Key Points

• This briefing marks the launch of Common Wealth’s US research and policy program. 
• Donald Trump’s return to presidential power makes it clear that the only path to overcoming the American far right and the authoritarian forms it will seek to cement is to build an alternative progressive political project and reconstructive policy agenda that can resolve the pervasive economic precarity, political disempowerment, and indignity that characterize American life. 
• Bidenomics attempted to address economic precarity and inequality through robust fiscal policy to drive a strong recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and to drive investment in domestic manufacturing. But this program failed to deliver a material transformation in people’s lives. The Administration rolled back income support, failed to adequately respond to inflation and the more structural underlying cost of living crisis, and was too optimistic that stoking a strong labor market recovery and creating manufacturing employment would deliver sufficient prosperity and stability to secure against Trumpism. 
• Common Wealth’s US program will focus on supporting a collective strategy to build a policy agenda and political movement that can address fundamental economic precarity and lay the economic underpinnings of rebuilding and defending a green American democracy for the 21st century.  
• Common Wealth’s US program for the 2025-2026 cycle will be focused on three core pillars:
  • Progressive macrostabilization and decommodification of life’s essentials: Universal social provision of energy, housing, transportation, and care divorced from dependence on market access;
  • Democratically coordinated decarbonization and global green cooperativism;
  • And, building a green industrial democracy for the 21st century.

These pillars are the essential building blocks of economic security. There is a fierce urgency to this agenda. Because only when a progressive program can ensure every American is able to enjoy the dignity of a secure home, the comfort of care and community, and work that genuinely empowers will the progressive project be revived, and the long, hard task of economic and political reconstruction begin.  

Donald Trump’s reelection has grave consequences for sweeping aspects of American life and, indeed, for the world. The incoming Administration seeks nothing less than the reactionary remaking of the American state and society to far outlast its next four years in power. Although the Biden Administration can point to many positive headline economic figures, there were many failures in the 2024 election campaign and past four years of economic governance in power for the Democratic Party to reckon with. Above all, the outcome of the 2024 election lays bare the structural cost of living and economic insecurity crisis that pains many Americans: Too many people are squeezed and insecure.^[1] In 2024, the rate of homelessness in the US reached record highs.^[2] The costs of housing, healthcare, elder care, and childcare are structurally and staggeringly high compared to disposable income.^[3] Debt burdens have increased with rising interest rates and the resumption of student loan payments.^[4]

Despite pursuing a program of fiscal spending to stoke growth, full employment, and green state-led developmentalism following the Covid-19 crisis, the Democratic Party failed to deliver a significant transformation in the quality of life for the many during its term in power. Indeed, for many Americans, quality of life eroded during this term as pandemic-related social welfare provisions were rolled back and inflation further ate at real wages. The Democratic Party offered neither a vision of nor credible path toward such a transformation during the 2024 campaign. The American far right has come to power in the absence of a compelling alternative project to address the existential deprivation, precarity, and disempowerment of millions of Americans. Building and implementing that alternative project is now all the more necessary.  

This briefing marks the launch of Common Wealth’s US program. Common Wealth was founded to support progressive movements to build and implement transformative ownership and economic coordination models. Our efforts are always shaped by and in service to a politics of durable and progressive transformation. We work in partnership with movements to develop radical but rigorous solutions to deep structural problems, seeking to expand the horizon of tomorrow while providing real answers to the pain working people face today. We do that by undertaking rigorous research to map how the economy currently works and how we can reorganize it to work differently to meet social goals and enable collective flourishing. Our work is motivated by the belief that market coordination — premised on concentrated private ownership, investment and allocation guided by the profit imperative, and competitive market governance — cannot adequately address the challenges of our age of overlapping emergency — from the cost of housing and healthcare to our prospects for delivering deep decarbonization and resilience.  As Trump’s return to power makes clear, this overlapping set of emergencies is at the root of a political crisis that threatens to inaugurate a new republic of the far right in the US. In the years ahead, we must respond in kind by articulating a coherent, commonsense, and reconstructive policy agenda that threads climate action with concrete and tangible changes to economic and political structures to ensure dignity, stability, wellbeing, and shared prosperity for all.

Common Wealth’s US program will focus on mapping the economic structures at the heart of existential economic and political crises in the US. And on developing a comprehensive, commonsense, and winning policy agenda to meet our current cost of living crisis and ensure collective prosperity in an age that will be defined by upheaval and instability. We will organize our research, policy design, and coalition building work on the following core pillars:

• Progressive macrostabilization and decommodification of life’s essentials (universal social provision of energy, housing, transportation, and care): How can we develop a 21st century program of macroeconomic stabilization policies that can in tandem keep prices stable, expand employment and necessary investment, and reduce the cost of living?  How can we restructure the provision of life’s essentials — health and care, housing, education, food, and energy — to ensure access is universal, equal, affordable, high-quality, and stable? 
• Democratically coordinated decarbonization and global green cooperativism: How can we deliver rapid decarbonization, end stagnation, and reduce inequalities of wealth and power within and between countries? Rather than reliance on the private sector to drive the transition, how can we build a new architecture of public coordination and democratic planning that can deliver rapid decarbonization, relief from the cost-of-living crisis, and shared prosperity? 
• Building a green industrial democracy for the 21st century: For many, work is a site of insecurity, drudgery, mental and physical harm, and domination. Workers will face increased hostility under the Trump Administration. Likewise, the governance of the US economy and the global economy drives inequality, instability, climate destabilization, and the hollowing of democracy. How can we use industrial strategy and planning to reimagine, reorganize, and rebuild economic cooperation from the workplace to the corporate form, to the commanding heights of the economy to ensure democracy, dignity, and decarbonization?

These are the pillars of a necessary program of transformation: we need credible and ambitious short-, medium-, and long-term policy goals towards achieving these pillars to secure deep material changes to people’s lives. Such transformation is an end in itself, as well as the political means that can continue to build, strengthen, and leverage political coalitions capable of reconstructing American political and economic institutions and defending a new green democratic republic for the 21st century. 

This briefing sets out the rationale and aims of these core pillars, against our dissection of  Bidenomics, the cost of living crisis, and inflation. It concludes with a discussion of what achieving them would entail and why achieving them is essential for addressing the cost of living crisis in the US and, more broadly, for securing the political economic basis of rebuilding and defending American democracy. 

[.fig]Three Pillars of Economic Transformation in the US[.fig]