I just wrote an essay saying our growing indulgence of political violence was dangerous. Kimmel’s statement contributed to exactly what I warned about. While not exactly cheering for Kirk’s death, Kimmel’s statement appeared to minimize its gravity. What’s more, why is a mainstream late-night entertainer acting like a partisan cable host at all? We’ve become far too accepting of the creeping politicization of everything around Teams Red and Blue.

There absolutely should be social censure against Kimmel, but to indefinitely pull him off the air for this infraction was dangerous and foolish. It would be bad enough if Disney had pulled Kimmel’s show due to intense public backlash and a cancellation campaign, but what actually happened is FCC Chairman Brendan Carr urged local broadcasters to stop airing Kimmel’s show, suggesting broadcasters might lose their licenses if they didn’t. "This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” he said. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way." Local broadcaster Nexstar said it would stop airing Kimmel’s show in response, while Sinclair Broadcast Group asked for an apology. Government pressure to silence dissent clearly motivated the decision.

These sorts of once-unthinkable events are no longer unusual in America. Kimmel’s suspension was just another move in an ongoing game of political silencing and retaliation. A worrisome consensus is growing across the political divide that those with power should decide the truth, silence claims they consider false, and punish through censorship or cancellation anyone who does not comply. What Carr did here echoes the Biden administration’s campaigns against content it labeled “misinformation,” urging broadcasters and social media platforms to remove politically inconvenient claims it didn’t believe were true.

It will just keep getting worse, until we act to make it stop.

A Fragile, Recent Inheritance

To appreciate why our national backtracking on political dissent is dangerous, you must understand that the robust speech protections we now take for granted are not America’s default. They’re a historic victory carved out in living memory. We’ve always had our First Amendment, and our politics has always been a boisterous affair of competing claims, but for most of American history, if you sought to truly threaten power, the rules on paper suddenly weren’t so broadly interpreted or vigorously enforced. Americans were free to speak, write, and participate in politics, but only so long as they didn’t cross red lines or threaten real power. America behaved not so differently than modern Western democracies like the UK and Germany do , in which police regularly visit people’s homes for posting things on social media that their governments dislike.

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During the First World War, the American government criminalized interfering with military recruitment, attempting to cause insubordination in the armed forces, or “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” directed at the government. Under these laws, it prosecuted antiwar activists, labor organizations, and pacifist religious groups who spoke out against the war. Authorities broke up public rallies and meetings, and the Post Office denied mailing privileges to newspapers, magazines, and publications. When Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs condemned the war and praised draft resisters in a speech, the Wilson administration sent him to prison for ten years and the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed it.

The Palmer Raids of the early 1920s swept up thousands of labor activists in warrantless dragnets to break up their political organizations, and the immigrants found among them were deported swiftly. During the 1930s, authorities suppressed socialist and communist organizing and purged “subversive” materials from libraries and schools. The 1950s brought us loyalty oaths for public officials, Smith Act prosecutions for teaching Marxist theory, the destruction of celebrities in Hollywood blacklists, HUAC harassment, and the hearings of Joe McCarthy.

In the 1960s, the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO suppressed lawful activist and civil rights movements through infiltration, disruption, and discrediting through false flags and dirty tricks. The Bureau spied extensively on Martin Luther King, and famously threatened to expose his dirty laundry if he didn’t commit suicide first. Presidents Kennedy and Nixon both weaponized the IRS, with Kennedy’s Ideological Organizations Project targeting conservative critics while Nixon’s Special Services Staff was built to audit, investigate, and harass an “enemies list” including figures like Jane Fonda and Senator Ted Kennedy.

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the contents of a Defense Department report demonstrating the government lied to the public about the Vietnam War in the 1970s, the government ordered The New York Times not to publish it under the Espionage Act. Ellsberg was prosecuted for a dozen felonies, until it came out at trial that the FBI had secretly wiretapped him without a warrant, the administration improperly offered the presiding judge the FBI’s directorship, and the government sent operatives to illegally break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to dig up dirt. The scandal forced it to drop the prosecution. Then came Watergate, in which a president sent operatives to break into Democratic National Committee offices to plant listening devices and photocopy documents.

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Government regularly worked to control narratives through mass media by leaning on the small circle that controlled the nation’s newspapers, radio stations, and three national networks. When persuasion failed, they often threatened to revoke broadcast licenses, a tactic that also reached print because newspapers often owned radio stations as well. FDR pressured Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune this way, Robert Kennedy used it to lean on conservative broadcasters, and Nixon used it to menace the Washington Post during Watergate

Kimmel’s current predicament, in fact, has uncomfortable parallels with the Roosevelt’s administration’s campaign to yank the radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, from the air to rid itself of his criticism. Coughlin was a Catholic priest with a Sunday radio show in the 1930s that attracted tens of millions of listeners, making him the most popular radio personality in America. The popular myth is the government pushed Coughlin off the air because he was a fascist, but Coughlin was a creature of the left promoting a left-wing social justice agenda whose primary rhetorical target was capitalism. His National Union for Social Justice championed a left-populist social-justice agenda to address the Great Depression with stronger labor rights and a living wage for workers, national old-age pensions, nationalization of key industries to prevent monopolies, more control of banks, and protections against union busting—while also trafficking in antisemitism blaming Jewish influence.

Coughlin was originally a strong and welcome Roosevelt ally, but over time came to believe the government was beholden to capital and the rich, and was not doing enough to help working people weather the crisis. The administration got worried about challenges from its left flank from left-populists like Senator Huey Long, and decided it needed Coughlin off the air. To silence him, the administration signaled license trouble for stations carrying his show, spurred the National Association of Broadcasters to restrict “controversial” airtime like Coughlin’s, had the Post Office revoke his mailing permit, and pressed the Catholic hierarchy to intervene. By the early 1940s, the most popular program in America was gone.

What happened to Kimmel isn’t alarming because it’s unusual, but because it represents a backtracking toward a norm we fought a great cultural victory to end.

The Free Speech Revolution of the 1970s

Our modern expansive protections of free speech and dissent were not, as many Americans appear to believe, enshrined in American culture since the Founding. Indeed, under John Adams Congress passed an Alien and Sedition Act criminalizing the writing, printing, uttering, or publishing of any scandalous or malicious writing criticizing the government or president. President Lincoln oversaw the arrest and trial by military tribunal of Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham for giving a fiery speech during the Civil War denouncing Lincoln and the war. The military sentenced the congressman to imprisonment for the war’s duration for expressing sympathy for the enemy, and Lincoln only commuted his sentence to avoid bad optics on the condition he be deported to the South.

The free speech protections we now take for granted were a hard-won victory enacted during a unique political moment during the 1970s. In 1974, journalist Sy Hersh published a bombshell article in The New York Times revealing the CIA was conducting massive, illegal domestic spying against antiwar activists. The CIA is barred from domestic political operations. It was a final straw in a string of scandals from Watergate to the Pentagon Papers that prodded Congress to decisive action. In a convergence of disillusionment, the New Left was scarred by crackdowns on antiwar and civil rights protestors, the New Right was drifting toward libertarianism, and the establishment in the center was desperate to restore legitimacy after one after another abuse. Around the same time, a Free Speech Movement taking a maximalist interpretation of speech that began among college antiwar protestors at Berkeley was gaining steam among New Left activists and academics. The Warren and Burger Courts drew on its ideas, and was starting to constitutionalize its broader vision through decisions like New York Times v. Sullivan, Brandenburg v. Ohio, and protections for expressive conduct like flag-burning.

In this climate, Congress launched its explosive Church Committee to investigate government suppression of political dissent. What the committee revealed came as a national shock. It exposed unthinkable abuses like the existence of COINTELPRO, NSA surveillance of Americans, assassinations, IRS harassment of political enemies, and the existence of an MKULTRA program that, if it hadn’t been documented by Congress, would sound like an insane conspiracy from Stranger Things. In the wake of all this scandal, exposure, and controversy, there was now agreement across the political spectrum that significant changes must come to ensure such abuses never happened again. Everyone in America was temporarily in favor of maximally protecting dissent and speech. As part of reforms to clean up government, America established new free speech norms around the Free Speech Movement’s ideals. This is the America most of us grew up in.

Then, a generation raised amid the protections of this great victory, unfamiliar with how recent and fragile it really was, began to test its limits to achieve low-stakes short-term goals. They rationalized shortcuts like silencing “bad actors,” policing “misinformation,” and outsourcing pressure to private intermediaries believing nothing bad would happen and their opponents would never reciprocate, because free speech is enshrined in American democracy. They believed they could conduct campaigns to fire people and push them out of opportunities, and their enemies would never do the same to them. As long as government didn’t act directly, using influence and threats to get private actors to do its dirty work like government did to Father Coughlin, everything would be alright. This broke the fragile tacit agreement the previous generation sacrificed to build. Now that it’s broken, I don’t know how we get it back.

People only obey rules and norms when they believe their opponents will as well. Once that belief vanishes, so does restraint. Violations of America’s free speech norms for trivial reasons were a tragic miscalculation, one that may have broken something fragile that can never be repaired. I don’t see why the outrages won’t continue to spiral in a cycle of score-settling until America winds up back where it started, with voices silenced for things they said, police showing up at homes for posts on social media, and the open suppression of dissent.

The only solution I see is new laws. We can codify our broken norms into unambiguous laws against political firings and cancellations. As a model, use the same discrimination laws that make it illegal to fire people for protected categories like sexuality or race. It now should also be illegal to fire someone, or damage their business or livelihood, because of political affiliation or opinion, enforced by private lawsuit. If firing people, silencing them, and destroying their future opens companies and governments to lawsuits, perhaps better judgment will prevail when the next weak politician demands retaliation or mob brays for blood. It’s far from a perfect solution, since it will create expensive litigation, and because some views truly don’t belong in certain workplaces. Reasonable norms against political retaliation were always a better solution, but since that’s now off the table, codified rules we agree to obey, with hard privately-enforced sanctions for failure, are the only way to rebuild trust.

Shutting the door on overt state pressure will be harder, but we can start to protect democratic participation by ending cancellation campaigns and career-ruinous reprisals. Re-draw the bright line that civic engagement in America must never be silenced, punished, cost your livelihood, or shut you out of your rightful place as a participating citizen in our democracy.

What do you think about Kimmel’s suspension? Join the conversation in the comments.

Kirk’s fans and critics are now engaged in a debate over the nature of his beliefs, whether he represented good or bad. I couldn’t care less. Neither does it matter to me whether Kirk was a good person—although by all accounts, everyone seems to agree he was a good man, husband, and father. The only thing that matters is that Kirk was participating in our democracy, and someone murdered him for it.

I remain bullish on the future of our republic because I know this turbulent era, although difficult to live through, is entirely normal. It’s common throughout American history for tumult to arrive during times of change, as old rules crumble but new ones aren’t yet in place. At the same time, history also teaches that no system lasts forever. Tragedies and errors during difficult moments are sometimes impossible to recover from, and instead of a prelude to reform the nation tumbles deeper into chaos until there’s no way back. Eventually, and I hope a long time hence, even America will blunder its way into collapse. That’s why this assassination feels like a dangerous crossing of a Rubicon.

Violence kills republics. Fear extinguishes democracy.

Despite the popular misconception, you can’t alter a nation’s course by killing public figures. No matter how effective someone is, removing them just leads to the next person waiting in the wings to take their place. Public figures don’t make people believe things, so killing them doesn’t make their ideas go away. Those who represent ideas in public represent the ideas that people already believe, filling their need for someone charismatic to say in public what they already wanted said. You can no more change a nation by killing someone than you can halt a criminal case by killing one prosecutor or police officer.

What changes nations is fear. Although you can’t assassinate your way to change, violence can frighten people away from democratic participation. Once you’ve cleared the public square of all the decent people, the radicals, corrupt, utopians, and would-be tyrants remain free to take it over and enact their wills. Political violence isn’t really meant to remove one troublesome person, but to sow fear that empties the public square of good and honest citizens.

