Unemployment is approaching 25% in the United States, if calculated the way it was until Bill Clinton removed "discouraged workers" from the figures. Among those lucky enough to have jobs, real wages have been falling for most since the 1970s.

Republicans have a solution: get the government out of the way, then sit back and wait for an entrepreneurial explosion to launch the economy to unprecedented prosperity.

Democrats have a different solution: trust them to set up exactly the right structure of economic and social policies, then sit back and wait for an entrepreneurial explosion to launch the economy to unprecedented prosperity.

Most Americans wisely reject both solutions. The Republican approach requires faith in a magical "invisible hand". The Democratic approach requires that too, but also a faith in policy makers' ability to properly manipulate an infinite set of unpredictable economic and social variables to free the invisible hand to do its magical work.

The Republican theory is much more accessible to people who never took a class in economics: "the government is the problem, get rid of government interference". The Democratic theory requires more fealty to complex models and elite academics.

Elizabeth Warren was one of those academic policy makers. But while the Democratic establishment was being led down Wall Street like a bull by the nose, Warren was sticking up for common sense and ordinary consumers.

She came to prominence on the Tarp oversight panel, where she called for a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to be created. President Obama created the agency, but picked someone more Wall Street friendly than Warren to lead it.

Warren had the last laugh when she became a US senator, and quickly emerged as 2016's only possible anti-Hillary – though she insists she is not, at the moment, thinking of running.

Elizabeth Warren could defeat Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Barack Obama beat Hillary by merely implying that he would clean up Wall Street. Elizabeth Warren is explicitly crusading to break up too big to fail banks, regulate consumer debt, and block Wall Street bonus excesses.

After the progressive base nominates her, the general electorate will have some practical questions, such as: why will a swarm of small banks be less likely to crash the economy than a few large ones? Anybody willing to think for more than five seconds about the structure of the banking industry will be familiar with the savings and loan debacle, when bad loans in an industry of small banks nearly bring the economy to its knees. Some reasonable voters may ask if it wouldn't be easier to regulate a few large banks than a sprawling decentralized industry of many small ones.

Many voters will have a problem with Warren's proposed clampdown on the consumer credit industry. To the extent that they even understand what she's proposing, it's going to sound like she wants to cut off their access to credit cards, auto loans and mortgages. As irresponsible as the consumer credit industry has been, voters will legitimately want to know how Warren proposes to supply them with a car to get to work when they don't have the money to pay for one and groceries when a meager paycheck has been spent.

Which brings us to the real issue that American workers care about – about which neither Warren nor her Republican opponent will have anything credible to say: how do we create high-paying jobs for American workers?

The real solution is unfortunately beyond the imagination of almost any Democrat or Republican. The real solution is a massive mobilization of labor and capital to redevelop the US economy – something that the US and every industrialized country has done before.

The great American example is the second world war, when the government worked with the private sector to super-size the national economy in an all-out sprint to reindustrialize an entire nation. More recent examples, taking place under governments of many political persuasions, include Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and China. Europe had two surges of intentional industrialization – one before the second world war and one after. Like America's great mobilization, most of Europe's took place within a liberal democratic framework.

All these intentional industrializations and reindustrializations had one thing in common: a society mobilized labor and capital directly, on a massive scale, in the cause of increasing the productivity of the national economy.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth Warren's new wing of the Democratic party is not even capable of imagining that kind of mobilization. The only way to get from Warren's policy proposals to jobs and higher wages is through a long and indirect chain of causality. That tortured logic won't win a presidential election, and it won't serve as the basis for a viable new direction in American politics.