The late Stephen Hawking understood where we were heading. Shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency and Britain voted to leave the European Union, he warned the world as we knew it was on an unsustainable path.

Writing in the Guardian, Hawking lamented that the automation of factories had already decimated traditional manufacturing and artificial intelligence would soon take middle-class jobs, leaving behind only a few supervisory roles for the highly educated or creative.

“This in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world,” Hawking wrote in 2016. “The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive.”

While every prior technological revolution created jobs to replace those that were phased out, the digital upheaval is only leaving more excess labor. The four tech giants which effectively control the American economy – Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon – employ relatively few people. Once thriving industries, from music to media to retail, are verging toward a form of extinction – existing, but only as spectral after-images of what they once were.

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When politicians typically nod toward this dire status quo, they talk nebulously about “retraining” workers for the jobs of the future, even if there really won’t be many jobs. There’s the hope that if only we teach enough kids to code, we will have a thriving economy on par with America’s golden years after the second world war.

This, of course, is a fallacy. Tech skills are important but they aren’t nearly enough.

It appears some Democrats are finally waking up to this reality. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a probable candidate for president in 2020, recently endorsed an idea that has long had credence in leftist circles but is now filtering into the mainstream.

Gillibrand told the Nation she supports a government-backed jobs guarantee. A proposal that animated Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and last saw life in the 1970s, it may become a litmus test for all Democrats seeking the nomination.

Were Donald Trump less in the thrall of the oligarchy, he’d be smart to support it, too.

The idea is simple. The government guarantees a job with livable wages and benefits to anyone who wants one. A national infrastructure bank could set a much-needed floor on wages and benefits.

Imagine a Marshall plan for America. Spending to put people to work instead of sending them off to war.

In a recent paper by Mark Paul, William Darity Jr and Darrick Hamilton commissioned by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the researchers offered one muscular vision: a bank to fund vital infrastructure projects and pay at least a national annual minimum wage of $24,600, with health benefits and opportunities to advance. This would go far beyond the universal basic income idea circulating in progressive and tech circles now.

A jobs guarantee would likely boost wages in the private sector, where consolidation has killed competition and monopolies dominate the landscape. Competing with the government, the private sector would feel pressure to increase pay and benefits.

America would not be alone. The new president of South Korea, Moon Jae, pledged to create 810,000 public sector jobs over five years. Moon promised to increase the number of teachers, firefighters, police, and social workers.

In struggling cities and hollowed out towns, politicians hunt for answers. Local governments can only do so much. A robust federal jobs program would offer hope for the millions who want to work but can’t because the factory or the shopping mall or the local hardware store shuttered long ago.

Working class and poorer people would have the dignity of a job, a place to go, people to see. A rising wage floor would mean the end of working poverty – people who have jobs but still can barely afford rent and food.

If Democrats actually want to build a long-lasting majority and be the party that stands on the side of the vast number of people, a jobs guarantee offers a path forward. But this shouldn’t just be about landing one party in power.

It should be about offering hope to those who don’t have any. Then, and only then, can America start to fulfill its promise as a shining city upon a hill.