In what would be the final year of the first Donald Trump administration, the COVID-19 pandemic put many age-old cracks in American society into high relief. Our ailing, grossly unequal healthcare system was woefully ill-prepared for a public health crisis that illustrated that a society is only as healthy as its most vulnerable members. Working families, struggling to patch together childcare even before the pandemic shut down schools and daycares, became more aware than ever before just how little they could rely on governmental support to raise America’s youngest citizens. Obstacles to accessing public services reached new highs as offices across the country shut down to stem the coronavirus’s deadly spread. Behind the doors shut by lockdowns, the opioid crisis spiraled even further out of control. 

I spent that turbulent period in the United Kingdom, where I joined other British residents at windows to clap and cheer nightly for the country’s National Health Service (NHS). Everything felt hopeless as the virus spread worldwide and the death toll rose daily. Yet a display of collective gratitude for the world’s first universal healthcare system served as a reminder that, together, people can overcome great darkness. But the contrast between my experience with the NHS amid a global health catastrophe and that of my loved ones at home in the U.S., many of whom were initially unsure if they could afford lifesaving care if they were to contract the virus, also added new urgency to a question I’d been mulling for many years: why have the hard-earned lessons from other countries’ struggles to obtain universal healthcare and other progressive programs not been learned in my home country—or, worse, ignored? 

Throughout most of my career as a journalist, I have lived in several countries in Europe and Latin America. I’ve been reporting for progressive U.S. media on issues that seem intractable at home: multiple public health crises coupled with soaring healthcare costs, a shocking rise in homelessness and housing unaffordability, and the life-threatening impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss, to name just a few. I have also seen firsthand how several countries have successfully addressed many of these same problems through effective policies and social programs aimed at bolstering the collective good. With numerous crises undeniably spiraling before our eyes in recent years, it seemed as though Americans might be more open than ever to hearing these success stories and internalizing their many lessons. It was time to share them with my fellow Americans. 

This realization became the starting point for a journey that would take me around the world to every continent but Antarctica in search of the policy triumphs that ultimately would make it into my recently published first book, Another World Is Possible.

Centering the lived experiences of my loved ones in the U.S. and my own, I took a “cradle to grave” approach to analyzing public policy over the next several years. I began with the U.K.’s National Health Service before heading to Scandinavia to talk to Norwegians about their family-friendly policies and to visit Finland’s world-leading public schools. I took a boat across the Baltic Sea to get a crash course on Estonia’s publicly owned digital infrastructure, at the heart of which is the idea that access to the Internet is a human right. I also returned to Portugal, where I had previously lived for half a decade and where all personal drug use has been decriminalized, to shadow its harm reduction programs and to spend time in its acclaimed “Dissuasion Commissions” (where people who’ve received citations for drug use are engaged in conversations about illicit drugs and informed about treatment options and other services should they need them). But I refused to limit my observations to Europe, as is the tendency of many who explore social democracy. Eventually, I made my way to Singapore’s impressive and affordable public housing high-rises, to Uruguay’s record-breaking wind and solar farms, to some of the Costa Rican community-run national parks that put its biodiversity law in action, and even to Aotearoa New Zealand’s retirement communities to learn about universal, non-contributory, flat-rate pensions.

Everywhere I went, I recorded in detail how each of these policies work and how everyday citizens experience them day in and day out, in the hope that they can serve as inspiration for American campaigns and policies in the near future. Inevitably, I also drew comparisons to the U.S. to highlight the sheer amount of work that must be done at home on all these fronts. Throughout this global journey, I learned many things about designing effective and long-lasting social policies and programs. Here are some key lessons from my journey.

We Need a Society Built for the Many, Not the Few

In the face of creeping authoritarianism following decades of bipartisan failure to address skyrocketing inequality, many Americans are urgently asking ourselves what kind of society we truly want to live in. Ultimately, that is the question at the root of all the policies I examined, from Singapore to New Zealand and Estonia to Costa Rica. Do we want to live in a society like Singapore, where housing is a right? How about Norway, where working families can count on guaranteed government support to raise their children? Or Finland, where everyone can count on receiving the best possible education in their neighborhood school? Or New Zealand, where people can age without fear of destitution? Or Estonia, where public services and direct democracy initiatives have been made universally accessible online? Or Portugal, where addiction is treated as a public health issue rather than a criminal one? Or Uruguay and Costa Rica, where clean energy and biodiversity protections safeguard the planet that humans and so many other species depend on? Or the United Kingdom, where healthcare is a universal right?

America is not working for the majority of us. We struggle to pay healthcare and childcare costs, we can’t afford to buy our own homes, we are caught off guard by rising energy costs, we are getting sick from the lack of clean air and water, we’ve lost loved ones to opioids and other drugs, we’ve watched many of our public schools fail our children, we cannot access public services (thanks in part to what Jacobin’s Meagan Day calls “austerity by paperwork”), we cannot survive on inadequate Social Security payments, and we’re anxious about the climate crisis that threatens to engulf our planet. Instead, America is working for a tiny superrich minority that amassed its wealth on the back of our collective labor—and our collective impoverishment.

