The re-election of Donald Trump is an American tragedy. But the response from California’s Democratic Party leaders—thus far limited to calling for a new era of resistance—is not enough to arrest the appeal of his politics. We need to give voters a better blue-state model for success. And we can start right here in California.

Tens of millions of voters just decisively reinstalled a manifestly corrupt criminal and aspiring despot because Democrats like me failed to demonstrate our leadership would better improve American lives. What we need is proof of concept: to show that Democrats can run large, complicated, and socio-economically variegated jurisdictions in ways that produce broadly distributed wealth, better life opportunities, and rising expectations for future generations.

California is ground zero. We are an unaffordable, high-tax, low-quality service state shedding our middle class to lower-cost even lower-service states like Texas and Florida. Businesses cannot afford to expand operations here. Young people cannot afford to start families here. And Democratic-run state and local governments cannot manage to deliver quality schools or solve public problems like homelessness, property crime, housing shortages, or traffic congestion. Although we’re the fifth-largest economy in the world, we have the highest poverty rate in the country adjusted for cost-of-living (which includes everything from housing to taxation). We stay competitive primarily because of our natural advantages and private resources—our Mediterranean climate, strategically located ports, private research universities, skilled labor force, deep and networked capital markets, and our diverse inclusive culture—not our public policies or elected leadership.

So what can we California Democrats do to present ordinary Americans a viable alternative? I propose a few guiding principles.

Public services exist for their users, not their providers. California Democrats have a proud history supporting workers’ rights, but that tradition can create conflicts when it comes to already-powerful government workers with civil-service protections and healthy benefits bargaining against the interests of working Californians who depend on the services they provide. Public schools, for example, should be run to prioritize learning and provide working families quality options in every zip code. Same with public programs to combat homelessness, provide public healthcare, or house public university students. Services should be regularly assessed against measurable objectives, and tailored to cost no more than necessary to achieve them. For a program addressed to a problem like street homelessness, the goal should be obsolescence—not permanent employment for select NGOs.

Abundant growth is good for everyone. President Kennedy liked to say that “a rising tide lifts all the boats.” He was right. Economic growth creates wealth for families, taxable income for public investments in schools and infrastructure, and funds public assistance programs like MediCal for folks who need them. California Democrats sometimes take action to support small businesses—particularly minority, women, and immigrant-owned small businesses essential to building wealth in lower-income communities—but our regulatory environment remains among the worst in the country. Costs, taxes, fees, needless professional licensing requirements, administrative review procedures, zoning rules, excessive employment regulations, and building codes make it difficult for all but the most highly-scaled or margined businesses to get off the ground let alone stay afloat. The result is a diminished supply of goods and services and higher prices for working families, the most obvious and painful of which is the offensive price of housing. California Democrats should prioritize growth by reviewing existing mandates, procedures, and fees. There should be presumption for repeal unless rebutted by convincing evidence that a rule is necessary for public health or safety.

Deregulate the production of public goods. California’s regulatory morass thwarts public investment as well as private enterprise. Sixteen years ago, Californians voted to shoulder billions of dollars of debt to build a public high-speed, low-emission commuter rail network linking the State’s major population and economic zones. It was among the first votes I cast, and represented California at its best: shared sacrifice for a bold investment in our collective future. But what happened? The project buckled under the weight of the State’s own hiring, building, and environmental review protocols, burned through repeated infusions of cash, and is barely on pace to provide limited 171-mile service between Bakersfield and Modesto in the 2030s. The same could be said for bike lane, greenbelt, mass transit, school, dormitory, and parkland reclamation projects across the State. We need to be a state that builds. California Democrats could start by exempting public infrastructure projects—broadly defined—from environmental reviews, and preempting local ordinances that encumber such projects with hiring, sourcing, and related conditions.

Prioritize progress, not perfection. California too often lets the perfect become the enemy of the good. Take homelessness, arguably the most pressing moral and governing crisis we’ve had for a decade. Instead of prioritizing the construction or retention of satisfactory temporary shelters to bring people indoors, policymakers often insist upon solutions that provide comprehensive services in state-of-the-art facilities built under onerous codes and staffed by expensive contractors. The result is the persistence of inhumane tent cities and festering squalor, as we pay far too much—in many cases more than $400,000 per unit—to move far too few people off the streets. This incompetence is malpractice, and worse, it’s cruel. We cannot expect voters to take us seriously—let alone trust us—when we cannot make meaningful progress to support our most vulnerable residents.

Message to meet people where they are. Politics requires bringing people to our ways of thinking, and that means talking in terms of others’ interests in ways that validate their insights and include their concerns in the solutions we are advocating. This is especially true for niche policies that may be the right things to do, but are low priorities for most voters. We can reform policing, for example, without vilifying cops or dismissing public safety. We can diversify social studies curricula without teaching kids to despite their country, themselves, or one another. Common sense matters. Virtue signaling—like “land acknowledgments”—turns normal people off, does nothing to advance our causes, and at worst undermines them. Tolerance matters, too. If we want people to respect the existence of different gender identities, for example, we need to respect their normal reservations about performing irreversible sex-change operations on 12-year olds.

Our work is cut out for us, but these principles may help us navigate our way out of the wilderness. And navigate we must. California is unlike any place in the world, one that could only exist in America. If California Democrats are going to help reclaim the American Dream from whatever malevolence befalls it now, we can start by reclaiming the California Dream first.

Adam Sieff is a constitutional rights attorney, and a Lecturer in Law at the USC Gould School of Law. He has served as a delegate to the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, on the board of the Los Angeles County Young Democrats, and as counsel to the Biden for President campaign.