Make America Great Again. But Not the Trump Way.

So, how do we make America great again?

Certainly not through bigotry and xenophobic walls — real and imagined. Instead, after the tragic news of late, let’s look at the recent successes in getting low income workers paid more, for some answers. These recent pay advances for American reflect a really inefficient way to solve big problems in society. But I believe we’ve reached such a dangerous place as a society that we can’t pass on any good answers. Do I sound alarmist? Good. I am. But my aim is to foster constructive action by raising the alarm — not fear and loathing.

I raise the alarm because the challenges I see in full bloom across the nation signal that these aren’t just one-off problems we face. It’s much worse — the American social compact itself is badly broken.

Here’s one path toward repair. Earlier this year, the states of California and New York agreed to gradually increase their minimum wages to $15 per hour, with a growing number of cities and states also raising the minimum wage. I have long supported this shift, and written about it on LinkedIn in 2013. More recently, the Obama administration changed pay rules that make millions of moderate wage workers eligible for time and half pay when they work overtime.

I believe this momentum around the minimum wage and workplace pay rules are examples of our social compact actually being re-forged in a few important ways. First, this country has so many low income workers (approximately one third of working American families are low income) that we have reached a tipping point. We have such a large concentration of people who work 2–3 jobs and can’t feed or house their families, that a natural window for change opened. Strong organizing and the sheer volume of struggling, fed-up workers meant that local elected officials had an opportunity (or, had their hands forced) to change the minimum wage since Washington has been stalled on this issue for years.

Obama’s pay-rule change is an example of how a President shackled by Washington inertia, found a creative way to take effective action, standing on the shoulders of state and local leaders. One could argue that the minimum wage shifts in New York and California prepared the country for the big changes on the wage issue for the nation, and paved the way for Obama’s national pay rule change.

We badly need to replicate this approach to change if we have any hope of repairing our social compact. At the risk of sounding vaguely Trumpian, it is clear to me that our social compact has cracks nearly everywhere. Pick almost any issue and you’ll see many. Let’s start with the lead allowed into the water supply in Flint, Michigan. Whether people believe in big government, or want to drown most of it in a bathtub, a great majority of Americans would agree that one acceptable role of government is to provide essential protections to citizens. While the situation in Flint could be dismissed as incompetence, the fundamental failure to protect is a strong argument to call it something darker — a gross violation of the first principle of the compact citizens have with American government.

Still feeling optimistic? Let’s move on to the economy. Being an election year, two main narratives have emerged. The first is that the economy is in great shape right now. This rosy storyline relies on the astonishing contrast between our current state of full-employment and near-record-high stock market indexes, compared to where we were during the Great Recession.

A second narrative emerges when we take a deeper look at the data, and this is a troubling story based in some ugly facts about our economy. Despite full employment and low interest rates, the US Census 2015 Current Population Survey tells us that 105 million, or nearly a third of Americans, live below 200% of the federal poverty rate. Things are much worse for African Americans (53% live at or below 200% of poverty) and Latinos (56% live at or below 200% of poverty). The picture darkens when we consider future prospects for these families across generations.

According to the 2016 Economic Report of the President, the US has less earning mobility than Spain and France (and many others ranging from Canada to Denmark), long-time punching bags of proponents of America’s prosperity formula. Even scarier is the systemic risk that is rising as our demographics shift. Our nation is estimated to be majority non-White by 2060. Given the way demographics are trending, this means we’ll also be majority downwardly mobile and majority low income if we don’t find ways to let all Americans thrive..

Even as an optimist who is bullish on American grit and ingenuity, I look at these facts, and I am forced to reconsider the bright and shiny future I tend to look toward. It is hard to call our country great without elements of the social compact that has made it great, actually functioning — like reward following effort, or protecting citizens when they conduct the most basic functions we take for granted in the developed world — like drinking water from the tap.

But I have not given up all hope. The recent example of progress on wage stagnation illuminates a path toward progress — where constructive citizen voice, organized locally, drives change in cities and states, and shapes national policy. What does this mean for you? Vote if you don’t already. Find common cause with your neighbors and coworkers on the challenges you want to fix where you live and work — and talk together about solutions, rather than finding villains to demonize. And, please share what works and what doesn’t when you set local plans in motion, so we get better at getting better. We need more of this to make America great again.

About Ben Mangan: Ben serves on the faculty of the UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business, where he is also the Executive Director of the Center for Social Sector Leadership. Ben is also a Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program. He is the former President, CEO and Cofounder of EARN. Follow Ben at LinkedIn and Twitter for truth telling about leadership, social impact, and human progress.

Photo: Eneas, Courtesy of Creative Commons