Fix the room first.
Then the house.

American democracy isn't being stolen in the night. It's being worn down in plain sight, legally, by both parties at once — districts drawn so the real contest is over before you vote, rules bent to lock in whoever's ahead, faith in the whole thing that rises and falls depending on who just won.

Look at one number. The count of U.S. House seats that are genuinely up for grabs has collapsed. Almost everywhere else, the winner is decided the day the map is drawn, not the day you show up.

The way out isn't to beat the other half of the country. You can't fix a democracy by defeating half of it. The way out is to change what the fight is even about: not left against right, but whether the government answers to you or to whoever paid for the last campaign.

And the proof you mean it is that you go first. You give up your own side's rigged maps and backroom tricks before asking the other side to give up theirs. It costs you seats in the short run. That cost is the entire point — the repairs that actually work are the ones that cost the person making them.

You start out a kid. Then a worker. Maybe a parent. Then, one day, someone's grandparent. Right now the country treats those like four separate problems, and you're the one who falls through the cracks between them. The fix is simple to say: take care of a person at every stage, not only the years they're most useful.

The clearest proof is what happened to kids. For one year the country sent families a monthly check, and child poverty fell to the lowest ever recorded. Then the check stopped, and it more than doubled. Same country, same families — the only thing that changed was whether the help existed.

The middle of life is the opposite problem: we spend more on health care than any country on earth — about 18 cents of every dollar the economy makes — and still come dead last among ten rich nations on how long and how well people live. And the end is a clock: Social Security starts paying less than it promised in 2032 unless someone acts, and the longer we wait, the more the fix costs.

You don't bet the whole country on an untested idea. You prove it in one state, measure it honestly, and let it spread because it works. Washington is the natural place to start — it already runs the three rarest pieces of this anywhere in the country.

The cost, in the open: one combined contribution of roughly $390 a year for a typical household — funded without any new income tax. And it ships as four separate, plain bills, never one giant everything-bill. That giant bill is exactly what sank the last serious attempt: one senator's no took down all of it at once.