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We’re watching Marines on the streets of LA after Trump’s immigration raids ICE running wild. National Guard mobilizing. Elected officials are getting handcuffed. Worse still, we are sleepwalking into war with Iran. The “opposition party,” Democrats, can’t figure out why they keep losing to a fascist game show host.

The answer is math. When a factory closes 100 jobs, it kills 844 total. That’s not a guess. That’s the Economic Policy Institute’s number for durable manufacturing. Every manufacturing job creates 7.4 additional jobs—machine shops, truckers, diners, suppliers, you name it. Retail? You lose 100 retail jobs, you lose just 222, one-fifth the impact. You can see the numbers for yourself in the table here.

I watched this multiplier destroy East Tennessee when NAFTA killed my furniture component factory. We didn’t just lose our jobs. The machine shops died. The truckers lost contracts. The diners lost customers. For every worker I laid off, seven more got destroyed.

Far too many Democrats look at this carnage and shrug. Manufacturing isn’t coming back, they say. The Chicago School says it’s inefficient. The future is services. They’d rather fund another war than rebuild a factory. They’d rather bail out banks than build anything.

And working-class voters abandoned the Wall Street Dems in droves. Not just white voters anymore. Latino workers, who were once solid Democrats, flipped to Trump. Black working-class voters are staying home or switching sides. The Democratic Party is becoming the party of college-educated professionals, while everyone who builds and makes and fixes things runs for the exits.

Some Democrats are starting to see an opening here. Melissa Morales runs Somos Votantes, a Democratic-leaning Latino group that’s been tracking how Trump’s doing with Latino voters. Their latest polling shows his support slipping, and Morales thinks she knows why.

“These numbers tell a pretty clear story—his economic credibility is eroding fast, and that’s a huge problem for him,” Morales said. She pointed out that Trump’s gains with Latino voters in the first place were mostly built on his promises to fix the economy. If that trust is breaking down, those gains could disappear just as quickly.

The opening is real. Democrats could win back these voters. But they won’t, because seizing this opportunity would require them to abandon the very ideology that defines them.

That ideology is neoliberalism, and it’s infected the leadership of the Democratic Party like a parasitic brain worm. It makes them incapable of responding to what people actually need. When voters say they want manufacturing jobs back, Democrats treat them like ungrateful children who don’t understand economics. When communities beg for investment in production, Democrats lecture them about comparative advantage while writing checks to defense contractors.

Americans want change. Big change.

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