A little more than a decade ago, I attended an advance screening of Maxed Out, a documentary about the boom market in predatory consumer-lending practices, exposed through the stories of unsuspecting victims. As the housing bubble had not yet popped, the event didn’t generate much buzz, even in a city as wonky as Washington, D.C. The audience was overrepresented by people like me and my peers: interns and junior political professionals whose antennae were constantly alert to free food and entertainment. But that night we had an additional reason to be excited: The film was followed by a Q&A with a Harvard Law School bankruptcy expert named Elizabeth Warren.

Five years later, Warren would become a Democratic senator and a household name, but her academic work, online writing, and advocacy had already placed her on a glide-path to progressive-icon status. It was natural, even at that early date, that a handful of young liberals living in the nation’s capital would want to hear what she had to say. Her presentation that evening was my first encounter with the toaster analogy, and to this day I remember being stuck by its elegance and explanatory power.

“It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house,” Warren later explained in the journal Democracy. “But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street–and the mortgage won’t even carry a disclosure of that fact to the homeowner. Similarly, it’s impossible to change the price on a toaster once it has been purchased. But long after the papers have been signed, it is possible to triple the price of the credit used to finance the purchase of that appliance, even if the customer meets all the credit terms, in full and on time. Why are consumers safe when they purchase tangible consumer products with cash, but when they sign up for routine financial products like mortgages and credit cards they are left at the mercy of their creditors?”

The essay was Warren’s attempt to lay out a solution to the toaster problem, but it also became a seedbed for the most unalloyed progressive achievement of the Obama era. When we buy toasters or microwaves or other consumer products, we take for granted that those items won’t destroy our lives, and a big reason we have such faith in them, whether we know it or not, is a federal regulatory agency called the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Financial products are subject to federal regulation as well, of course, but at the time, that authority was distributed among a number of agencies with larger remits—the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, for instance—many of which were caught in the grip of regulatory capture. In her Democracy article, Warren unveiled a proposal to consolidate all of that authority into a single new independent agency that would police the entire consumer credit industry, with the long-term goal of making borrowing more transparent and less risky.

Warren had identified a complex problem, distilled it into simplicity, and traced the outlines of a solution. Just three short years later, President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which birthed a minor miracle of reform: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As the Democratic Party seeks a way out of the wilderness, the origins and realization of the CFPB should serve as a template for progressive policymaking that serves real needs and has the political power to unify the warring factions on the left.