, and progress is at a crawl. Climate change and the energy transition, inequality and an affordability crisis, creating opportunity in an evolving economy, defending freedom at home and around the world, and providing better care to all Americans—these are only some of the big challenges America needs to address in this century. If Democrats want to make progress on these in the future, we need to show the ambition and vision that can earn us the right to lead.
But if you’ve worked on big problems, you know how difficult it is to make any progress at all. Constraints like high costs, unintended consequences, political polarization, and competing interests pile up, and we end up trapped in incrementalism.
Innovation is a path out. Technology won’t solve our problems for us, but it can eliminate constraints so that we can make real progress, and it can create the capacity we need to pay for it. Where would we be in managing the COVID pandemic without the vaccine? How much worse would our climate outlook be without cheaper solar energy, electric vehicles, and a thousand other innovations?
Already in this century, we’ve seen breakthroughs in areas as far-reaching as energy, biotech, transportation, education tech, and even democratic governance, and more are in sight. And, AI could accelerate all of them. We have an opportunity in this generation to develop the technology that will help us make real progress.
But we’re squandering that opportunity.
The American engine of invention is a complex of the rule of law, universal education, research universities and laboratories, financial institutions and investors, skilled immigration, open and competitive markets, and more, all of which pave the road from the laboratory to the real world.
It took centuries to build, and now we’re hard at work pulling it apart in a matter of months: tariffs and weakened international relationships, attacks on universities and K-12 education, canceled research programs and grants, restrictions on international students and skilled immigration, and general chaos that will drive investment overseas. We won’t see the results immediately, as companies and institutions try to be resilient, but progress takes place over generations. AI seems to have burst onto the scene in the last few years, but the work to get here began decades ago. How many breakthroughs that would have happened five, ten, or twenty years from now have we canceled in the last six months?
Americans should be united in defending our enviable system, but the coalition for innovation has never been weaker.
Part of the problem is that the signal has been lost in the noise. Technology has become identified with its worst problems: manipulative and addictive products, enormous resource consumption, invasions of privacy, creepy chatbots, job loss, inequality, and concentrated wealth and power. These are absolutely critical problems that we have to address, but they shouldn't overshadow what innovation can do for us.
On a partisan level, Republican leaders are in lockstep behind the President as he hands the race for the future to other nations. For our part, Democrats aren’t broadly anti-innovation – it’s there in the CHIPS and Science Act, as a part of the Green New Deal, and in the New Democrats’ Innovation Agenda - but we aren’t broadly pro-innovation either. It just isn’t where the party’s energy is. Pick a prominent Democrat or a candidate in your area and try to find their position on technology or innovation. If they have one at all, it’s likely to focus on harms and risks rather than what we might accomplish. Before I decided to run for Congress, a colleague and I met with senior national Democrats to pitch innovation as an issue we could use to inspire more Americans to join us. We were told that when people hear “innovation,” all they think about is losing their jobs, and so the party wouldn’t focus on it. That answer was one reason I decided to run.
Meanwhile, the most prominent defenders of innovation aren’t helping. They offer pompous manifestos; cold utopias full of delivery drones, miracle drugs, and autonomous everything; and ever-ballooning hype. For the price of deregulation and a cozy relationship, many of them threw their weight behind the very administration that’s now setting us back. Altogether, their efforts have convinced the public that technology is just another form of arbitrary, unchecked power.
We can’t go on like this. If we don’t defend and expand our ability to innovate, we’ll waste the opportunities in front of us and leave behind a nation and a world dimmer than the one we inherited.
To turn it around, we have to make the stakes clearer. We can start by offering a vision defined not by exciting technologies but by the freedoms and capabilities people will enjoy. All of us should have comfortable places to live, good food to eat, and time to enjoy life. We should be healthy and cared for, and have meaningful family, social, and community connections. Our work should be challenging and fulfilling, and we should be free to express ourselves. We need innovation to make that future real, but technology should be the background, not the foreground, of our vision.
Then, we have to help people see how innovation is essential to that humane future. There is a line that connects a grant given to a university to a company that commercializes that research as a new treatment to a grandmother who can manage her illness and have more years with her family. It’s not direct, and it doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s absolutely real.
There are lines like that from every policy that spurs innovation - funding for basic science, investment in emerging industries, training and recruiting talent, keeping markets open and competitive - to every social outcome we want: opportunity, equality, care, free expression, and democratic renewal, among others. If we’re not inventing, we’re not doing nearly enough to achieve our goals. If we’re not telling that story, we aren’t leading.
In this campaign, we’ve outlined our focus areas for driving innovation and growth on our website, and we’ll continue to flesh these out here. Innovation, like growth, isn’t incidental to progress. It’s indispensable.
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