MILLIONS OF WORKING PARENTS struggle every day to find decent childcare they can afford. And it might not be happening if only Richard Nixon had signed legislation to create a comprehensive childcare system back in 1971.

The bill had landed on his desk in the middle of a major demographic shift: women entering the workforce in large numbers, creating demand for childcare that leaders in both parties said they wanted to address. Nixon signaled he would support a major initiative, and seemed friendly to a bipartisan bill that passed both chambers.

But autonomy for women and changes to family structure didn’t sit well with many social conservatives, especially top Nixon adviser Pat Buchanan. Nixon heeded Buchanan’s advice and rejected the bill, warning in a veto message that it would be “family-weakening.”

Since then, Democrats and Republicans have been arguing over whether the federal government has any business supporting childcare and—if it does—what that support should look like. The polarization helps to explain the failure of more recent efforts to pass childcare legislation.

A new proposal from Project 2029, a Democratic-aligned think tank, is designed to get past that polarization.

It envisions legislation on a scale that would rival or exceed what those 1971 lawmakers had in mind. But it also addresses some concerns from Republicans and conservatives by offering families a choice: access to free childcare, financed and regulated by the federal government, or direct cash support that parents could use to offset the cost of other arrangements, including staying at home to raise kids themselves.

“In a lot of ways, this represents a real evolution in Democratic thought on childcare,” Elliot Haspel, a prominent left-leaning analyst and writer on childcare policies, told me in a phone interview. “It’s the idea that, actually, families want and need wildly different things when it comes to their childcare, and it’s also that they need something that is simple to use.”

The primary authors of the proposal are veterans of past Democratic administrations. That’s not a coincidence.

For the last few years, left-leaning advocates and experts on a variety of issues have been trying to develop ideas that approach longstanding problems in novel ways. A starting point for many of these conversations has been trying to understand past failures. In the case of childcare, that means revisiting what went wrong the last time Democrats tried to take a big swing—back in 2021, when Joe Biden was president.