It’s not too early to talk about what the Democrats must do once/if we take back power. But one thing that is clear, going back to the way things used to be is not going to work.

The Republicans have forced this hand. The attack on voting rights, the insanely out in the open level of corruption, the open racism, and the fact that any attempt to reverse any of this will be stopped by a Council of Six on the Supreme Court demands the Democrats be much bolder than they have been.

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to a Kentucky newspaper editor frustrated with the pace of the Civil War. The president understood something many Americans did not: there was no going back.

“Broken eggs cannot be mended,” Lincoln wrote.

The old Union was gone. Whatever emerged from the war would be something different. Hopefully better, but different.

I thought of that quote this week while reading a pair of columns by Jamelle Bouie and Paul Krugman. Both are writing about Trump and the Democratic Party, but they’re really writing about something much larger: the temptation to believe that if we can just survive the current madness, everything will go back to normal.

It won’t.

Bouie was writing about the nascent effort some Democrats are calling “Project 2029,” a loose attempt to do for Democrats what Project 2025 did for Republicans. The specifics matter less than the underlying point. Conservatives didn’t wake up one morning and accidentally create Project 2025. It was the product of decades of work by think tanks, activist groups, legal organizations, media outlets, and donors all pulling in roughly the same direction.

Republicans built an infrastructure for governing long before they won the chance to govern. Democrats, by contrast, often seem trapped in permanent reaction mode. Every election is treated as an emergency. Every outrage demands a response. Every constitutional crisis becomes the crisis. There is rarely time to think about what comes next because we’re too busy trying to survive what is happening now.

To be fair, the current administration generates enough chaos to keep everyone occupied. But Bouie’s point is that eventually you have to build something. You can’t spend forever playing defense. And he also thought of Lincoln’s quote.

Krugman arrives at a similar conclusion from another direction. He argues that too many people treat Trump as though he is the entire problem. He’s not. Trump is a symptom, a particularly loud and destructive symptom, but a symptom nonetheless.

The forces that produced Trump, including our polarized media environment, growing distrust of institutions, a Republican Party increasingly untethered from reality, and a political culture that rewards performance art over competence, aren’t going away when Trump finally exits the stage. They were here before him, and they’ll be here after him.

That’s where Lincoln’s broken egg comes in. Too many Democrats still talk as though their goal is restoration. Put the institutions back together. Restore the norms. Return to the old politics.

But broken eggs cannot be mended.

The pre-Trump political world is gone. Some of that is for the better, but much of it is not. Either way, we’re not getting it back. And clearly, Americans really don’t want us to go back.

The question isn’t whether America can return to what it was in 2015. The question is what comes next.

Conservatives spent decades building toward the future they wanted. Democrats are only beginning to ask what future they want to build. The answer to that question may determine American politics long after Donald Trump is reduced to a very sad and pathetic chapter in a history book.

The last word goes to Florence + The Machine.