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Such political violence comes in many flavors, not just assassinations and murders like Putin’s critics falling out of windows. There are riots that burn people’s homes and businesses. There are intimidating protests with smoke, and shouting, and shoving, and implied threats. There are gangs of masked thugs roaming streets. There are targeted prosecutions in which prominent figures face kangaroo courts, ending up in cold cells. There are also quieter forms of intimidation, like campaigns to remove people from jobs and public positions, rendering them pariahs. This is why cancel culture was so worrisome, since organized campaigns to sow fear through public punishments, humiliation, destroying livelihoods, and tarnishing reputations are part of the same spectrum, a softer version of limiting participation in democracy.

This is exactly how Rome’s republic fell. By Caesar’s era, the old Roman republic of public duty had long since fallen to intimidation, corruption, and fear. Gangs of political muscle now prowled streets, disrupting assemblies, swaying elections, and silencing those whose words they did not like. Speaking in public was dangerous, and even senators were physically attacked. The powerful suspended official rules at whim. Naturally, good Romans withdrew from politics, as politics had become dangerous, leaving Rome in the hands of strongmen and generals who could protect themselves through strength and fear.

There was also Roman lawfare, which is ultimately what caused Caesar to rebel. Roman magistrates had immunity from prosecution while serving, but after their terms were over anyone could bring a case against them for corruption during their term. Convictions, now political and rigged, almost always ended in exile and ruin. When Caesar’s term governing Gaul was ending, he was recalled to Rome. He fully understood if he returned alone without his army, his enemies intended to have him prosecuted, exiled, and potentially even killed. Instead of accepting a rigged game, Caesar marched his army from Gaul to Rome, beginning his dictatorship.

The lesson is, when intimidation, threats, punishment, and fear become part of the political game, the only smart move becomes to withdraw if you are weak, and march on Rome if you are strong.

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To maintain the democratic stability on which our prosperity and strength depend, everyone must be free to speak, debate, and participate in public. They must know government’s power will only be used transparently and fairly, subject to our collective will. People must trust the state will zealously root out and expose attempts at intimidation or violence, will punish the powerful for engaging in such methods, will not allow its agents to unjustly use power against enemies, and will always conduct its affairs honestly and in accordance with the truth. Most of all, those who speak their mind, no matter what anybody thinks about what they’ve said, must be safe from punishment or murder. Once this ironclad rule is broken, people naturally flee the square, allowing dark forces to take it over.

People think a lot about political conspiracies these days, but the kind of conspiracy that worries me most isn’t the overt cartoonish kind with evil cabals. It’s the tacit one all radicals and utopian schemers share, the unspoken cooperation crossing the divides of politics to destroy the legitimacy of liberal democratic norms and institutions. The most hated opponent of any revolutionary, utopian, would-be oligarch, or radical, isn’t their stated enemy but the democratic order itself. Since their ideas are neither wise nor popular, the people will never willingly accept them. The only way they can hope to implement their insane plans is to chase the people away from the public square, so they can wage their final battle amongst the other radicals for ultimate control.

That’s the dark truth they too often seek to hide. It’s in the interest of every revolutionary and radical that your life becomes intolerable. It’s in their interest that society becomes dysfunctional, policy becomes irrational, and the government becomes dictatorial. It’s in their interest that you become afraid. As Lenin is famously said to have put it, “the worse, the better.” It’s this unspoken, unacknowledged, conspiracy of interest that worries me the most.

The consolation is these would-be shadow engineers are fools. Another hard lesson of history is that, when events start spinning out of control, the result is never what the instigators thought. Liberal revolutionaries who threw in with the Ayatollah did not think they would end up with a theocracy. The communists who overthrew the Tsar did not foresee getting murdered by Stalin. When Robespierre was chopping off heads in France in the name of egalitarian revolution, he didn’t foresee he was empowering a dictatorial hereditary military emperor. As Danton said, revolutions always eat their own.

The only way a killing can destroy democracy is if we indulge it, or turn away in cowardice. Violence we can get through. America got through armed radicals holding pitched battles in Bleeding Kansas, John Brown raiding a federal armory, John Wilkes Booth assassinating a sainted president, and an outright bloody civil war. We got through the strife and violence of the 1960s and 1970s, with murdered presidents and public figures, urban riots burning cities, and young radicals setting off bombs to make a point. The danger isn’t the violence, but those who celebrate it as a useful tool to eliminate opponents, or those who turn a blind eye to it in fear.

What makes this current bout of violence most troubling is we live at a time without public trust. Too many Americans now feel the system is impotent and unaccountable, and so they quietly like the radicalism. They dream of change, and they like seeing those they view as villains get their due. Many no longer trust institutions to tell the truth, and for good reason. Rules are not followed, institutions fail to fulfill their missions, and justice too often does not prevail. For many Americans, this makes democracy feel false, a show conducted to distract us while others in the shadows do whatever it is they wish. Whatever our institutions say, half of America will never believe them, and it’s entirely their own fault. It’s this attitude that will someday kill our great republic.

That’s why I’m so unsettled. The antidote to this dangerous moment isn’t to once again announce we caught the bad guys and then ask everyone to move on and go back to normal. The only true antidote is to earn back public trust. The real villains aren’t just the random shooters, but the leaders who hollowed out the very system meant to neutralize them and keep their kind at bay.

What do you think about the rise of political violence in America? Join the conversation in the comments.

A few weeks ago, America engaged in great national discussion over Cracker Barrel’s clumsy effort to rebrand. The restaurant chain is facing hard times, with stagnant growth and declining profits. Bleeding traditional customers, Cracker Barrel desperately wanted to refresh its image to bring in younger patrons. As the corporate playbook dictates, executives decided to overhaul the brand with a new logo and “brighter” and “more modern” stores. It was a disaster.

Across social media, Americans were horrified at the new bland logo that erased Cracker Barrel’s iconic old man in a rocking chair, Uncle Herschel, and comfy sub-branding as an “Old Country Store.” People denounced the new interiors, which looked like every other boring suburban chain. Most troubling to Cracker Barrel, many people saw its $700 million refresh as an intentional abandonment of what Cracker Barrel stood for—Americana. It seemed to them political, an intentional erasure of something they believed meaningful.

Within a week and 11% stock drop, the restaurant chain frantically backtracked and canceled its ambitious plans. Uncle Herschel will stay.

On social media, people categorized this debacle as one of cultural politics, another episode of “Go Woke, Go Broke.” Even President Trump weighed in on a restaurant chain rebrand. I think this interpretation is wrong. Cracker Barrel’s executives didn’t make these foolish moves because they hated America or wanted to destroy their own company’s iconic image. They were incompetently trying to make money according to a clueless style of financial thinking now common across America, financial min-maxing that’s slowly undermining the foundation of the real economy.

The culprit isn’t culture. It’s managerialism.

Min-Maxing Destroys Value

Min-maxing means making decisions solely on the numbers, maximizing good ones while minimizing everything else as irrelevant. It’s a term that originally came from gaming to describe the kind of player who turns every game into a spreadsheet simulator. This is the kind of gamer who puts every single point in their warrior maximizing strength, and zero into intelligence, to create an unrealistic character that in reality could barely speak. It’s the kind of person who spends hours calculating how to most efficiently run through the game, and then only does those things over and over again as if it were the most terrible soul-sucking job. They maximize rewards in the most efficient fashion, while ignoring everything else.

In other words, a min-maxer obsesses over some narrow slice of metrics to suck all fun and purpose out of the game, turning it into a mechanical chore.

What makes min-maxers infuriating is they don’t just ruin their own fun. Their existence ruins everybody’s fun. Add a few min-maxers into a game, and soon everyone feels like they have to min-max, until the entire experience becomes a bore. Then the game slowly dies, because who wants to spend their free time in a second tedious job. In the name of increasing efficiency, they ignore the purpose and meaning of the experience.

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This is what Cracker Barrel executives were doing with their brand-destroying strategy. They were trying to min-max corporate spreadsheets without any real understanding of what they were meant to be managing or creating. They weren’t waging culture war. They saw their company as a series of metrics, and the numbers were going down. They pulled the easy levers everyone else was following that they thought would make those metrics start going back up.

The problem for Cracker Barrel is the reason the company became successful is because it was a unique restaurant that didn’t follow the standard corporate playbook. It’s a weird idiosyncratic place with homey charm that serves catfish for breakfast. Its interior is authentic in a messy, haphazard way, not anything an interior designer from New York would do. You wait for a table inside a quirky store with old candies from the 1950s, Americana blankets, T-shirts, ceramic containers, and plastic toys. Outside is a massive porch with rows of wooden rocking chairs. Cracker Barrel wasn’t only selling breakfast food like Denny’s or IHOP do. It was selling comfort, nostalgia, charm, and Americana. It probably didn’t help that Cracker Barrel executives are mostly mercenaries who hop from business to business, and likely don’t truly love the brand or eat there themselves. Americana didn’t look economically efficient or on trend in anybody’s spreadsheets.

The experience at Cracker Barrel is hardly unique. Every major business in America eventually does this. Remember when McDonald’s was colorful and fun, with a ball pit in the play place and big friendly plastic tree man in the dining room? McDonald’s now has cold, white, sterile walls, big computer screens, and the look of a hospital lobby. Remember when Pizza Hut had iconic red roofs, checkered tablecloths, big red cups, and a jukebox? Now it looks like a food court restaurant. Remember when Starbucks had comfy couches, indie music, and a warm cozy vibe? Now it looks and feels like a bus terminal. When the founders who made these places unique left, the MBAs eventually took over and then min-maxed them into mediocrity.

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I believe strongly in efficiency. We absolutely should run businesses, and every institution, efficiently and well. We should make wise decisions, study what we’re doing, and manage professionally in the name of chasing excellence. I also have no problem with capitalism or making money. Businesses want to maximize their profit. The problem isn’t efficiency as an idea, but the narrow band of metrics they now maximize in the name of efficiency to the exclusion of anything else. The goal of the economy isn’t to maximize some abstraction. It’s to build the real world in which we all must live. It’s to build places and things that delight us and make us happy. It’s to deliver excellence. If calibrated right, this also happens to make people a lot of money.

Truly great business people, of course, fully understand this. On paper, it seems ridiculous that Costco sells a hot dog and a soda for only $1.50. Any corporate min-maxer would tell you that’s inefficient and, in fact, bean counters inside Costco have railed against the policy for years. Costco’s wiser leadership understands a $1.50 hot dog gives people joy and makes them love Costco, creating far more business than it costs. Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple min-maxing spreadsheets and focus groups but by creating truly transcendent products. Walt Disney didn’t revolutionize entertainment and build cherished childhoods through a theme park wonderland by following someone’s playbook of best practices. Howard Schultz didn’t build the Starbucks empire selling coffee for dollars that previously cost cents by copying existing models. Google in its heyday, when it was rolling out one after another innovative product built on free time it gave its employees to explore, wasn’t min-maxing the value of its labor. These people all realized the true goal of a great business isn’t to maximize some spreadsheet but to create excellence, and that excellence in turn would create staggering profits because it actually delighted people and improved the world.

Min-maxing is for corporate bureaucrats and operators who don’t understand what excellence is or where it comes from. It’s a mode of thinking not of entrepreneurs and leaders, but managers selected for following rules and pleasing superiors. These corporate bureaucrats lack the vision to imagine. They don’t know what’s a worthy risk. They have no idea what makes something special. They’re hired guns who don’t even truly love the things they’re entrusted to create. A bureaucrat lacks vision or imagination, wanting someone to hold their hand and give them a clean and easy formula for success. They want someone to tell them what success is, what milestones to reach, and what steps to follow. They know how to execute and copy, so they execute efficiently, maximize metrics, and copy what other successful firms have done.

There’s a place for this kind of box-checking bureaucrat in any organization. It isn’t supposed to be leading.

The Min-Maxing Economy

We now live in a min-maxing economy. Everything we encounter is run by people who are min-maxing metrics.

One min-maxed business is frustrating. A country where every institution does it is a nightmare. Business bureaucrats who run things around these principles aren’t trying to surprise us, delight us, or provide us excellence. They reduce everything to abstractions they can maximize. They mistake process for excellence, don’t value creativity, innovation, risk, or whimsy, and lack a sense of wonder or possibility. They cut corners and make everything cheap. They make their products and services boring, tedious to use, and frustrating on purpose. It’s why so many iconic brands have dulled. It’s why so many experiences that people remember as being special now are not. It’s why few in our everyday lives are still surprising, meaningful, or fun. An entire nation doing this all the time sucks the life from everything.

