The U.S. government wastes approximately $4.5 trillion each year. “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, an Illinois Republican, famously said, and said often. In this case, you’re talking about thousands of billions. ($4.5 trillion is the sum total of annual military spending that exceeds what we need to defend the United States homeland, the higher interest paid on the national debt due to the Fed’s attempts to fight inflation, federal subsidies paid to people and companies who don’t qualify for them, uncollected taxes the IRS doesn’t even attempt to get and foreign aid, much of it to rich countries.)

            So much money, so little imagination.

            The 2024 presidential campaign highlights the small-bore thinking that dominates electioneering and journalistic punditry. Trump and the Republicans called for eliminating taxes on tips; Harris and the Democrats followed suit. If enacted, this change would only affect 2.5% of wage earners.

GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance suggested a $5,000 increase in the earned income tax credit; Harris called and raised to $6,000. Only 13% of taxpayers qualify for that benefit.

Harris wants to pay a subsidy to first-time home buyers. Good news: it would apply to roughly one out of four people buying a house or condo in the next few years. Bad news: the idea is dead in Congress, and not only because of intransigent Republicans.

And that’s assuming those ideas don’t wither on the vine. Americans are broke, angry, resentful and worried sick, but those who want to lead them don’t seem to have any interest in directly addressing their concerns. In their first sit-down interview with a journalist, Harris and her running mate Tim Walz refused to name a single thing they would do on day one.

            Candidates are nibbling around the edges of big systemic problems like the unaffordable rents and mortgages and ignoring others, like the existential threat to humanity presented by climate change, entirely. The political system is unresponsive to our wants and needs, and we know why. Lobbyists and big corporate donors with a vested interest in the status quo pay to install cooperative candidates who promise that nothing will fundamentally change and to oppose and remove those who resist them and their interests. Educational institutions purge and blacklist teachers who challenge the dominant corporatist narrative. The news media are loathe to challenge the half-dozen corporate leviathans that own them and do not hire new investigative reporters or rebellious outsiders who threaten to rock the boat. Citizens, surveying this bleak landscape of conformity and corruption, have concluded that the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon. Voters feel trapped, forced to choose between two nearly identically unpalatable parties; they opt out entirely or cast hate votes against the party and candidate they despise most.

            There could be a better way.

Americans consume politics passively. During election campaigns, those of us who take an interest in politics tune in to check what the two major parties and their candidates have to offer. If we’re really engaged, we volunteer to phone bank and talk to our neighbors on behalf of a contender. We may pay out a donation. But we don’t exert political pressure. Politics is a section of the newspaper, a subject link on a website or an app, a form of entertainment delivered in the same format as sports, traffic, weather and streaming movies.

It is different in many other countries. Politics are an activity, something you participate in personally. Protest marches, national strikes and other forms of direct action in the streets are not considered outlandish alternative forms of politicking outside the normal system, as they are here. These tactics, which can shut down cities and might even bring down a government, are legitimate forms of confrontation that can force changes that an ossified electoral democracy would otherwise never consider. At their best, they are so dangerous-seeming that the mere fear of provoking a riot can prompt the ruling class to yield to the people’s demands without anyone having to draw up a picket sign or throw a Molotov cocktail.

In the absence of a revolutionary leftist organization, the periodic spasms of activism we see in the United States—Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, the Battle of Seattle—rarely result in lasting improvements in people’s living and working conditions. We absolutely need such an organization. Such an organization would, in most countries, come up with a list of demands it would use to recruit members and set standards for what the elites would need to concede should they desire to remain in power with the active consent of the governed. But there are currently too many obstacles in our duopolistic political culture to allow such a formation to gain traction.

So let’s start with demands. The first step of radical organizing is to examine the structure of society and its structure as it is and to imagine how they could be reordered and the fruits of its labor redistributed in a fairer, more equitable and more just way. What and how much do we have? How are we spending and dividing these items? How could we do it better?

What should be clear to everyone is that the current rubric, in which we send billions of dollars to foreign countries at the same time American citizens sleep out in the street and go bankrupt from paying medical bills and can’t go to college because it’s too expensive is stupid, rotten and ridiculous. The fact that neither major political party and neither major presidential candidate is willing or able to even begin to think about a different set of policy priorities that addresses the everyday concerns of the vast majority of people is the ultimate evidence of their illegitimacy. Fortunately, we don’t need them. We can figure out what we want and need.

We can demand improvements that, if the system chose to grant them, are realistic and viable. And if (when!) they deny us the better lives we deserve, we can build that revolutionary party we need to seize power and make it happen.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)