We Need Public Ownership, Not Private Profit

Essential services should be publicly owned and operated. Public schools can be improved, but as long as private schools provide an off-ramp for the wealthiest citizens, the education system cannot actually be made equitable. Weaning our grids off fossil fuels is an existential matter, and it should be done in a way that prioritizes the public’s needs rather than private companies’ profits. Digital government services are necessary, but they can’t be delegated to private companies that profiteer and that collect and misuse private data as they fail to keep it safe.

The clearest example of the need to keep essential services publicly owned—or, at the very least, publicly funded and universally accessible—is healthcare. Our very lives depend on it. Under the current system, there are countless incentives for private profit that can put a person’s life at risk or bankrupt them while they are in the process of trying to heal. It should come as no surprise that as the United States spends more and more on healthcare—in 2023, health expenditure reached a historic high of almost 19 percent of GDP—private health industry profits have soared. It is simply unconscionable for companies to profit from Americans’ sickness. Imagine how we could improve the health of all Americans if our money were used to fund actual care rather than line corporate pockets.

If we can take ownership of our essential services, we can remake them to work for all of us.

We Can Have It All

As I observed throughout my travels, many key policies intersect with one another. Portugal’s drug decriminalization is a legal shift, but it is aided by the country’s universal healthcare system, which offers addiction treatment and other care free at the point of delivery like the United Kingdom’s NHS. Robust old-age pensions are essential, but if housing becomes unaffordable, as it increasingly has in New Zealand, more and more of pensioners’ checks will go toward housing and leave little for other needs. This intersection of housing with other needs is something Singapore realized early in its designs for public housing. In other words, while any progress made on any front is welcome, we need to—dare I say it—do it all.

Contrary to what we’re often told about progressive policies, we can have them all. Not only can we afford to, the truth is that we simply can’t afford not to. American lives are being lost because our healthcare system locks people out based on price. Record numbers of Americans are experiencing homelessness while countless others are unable to afford to buy homes to meet their needs because our government hasn’t guaranteed housing as a right. American moms are dying at higher rates than those in other wealthy nations because both our healthcare system and nonexistent parental leave policies are harming them. Too many American children, particularly children of color and poor children, aren’t getting high-quality care and education from their earliest days because our daycares are unaffordable and our schools inequitably resourced. Americans aren’t getting access to the government programs and services they’re entitled to partly because our digital infrastructure is lacking. Americans from all walks of life are overdosing on fentanyl or being incarcerated for drug use because we are refusing to see addiction as a public health issue rather than a criminal offense. Americans are being displaced and dying as the climate crisis wreaks havoc on the environment we depend on to survive. Plants and animals are disappearing before our very eyes due to feeble biodiversity protections.

In many cases, such as in healthcare and education, we’re already outspending other countries, and it’s just a matter of redesigning the systems that are already in place. When it comes to family-friendly policies and greening our energy grids, these have been shown to pay for themselves with projected economic gains. But whether we’re talking about investing in bettering Americans’ daily lives, protecting our natural environment, or reenvisioning broken systems, these progressive policies pay off.

We Need Leaders

Political will and strong leadership from a broad range of class, racial, educational, and professional backgrounds are critical to designing the sorts of policies that can make a profound material change in people’s lives. Everywhere I went, I came across leaders who fought for radical change in the face of staunch opposition. João Goulão, a Portuguese medical doctor, understood early on that drug addiction was a public health concern, and biochemist and parliamentarian Alexandre Quintanilha led the way toward a radical approach to the dual epidemics of drug overdose and HIV/AIDs facing the country. Ramón Méndez, a physicist, was appointed to engineer a greener future for Uruguay, while electrical engineer Gonzalo Casaravilla made sure it remained in public hands as head of the country’s electric utility. Environmentalists Patricia Madrigal Cordero and Vivienne Solís Rivera, together with elected representative Luis Martínez Ramírez, valiantly protected Costa Rica’s vital biodiversity for future generations and helped reverse some of the damage that had already been done to the environment.

What struck me most in meeting so many of these leaders was that they were, for the most part, ordinary people from all walks of life who simply wanted to serve their fellow citizens by doing what they did best. In the end, this is what made them extraordinary. In America, we, too, will need extraordinary leaders to write and pass progressive legislation even in the face of extreme polarization. I noticed something else remarkable on this journey. Many of the ideas I explored have begun to spread throughout the United States, too, and have influential sponsors. At the local level, with homelessness increasing 12 percent in 2023 after pandemic protections were lifted, state leaders Stanley Chang and Alex Lee have continued agitating to pass Singapore-style public housing bills. At the federal level, congressional Democrats recently tried to pass paid parental leave—which is popular across the political spectrum—and got closer than ever before. The former Director of the National Parks Service, Charles Sams III, the first Native American in the post, understood that biodiversity protections needed to be based on communities’ needs and knowledge, especially that of Indigenous people. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 57 percent of Americans think the federal government should ensure healthcare coverage, and the Medicare for All Act, which would establish universal, single-payer healthcare, has continued to grow in popularity thanks to champions like Senator Bernie Sanders. All over America, there are also more and more candidates winning local and national elections based on progressive campaign promises like a just clean energy transition and subsidized child care.