It’s not just about restaurant businesses, of course. The same managers trained to advance this principle run every institution, and so every institution is run with the same managerial bureaucracy. It’s our media companies. It’s the film industry. It’s book publishing. It’s popular music. It’s universities. It’s non-profits. Of course, it’s also government. The same people and thinking are everywhere, and so everywhere is the same. These people aren’t actively trying to destroy things we believe are valuable out of malevolence. They’re doing it because their metrics, which do not measure them, tell them so. In practice, does it make a difference?

What’s most frustrating about these institutional min-maxers is think they’re doing a bang-up job. They think of success not in terms of excellence, but metrics, so when they destroy valuable things, they believe that’s doing well. When inevitably there’s backlash, they’re baffled. They always feel the criticism is crazy and unfair. They call it ignorance about how the world actually works, without realizing the ignorance about the world is theirs entirely.

A lot of what gets blamed on culture or politics is this kind of managerial min-maxing run amok. I suspect it’s why so many Americans are currently angry, although they can’t put their fingers on the reason. Everywhere they turn, their lives are made intentionally frustrating, and things they loved are hollowed out on purpose. They feel a national leadership culture comprehensively working to transform America from a wonderland of innovation into the national equivalent of a Soviet apartment block. Not knowing the source of the problem, they channel their fury and frustration into politics. This is why I think the Cracker Barrel controversy resonated.

We must remember, the purpose of an economy isn’t to generate spreadsheet abstractions. It’s to build a world of real things. What matters isn’t what the metrics say, but what you build, whether you delight people, and whether you provide them things they love. It’s whether you fulfill their needs, offering extraordinary experiences at fair prices. It’s whether you make the world around us better, and provide the people who work for you a good life. It’s whether you create not just prosperity, but also charm, joy, and meaning. When you do this, as Apple and Disney in their heydays knew, you also make a lot of money. This is how capitalism is meant to work. Min-maxing metrics isn’t even good business strategy. Yes, your spreadsheets look pristine, but you deliver mediocrity and leave most of the wealth you should have generated on the table.

Min-maxing is mediocrity, and America is not a mediocre nation. To thrive, we need leaders who build real things and maximize them for wonder, serendipity, meaning, and joy, not just abstract metrics. We must live in the world we create, and so prosperity means creating a world we actually want to live in. An America that valued excellence again wouldn’t strip color and play places from McDonald’s, but add a little more magic to every street corner, school, and civic building. It’s long past time we clawed back control of our nation from this small-minded mentality and once again began rebuilding a wondrous America.

What do you think about the min-max economy? Join the discussion in the comments.

In part one of this essay, I argued the American university has drifted from its purpose. Our universities are no longer primarily institutions of learning. They’re credentialing machines for selecting members of the professional class and national elite. As Stafford Beer famously said, “The purpose of a system is what it does. There is, after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” Whatever our universities claim their purpose is, this is now what the university system actually does.

If we want our universities to reclaim their place and play their role in repairing our ailing republic, we must reverse this drift in mission. This requires reviving a different kind of education that provides Americans with the knowledge, judgment, and character necessary to govern our democracy themselves.

The Crisis of Credentialing

To recap part one of this essay, American universities are mired in a cluster of crises that collectively are rooted in their drift away from educating toward credentialing an elite.

• They cost too much, often trapping students in debt they’ll spend decades trying to repay on a middle-class salary.

• Only about 30 percent of tuition goes to classroom teaching. The rest is spent on opulent facilities and ever-growing ranks of administrators, while actual teaching is pushed onto underpaid adjunct gig-workers.

• They don’t ensure students master essential knowledge, instead asking nineteen-year-olds to wander through course catalogs shaped by faculty preferences rather than student needs.

• Many students graduate without even basic skills. Studies and surveys show many students can’t understand their reading, and lack the basic skills necessary to reason.

• Students increasingly don’t value the experience, skipping reading assignments and outsourcing their work to AI.

Put together, this raises an alarming question of why we’re doing this at all? Why ask young people to take on crushing debt just to spend four years sampling random topics taught by gig-workers, and not even engage the work? It’s tempting to presume these problems are the result of failed leadership, lack of vision, political agendas, or even corruption. If that were true, the simple fix would be to simply replace the leaders and reorient the institutions back to education. What if it’s intentional, symptoms of an intentional strategy for pursuing the modern university’s real priorities and agenda? What if this is simply what a modern university is designed to do?

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If I wanted to provide students an incredible education, I could do it for a lot less than our universities charge. I would start by finding the most brilliant scholars I could find, and offer each of them a generous $300,000 a year to teach two courses a semester with an intimate class of just twenty students. If each course met twice a week with four courses per year, the total cost would be about $1,875 per student per course. Add in a well-equipped classroom, a few hundred dollars in books, some technology, and room and board, and you’re still nowhere near today’s prices. Yet our modern universities have decided instead to teach students in massive lectures staffing classrooms with adjuncts precariously struggling to stay off public assistance.

So where are the universities spending all this money if it isn’t going into the classroom? It’s not, as many assume, going to research. Put aside the absurdity of the idea of financing America’s research budget by saddling nineteen-year-olds with debt they’ll spend decades paying off. Only 25% of university research budgets come from internal university funds, which universities call institutional support. Little of that comes from tuition. Most comes from endowment income, profitable university-run businesses, professional programs, or money from other grants reallocated to university overhead on paper. The rest comes from the federal government and foundations. Tuition has little to nothing to do with research.

Then where is all this money going? It pays for manicured gardens, marquee programs, and a swelling class of administrators. None of these provide students a better education. What they purchase is prestige. They impress people, attract elite students, and increase a university’s rank in the academic hierarchy. As we all know, universities are not equal. They exist in tiers of status and prestige. Rising into a higher tier means attracting well-connected and accomplished students more likely to ascend into elite careers, which in turn reinforces the cycle. More alumni in elite positions raises the institution’s prestige, making its credential more valuable, further elevating the status of its faculty and administrators. Providing a stellar education doesn’t move you up this ladder.

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Since the university’s real business is selling credentials to join future elites, its money and attention go to whatever boosts its status. A university’s value is no longer the education it provides but its power to confer what, in effect, is a golden ticket into America’s professional class. This is the reason behind our intense focus on admissions. These valuable credentials shape the identity of America’s future leaders, and thus America’s future. Those who want to influence America naturally seek to influence who gets into which universities, and what ideas, attitudes, and loyalties they instill. It’s the reason students are no longer learning, refusing to do their assigned reading and outsourcing papers to AI. Most are there only for the credential, and the learning is optional. It's why curriculum is an afterthought, with universities allowing teenagers to assemble educations from scratch from disconnected courses. The result is a degree with an impressive name-brand seal, but no coherent foundation.

Nearly every symptom of the crisis in this broken model stems from deliberate decisions flowing rationally from the incentives to pursue the university’s true priorities and mission. It’s naive to think we can fix this problem by replacing leaders or pressing for well-meaning reforms. Until we fix this drift in mission, the same problems will always reassert themselves as new people chase the same incentives.

Republican Virtue

If universities don’t exist to credential elites, what should they be doing? The true purpose of the American university should be forging self-governing democratic citizens.

A democracy is an unusual government. Its people have no rulers. They’re meant to rule themselves. This is why many people believed America’s experiment in democratic government would fail. They doubted ordinary people would ever have sufficient knowledge, judgment, and character to govern themselves. They expected any democratic republic would inevitably collapse into authoritarian tyranny as its people, lacking the knowledge, wisdom, and virtues needed to sustain democracy, failed it. America’s Founders called these habits of mind and character required to sustain democracy “republican virtue,” meaning the civic virtues necessary in a people to make democracy work.

James Madison explained it in Federalist 57:

The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.

America’s Founders never thought crafting democratic institutions, like Congresses and presidents and separations of powers, would be enough. Whatever the Founders wrote on paper, the people who would come after them to staff and control those institutions would decide whether to uphold their values or ignore them. For democracy to flourish, it needs not just well-designed institutions, but citizens with the wisdom and judgment to select good leaders and guide wise decisions. To do this, these citizens need knowledge about public matters, and the character to put the public good before their own. Most of all, they must be committed to democratic ideals and understand how democratic institutions are meant to work. If the people decide they no longer care, whatever is written in laws and constitutions won’t matter.

As John Adams wrote:

There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest Connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society.

Where would ordinary citizens learn these extraordinary skills? As Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams, they must be intentionally inculcated: No government can continue good but under the control of the people. . . Their minds were to be informed, by education, what is right & what wrong, to be encouraged in habits of virtue, and deterred from those of vice by the dread of punishments, proportioned indeed, but irremissible. . . These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure of order and good government.

This is arguably the reason America struggles. We’ve forgotten about these republican virtues. We ask citizens and legislatures to make wise decisions on a wide array of complicated issues, but nowhere do we teach them how to do it. Our leaders don’t consider their offices duties, but rewards to enjoy and exploit. Our people don’t view government as a place to work through compromises for the common good, but arenas to defend their interests, extract concessions, and punish enemies.

What institution in America could possibly teach these skills and virtues except the university?

What College Ought to Be

How can we reorient universities from empty credentialing toward what they ought to be—training grounds for imparting the civic virtues necessary for democracy. If we hope to reorient the university toward its intended purpose, we must wage a two-pronged attack.

First, from one end we must champion a national curriculum built around creating educated citizens and encouraging civic virtue.

The goal of college was never just training workers. You don’t go to college to get a job. As part one of this essay discussed, most skills we need to become productive workers aren’t learned in classrooms, but from experience on the job. The goal of college was always meant to be not job training, but educating good citizens capable of managing our democracy so America will thrive. If the people are the government, the people need the skills to rule. The skills necessary to rule are those of a classically liberal education. You don’t learn to make decisions or rule with engineering, marketing, or email writing. A classical education is what teaches you to think, build things, change things, understand humanity, form an understanding of reality, lead people, influence systems, transform societies, and run the world. This is why rulers and aristocrats provided this kind of education to their children, because they intended them some day to lead and rule. In a democracy, we all must lead and rule.

The same entrepreneurs, business leaders, and political figures who demand all education be practical and fully focused on employment never follow this advice themselves. Anyone who has listened to a podcast knows modern leaders think about and study not just math and engineering, but public policy, history, philosophy, foreign affairs, and politics. There’s a push lately to steer students exclusively into STEM, in the belief this will help them fill jobs in our economy. The sciences, of course, are indispensable. Fields like physics, biology, and engineering teach us the laws of the material world, just as fields like history, philosophy, and literature teach us how to navigate the human world and reality. The greatest minds of history understood this, which is why they moved easily between both. The greatest figures of science like Leonardo, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz, all also wrote about and studied history, philosophy, and art. When masters of the universe tell you that you only need to learn the skills of a productive worker—advice that they don’t follow—it’s because they don’t think people like you are meant to rule yourself.

A modern civic curriculum would integrate history, philosophy, literature, math, and science with a deep civic education. It would teach world history from the Bronze Age, to the Vedic civilizations, to Alexander, to Rome, to the Chinese dynasties. It would teach Plato, Confucius, Homer, the Mahabharata, de Tocqueville, Kant, and Nietzsche. It would study constitutional theory, democratic philosophy, America’s institutions, the writing of the Founders, and thinkers like Locke, Hobbes, and Montesquieu. Add to this the cutting edges of the sciences from biology, to math, to quantum physics. Like the aristocrats of old, it would also strive to cultivate character in order to forge democratic citizens of grit and duty prepared to sacrifice for the common good. Most important, this curriculum would be as rigorous as any medical or law program. Those who claim the humanities are easy are mistaken; they’re just as rigorous, if not more, as the hard science, but only taught less seriously and graded easier. This curriculum should be as arduous and demanding as anything in the sciences.

Graduates should emerge knowing everything we expect of an educated person capable of leading and participating in the governing of a nation.

From the other end, we also need structural reforms to force an end to the credentialing tyranny.

As we push universities with one hand to reorient their mission, we should with the other strip from them the job of credentialing. Who, after all, are self-appointed university administrators to be sorting citizens into social classes in what’s meant to be a meritocratic and democratic nation? No one elected them. No one voted for them. No one consented to their rule. By what right have unaccountable private citizens claimed the right to select and shape an American ruling class? If this job must be done in a democracy, surely it must be done transparently through democratic consent in a clear system open to public inspection and subject to public accountability.

