This opening panel in the 2023 DPI Annual Convening explored the challenges of our current political paradigm, where politics is extractive, transactional, and driven by political operatives in NY or DC, how that political “common sense” undermines multiracial democratic practice, and what we can do together to create and realize a new paradigm where the political system builds power in Black, Latino, AAPI, and Native communities that they can use collectively to win change.