We Really Need One Another

We need more than political leaders. In every country I visited, activists, union members and leaders, researchers, civil society groups, and many more encouraged their representatives to write and rewrite policies to serve as many people as possible—holding them accountable every day. Many are still fighting to expand the scope of these policies or else to protect them from attempts—most often from the political right—to defang or destroy them. NHS founder Aneurin Bevan’s spirit lives on in Dr. Tony O’Sullivan and fellow activists as they strive to protect the United Kingdom’s National Health Service and reverse the harm inflicted through years of funding cuts and stealth privatization efforts. Environmental advocates like Silvia Rodríguez Cervantes have continued to demand that Costa Rica’s government stay true to the Biodiversity Law amid pressure from wealthier countries and companies, including during negotiations for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). In every country, there are people like O’Sullivan and Rodríguez Cervantes, and alongside all of them are the countless everyday citizens who form part of their movements, provide them with solidarity and support, and inspire them to keep working.

Given how much more sway lobbyists hold over our elected representatives than their average constituents do, I am more convinced than ever before that change will have to stem from the people through America’s growing grassroots movements, unions, civil rights groups, and other forms of collective organization. A better future will depend on all these groups. Although union numbers have still not reached the highs of the past century, in recent years there’s been a notable uptick in union membership among workers under 45. There have also been a number of high-profile strikes and union victories across large sectors like the film, entertainment, fast-food, and other service industries; automobile companies; and academic settings from elementary schools to universities. With nearly 70 percent of Americans expressing approval of labor unions, public support approached a 60-year high, according to a recent Gallup poll. And in places where formal union organizing is absent, workers have been taking matters into their own hands and organizing their workplaces, as labor studies professor Eric Blanc explained earlier this year on the Current Affairs podcast. And when it comes to electoral wins, we should take heart in a surprising example that emerged from the 2024 general election: Missouri, Alaska, and Nebraska, three states that voted overwhelmingly for Trump and other Republicans, also passed paid sick leave ballot initiatives. It is through these kinds of collective expressions of power that we can begin to build an America that works for us all.

We Can Make the Best Out of the Worst of Times

It may feel impossibleto internalize the practical optimism that can be found in these stories as our country plunges deeper and deeper into chaos. Although the crisis we face has been decades in the making, it seems to be worsening with the onslaught of mounting civil rights abuses, public spending cuts to make way for even more tax cuts for the rich, attempts to gut the institutions at the heart of our government, and news every day of the ways the Trump administration and its coterie of oligarchs are dialing back progress made on everything from LGBTQ rights to environmental protections. But I have seen what so many other countries have managed to do during their darkest moments to redefine their societies in just a matter of years. Because of this, I know that barbarism will not prevail in America or beyond in the long run. 

Profound societal change often begins in moments of deep crisis. In Britain, the National Health Service was born from the bloodstained devastation of World War II. Portugal’s radical drug reforms arose from the desperation created by dual epidemics unlike any the country had seen. Estonia, Finland, Singapore, and Norway all designed their own policies in the midst of financial crises that required them to reimagine the very foundations of their economies. Faced with environmental devastation, Uruguay and Costa Rica found ways to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises head on. All these historically difficult periods had one thing in common: they forced their citizens not just to hope for better but to work toward better, and people in these countries took it upon themselves to do so.

Rather than raise our hands in surrender as we face this avalanche of problems—problems that seem to multiply by the minute under the second Trump administration—we must look to these examples and take heart. The lesson is crystal clear: some of the most effective and longest-lasting solutions are forged in the darkest of times as we look up from the pits of despair and envision a way out. More importantly, it’s at times like these that we learn how not to fall back in.

Copyright © 2025 by Natasha Hakimi Zapata. This excerpt originally appeared in Another World is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe by Natasha Hakimi Zapata. Published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission. 

Natasha Hakimi Zapata is an award-winning journalist, translator, and university lecturer based in Europe. Her book Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America From Around the Globe (The New Press) was named a 2025 LitHub's Most Anticipated Book and featured in The New York Times Book Review and NPR. Her articles appear regularly in The Nation, In These Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the former foreign editor of Truthdig and has received several Southern California Journalism and National Arts & Entertainment Journalism awards, most recently in 2024 for her work as a foreign correspondent.