While it might be possible to convince the academy to embrace a rethinking of their mission, removing the toxin of credentialing from their hands will surely involve a fight. It will probably require new policies and state interventions, just as government once pushed universities to expand from small training grounds for scholars and elites into mass institutions after the Second World War. Doing this won’t be easy, but here are some ideas for how we could start:

• Create a national admissions program like medical matching to bring transparency to admissions, while removing influence from administrators whose role should not be selecting a national ruling class. Universities can no longer treat admissions as black boxes subject only to their whim if university admissions is going to be deciding young people’s opportunities for life.

• Expand universities to admit more students, limiting the effect of ranking and tiering by destroying false exclusivity. Expand their size to admit as many students as can prove they can handle the work.

• Create a national certification program in which students attending any tier of school can prove their knowledge and earn top certifications independent of the school they attended. Create a new, rigorous, but more transparent credential that allows anyone to prove what they have learned.

• Bring national pressure to reduce costs, and, if necessary, force universities not to overspend on extravagances and perks if they expect federal dollars. Tie federal funds to reducing administrators and the use of adjuncts, putting money and professors back into classroom.

The goal should be to make universities compete on the education they deliver, not their status or position.

What we’re doing isn’t working. The credentialing machine serves no one. The twentieth-century expansion of higher education was the right decision, but it only went halfway. It opened opportunity, but kept the hierarchy. We now must finish the job. We should commit to a new vision of what the university is meant to be, in order to spread opportunity and allow America to flourish. Rebuild universities into institutions worthy of a democracy, ones devoted not to sorting rulers but educating the democratic citizens of a republic.

What do you think the solution is to crisis of academy? Join the conversation in the comments.

The root cause of the modern university crisis isn’t incompetence, or even politics. It’s about a loss of mission. Our universities have forgotten and abandoned their primary purpose, which is educating democratic citizens. Instead of institutions built around education and civic duty, they’ve embraced a mission of credentialing America’s experts, professionals, and national elites. Their chief purpose is no longer cultivating leaders but sorting young Americans as credentialing factories. This drift in mission has created the university crisis: ballooning costs, weak curricula, and students more interested in diplomas than learning.

This mission drift is the problem we must fix to restore universities as America’s civic heart. This first part of a two-part essay will discuss how we got ourselves into this situation.

The Crisis of the Modern American University

American universities are in crisis, despite flourishing on paper. On some metrics, they’re not just the best universities in the world, but arguably in world history. They attract top students and faculty across the globe. They dominate in Nobel Prizes, patents, and academic citations, helping along transformative discoveries like the Internet, GPS, CRISPR, and AI. They’ve spread higher education throughout American society, with fully half of American adults now holding some form of post-secondary education, and 37% holding a bachelor’s degree. What possibly could be the problem?

For one thing, there’s the price tag. As the college degree has become a minimum baseline for a middle-class job, its cost has skyrocketed. The average cost of public in-state tuition is now $11,600 per year, while out-of-state public tuition is $30,800 per year, and private schools are at a staggering $38,400 per year. Elite schools are racing ahead even further, with schools like Harvard now getting close to $60,000 per year, and a few trailblazers like Brown, Columbia, and Vassar exceeding $70,000. Add in food, books, and housing, and some university degrees are getting awfully close to $100,000 per year in total expense. At that price, loans and aid are hardly sufficient when the median salary of the holder of a bachelor’s degree is around $80,000. The salary of those aged 25-34 is only around $67,000.

All this money isn’t even going into the classroom. Only about 20-30 percent of university budgets today reach classroom teachers. Most spending instead funds beautifully manicured campuses and rapidly multiplying administrators. Many universities now employ three times as many non‑faculty staff as teaching faculty, while relying on poorly-paid gig-worker adjuncts willing to teach classes for a few thousand dollars per course, and earning as little as $25,000 per year.

At least students must be getting back an extraordinary education. Unfortunately not.

The Atlantic recently set off a national discussion with an article, supported and confirmed by many professors, that American students today have trouble reading or understanding books. A 2015 AACRAO study found around 40% of college graduates lacked the complex reasoning skills needed for white‑collar jobs, such as interpreting data or evaluating evidence. In a survey of employers, HR Drive found 60% of employers said recent college graduates lack critical thinking and problem‑solving ability, and 44% lack writing proficiency. The American Institute for Research found half of students in four-year colleges lack the skills necessary to perform complex quantitative tasks such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing arguments in newspaper editorials. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported few American university students today actually do the assigned reading at all, and many lack the capacity to even understand it.

What about the substance of what they’re learning? ACTA’s nationwide audit of general‑education requirements found that, out of 1,134 institutions reviewed, only seven require students to learn all seven core areas of a basic education: composition, literature, foreign language, history and government, economics, math, and science. Anecdotally, it’s shocking what many highly credentialed college graduates don’t know. How many college graduates have actually read and understood Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Plato, and Kant? How many can use calculus, explain relativity, or know how DNA works? How many understand the basics of economics? How many can list the Chinese dynasties, or put the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, and Inca in the correct historical order? This lack of knowledge is no accident, since universities today make very little effort in shaping their curricula to ensure graduates emerge with a base of knowledge. They hand nineteen-year-olds dense catalogs of randomly assembled topics reflecting what professors like to teach, not what they believe students need to learn.

Most alarming, American university students have, according to studies, a shockingly rudimentary knowledge of America’s political system. Many don’t know the articles and amendments of our Constitution. They don’t know how to read a Supreme Court opinion. They don’t understand how federalism works. They don’t understand what Congress actually does. They don’t know the major events that shaped American history. They can’t recite a sentence about each of America’s presidents. Many university graduates don’t know the basics of how our democracy works. Best of luck explaining the difference between Medicaid and Medicare. Yet these graduates don’t just aspire to shape our policies and choose our leaders as members of the electorate, but feel entitled to positions of leadership where they’ll run our major institutions. Our universities claim they’re producing the nation’s future leaders, but those future leaders don’t even have the basic knowledge of competent democratic citizens.

Universities aren’t solely to blame, since many students seem to undervalue their education themselves. A NBER study a few years back found the time students spent on class each week had fallen from 40 hours in the 1960s to only 27 hours by the early 2000s. With the widespread availability of AI to write papers, today students likely spend even less. AI has dramatically increased cheating on campuses. A popular recent New Yorker article sparked national debate with college professors complaining that most of the work they now assign isn’t completed by the students, but by AIs. Students are going through the motions to get a passing grade and degree without doing the difficult but rewarding work necessary to learn things.

This all raises a question. Why exactly are we doing this? Why ask young Americans to spend four years out of their lives and assume hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, just to spend four blissful years among gardens to be taught a random collection of topics by poorly-paid adjunct professors that have little to do with their middle-class careers? The cost is staggering, the debt is life-limiting, few are learning much, none of it seems to have any purpose, and neither the universities nor society seems to care.

All this only makes sense once you understand the real purpose of today’s universities. They’re mills designed to sort through America’s youth to decide which will obtain the necessary credentials to obtain the opportunity to join America’s leadership class and elite.

How the University Lost Its Civic Mission

In the 20th century, America transformed college from an elite civic institution into a mass system open to everyone. In the belief that America needed a broad, highly educated population to administer a modern industrial nation and compete with the Soviet Union, the government began investing heavily in research and education. This in itself was a good thing. A democracy is meant to be a meritocracy with opportunity available to everyone, while America was at the time still under the soft rule of a semi-closed establishment. In light of the Second World War followed by the Cold War, America decided it could no longer justify or afford to waste all this potential. As access widened, research boomed, and campuses ballooned, the older purpose of the university of forming capable citizens for a self-governing democracy was quietly displaced. This traced back to the fundamental challenge of democracy. Who is supposed to lead and manage its institutions?

The most divisive and difficult issue for our Founding generation was how to locate and select the talent necessary to lead and administer a self-governing democratic republic open to all the people. Democracies are meant to be meritocracies in which people govern themselves. The problem is they still need experts and professionals to lead and administer their institutions. They need trained and competent diplomats, generals, bankers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, and CEOs. In a democracy of the people, where are these leaders supposed to come from? Federalists like Hamilton believed America should train a meritocratic elite to create an educated and commercially-minded “natural aristocracy” to replace the role of the nobility. Democratic-Republicans like Jefferson found this alarmingly monarchical and wanted to instead rely on what they called “yeoman farmers,” meaning farmers who owned and farmed their own land—in theory small landholders, but in practice tending to mean wealthy plantation barons like Jefferson. This debate led them to create of our first political parties.

America’s Founders realized monarchies like Great Britain relied upon a hereditary class of nobles, which it trained from birth to lead. Young people from the right families were tutored with all the skills and knowledge necessary to become the administrators, diplomats and generals the state would need. They weren’t taught the knowledge necessary to become useful workers, but a broad liberal education in history, philosophy, religion, government, and natural sciences traditionally meant for those who would have to lead and rule. This education was also meant to instill traits of good character, civic virtue, and noblesse oblige that leadership required. Every autocratic system has come up with a similar solution for training its elites. The Chinese Empire used a bureaucratic system of mandarin officials. Modern autocracies induct promising youth into loyal party cadres, training them for top jobs while instilling the party’s beliefs and values. How would a democracy of the people solve this problem?

After years of political warfare over the question, the rival visions of Hamilton and Jefferson consolidated to create what we used to call America’s “Yankee aristocracy” or old establishment. America’s leadership would mostly come from a semi-closed social caste descended from a handful of wealthy colonial families, who would be trained for leadership from birth like the old aristocratic families of Europe. The group was technically open to new members who could earn their way into the pages of its Social Register by building independent fortunes or otherwise distinguishing themselves as in Hamilton’s vision. In practice, however, inclusion was difficult and rare, and for people from unwanted backgrounds effectively impossible. This mostly Anglo-Protestant Yankee aristocracy based in the Northeast with names like Cabot, Lowell, Adams, Astor, Roosevelt, and Forbes would, after the Civil War, intermarry with and integrate with the parallel system of Southern aristocratic families, becoming a single national establishment.

This establishment saw itself as stewards of the republic and America’s rightful ruling class carrying out a duty to preserve America’s institutions, with noblesse oblige to look after ordinary people laboring under their inherited leadership. For generations, it held almost exclusive power in government, finance, media, and law. It trained its members for leadership in a network of Ivy League schools and prep academies, which provided them with the same liberal education classically required to impart the knowledge and character necessary to lead and rule.

Historically, universities had always been small institutions of elite scholars preparing to enter a handful of elite professions that required specialized knowledge, like law, medicine, theology, or academia. Many like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had religious roots, and they educated students in the classical liberal arts tradition with Latin, Greek, philosophy, rhetoric, mathematics, and moral instruction. The purpose of the university was to educate and form character, producing gentlemen, clergymen, and professionals prepared to assume their duties leading society. Elite families sent their sons to college to prepare them for their future roles in national leadership. University degrees weren’t open to, or expected from, working or middle-class people to enter the workforce. In 1900, only around 3% of people even sought a college education. Thus, we came to associate a university education with prestige, opportunity, and access to social mobility.

After the Second World War, after an assault from both ends, this soft aristocratic system gradually came apart. On one end, waves of immigration, a national mobilization during war, followed by the economic plenty of the postwar boom, strengthened the political power of new would-be elites outside old aristocratic families. On the other end, national mobilization followed by Cold War demands caused Americans to recognize a modernizing world required more educated people for a growing number of white-collar roles. New demands for efficiency and meritocracy saw new demands that prep schools, Ivy League universities, and powerful institutions allow in more talented Americans. These demands saw America embrace a more meritocratic ethic and America decided college should now be encouraged for everybody.

