A true people’s Project 2029 must be decisive. It will take more than repealing MAGA’s executive orders and returning to business-as-usual neoliberalism if we want to extinguish fascism as it exists in the United States today. American politics doesn’t need yet another technocratic fix— we need to bring down the hammer of the popular will. We must create a forwardly socialist alternative to the liberal conception of Project 2029, one that can defeat fascism at the ballot box, contest its hegemony over American political institutions, and restructure our domestic governance structures to be more fundamentally transparent and democratic.

The neoliberal conception of such a project as it is being put forward is no accident. The Democratic Party does not lack credentials or deep pockets, but it does lack the capability to articulate a positive vision of a better future. The very coherence of the party depends on a balancing act of reconciling what are ultimately irreconcilable interests: capital and labor, democracy and empire, welfare and accumulation, the oligarchy and the people—without ever resolving any of them, aiming instead to co-opt and demobilize the progressive energy of its own supporters. These do-nothing Democrats are not leaders who bring the people forward, but rather the representatives of special interests and personal careerism. This establishment has only managed the decline of the current social order while suppressing the vision and energy for a better world among its base. Such a phenomenon has been inspiringly contested, with the momentum behind the ongoing socialist insurgency only growing day by day. The party’s attempt at mediating these irreconcilable antagonisms is becoming an impossible task. It has survived this long, but it has become clear that it cannot and will not in this form for much longer.

A party project that genuinely embodies the spirit and politics of the people who support it would require an entire upending of the Democratic establishment’s political methods. But that the Democratic establishment is so oppositional to even the most minor popular reform means that this insufficiency is an Achilles’ heel we must capitalize on. It is exactly a consolidated, ideological campaign from the left flank in the lead-up to the looming 2028 presidential elections that could bring these contradictions to the fore and fracture the very coalition the current Democratic Party leadership is desperately trying to hold together. It would unleash the energy of the people into an electoral surge against the far-right and for socialism in order to make meaningful and lasting change.

This is why we cannot let the question of a ‘Project 2029’ be monopolized by agents of internal reform and incrementalism, an initiative to return to business-as-usual politics, as the Democratic establishment (in the image of Pritzker or Booker, of all people) would prefer. Such an endeavor, in the hands of these people, would be dead on arrival. There would be no need for the far-right to contest the election and attempt another Jan. 6—the visionless Democratic establishment will hand the election to the far-right on a silver platter, just as it did in 2024. Our Project 2029 is something that must be organized and burst onto the scene, developed with the tasks of the moment and the real needs of the millions in mind. In its content, it means a shift in the very conditions through which the current political system, the constant and draining tug-of-war of the current political duopoly, is reproduced, changing it forever.