Carpe Momentum: The Old Thinking That Got Us Here Won’t Save Us Now

A convicted felon became president, the planet burns, and inequality grows under the watch of Democrats and Republicans alike.

Albert Einstein once observed that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. It is a reminder that crises, once born, demand a radical shift in perspective if they are to be resolved. Yet in American politics today, nowhere is the refusal to embrace new thinking more evident than in the Democratic Party’s treatment of its own progressive challengers and its paralysis in the face of planetary crisis.

We saw this when the Democratic establishment moved to sabotage Bernie Sanders, a candidate whose movement threatened to upend a comfortable donor-driven status quo. Now, we are witnessing the same old thinking deployed against Zohran Mamdani, who faces smears and cold shoulders from party leadership, including Hakeem Jeffries refusing to endorse him and Kirsten Gillibrand falsely smearing him with Islamophobic attacks for daring to prioritize working people, immigrants, and climate justice. Meanwhile, in the space of a decade, the Republican Party has transformed radically into an authoritarian, grievance-fueled machine openly celebrating cruelty and destruction.