After the war, America made a powerful coordinated effort to expand access to higher education. Excluding large swaths of the population from universities—particularly talented working-class students and the children of recent immigrants like Irish Catholics, Italians, Poles, and Jews —was seen as wasting national potential. The crown jewel of this effort was the GI Bill, which offered tuition and living stipends to millions of returning veterans, many from working-class and rural backgrounds, which broadened the social makeup of universities. Governments also invested in public universities and community colleges to handle this surging demand. As the Soviet atomic bomb and Sputnik created a sense of urgency to outpace the Soviets in science, the government set up laboratories funded by the Pentagon, issued federal contracts for weapons, computing, and aerospace, and poured money into universities to drive research in physics, engineering, and math. It applied pressure to diversify and expand universities and open them up from bastions of the old establishment.

When combined, these developments saw universities transform rapidly from small institutions of scholars into mass institutions espousing meritocratic principles and open to all talent. As universities grew, they moved away from faculty governance to large administrative bureaucracies to manage enrollment, compliance, housing, athletics, and student life. This brought an end to the classical model of education based around history, philosophy, and literature, and the idea that the university is meant to inculcate civic duty and public virtue. America still needed experts, professionals, managers, and leaders. In fact, it now needed them more than ever. The universities, long trainers of America's elite, became the default institutions to select those leaders. Before long, a college degree became almost necessary for middle-class employment, turning universities into gatekeepers for social mobility.

Without intending it, we reopened the question that troubled America’s Founders. America had justly and commendably re-embraced an ethic of meritocracy and democratic opportunity open to everyone. The old American establishment wasn’t dead exactly, but pushed from center stage. Who would now decide which young Americans would be trained and elevated into positions of leadership? The default institutions left to do this job were the universities that long trained America’s establishment. University admissions replaced the Social Register as the gateway to America’s elite.

Since World War II, universities’ main job shifted from education to credentialing professionals and managers. University admissions has become a de facto sorting mechanism deciding where young American students will enter the American system. It took a few decades for the logic of this transformation to play out fully, and a few decades more until we noticed it. This is the heart of the civic crisis now tearing at the university. Important national institutions formally dedicated to forming free citizens capable of self-governing now function primarily to sort and certify elites. Everything else they do is subservient to this goal. Once you understand this, everything the universities are doing makes sense.

By what right, however, do un-elected universities claim the role of deciding who will have opportunity in America and who will not? To whom are they accountable in making such decisions, and with what transparency are they required to do it? Most important, in taking on this role, what else is being lost? What necessary jobs are being neglected, and what is the social cost of this dereliction? What about the substance of the education? America is meant to be a meritocratic society in which everyone can rise and fairly pursue their dreams. Having an unacknowledged aristocracy trained from birth to rule was clearly unjust, inconsistent with our values, and a waste of human potential. Does the present system uphold our core values, or does it hinder human potential too? How is America and its people made better by this system? Can we do this better, and if so how?

Part II will explore how we can reclaim this original mission and restore our universities to their place as the civic heart of American life.

What do you want to see in Part II? Join the conversation in the comment.

I wouldn’t just build grand buildings and public art. By monuments, I mean any great work of ingenuity and culture meant to last centuries. I would fund symphonies. I would fund crazy unfashionable science. I would fund interesting writers and bold philosophers. I would finance great edifices that take centuries to complete and stand for millennia.

When I tell this to people, I’m often shocked at how much they seem to hate it. What I usually hear is that it’s frivolous and narcissistic. Millions around the world are suffering. They don’t need statues or works of art. They need food and water and housing and medicine, and they need it all right now. In the face of such pressing need, spending on grand projects is wasteful and offensive. It’s an egotistic attempt to bask in a pathetic reflected glory, like some Pharaoh stealing wealth to build an obnoxious Sphinx in the dunes bearing his prideful face. I think we must do both.

To be clear, I support philanthropy. I believe in uplifting people and alleviating poverty. I’m all for malaria prevention, access to drinking water, and rural schools. I know a ludicrously small amount can immeasurably improve a significant number of lives. While such work is necessary, however, many institutions are already doing it. Western governments devote immense time and resources to international development. There’s the United Nations, major foundations, global institutions, and an entire NGO industrial complex. There’s an industry devoted to international development staffed by professionals, along with a robust charitable sector at home spanning churches, foundations, and national institutions. Who is building monuments?

Philanthropy solves the material problems of today. Monuments speak across time to inspire us and locate humanity’s place, helping us as a species develop into a better future. Civilization requires both these things. Without works that endure, we leave no inheritance of beauty or wisdom, no testimony to who we thought we were, or what we thought worth doing. We give up on the belief that our civilization has something to say across centuries, and forfeit the responsibility to imagine a future beyond our own brief lives. Material comfort cannot be the sum of our ambition. A culture without monuments is one that no longer sees itself as part of the human story.

For most of human history, those with great wealth and power took on this civic responsibility. The Medici funded breathlessly incredible works of art. European kings built grand cathedrals of stone and stained glass. King Louis built a palace at Versailles. The Mesopotamians built ziggurats and hanging gardens, the Chinese Emperors built a Forbidden City and Great Wall, and Shah Jahan built a Taj Mahal. Great artists and thinkers like da Vinci had patrons. Who fills this role now that the merchant princes, aristocrats, and kings are gone? Who is funding our da Vincis? Who is building our pyramids and grand cathedrals?

It can’t, and won’t, be democratic governments, and I understand why. It’s hard to raise a family, and voters don’t want their dollars spent on non-pressing needs. We won’t be building many more grand buildings like the White House or Capitol, or post offices resembling Greco-Roman temples. Government buildings now are efficient, modern, and cheap. Even new monuments lack audacity. Democratic citizens would rather a new program or tax cut than another Rushmore.

The ultrarich build companies, not monuments. They spend on elaborate houses and boats hidden from public view. Instead of funding art and science, they carve their names into the walls of institutional buildings not meant to last fifty years. Instead of sponsoring new artists, they buy already famous works and hang them on their walls. Their philanthropy is present-oriented, material, and efficiency-based, like Bill Gates’ vaccines and mosquito nets. Most times, they find a good cause and simply write a check. They’re focused solely on feeding bodies, but rarely souls. The reason for this ultimately falls on us.

No one builds great works because we no longer value them or socially reward them. Imagine some rich guy financing some glorious public monument that would take a century to build. People would attack him as a narcissist. If he sought to sponsor artists and scholars, they would find him condescending like collecting pets. If he were to finance frontier science or unpopular research, they would call him a dangerous crackpot. They would tell him he’s squandering resources better spent on making money, driving growth, or meeting needs. Look at what we say about space exploration, like SpaceX’s plan to get to Mars. They say going to Mars is pointless, not inspiring. Now imagine it was a new Alhambra or a pyramid.

We consider grand buildings, speculative science, public gardens, and novel art to be frivolous. Who can then blame holders of great wealth from spending it on boats and houses and sports franchises and massive weddings when anything more ambitious will just get you attacked.

It’s a dangerous lack of vision and civic ambition that’s holding America back. We inherited pyramids, cathedrals, and epics we did not build. We owe a comparable inheritance in return. It’s not selfish to build monuments. It’s selfish not to. We should use our brief moment in the sun to contribute the most beautiful and meaningful note we can to the symphony of human history.

Greatness Is Valuable

What’s the true value of Shakespeare’s plays? If you calculate it solely based on what he earned from them during his lifetime, they weren’t that valuable. Shakespeare was financially successful, earning enough to retire a country gentleman. It’s a solid life roughly equivalent to a successful doctor or a lawyer. It’s hardly a financial windfall like founding Microsoft or Google.

If you consider instead the impact Shakespeare’s plays had in the four centuries since his death, they suddenly look a lot more worthwhile. How many times have Shakespeare’s plays been performed over the last four hundred years? How many people read them? How much other art have they inspired? How much wisdom did they communicate about the human condition, changing people’s minds in ways that matter? The value those plays have generated for humanity must be in the trillions, and more than the lifetime earnings of Ford Motor Company, Standard Oil, or Google.

What about Michelangelo’s David, carved in 1504? What about the Iliad and Odyssey, composed by Homer around 750 BCE based on an oral tradition from sometime before 1000 BCE? How about the Pyramids at Giza, dating back thousands of years more?

Great works don’t house us, clothe us, keep us warm, or feed us. They don’t even entertain us or make us happy. They express hopes, dreams, experiences, and values. They communicate ideas across cultures and centuries. Their purpose isn’t to sustain us as material beings, but to inspire us and push us closer toward what humanity could become. When you stand before the Parthenon or Taj Mahal, you realize you’re part of a human story that goes back millennia and will continue for millennia more. You touch a bit of greatness and, for a moment, know that as a human greatness also lies within you. You know you’re capable of, and meant for, more.

Creating great works that inspire generations is the purpose of civilization. America exists not only for us alive today, but for all humanity that will live ages after we’re gone. It’s our job to share it with them, just like it was the duty of the dynastic Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, and the Han to share their worlds with us. In the symphony of human history, we play a single note. That note is sounded in the works we leave behind.

Restore the Will to Create

The Bishop of Paris began the Notre Dame cathedral in 1163, with support from the French crown. It took around a century to complete the building in 1260. Further additions took another hundred years, finally finishing in the middle of the 14^th century. Imagine a government or corporation announcing a project on this scale. What would voters or investors think? To us, building a cathedral that takes centuries seems foolish. No one can make money off it. None of us will enjoy it. We’ll all be dead by the time it’s done.

This isn’t to say Americans haven’t created some great and lasting things. We sponsored some revolutionary science. We stumbled into some great art in films and music during our pursuit of commerce and entertainment. We built the James Webb telescope, a marvel of humanity. One might identify modern playgrounds like Las Vegas and Disney World as wonders of the world. We built Central Park, the National Mall, the Transcontinental Railroad, and the Golden Gate Bridge. However, the greatness of these projects was purely accidental. They inspire awe and gratitude, but weren’t built as wonders. They’re byproducts of more practical concerns on a grand scale.

What we don’t do much is literature or art. Our buildings are utilitarian, calculated to end their useful life in less than a single century. We don’t build many public spaces, and those we have are slowly disappearing. After building a rocket to the moon in 1969, we haven’t been back since 1972. We don’t even still have the Space Shuttle popping in and out of orbit that we intended to replace it. We’ve barely explored the ocean. When some dream of exploring the depths or space, or building lunar colonies, most Americans seem to find it pointless and ridiculous.

If our civilization were suddenly to collapse, how much after a thousand years would we really leave behind? Within a century most of our buildings would be reduced to grassy fields like parts of once great Detroit. Our skyscrapers would collapse, leaving at most random girders sticking from landscapes. Some stories would remain, perhaps the myths of the Jedi or tales about Abe Lincoln and George Washington. There would be some old coins in collections, and a few old books preserved. In five thousand years it would pretty much be down to just Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam. Almost certainly, it’s less than remains of Rome or Egypt.

America is a unique and dynamic culture built around innovation, pioneering, and liberty. We’ve gained insights into what makes a nation good. We’ve developed ideas on liberty, justice, dynamism, opportunity, innovation, and realizing dreams. We’ve invented things and created a military machine that awes the world. Yet somehow we’re at risk of becoming our era’s Mongol Empire, which burst across the steppe to subjugate an empire from Kiev, to Baghdad, to Beijing but built few lasting monuments and left no great works of literature, art, or architecture to shape the civilizations that followed. Its legacy is one of great power that did not inspire or build.

This isn’t a role democratic governments can fill. The best we can hope is, when we build public infrastructure, we once again build Beaux-Arts masterpieces like the original Penn Station and fewer Brutalist monstrosities. We must therefore depend on private Americans looking to pay back successes and leave legacies. To do that, we must update our attitudes and values to socially reward it. We inherit great works from the past and are meant to add our own.

If I had billions, I’d sponsor talented thinkers and artists with no-strings-attached stipends to live comfortable middle-class lives experimenting with ideas and art. I’d try to build Plato’s Academy for our age and discover the next da Vinci, Picasso, Beethoven, and Kant. Then I’d go out to the middle of the country and amid a cornfield put up a giant stone hand shaped in a big thumbs up. In a thousand years, let archaeologists who no longer speak our language know something essential about who we were: confident, joyful, irreverent, optimistic builders and dreamers who believed in a shot at greatness. Let it communicate across generations the permission to go-ahead, risk, and strive.

Just as we reflect upon the pyramids, they’ll reflect on what we built and consider for a moment what else humanity can achieve. As they gaze upon it, it will bring a bit of the spirit of America into their world as they contribute their note. The question isn’t whether we should still build monuments. It’s how we can restore our confidence that we’re a civilization worth remembering, and one that ought to build them.

