Tuesday’s “Blue Wave” was more than a rebuke of United States President Donald Trump. Across the nation, voters made it clear that they reject the tech oligarchy, its vassals in the Trump administration and a MAGA-fied Republican party, as well as the sinister agenda they share and have been trying to impose by brute force for the past two years. Proponents of human rights, liberal democracy and the rule of law are right to celebrate.

But this isn’t the end of the technofascist plot against America. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this isn’t even the beginning of the end. However, it might be the end of the beginning.

Now that US voters have demonstrated opposition to the AI-driven immiseration and oppression agenda, we must turn our attention to accountability, reform, and renewal – and to the intra-left debates that will determine whether elected leaders will actually do the hard work, or merely pay lip service to it. The pro-democracy movement has drawn blood, but technofascism still lives. Here’s how to bury it.

Accountability

Notwithstanding likely House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries’ (D-N.Y.) pablum about “Americans wanting [Democrats] to get things done on their behalf” rather than “get even,” the new congressional majority must fulfill its constitutional duty to investigate suspected wrongdoing (including corruption) by the executive branch and its private sector cronies, and begin collecting the evidence for eventual prosecutions. Louder for those in the back: accountability isn’t retribution. It’s the foundation of the rule of law.

At a federal level, it seems unlikely that Trump’s Department of Justice — which, at this stage, effectively operates as his personal law firm — will suddenly start acting in the public interest, but the evidence garnered through congressional investigations may nonetheless support state-level prosecutions, civil lawsuits, and generally sustain the momentum of public outrage into 2029, when voters will have the chance to vote for a new administration. Civil society must send a clear message to Democratic leadership: there is a difference between accountability and retribution. Investigations and oversight proceedings should be framed not as punishment, but as the necessary consequence for the technofascists’ attempt to overthrow American democracy.

Delivering that consequence will require prioritization, as the scale and scope of the administration’s wrongdoing threaten to overwhelm Congress’ already insufficient staff capacity. This will ultimately be a political decision, but it will be one on which public interest groups should weigh in to ensure that the tech industry’s role in implementing, bankrolling, and even motivating the Trump administration’s worst abuses is highlighted. And there is no shortage of such examples: DOGE’s destruction of USAID and decimation of the federal workforce. Office of Personnel Management director Russ Vought’s reckless use of large language models to slash public spending. Federal contractor Palantir’s violations of the Privacy Act to combine data from across the government to assist in ICE abductions. The introduction of ever more digital hoops for beneficiaries to jump through to access the public benefits to which they are legally entitled. The list goes on.

Highlighting the role of the tech industry in these abuses serves two key purposes. First, consequences are a deterrent to further abuses. If all the broligarchs get is a slap on the wrist, there’s reason to fear they may double down on their efforts. And second, the public spectacle of oversight hearings is essential for building the political momentum for necessary reform under the next administration.

Reform

Absent a truly extraordinary set of events involving multiple successful impeachments and/or the 25th Amendment, the 120th Congress’s reform ambitions will be hamstrung by the White House until 2029. The next two years offer a precious window of opportunity for the non-fascist majority to vigorously debate and map out a reform agenda for the Third Reconstruction we desperately need — and to build the case for it with the public, so that the 48th President and 121st Congress (both taking office in January 2029) can hit the ground running.

In addition to structural reforms to civic institutions targeting voting rights, the two-party system, and the Supreme Court, the federal government must act to reign in the power of the tech industry, particularly the billionaires in thrall to the cult of AI. These reforms must be aimed at dismantling the sources of the industry’s power — wealth, data, market concentration, control over both mainstream and social media — and imposing meaningful corporate governance and accountability requirements. Specifically, that means amending the tax code to ensure that the wealthiest individuals and corporations pay their fair share; enacting comprehensive privacy legislation rooted in data minimization and purpose limitation; meaningfully address market concentration through antitrust enforcement and competition policy; and reversing the consolidation of media ownership that has been decades in the making.

As corporate accountability advocates know all too well, tech CEOs have successfully used dual-class share structures to keep their shareholders from holding them accountable, while OpenAI and Anthropic seem poised to use their status as public-benefit corporations (PBCs), which allows them to consider their public-interest mission alongside their duty to prioritize shareholder dividends, in similar ways after their planned IPOs. The sustained assault on the environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment practices have further eroded the notion that publicly-traded companies should be responsive to the public interest. Fortunately, there is already a rich literature and community of practice grounded in the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, whose insights will be invaluable to the project of corporate governance reform.

Renewal

If the American people are serious about permanently defeating technofascism, we must tackle the problem at its root: Silicon Valley’s extractive surveillance-based business models, market concentration, and the power structures that insulate its billionaire leaders from accountability. If this seems radical, that’s because it is: it targets root causes rather than symptoms to deliver the kind of big, structural change that this moment demands.

Building the future we all deserve — one in which all our basic needs are met, government at all levels operates in the public interest, and each of us is treated with dignity and respect — will require first dismantling the engines of structural oppression that stand in the way of progress. When Big Tech and the broligarchy are gone, entrepreneurs will finally have a chance to build new businesses whose success doesn’t rely on commodifying their users’ attention, monetizing their data, exploiting workers, enshittifying their own products, and degrading the natural environment. I can’t wait.

But, I also cannot stress this enough: we can’t just skip ahead to this part. We have to do the hard work of reform, and the hard work of politics, first. But then? Then, we could have nice things. Let’s get to work.