It’s not just red tape holding back government-funded exploration and innovation. It’s a new cultural pessimism about the future.

T here is a joint NASA-SpaceX launch this week. But even this collaboration is a sign of the agency’s decline before its private competitor. Elon Musk’s space company is effectively giving NASA an Uber ride into space. More than 4,000, or 20 percent, of NASA workers are opting to leave the agency, accepting the deferred resignation offered by the Trump administration to streamline government. The fact that the Trump administration scrapped the nomination of billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman to lead the agency highlights a sense of crisis and lack of direction.

Writing in Newsweek, Riley L. Roberts and Matthew Beddingfield argue that Democrats should take up the agency as a political cause and connect it with the budding “abundance” agenda on the left. They argue that public investment in ambitious technological projects without a profit motive often yield incredible discoveries and innovations that do spawn profit-making industries and advancements in our way of life. After all, the early NASA program’s dash in the space race yielded many technologies.

Now, as scarcity politics grips Congress, Democrats can seize the opportunity to do more than defend science — they can champion it. By making the case for a bolder, federally-backed innovation agenda, they can show voters how public investment has always been the engine behind America’s greatest breakthroughs. What has been referred to as a stagnating of the U.S. innovation ecosystem, and the “undermining of science in America,” should be leveraged by Democrats to promise voters not just greatness, but more.

As a guest on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant podcast, former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg outlined how federally funded projects have led to monumental ideas later transformed into usable reality, including the internet itself.

The authors are correct, and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the authors of the book Abundance, are correct to point out how slow, burdensome, and delayed by red tape innovation can be, especially on the public side of the ledger. They are correct that this has in many ways ruined the appetite of the public for more of this kind of investment, especially when Elon Musk is managing to leverage private investment and commerce into accomplishments hardly anyone thought possible, like reusable rockets caught in the air as between chopsticks.

But I think there is a broader problem, identified by Peter Thiel, that prevents liberals from taking up their mid-century idealism into massive public projects that aim to bring us progress: Americans have largely stopped believing in any future worth living in. We’ve effectively ceded the imagination of the future to others, namely the Chinese, who have turned the ubiquitous communication revolution of the internet into a surveillance state and social-credit system, or the Europeans, who imagine a future of, well, austerity — ultra-expensive energy, below-replacement fertility, and ultimately degrowth to save the planet.

The generation that funded and thrilled to NASA in America was one shaped by the completely unprecedented technological leaps of the early 20th century. A boy born in the first years of the 20th century could remember a time before Kitty Hawk, and man’s first flight on an airplane, and live to witness, just 66 years later, Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon. The great rises in life expectancy in the United States were in the first half of the 20th century. The American people in NASA’s halcyon years were formed by the quick trend of mass urbanization that decisively and irrevocably primed them psychologically to view themselves as moving from traditional ways of life into a richer, more varied future. It was also a country formed by immigration laws to be more cohesive.

There is a fundamental truth to Thiel’s lament that we were promised flying cars, and got Twitter instead. Many born after 1970 have felt this period to be one of slowing progress, or even regression (on lifespans), and distraction, and diversion. Nobody wants to go back to a pre-internet life, but on the whole, public enthusiasm is muted. This massively disruptive technology has been received by the public as a mixed blessing. The internet promises anonymity to bad actors and inflicts exposure, doxxing, and massive data leaks on the innocent. In the hands of our rivals, it is creating 1984’s totalitarian and invasive screens, but in 8K resolution.

All the institutions that were tasked with bringing us the future now seem like rent seekers. One of our biggest tech companies, Google, made one superlative product, a search engine, which it then spent two decades making unusable. It is rapidly being replaced by what amounts to a more sophisticated Google Search that has been branded as artificial intelligence. One of our first discoveries with AI is that it will just start lying to you when you put it under pressure.

The salad days for NASA belong to a different country. One that was extremely young, having just stepped through the Baby Boom. One that had every visible reason to be assured that whatever was coming next was going to be cool, and probably conducive to health and well-being, certainly enjoyment. We’re just not that kind of people anymore. So we can’t build that kind of NASA.