What do you think about building monuments? Join the conversation in the comments.

What makes a government good? What makes one effective? What is government supposed to do, and what shouldn’t it do? The reason we disagree so much about politics is often because we hold different theories about what the purpose of government is.

Most Americans today, whether they know it or not, hold one of two views of government. One theory holds government is meant to be our benevolent parent, managing society for our benefit. The other pushes back against this idea, holding government is meant to be more like a forest ranger that allows things to sprout on their own, and then puts out fires when necessary. These two theories frame our politics so completely that, for many people, it’s almost impossible to imagine government could be anything else.

America is overdue for a new theory of government. The American people have increasingly lost faith in both these visions, and for good reason. If neither model still works, we need to look elsewhere, but we need not start from scratch. America once had another theory of government, one that combined liberty with virtue, and opportunity with responsibility. It was neither technocratic nor hands-off. It was deliberate, principled, and uniquely American. It’s time to move forward by moving back. Government should be neither a parent nor a ranger. It should recover America’s lost tradition and once again become the steward of a system designed for individual human flourishing.

Government Shouldn’t Be a Parent

For most of the twentieth century, the dominant theory of government was the wise and benevolent parent. This theory held that government should be a proactive, compassionate force nurturing and guiding citizens as a conscientious parent might do for their children. It’s a theory with roots in the Progressive Era and solidified through the New Deal and Great Society that holds expert-led institutions should manage complex social and economic systems to produce the best outcomes for citizens and the nation.

The idea that experts should manage society has ancient roots, going back to Plato’s philosopher kings in his Republic. To Plato, this meant a ruling class trained from birth to properly manage the state. To Rousseau, it meant the general will set out in his Social Contract. To Hegel, it meant a state responsible for the moral development of citizens. To Rawls, it meant a society that structures its basic rules to fairly distribute liberties and opportunities. To Lippmann, it meant an elite managing complex modern societies on behalf of a public he believed lacked the capacity for rational decision-making. To Sunstein, it meant experts pushing citizens to make wise choices through a series of “nudges.” All these ideas believe in empowering wise and virtuous experts to chart the nation’s course, manage society, make national plans, and sometimes restrain individuals so the greater system thrives.

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The idea of government as parent can take many forms, ranging from soft technocracy to outright dictatorship. That most extreme version supports ideas like communism or fascism, which is why some see the entire idea as an anti-democratic ground for tyrants. However, it can also be the foundation of republics with expert agencies, most corporate hierarchies, and even many churches. Since FDR, it’s been the backbone of the New Deal, which empowered experts to oversee America, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which empowered them to socially and morally reform it. In this form, it’s less a theory of domination than what we might call a benevolent, bureaucratic, technocratic, “administracy”—a system governed by experts who believe they know what’s best. It creates a nation ruled by experts who collectively act like a benevolent machine intelligence, planning the best and most fair outcome for the whole. Citizens are free to make decisions so long as they cooperate with the administracy’s plans for the nation’s collective good. When citizens disrupt those plans, or move outside the lines set out for them, they’re restrained or limited so the greater system can succeed.

This is how a parent manages a family with children. Like a good parent, the state wields authority to ensure citizens share resources, so everyone under its care, particularly the weak and vulnerable, receive everything they need. It overrides decisions it believes, in its judgment, are harmful or unwise. Like a parent, it views itself and citizens as interdependent, with its role balancing individual freedom with it’s view of collective responsibility.

There are clear benefits to entrusting governance to trained professionals who prioritize efficiency, data, and institutional memory over partisanship. It’s attractive to those who simply hope to plug themselves into the system, play a valuable role, and get back a decent life. It promises stability, expertise, and efficiency enforced in the name of fairness and justice. If you work hard and play by established rules, it promises that, while you might not achieve your wildest dreams, you’ll do okay. It also appeals to professionals who expect to be the ones administrating the system, offering them a meaningful role to make society a little better. Sadly, it also appeals to those drawn to power and authority, offering an attractive system to corrupt for selfish benefit.

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As twentieth-century scholars like Hayek argued, however, this sort of system has significant vulnerabilities and downsides. It’s impossible for any group of experts, no matter how smart, to entirely understand, much less manage, all the complexities of modern societies involving millions of people with different wants and needs. Managed systems are wonderful at creating efficiency, predictability, and avoiding mistakes, but bad at dealing with individuals or outliers. No matter how well-intentioned, centralized systems suppress individual initiative, overlook local knowledge, and stifle innovation. Managed systems kill individuality and meaning, making the world more predictable and small like a row of chain stores in a corporate shopping mall. McDonald’s can train teenagers to produce consistent hamburgers, but can’t produce the innovation and creativity necessary for a Michelin-starred meal.

Even if these systems could succeed, moreover, there’s a human cost. Human beings thrive on autonomy and agency. People are driven by their aspirations and fueled by dreams. They desire control over their destinies. They want a chance to soar. Even when done with good intentions, limiting people’s choices injures their autonomy, diminishes their dignity, and crushes their dreams.

As history also demonstrates, people entrusted with great power don’t always use that power like the neutral and benevolent experts that theory posits in books. Sometimes they’re greedy, lazy, and self-interested. They prioritize status and position over getting the right result. They’re credentialed but not competent. They reward friends, punish enemies, and kneecap rivals. They’re rigid and inflexible. They fall prey to ideological fads. They curry favor and give in to pressure from power.

At the twentieth century’s dawn, the idea of a managed society of neutral experts promised efficiency, prosperity, and fairness. Today, more aware of the flaws and downsides, Americans no longer believe in it. We’ve lost faith in the promise of this vision designed for the industrial twentieth-century world of mass production. From the Soviet collapse to American urban renewal debacles, these systems in practice have a track record that too often reveals rigidity, overreach, and a failure to respond to the unpredictable needs and energy of real human lives. Expertise, when unchecked, has too often produced systems that care more about plans than people, offering predictability at the cost of innovation, individuality, and dreams. They too easily devolve into Kafkaesque bureaucracies that stifles change, or corrupted oligarchies that extract value and hoard opportunities instead of creating the mass prosperity, fairness, and justice they promise.

It's a vision that meant well and got some things right, but misunderstood some critical aspects of human nature. As a result, too many Americans no longer trust in this theory of government. If we want to build a powerful movement of change looking ahead at the future, we can do better.

Government Should Be More than a Forest Ranger

An alternative vision of government grew to push back against the wise parent model, the state as forest ranger. This theory holds that government should be a minimalist, watchful presence that protects the conditions for individual flourishing without directing its course. A forest ranger doesn’t plant trees or direct streams. A ranger guards the edges, watches for fires, and lets the ecosystem evolve on its own.

The forest ranger state has roots in Bentham’s utilitarian limits on coercion and Mill’s classical liberal state that intervenes only to stop direct harms. It developed over the twentieth century in response to the managed state through ideas like Berlin’s negative liberty, Hayek’s defense of spontaneous order, Nozick’s minimal state, and Friedman’s defense of markets. It held that the state should simply prevent violence, enforce contracts, but otherwise allow spontaneous order to emerge. This idea is sometimes called a nightwatchman state, although that’s inaccurate because a nightwatchman is an enforcer of rules some authority made to govern others. This vision is less about enforcing rules than putting out fires. People are free to organize themselves as they choose until something overheats or breaks, when the state steps in to act.

The idea of the state as forest ranger has thrived alongside the idea of the state as parent as its counterpoint. When those preaching expertise and management went too far, those preferring the spontaneous order of the forest ranger pushed back. When authority sought to abuse its power to limit innovation, advocates of spontaneous order preached the benefits of limiting state power to allow new things to grow. When the desire for predictability and order limited freedom and opportunity, advocates of spontaneous order fought to limit state power in the name of the individual. This back and forth debate fit well into a world of industrial mass production and mass politics. These ideas flourished together like a Yin and Yang.

The forest ranger model appeals to dreamers, innovators, and anyone trying to change the world. Change disrupts existing orders and threatens the positions of those with wealth and power. Our world’s history is therefore a story of long periods of stagnation and decline, as those with power used it to strangle change, hoard opportunity, and reward friends and allies over talent. We all know that people with unusual new ideas rarely get rewarded by organizations built around old orders. Allowing disruption without permission lets talent reveal itself and big ideas emerge to invent, build, and repair broken societies.

What this theory too often forgets is that decentralized systems only foster merit and innovation when they're grounded in fair rules that reward character, talent, and effort. There’s a myth of efficient markets, that whatever emerges out the chaos of decentralized systems is always what’s most efficient, popular, and best. That only happens in systems embedded within well-enforced rules explicitly rewarding talent and virtue. As Hayek himself argued, markets depend not just on freedom, but on rules that channel that freedom productively. Market systems are fundamentally games built around some set of rules. Those rules decide what behavior is rewarded and what is punished. They decide whether the field is fair, or tilted toward powerful interests and incumbents. They decide whether talent is free to rise, or constrained by power. They decide whether corruption is accepted, or rooted out and punished. Markets and decentralized systems aren’t inherently fair, balanced, or efficient. They’re only that way if we choose to make them so and enforce it.

In a world without rules, the winner isn’t always the most virtuous. It’s often the most brutal, well-connected, and willing to do what others won’t. When empires collapse and laws vanish, what emerges from that chaos isn’t flourishing new utopias. It’s violent warlords brutalizing, stealing, and making themselves into kings. When power emerges without the constraints of rule and law, those who rise aren’t the builders and innovators but the crime lords and oligarchs capable of extracting resources through power.

Just as Americans have lost faith in benevolent technocrats, they’ve also grown wary of government that abdicates its role entirely. Public power is dangerous because the people who control police forces, intelligence services, and courts can abuse their authority to secure their positions and take the things they want. Private power, although less dangerous than public power, can be quite dangerous too. In order for decentralized systems to work, the game must be fair with a level playing field and good incentives. Talent must be rewarded and corruption rooted out. Powerful corporations, crime families, and corrupting interests can wield power to create injustice, cruelty, and corruption, which must also be policed. If left alone, good things don’t automatically happen.

If Americans no longer trust the government as parent, or the government as forest ranger, there must be another choice. We need another way that protects freedom but doesn’t abandon virtue, fosters innovation without surrendering fairness, and uses the state not to rule over life but to shape the conditions for a good one.

The Whig Vision: A Government of Human Flourishing

In his Politics, Aristotle argued the state exists for the sake of giving people good lives. Its purpose was neither to manage the daily life of citizens, nor stand aside entirely as a watchman. It was to establish a framework that allowed citizens and society to flourish. Aristotle rejected Plato’s rule by philosopher kings managing the state, but also believed the state had a greater role than the forest ranger. He believed government exists to create a framework in which citizens can become virtuous and lead fulfilling lives. This is the Whig vision, a forgotten American tradition that once anchored our republic and guided reformers from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt.

This Whig vision goes back to Alexander Hamilton, who made it the motivating philosophy of his Federalists. It went on to become the core of the American Whigs, Lincoln’s Republicans, and Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism. It fueled a Whig Party that’s often confusing to contemporary Americans because it’s conservative in some ways and progressive in others. It was pro-commerce and pro-capitalism, but advocated for vigorous reform to spread education, build infrastructure, provide opportunity, and uplift people. It inspired Lincoln’s Republicans, who broke slavery and rebuilt the republic. It became the core of Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal, which sought to ensure fair rules would break corrupt concentrations of power and protect the weak by creating an order in which justice and virtue prevailed. Roosevelt’s New Nationalism rested on the idea that success should be determined not by wealth and privilege, but by hard work and character.

Unlike libertarian thinkers who sought to minimize the state, or thinkers trusting expert managers, Whigs believed in harnessing state power to create the conditions in which liberty, virtue, and prosperity could thrive together. The Whig philosophy sees the job of government not as managing outcomes but promoting opportunities and rewarding fairness, merit, and virtue. It holds that a strong republic requires virtuous, informed, prosperous, and self-disciplined citizens. Government should create systems that reward and promote industriousness, virtue, and social mobility. It should provide citizens the tools they need for individual success, and work to spread opportunity fairly to everyone. Then it should leave people free to chase their desires and allow character and merit to rise. It seeks to design and oversee a system in which we can pursue our dreams and flourish.

