On Wednesday, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, who is running for his third term, debated his Democratic primary opponent, the actress and activist Cynthia Nixon. The most revealing question, and answers, came at the very beginning of the event.

The first question posed to Nixon concerned her qualifications for the job. Maurice DuBois, a CBS anchor, asked, “What in your experience and background should give voters confidence that you can run a state of twenty million people and a budget of almost a hundred and seventy billion dollars?” Nixon responded by pointing to her seventeen-year record of activism. She had campaigned for more equitable funding for public schools, she said, noting that New York State has “the second most unequal” education system in the country. She had campaigned for marriage equality, helping to raise eight hundred thousand dollars that funded opposition research on several state senators who opposed same-sex marriage—an effort that helped cost three of these senators their seats.

In his rebuttal, Cuomo attempted to render her experience irrelevant. “The governor of New York is not a job about politics,” he said. “It’s not about advocacy—it’s about doing. It’s about management. This is real life. . . . You are in charge of fighting terrorism. You are there in cases of fires, floods, and emergencies, train wrecks. You have to deal with a legislature that’s very, very difficult.”

Imagine if, in response to the moderator’s question, Nixon had said, “A state is not a company—the governor doesn’t ‘run’ it. The question is not whether I can balance a budget, put out a fire, prepare for a flood, or prevent a train wreck. There are professionals who can do any of those things far better than I. The question is whether I can lead and inspire those professionals and millions more people to forge, in this state, a more equitable, safer, better society that we all want to live in.”

She did not, of course, say that. It seemed that the moderator and both candidates shared an understanding of government and politics, a view that considers a governor (or a mayor, or a President) the chief executive and politics the process of hiring that chief executive. This person “runs” a state: she is competent in an emergency and may gain relevant experience by raising money or doing opposition research.

This view is shared by a great many Americans—it may indeed be the dominant view of government and politics. Roger Berkowitz, the academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center, at Bard College, traces this understanding to a speech by John Kennedy, in 1962, in which the President declared that major ideological divides in American society had been bridged and that only technical issues remained. “Today, these old, sweeping issues very largely have disappeared,” he said. “The central domestic issues of our time are more subtle and less simple. They relate not to basic clashes of philosophy or ideology but to ways and means of reaching common goals — to research for sophisticated solutions to complex and obstinate issues.”

Kennedy was wrong historically, failing to anticipate the magnitude of the issues that would arise with the civil-rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the social movements of the coming decades. What’s worse, however, was that he was also wrong politically. In proclaiming the dawning of an era of technocrats, the era of competence and the search for the right solution, Kennedy was, in effect, declaring the end of politics.

Politics is the process of creating and re-creating society. It does not consist of—it may not even include—the process of finding the person best qualified to offer the right solution. In fact, democratic politics will not produce the right solution, and may not produce a solution at all. Any decision achieved democratically will be both imperfect and incomplete, because it will reflect a plurality of views, interests, and needs. This is the beauty of democracy: its work is never done, and there is always the promise of a different, better future.

This promise of change is what has propelled the stunning primary victories of insurgent politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in New York, and Andrew Gillum, in Florida. Nixon shares many of their positions: she is in favor of single-payer health care, robust labor unions and the right of public workers to strike, strong regulation of the housing market, and radical legislative responses to Donald Trump’s war on immigrants and his Administration’s threat to reproductive rights. She favors the legalization of marijuana and frames it explicitly as a racial-justice issue. During Wednesday’s hour-long debate, she articulated many of these positions. But, following conventional campaign wisdom and the logic of the (female) political upstart, she framed most of these as questions of policy rather than vision. Only toward the end of the debate, while answering a question about whether she was seeking the endorsement of Bill de Blasio, the Mayor of New York, did she say, almost as a parenthetical, that she is proposing a “vision of New York as a real progressive beacon, not just a rhetorical progressive state, the way it is now.”

As for Cuomo, he continuously invoked Trump: the question, he made clear, is who can best wage battle against the President, who, as Cuomo said, “is the main risk to New York; he is trying to change the rights and values of New Yorkers.” It’s a fair assessment of the situation, and a fair question. But taking on Trump is not a matter of having the best accountants and firefighters, or the best-articulated policy proposals: it is a matter of putting forward a vision that offers the opposite of the Trumpian pull of the imaginary past. That vision—the promise of something yet unknown—is, in fact, the stuff of politics.