Americans today need to see evidence that their government has answers to the problems that afflict them. Across the state and across the country, people are struggling with their daily grind: making it to work, caring for loved ones young and old, saving for a life after work, navigating a nation awash in weapons. Too often, the only thing flowing from the Potomac is pessimism and paralysis.

Amid a painfully slow economic recovery and demographic churn, enough voters in a fateful combination of states felt so left behind that they embraced a populist who promised to wrench back the clock to an earlier era. Donald Trump’s presidency threatens to accelerate the cycle of cynicism. For all those who believe strongly in the moral momentum of progress, the rising populist tide brings with it an alarming, retrograde undertow.

There’s a better alternative to jingoist nostalgia: chipping away at a public unease by building public confidence, measure by measure.

Massachusetts, home to the nation’s first free municipal public library and first public health department, has never shied from causes — like marriage equality, universal health care coverage, the abolition of slavery — because of their unpopularity beyond the boundaries of the Bay State. New England was built on global exports — chief among them, good ideas.

In a series of editorials over the past year, this page has detailed a set of good ideas designed to empower human flourishing and broaden prosperity for decades to come: building digital infrastructure, mobilizing the immobile, registering voters, curbing abuse of the desperate, hailing better regulation, reforming elections, extending access to affordable child care, investing in retirement security, empowering strong families, and ending a gun violence epidemic of our own making.

Most importantly, these are ideas that can be enacted at the state, city, and neighborhood levels. Capitol Hill’s recalcitrance is no excuse for Beacon Hill’s inaction.

There is a common theme here: Too often our laws and customs find themselves inadequate to the challenges of a world for which they were not designed and could not have anticipated.

The Founders, adrift from an empire in a hostile wilderness, could not have foreseen the AR-15. The city councilors who took aim at regulating taxis at the dawn of the age of automobiles could not have foreseen the navigation revolution and the ride-hailing companies it enabled. The architects of Social Security didn’t anticipate that American life expectancy would increase by two decades by 2016. When the state got its first taste of the lottery revenue, it didn’t anticipate the financial addiction that followed. The public education system was designed for a time when a single income could support a household.

Self-government requires routine maintenance to serve an ever-changing constituency. Voters and those they elect must act locally and think generationally.

Here are some updates on the issues that the Cutting Edge of the Common Good series addressed this year:

∂ This spring, Verizon announced a $300 million partnership with the city to replace the aging copper wire infrastructure with its fiber optics network, FiOS. By year’s end, 25,000 addresses in Roslindale, Dorchester, and West Roxbury are poised to have access to the high-speed network. Moving forward, the city should urge the company to accelerate the proposed six-year timeline to wire the entire city and keep score of how many homes have fiber access.

∂ This fall, the MBTA announced a pilot partnership with Uber and Lyft to subsidize rides for people with disabilities. If the pilot proves successful, the MBTA should expand these efforts to ensure that all residents are able to participate fully in our civic life.

∂ Over the past year, the state has passed several common-sense regulations of ride-hailing to allow companies like Uber and Lyft to operate freely, while also protecting customers with background checks on drivers. Boston should continue to embrace this now critical component of our transportation network, including removing restrictions on ride-hailing firms picking up passengers at Logan Airport.

∂ This summer, the state Senate passed a bill that would establish 16 weeks of paid family and medical leave for all workers and up to 26 weeks for temporary disability leave. That’s an important step in one chamber, but the full Legislature should return to the measure promptly in the new year and see it enacted into law.

∂ While there was predictable silence from Washington on the issue of controlling the availability of assault weapons, Attorney General Maura Healey moved to tighten restrictions on the weapons in Massachusetts, including cracking down on rifles that have been tweaked just enough to evade the letter of the state’s 1998 assault weapons ban. The state can and should go further in its efforts to keep these dangerous military-style weapons out of circulation.

Taken together, these disparate issue areas provide a policy blueprint for Massachusetts that can both address the challenges facing our state and serve — as Romneycare demonstrated — as a model for export to other states or nationwide.

As 2016 dawned, progressives in Massachusetts and beyond had achieved enough of their goals, from near-universal health coverage to marriage equality, that they lacked a well-defined policy agenda. This page has outlined such an agenda based around solvable problems that don’t always make a stump speech.

Trump’s election — and ability to attract more than 1 million votes in this state alone — shows how much an alternative approach like this is needed, one that defeats pessimism and cynicism one solution, one achievable goal at a time.

In an age when far too many people feel their government has failed them, this country badly needs examples of governments that are responsive to today’s problems and can set an example of how to fix them.