“The government hasn’t often delivered the things we said it should deliver,” said Khanna. In the CHIPS Act, which he co-wrote, “money was allocated for rural broadband, but we don’t have much evidence that it’s actually been dispersed and working.” Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act contained significant investments in American industry, but many promised factories still haven’t been built.
The administration, he said, should have chosen a few cities as demonstration projects: “Pick a community like Johnstown, Pa., or Galesburg, Ill., or Milwaukee, Wis., and say, Here’s what it was, here’s a year later what we have done in this community, and here’s how it’s turned around.” Democrats, he suggests, lost the ability to tell a coherent story about how they’re making people’s lives better.
Khanna isn’t alone, of course, in arguing that progressives have squandered public trust by failing to govern effectively; my colleague Ezra Klein has repeatedly leveled similar critiques. But Khanna is also making a broader argument, which is that Democrats have failed to conjure up a vision of the future that’s either reassuring or exciting.
“This is, I think, where we have such a challenge to present the counter to the Trump-Musk-Vance presidency, which is they’re trying to take the patina of the future and connect it with deregulation and Texas,” he said, invoking the location of Musk’s new headquarters, a state that combines social conservatism with laissez-faire economics.
Khanna continued, “What we have to do is say we get the future, we understand technology, and we have a far better vision for how technology is going to help your family, your community, and how we’re going to regulate technology.”
