1. Even when the economy today is “good,” it’s not really good. That is, even when unemployment is low and the market is doing well and so on, the fact is—a fact mostly unremarked in the daily media—we are still in the midst of an economy whose main feature is that millions of dollars every year are being transferred from the poor and the middle class to the top. So even when the working class (the 50th percentile, say) is doing better, the super-rich (the 1 percent and even the .1 percent) are doing way better.

2. Economics has finally recognized the existence of politics. For decades, or centuries even, economics gave no thought to politics. Wages, for example, were determined by a set of market forces, and politics had nothing to do with it. That’s how academics thought, but it’s not how the world works. In the world, workers make what they have the political power to make. That seems obvious to you and me, but economists were (and many still are) deeply resistant to acknowledging this. The book tells the story of how this change came about, through the work of people like Joseph Stiglitz and groups like the Economic Policy Institute. It’s a really important change because it rejects the assumption of classical economics that left alone, the market will find equilibrium. No—the state has to play an evening-out role.

3. Economics has changed profoundly in this century. In sum, much of economics has moved from being based on theoretical modeling to being based on empirical data. And as this change has happened, economics has moved left, not because economists are leftists, but because the empirical data showed, for example, that r > g, in Thomas Piketty’s famous formulation. That is, the data show that the system is rigged for the rich in a way theoretical modeling did not. There are still, of course, plenty of conservative economists, but a younger and more diverse generation of economists is changing the profession, and those changes are seeping their way into politics.

4. Finally, here’s how the Democrats should explain all this to people. Republicans and the right are not, of course, just going to lie down and stop arguing economics. We’re in for a long battle. I think the best way for Democrats to win it is this: They need to attach their economic ideas to the ideals that Americans are taught to cherish from an early age—democracy and freedom. They should say something like: Yes, our economic policies will put more money in your pocket. But they’ll do more. They are good for democracy, because as the founders knew, a healthy democracy depends on a strong middle class. Too much economic and political power in the hands of the rich leads to oligarchy, and that’s where we’re headed if the trend of the last few decades isn’t arrested.

In addition, our economic plans will advance freedom. The right has sold people one definition of freedom: The free market means freedom. Well, there are a lot of small towns across this country where people are “free” to work at the dollar store or sell a little Oxy. That’s not freedom. There’s another definition of freedom: making people free to live up to their fullest potential. That’s a kind of freedom that dates to Franklin Roosevelt’s “four freedoms” and the definition of rights advanced in his 1944 State of the Union; it even goes back to some founders, as Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath show in an important recent book. When that single mom who works at the dollar store can go to free community college and has a safe and affordable place to park her toddler while she takes those night classes, she is doing exactly that: fulfilling her potential, and in addition, contributing more to the economy. That’s freedom, too. I think the Democrats need to say that—especially after the Dobbs decision. When the right has taken away a half-century-old freedom from women, the door is open to repossess that word and radically redefine it.

Long-standing neoliberal economic assumptions are finally being successfully challenged. If we can save our democracy in these next couple of years, we can win this fight. And I think we’re more likely to win it when we make people understand that economics, democracy, and freedom are not separate things. It’s all one argument.