The Whig vision doesn’t aim to engineer outcomes, maximize GDP, or serve any particular class or interest. It designs rules to ensure the game rewards merit and virtue, but doesn’t reward evils or corruption. Government is to ensure a level playing field in which everyone can fairly compete to chase dreams. It makes sure the game rewards hard work and merit, and not cruelty or greed. It encourages merit and talent, while ensuring everyone has the tools and opportunity to rise. The state fosters and rewards virtuous citizenship, and shapes systems that produce fairness and justice. It allows people to define their own goals and dreams, but also takes on the responsibility to ensure they have a fair and equal chance to reach them. It prizes not just efficiency and production, but also individual agency, creativity, and meaning.

The Whig tradition takes the best parts of government as parent and government as forest ranger and unites them. Like government as parent, the Whig tradition believes government has an affirmative responsibility to shape a better, fairer, more prosperous society. It has a duty to reward merit and character, and police corruption and injustice. It must provide a level playing field and offer education and tools necessary for anyone to rise. At the same time, like the forest ranger, it’s rejects the job of ruling over people like a national manager. It’s not the state’s job to manage people’s lives, pick winners, or decide who others are meant to be. It seeks to unlock the opportunities that innovation and new ideas can bring. It shapes the conditions for people to chase their American Dream, and then leaves them free to chase it. After creating fair and virtuous rules, it leaves us free to compete in this better and more just system however we choose.

I increasingly believe this vision can help win back the trust of the American people. We need a political movement organized around the idea that the purpose of government is to create a system in which citizens can flourish, and then takes pride in watching them thrive. This is the tradition that grew out of America’s Founding and shaped our politics for generations, until we forgot these ideas that once fueled national success. It may sound simple—and it should be—but today it feels foreign, idealistic, and naïve to many Americans. It feels conservative to some, and progressive to others. It’s neither. It’s a vision that feels new because it’s old, and American enough to bring back.

Should we bring back the Whig tradition? Join the conversation in the comments.

It could be true. It should be. I want it to be true. However, if Substack wants to reach its mighty ambition, this platform must evolve.

Substack’s promise isn’t to become America’s largest blogging platform. It’s more than social media or a newsletter delivery service. It certainly shouldn’t be copying Twitter or trying to become TikTok for intellectuals. Substack’s opportunity lies in becoming the beacon that fills the darkened space that twentieth-century publishers, television networks, radio stations, and magazines left behind. Substack should be a limitless magazine with an endless supply of interesting, surprising, brilliant, poignant, stirring, energizing, and wonderful things for the world to discover and read. It should be a cultural nexus. It should be the connective tissue linking people to stories and ideas. Instead of a platform to monetize old media’s fading stars, it should be the forge that mints new ones and introduces them to the world.

If Substack wants to reinvent media as it claims, it must reorganize itself to help readers discover extraordinary things.

What About the Readers?

I came to Substack not because I wanted to write here, but to read.

I’ve been writing at Substack for about nine months, and it’s a great platform for writers like me. The writing interface is clean. The subscription system is easy. There’s a great community of brilliant writers here with interesting voices and important things to say. As a place to launch a publication, it’s far from perfect but best in class. What matters though isn’t the perspective of writers like me who supply Substack with their voices, sentences, and ideas. What matters is how Substack fits into our culture, society, and world, meaning what it is to readers.

Why should anyone without sentences to sell spend time at Substack? Why should they spend money? If Substack is going to succeed at overtaking media, what matters isn’t technology, monetization, or the interests of writers, but the audiences we want to reach. Right now, the reader experience is honestly a mess.

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Substack supposedly hosts over 75,000 publications. Good luck finding them. They’re difficult to search. There are no collections. There are few leaderboards or lists. There are no links from one thing to the next. When you come to Substack, it doesn’t feel like arriving at a media company, a newsstand, a forum, a literary journal, a newspaper, or a nexus of ideas. If I come to read interesting takes on politics, how do I find them? If I want to learn about new discoveries from people in their fields, how do I do that, too? If I want to read short stories or poems or serialized novels, how am I meant to discover the ones I might enjoy?

When someone comes to Substack, there’s no slick landing page promoting interesting new things to read. There’s no recommendation engine. There’s no vehicle for promoting new voices. There isn’t even a useful directory. The only tool to find anything fresh on Substack is Notes. Unfortunately, that’s now degrading as a vehicle for discovery too.

A year ago, Notes was marginally useful for finding interesting pieces and new writers. The advice for anyone starting a Substack was to engage heavily with Notes. Back then, people still mainly used Notes to promote their writing, along with the writing of others that they liked. People still use it like that sometimes, but not as much. As new people joined, most of them used Notes for X-style microblogging. Notes is no longer an engine for discovering things on Substack but a slightly more upscale X or Bluesky. When Substack first launched Notes, the Notes were shared widely with people you didn’t know. These days, the Notes algorithm is noticeably more incestuous, largely circulating Notes in tightly-bounded clusters with people who already read one another instead of reaching new readers. That’s fine for social media, but not for finding readers.

If someone doesn’t already read you, good luck with them finding you through Notes.

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This might be okay if there was some other place to share and discover Substack content off platform, but there isn’t. Other services, desiring to keep traffic to themselves, hate Substack and punish Substack outlinks. Putting a Substack link anywhere other than Substack is basically asking that post to vanish.

How can Substack become a limitless vortex of interesting new things if no one can find anything on it other than the things they already know and read? How can Substack nourish minds if the only voices it promotes are top sellers, meaning people who are already popular and known? If you do luck into finding something, how are you meant to easily find the next thing? In this world of hundreds of thousands of hidden articles and stories, where is Alice’s rabbit hole into which you fall to discover exciting things? Other creative platforms are far from perfect, but at least they try. YouTube doesn’t just serve videos from people you already know. It uses topic browsing, recommendation systems, and human curation. Spotify promotes new artists through playlists and algorithms. Netflix is scrollable and makes recommendations. Writing involves more variety and creativity than any other human activity or art, but Substack does none of these.

The reasons for this seemingly baffling design decision is hardly a mystery. Substack’s current focus is bringing people with large existing audiences to the platform. The reason for that is no mystery either. If someone already has hundreds of thousands of people following them, that’s hundreds of thousands of new subscriptions up for grabs. I get it. In the short term, it’s smart. Over the long-term, it’s disaster.

People with large existing audience built them in the media world that’s dying. They’re mainly former staff of publications that once had huge audiences, TV personalities back when TV mattered, or the first-wave of early 2000s bloggers who got famous as pioneers and then picked up legacy media jobs. It’s questionable whether these are even the right backgrounds for Substack. Legacy media spent years beating out the voices and ideas of its stars with terse house stylebooks created when ink had costs. TV is a place in which saying nothing in a soundbite is an art. Building a following on snarky, cliquey, and cruel echo chambers like X is hardly useful to creating compelling essays. Even if they were, there’s a limited supply of old world stars and we’re not making any more. The pipelines that created them are gone.

If Substack is the future of media, it needs to invest in media’s future. Why isn’t Substack focused on where the opportunity is, creating its own new stars?

Substack has so many amazing writers. Their work has voice and style. They’re interesting. They’re insightful. Many have interesting backgrounds and experiences giving their words weight. They don’t write in that clipped house style of the twentieth century, where voice was flattened and risk edited out. They have something interesting to say. The people I read here aren’t just as good as anyone from traditional media. They’re better. Reading them feels like returning to the days when Scott Fitzgerald was publishing dispatches in the Saturday Evening Post, or Hemingway in Colliers, or Hunter Thompson, and Tom Wolfe, and Susan Sontag were getting paid to publish brilliant essays in places like Esquire, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. What’s better is these writers are part of a community. When they publish something great, I can expand on it and share it. When I do something great, they do the same. Substack is a network of fresh writers, thinkers, activists, storytellers, and stylists offering their words in conversation, and readers get the benefit.

The problem is these thousands of writers with scorching talent, but no household name, are fighting against the Substack system instead of flourishing with it. This is a community churning out so much brilliant work no one can find, and instead of helping them, management doesn’t even see the problem. Everyone who writes here has this conversation constantly. It’s why people get angry at new features that don’t promote writing. It’s why people get mad instead of thrilled when big names come onboard. It’s why people obsess over metrics. It’s why too many of the best performing pieces here are snake-oil promising the Substack middle class with hacks for growth.

I think it’s great that Paul Krugman is now on Substack. It gives the platform legitimacy. It brings in readers. Does anyone believe, however, if Krugman showed up on Substack still a mere economics professor, he would have the same success? His content would be just as good. The audience would still be there. They just would never know they wanted to read him. The reason Krugman can quickly build a large audience on Substack is because for years The New York Times put him in front of its large audience, allowing readers to learn they liked him. Why isn’t Substack doing the same for all the impressive professors, public policy wonks, novelists, autodidacts, experts, activists, and muse-touched daydreamers already here?

Forget about us writers. What about the readers? How are they supposed to find brilliant things to read? How are they supposed to fall down a rabbit hole of curious discovery? Where is our twenty-first-century endless issue of McClures, Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, The New Republic, Time, Esquire, and Rolling Stone?

Substack Economics

I’ve often heard it said the economics of Substack can’t support a middle class of emerging writers. That’s bunk.

The commonly accepted figure is Americans now spend between 6 and 7 hours per day connected to their screens. They spend 2 to 3 hours on social media. Not all of this is reading articles; a lot is tweets, TikToks, DMs, YouTube, podcasts, and Instagram. However, people across the world are spending hours and hours each day reading, clicking, and scrolling through ideas and information. That means there’s an insatiable demand for ideas, stories, conversation, and distractions for anyone prepared to offer something compelling.

What an incredible opportunity.

They say people will never pay for more than a few Substack subscriptions. Those five dollars quickly start adding up. They say this means Substack will never be more than a vehicle for a handful of stars, supported by the dreams of tens of thousands of naïve hobbyists scribbling away thinking they’re writers when actually they’re the market. Hogwash. In the 1990s before the Internet, magazines were over a $10 billion industry, with publications routinely paying $1 to $3 per word to top writers. Adjusted for inflation, that’s over $20 billion. There was so much money in writing articles that top writers received colossal expense accounts, while Tom Wolfe earned over $80,000 in 1989 dollars to deliver a single 7000-word piece. People will pay to read things. They’re already paying to read things on Substack. You just need to create something worthwhile. The reason people have a small budget for reading at the moment is the same reason they stopped paying for music and television in the early 2000s. The market was broken and the distribution model was junk. As soon as someone fixed the market, they started to pay again.

The market for Substack is bigger than you realize, and there’s more than enough to share. Give people something worth reading and package it in a way that’s compelling, and they will come. This is the start of a golden age for the written word, and we’re just waiting for someone to pick up all the gold coins scattered on the ground. The key to unlocking all this treasure is in discovery, and in minting and elevating a new generation of stars.

For readers, Substack should feel like a literary and journalistic wonderland of stories, ideas, and style. It should put a vibrant array of interesting articles from new voices at your fingertips. It should help you easily find things that interest you. When you find a piece you like, it should help you discover similar pieces from other writers. If you want to find something on a topic, it should be searchable and findable. If you want to delve into a style, it should shower you with options. Instead of promoting top sellers, how about fresh talent? Coming to Substack should feel like walking into a candy store for words.

Substack should link pieces and writers in conversations. It should help you easily find other pieces from the same writer without having to tediously scroll the back catalogue. It should offer collections of interesting essays on a theme. It should hold events like forums and literary festivals. Instead of invisible algorithms or AIs looking to increase the empty metric of engagement, it should empower humans to increase wonder and discovery. Instead of wading through snarky X-style notes, Substack readers should find a vast array of interesting pieces and new voices. Instead of trading social media posts, readers should become part of communities built around stories and ideas. When a reader comes to Substack, they should fall down a wondrous rabbit hole into discovering marvelous things.

