After seven months of polling and soul-searching, the Democratic leadership has unveiled its program for moving forward past the debacle of 2016.

In a New York Times op-ed on 24 July, the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, placed the blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the electoral college on the Democrats: they had been too timid and vague in articulating a vision for the country. But that, he promised, was changing. The Democrats had devised a program – a Better Deal for the American Worker – to offer to the American people. That deal had three legs: better pay, lower expenses, and investments in programs that would give workers tools to compete in the21st-century economy.

Critics immediately pointed out that these policy proposals were hardly new for the Democrats, who have called for similar programs in the past, and that calling their plan a “better deal” presumed that the current deal was good.

And therein lies the rub. The rise of Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left signaled that Americans hate the current deal. While Trump and Sanders each had distinctive supporters, both spoke to the reality that since 1980, the political policies of neoliberalism have concentrated wealth in the pockets of a tiny elite.

Statistics bear this out: economists show that the prosperity of the nation from 1945 to 1979 reflected a general compression of wealth ushered in by the policies of New Deal Democrats in the 1930s and continued by both parties until the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Beginning in 1981, when government policies began to undermine the liberal consensus of the previous generation, wealth began to diverge. It is more unevenly distributed than ever before. Working Americans are living this divergence as wages have stagnated or declined, higher education has become unaffordable, healthcare coverage is out of reach, and infrastructure has deteriorated, all while the rich are getting richer. As hard-working Americans fall farther behind, they have lost faith in government.

Today’s Better Deal acknowledges the grassroots anger that Trump and Sanders tapped, but tries to pick up Sanders supporters – as well as, perhaps, wooing some of the 74% of Trump voters who are unhappy with their economic positions – and fold them into the existing Democratic coalition of different groups interested in specific policies. This is not altogether misguided: polls show that a majority of Americans actually support Democratic social policies on same-sex marriage, abortion, and racial and gender equality, so expanding that coalition to include voters concerned about economic injustice makes sense.

But courting workers to rejoin the existing Democratic coalition is weak medicine for a life-threatening illness. America is at a cataclysmic moment in its political history, one in which the two major political parties are moribund and are facing insurgencies that still remain inchoate. In the ruins of our political traditions, a radical minority has seized power by manipulating the basic structures of democracy, pouring corporate money into elections, gerrymandering districts into tortured boundaries, purging voters from the polls, and now, quite literally, denying reality. The disjunction between the current political system and the reality of Americans who live under it is so profound that the only solution is either to capitulate to oligarchy or reclaim American democracy.

It is this crisis the Democrats must face. And their history has given them unique tools.

Democratic leaders originally formulated their ideology in a time that looked to their followers much like the present. In the 1820s, westerners and political outsiders worried that rich men in the east had commandeered the government for their own ends. Andrew Jackson, rough, racist, and rich wild man that he was, famously articulated that “the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes”. Government must not “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful,” he wrote, but instead protect everyone, rich and poor, bankers and workers, equally. Basic economic justice, he insisted, underpinned American democracy.

Jackson’s insistence that the government’s job is to keep the economic playing field level – for white men, in his day, but the idea was expandable – became the ideology of the Democratic party. It was to this idea Franklin Roosevelt returned in the 1930s to sell his New Deal, the system of regulation and social welfare that is now being gutted. FDR vowed “to restore America to its own people” after the policies of what he called “organized money” had, like today, redistributed wealth upward to a tiny minority. Changing the laws was not, as FDR said, a question solely of economics: it was a movement for the restoration of American democracy.

Today, the Democrats have the opportunity to make the traditional Democratic argument. The catastrophic Trump administration presents a crisis that rivals the Great Depression, which opened the way for the New Deal, making voters more likely to back great change that restores their faith in government, rather than minor tweaks of the current system they distrust. Democrats must insist on restoring American democracy not just by calling for higher wages and free college, but also demanding an end to voter suppression and gerrymandering, business regulation, investment in large infrastructure projects, and paying for social welfare by increasing taxes on those who have so disproportionately benefited from the tax cuts of the past three and a half decades.

Jackson warned that when the rich commandeered government, they passed laws that “arrayed section against section, interest against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commotion which threatens to shake the foundations of our Union.” In words worth heeding now, he went on: “It is time to pause … to review our principles, and … take a stand against … any prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many, and in favor of compromise and gradual reform in our code of laws and system of political economy.”

In a moment of historical crisis that looks much like those of the past, the Democrats’ goosed version of older policies is not going to cut it.