The losses we now face as Americans are dizzying and hard to even track, much less emotionally process — so much so that it’s easy to lose track of what’s at stake in the fight with oligarchs Elon Musk and Donald Trump: some of the greatest working-class achievements of the twentieth century.

Oddly for someone currently laying waste to those achievements, Trump has an instinctive grasp of how much they matter. In his quasi-State of the Union address several weeks ago, rhapsodizing eloquently about the wonders of America, he singled out the Hoover Dam — curious given his cuts to the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees the dam, and given his clear determination to sabotage the collective accomplishments of New Deal, of which the dam is one.

Another great wonder of America that Trump mentioned in his speech was the Golden Gate Bridge, another New Deal–era creation. There again, ironies abound: that beautiful and aging bridge has structural problems, and the federal agency that has been monitoring and reporting on those issues, the National Transportation Safety Board, is also facing staff cuts by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — raising the alarming possibility that these structural problems could go unaddressed, leaving the bridge at risk of collapse.

Speaking of great government achievements of the twentieth century, our National Parks System (NPS) — more than eighty-five million acres of land — has long been the envy of much of the world. Even the Chinese government, no slouch at public infrastructure creation, regards it as a model. Though the specifics vary and many of the NPS cuts have been overruled by courts, Musk and Trump have been significantly slashing staff from the parks.

We constantly celebrate our great wilderness in America, from legends about the frontier to “the purple mountains’ majesty” of our national anthem to car ads that panoramically revel in the Western landscape. But the National Parks System is what has kept much of that glorious landscape from being turned into auto dealerships, coal mines, or strip malls, as it all would be if our oligarchs had their way. The National Parks have never been more popular, last year reaching a record high of 331.9 million visitors. We must protect these workers and these lands for the leisure and delight of the working class.

Wallace Stegner once called our national parks “America’s best idea.” You wouldn’t know it looking at our current political class, but there’s considerable competition for that title.

Our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is also the envy of the world. It grew out of the government’s malaria-prevention efforts during World War II and helped to virtually eliminate malaria, polio, and other illnesses from the United States. The CDC is also responsible for the eradication of smallpox, the only human disease we have completely eliminated.

The CDC is only one small piece of the massive federal infrastructure of medical research in the United State. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary funder of medical research in the United States, supporting cancer research that has saved some 3.8 million people’s lives since 1991, and cutting the number of heart attack deaths in half between 1999 and 2020. Every single American benefits from its work.

The billions in NIH funding to universities support life-saving scientific research, but also help sustain our higher education system — tremendously fragile now and far more privatized and stratified than in most wealthy countries, but still one of the best in the world, unsurpassed by any other country in the variety of subjects offered and the diversity of expertise.

Our K-12 system is free to every American child, and public schools are beloved by millions of Americans who use them. Yet Trump issued an executive order to eliminate the Department of Education. The Environmental Protection Agency has provided robust and popular regulation of our air, water, and ecosystems since its founding by President Richard Nixon; Musk and Trump are decimating it. Social Security, another New Deal program, keeps millions of elderly and disabled people above the poverty line and provides 40 percent of its recipients with their sole income; that agency is in a court battle for its existence in the face of DOGE’s efforts to shut it down.

Possibly unsurpassed by any other country is our federal information system. If you’ve ever tried to get concrete facts on any topic from a European government, you’ll appreciate the helpful and brilliant workers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Center for Education Statistics, and countless other agencies that exist just to inform us on how our society is doing so we can figure out how to improve it. All this is on the DOGE chopping block, as are the agencies that oversee and fund libraries, museums, and archives.

The daily acts of sabotage committed by Musk upon our federal government will cause great misery and suffering; they are wrecking our constitutional system, and not in a good way. But we’re also not talking enough about the incredible achievements of our federal government, and the immense services our federal workers have long provided despite a hostile ruling class and a public sector that is notoriously stingy. Americans should be proud of what we’ve built and recognize that it’s worth restoring and expanding.

We on the Left have often failed to tell the story of what we have. One reason we know there could be socialism in America is that our government and its workers have already built and achieved so much. We are now in this position of having to mourn and protest and try to stop these losses to our public sector, without having properly articulated what that public sector has done and what it is capable of doing.

Many on the Left eschew patriotism. We tend to focus more on what is lacking in our system. We don’t celebrate the immense accomplishments of the American public sector but campaign relentlessly on programs that don’t yet exist.

We talk about universal childcare, but we don’t say we know that can work because Head Start — under attack by DOGE — is already a great and successful program, producing better long-term educational outcomes for children enrolled in it. (An exception has been Bernie Sanders’s call for Medicare for All, which in one phrase conveys the idea that we have much to build on and deserve much more.)

We talk about free college, but we don’t say that we know our system can do this because thirty states already provide free community college, and the federal government already helps more than ten million more students with college tuition — another item potentially on the chopping block with Musk and Trump’s attempted elimination of the Department of Education.

“Make America Great Again,” Trump has been bellowing at us for more than a decade now. What’s wrong with that phrase in and of itself? There is nothing amiss in the idea of American greatness, especially when it’s tied to concepts of collective achievement and collective betterment rather than xenophobia, narcissism, and reactionary mean-spiritedness.

Now is the time to talk about what has been great about America, and to defend what its working class has achieved and deserves, against the nihilistic oligarchs who pillage for their own enrichment. Now is the time to argue that it is deeply insulting to all of us to call our government and its workers “waste”; rather, our federal government is the foundation for a society in which we build beautiful things and everyone can thrive.

The Americans fighting back against the Trump/Musk demolition, especially federal workers, are on the front lines of defense against the ruling class’s war on the very idea of a collective project. They know that the private sector has no incentive to and fundamentally cannot protect the places we love, educate our children, cure cancer, keep our bridges standing, or keep our elderly out of poverty. Only we the people can do that.