Make America work again. Pass the Biden infrastructure plan.

Does America still work?

While the question is a gut-punch, it’s a fair one. For the Cassandra, there’s much to support a negative view. Hyper-partisanship, rising inequality and discord, mass shootings and twitter snark, the inability to find common agreement on what were once “facts”, have all conspired to create a sense that we’re somehow lesser than the sum of our parts. A sad reversal of the E Pluribus Unum ethos on which the American nation was founded.

The truth is we’ve been here before — divided, angry, irritable. Yet, we’ve repeatedly shaken-off moments of malaise in order to pioneer lands and technology, expand civil rights, win wars, cure diseases, and put footprints on the surface of the Moon.

America is in the doing—a land fit for builders, doers and dreamers. The best way to prove that we still work as a nation is to put America to work.

President’s Biden’s Infrastructure Plan is a once in a generation opportunity to do just that. A domestic moonshot, the plan galvanizes the best of American idealism, ingenuity and innovation in a historic effort to fashion the future rather than fear it.

Imagine replacing the dominant American memory of our moment—the insurrection at our Capitol—with a symphony of action; a cacophony of steel being forged, spiffed-up schools, roads repaired, trees planted and broadband expanded. Imagine millions of Americans employed in union-wage jobs, bringing clean water to communities collecting rainwater to bathe children. Imagine a modernized grid that delivers the enormous promise and prosperity of renewable energy to the forgotten places of America.

Our shared American future lies in bridge-building, both figuratively and literally.

America must be a nation that once again dares greatly. An America that builds is precisely what the world needs in this “crowded hour”.

The next half century will be dominated by the tension between a rising China, with all its authoritarian efficiency, and the United States. Writ large, this is a contest that will determine whether the future belongs to autocracy or democracy. With gleaming new cities and abundant artifices, China’s gone all-in. And so must we, if the freedoms of assembly, thought and speech are to be guiding values in the 21st Century.

Yes, the plan is expensive. Certainly there will be abuses. But fear of the negative preventing creation of the positive is inherently un-American.

President Biden’s infrastructure plan shouldn’t be partisan, but it will be. Only in Washington DC could patching potholes and schools roofs while creating jobs that can’t be outsourced become a partisan battleground. The fight is just as predictable as DC Republicans opposing the plan as more “tax-and-spend” from the Democrats. These tired talking points won’t win the era for a number of reasons.

First, infrastructure significantly enhances the economy, in both the near and short-term. For the same reason that your local bank is happy to finance your kitchen remodel, infrastructure investments make our country more valuable, not less. But instead of cabinets or countertops, we’re making investments that will create better jobs, fight climate change and provide an alternative to relying on fast-food restaurants as our most reliable provider of wi-fi.

As demonstrated time and time again, only fools bet against the American economy in the long-run. And as FDR’s New Deal and GI Bill or Eisenhower’s massive interstate construction plan so overwhelmingly proved, the benefits of investing in our people and shared property is simply incalculable in terms of upside.

Beyond that, I would counsel my Republican friends to tread cautiously in this debate. The party of Reagan’s “trickle-down” and “supply-side” economics, of the Bush/Cheney “deficits don’t matter” ethos, of Trump’s profligacy, simply lack the credibility to lecture anyone about fiscal discipline. Fellas, that’s a losing hand.

The irony here of course is that Donald Trump himself campaigned on an infrastructure plan $1 Trillion larger than the Biden one, because he knows a thing or two about building.

While Democrats hate to admit it, had Trump followed his gut and led with an infrastructure bill after his inauguration, he’d likely be president today. Instead he followed the advice of DC Republicans and led with a repeal of Obamacare—something his party couldn’t deliver, despite their majorities in both houses.

As a result, Trump now runs a country club instead of a country.

The decision in this moment is just as stark. We can either build the future or be its victim. My vote is that we get back into the business of building the future and write the history that ours was not an age of American decline, but a time for American renewal.

Adam Edelen is the Founder & CEO of Edelen Renewables. He is a former Kentucky State Auditor and candidate for governor.

This story was originally published April 8, 2021 at 10:00 AM.