I’m not saying this only because it’s what I want. It’s where the market hole exists, and therefore the market opportunity. It’s also what we need. Culture right now is rotten. We’re angry, divided, and addled as a people. We shout and repeat empty slogans. We elevate junk and noise. We care too little about ideas or truth. There’s far too little wonder. There aren’t enough rainbows or symphonies. There’s too little curiosity and joy. Our culture is stagnant and we’re in a creative drought. Our world has too little color and too much gray. There’s hunger to return to a more vibrant world in which curiosity and wonder reign. There’s a market to satisfy that hunger.

I’m confident it’s only a matter of time until someone figures out how to do it, and whoever does it first will own the market for writing, creativity, stories, and ideas. I hope it will be Substack.

What do you think about the lack of discovery on Substack. Join the conversation in the comments.

That sounds obvious, until you realize it’s an idea too many have forgotten. We talk about the economy in an entirely mechanical way. We quote statistics. We watch markets. We obsess over profits and growth. We act as if the point of the economy is to enrich investors and make the green numbers on spreadsheets go up. We forget what an economy is for.

The economy exists to productively employ the talents of everyone willing to contribute, in order to make the things people want and need. It’s supposed to make sure everyone, at every level of society, can plug themselves in somewhere to do something productive that helps society, so that everyone who is willing to contribute can have a decent life.

The purpose isn’t to make the state strong, producing resources it can use to project power. That was the theory behind the Soviet Union, and now of modern China, that citizens go to work each day to increase the power of the state. It’s certainly better for a country if it’s capable of projecting power against competitors, but unless you’re at risk of invasion that’s a second order concern.

The economy also doesn’t exist merely to fuel growth and innovation. Many business leaders and economists judge the health of an economy based on numbers, stockmarkets, businesses forming, innovations, and efficiencies. Those are all good things, but they’re not the point. The economy isn’t an end in itself. An economy that’s growing isn’t good if it doesn’t provide people with decent lives.

The purpose of the economy also isn’t to create profits for investors. If you can create a successful business, good for you. If you want to pore over charts to find arbitrage opportunities, enjoy your big house and boat. Why should anyone else care about whether you can easily get rich, much less structure their entire society around helping you achieve it? If the economy allows you to make a profit, that’s great, but everyone else isn’t required to work each day just to make you rich.

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The economy exists to provide people with good lives. It should produce houses they can live in, and grow food that they can eat. It should create medicines and treatments to cure their cancer. It should educate their children. It should produce cars, and trains, and airplanes that get them where they need to go. It should build bridges, highway systems, and restaurants. It should make music they can enjoy, shows they can watch, and sports leagues that make them cheer. We go to work each day and produce things to meet our needs in order to produce happy lives.

Good lives, moreover, don’t mean producing enough nice things in the aggregate that some people can enjoy them while others struggle. It means good lives for everyone willing to work and contribute. Not everyone can have a life of luxury, and as people make different choices some will have more material things than others. If you work hard and contribute, however, you should get a decent life. The economy should make enough real productive things and get them into everybody’s hands—comfortable homes, delicious dinners, enjoyable leisure, productive educations, flourishing health, opportunity, and most important of all dignity.

People don’t exist to serve the nation. They’re not fuel for the system to burn up so it can grow. They’re not an underclass of servants who labor to make others rich. They aren’t objects for others to exploit in their quests for innovation or immortality. The system exists to serve the people, not the other way around.

What it Means to Live a Life of Dignity

Saying the economy exists to give people good lives doesn’t just mean paychecks. Money is an abstraction.

We’ve all seen economic charts demonstrating that ordinary Americans today are richer than they’ve ever been on aggregate. They show Americans richer than Europeans, and in fact richer than almost any other nation in the world. Americans by historical standard are insanely rich compared to any people at any time in history. What can ordinary working Americans possibly complain about?

These charts always remind me of the old talking point that working Americans today are richer than a medieval French lord. The lord lived in a drafty castle with no heating, air conditioning, electricity, or indoor plumbing. He had no access to a car, and had to ride a horse around. He had no smartphone. He ate well, but couldn’t get fresh fruits or vegetables out of season. He had no access to the Internet, and even books in his time were obscenely expensive. His clothes had to be handcrafted, with no fast fashion to fill his closets. By any standard of material prosperity, the lord was worse off than you. In fact, if you had to trade places with his standard of living, you wouldn’t.

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At the same time, the lord didn’t care if he had a smartphone because he didn’t even know what one was. Who would he even text? The lord didn’t care he didn’t have a flat screen or Netflix because those concepts didn’t exist in his world. He might have appreciated central air if he had it, but didn’t miss it because it wasn’t something he knew he wanted. Not having those things mattered to him as much as you feel deprived that you lack a teleporter and a jetpack. Someone in the future might feel sorry for you because you don’t have a teleporter, which is essential in their world to travel to a job, see friends, or have access to the world. You would probably enjoy a teleporter, but it isn’t something you need to live a life of dignity in your world. For you, it’s just a novelty. Having one would be fun, but not having one doesn’t make you feel deprived, affect your life, or make you poor.

The French lord is better off in his world than you are in yours because he has all the things he needs to live a flourishing life. The things you have that he doesn’t don’t matter to his world at all, but they matter a lot to yours. In your world, a mobile phone isn’t a luxury but a necessity to communicate and participate. You need a house with the basic comforts of our society. You need a college education to secure a decent job.

The measure of whether you’re well off isn’t about wages or economic statistics or even absolute material prosperity but whether you have access to the things you need to live a life of dignity in your society. Do you have the resources and opportunities that allow you to do a job, fulfill your needs, and when you’re done relax and enjoy your life? Or are you struggling and desperate, forced to choose which bills to pay and which necessities to go without? Can you hold your head up high as a free and equal citizen, or are you frightened all the time about your future and forced to beg and scrape and bow like someone’s serf?

This simply isn’t a situation the people who make economic decisions ever face. They have secure roles within the system giving them access to all the things they need to live lives of dignity. They have no idea what it’s like not to be able to buy brand name cereal at the store. They never worry about paying the phone bill. They never feel terrible that their kids are attending a less prestigious college to save money. They never cancel Netflix because it’s gotten too expensive, or pass on a Chipotle burrito that no longer safely fits into their budget.

The people who do get this are the voters, only they lack the influence to do anything about it outside of politics. They can protest, act out, and vote. Increasingly, that’s exactly what they’re doing, and I understand why. It’s because too many of the people in a position to do something—making sure every American who is willing to work and contribute can do so—don’t.

What Decision Makers Don’t Get: Dead Ideas.

When you say to people the economy exists to create good lives, too many Americans don’t understand what you mean. Their minds are frozen around dead ideas from twentieth-century debates.

The old left-right economic debates were about trade-offs between markets and regulation. When you say you want to make sure ordinary people are treated with dignity in the economy, people therefore think you mean you want to institute more 1960s-style welfare policies, play with minimum wages, regulate markets, or tinker with interest rates. The left thinks you want to abolish capitalism, raise taxes, and punish millionaires. The right is worried you want to empower more bureaucrats that will burden the economy and institute socialism. These are knee-jerk responses based around dead debates.

Does anyone truly think the solution to any of America’s problems today is more 1960s-style social programs? Will simply redistributing income through old welfare-state policies ensure that everyone who contributes gets a decent life? Will railing at billionaires and pretending we’re going to tax the rich do anything productive? Does anyone truly believe setting the economy free from any rules will magically accomplish it either? When jobs get sent to other nations or destroyed, have new and better jobs always miraculously appeared? Will there always be enough work so everyone who wants to work hard has the opportunity to earn a living with respect? When private equity buys productive enterprises and loads them with debt until they collapse, is that truly economically efficient? When AI replaces all the entry-level office jobs, is that truly in America’s long-term interest?

Are our only choices the dead idea of communism, outdated 1960s welfare statism, or total hands-off market fundamentalism? Or perhaps are those ideologies, appropriate for the world of 1980, no longer up to the task of dealing with the problems we face today? Do any of them offer answers to ensure everyone who works hard and contributes not only gets to survive, but gets to lead a decent life with dignity?

An increasing number of Americans don’t think they do. A warehouse worker sleeps in his car despite working 60-hour weeks at a billion-dollar company. A laid-off software engineer burns through savings as job rejections mount. A home health aide keeps others alive while skipping her own medical care because she can’t afford it. A young designer saddled with student debt competes with AI and gig workers from India. This is an era of incredible disruption. Old economic models are collapsing. What are we going to do to make sure every American in this new economy who wants to contribute can get that decent life?

People need a safe and comfortable home. They need to be able to afford McDonalds hamburgers and good food at the grocery store. They need to afford medicine and healthcare. They need to be able to afford Spotify and Netflix. They need a smartphone, a car that isn’t a clunker, and clothes that aren’t all secondhand. They need to be able to buy insurance. They need to go out for drinks sometimes with friends. They also need the security to know that if something happens, they won’t get thrown into the street. These things aren’t luxuries in 2025 America. They’re the basic things a person in 2025 America needs to live a life of pride and dignity.

Everyone who works should get the basic things they need to live a decent life in the circumstance of America as it exists today. You wouldn’t accept going without them, and you’re no better than they are even if your degree is fancier and you think your job is more important. This isn’t an impossible thing to accomplish, and it has nothing to do with the old economic left and right.

Our era increasingly looks like the populist revolts of the late nineteenth century as industrialization tore up the agricultural model, leaving middle-class family farmers broken and left behind. Or similarly, it looks like the depths of the Depression, when the system wasn’t working and old tools that previous governments used to fix downturns hadn’t worked. These disruptions caused similar turmoil in politics until smart policy people discarded old debates and aggressively experimented with bold new ideas no one had ever tried. They tossed away old policy books and abstractions and thought from first principles about how to rebuild their society for a new era. This is what we need to do again.

If I were in charge of a major political party with the power to dictate its message and agenda, I’m confident I could win every election for the next decade or more by simply repeating the purpose of the economy is give everyone willing to work hard and contribute a decent life. I would offer a Dignity Economy agenda organized around making sure it happened.

A Dignity Economy has mechanisms to help anyone who wants a job to find one. It makes sure employers treat employees with dignity, instead of costs to squeeze. It makes sure housing is plentiful and affordable. It makes sure job-seekers aren’t lost in automated hiring systems or ghosted by employers. It makes education affordable, and more than a credentialing mechanism for hoarding opportunity. It helps people start businesses and take risks. It considers how businesses treat workers. It makes it possible for profitable businesses not to need to chase pointless eternal growth. It provides access to good healthcare independent of employers. It fights monopolies and the rot-spiral of service degradation in the services people depend upon and use. It builds public infrastructure that’s clean, efficient, and reliable. It creates stability in people’s lives, so that if they suddenly lose their job they’ll be okay until they find a new one. It has mechanisms to fund socially-useful things that markets don’t, like ideas, music, and art.

It reorients the state from the outdated fight over who should act—private markets or government—to whether things work and serve the people. It makes government about not who should get the power, but how to make the system deliver a good life to everyone willing to contribute. Until someone does this, our system will continue its tumble downward.

The point of the economy is to give people good lives. Repeat that until the people who can make it happen hear it.

What do you think about the Dignity Economy? Join the conversation in the comments.

I know politics is serious business intertwined with our identities and beliefs. I know threatening things people hold sacred frightens and wounds them, so they can turn to hate. I know intemperate nastiness has infected politics at various times throughout our history. The horrible campaign between once-close friends Thomas Jefferson and John Adams is a great example, where supporters convinced themselves their opponents genuinely wanted to destroy our young democracy. Jefferson’s dirty-tricks hatchet man James Callender published a famous hit piece about Adams in that campaign:

“Ye will judge without regard to the prattle of a president, the prattle of that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness; without regard to that hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

As crazy as today’s political insults are, at least no one is calling their opponents hermaphrodites, although I wouldn’t put it past them.

It’s unclear whether these bad habits are trickling down from people in high office or trickling up from the people, although it’s most likely a mutually reinforcing downward spiral. We all can see the reasons behind the temptation. It’s a time of national turmoil. Social media elevates the morally flexible, nasty, and mentally troubled, often creating a public sewer providing the dopamine rewards of shock and entertainment in service to the holy metric of engagement. Congress is increasingly filled with entertainers, attention-seekers, and grifters instead of thoughtful policy-makers. Ordinary Americans are increasingly frightened and bewildered and seeking to identify the villains causing our decline. All of this encourages hatred. What surprises me is how many people believe it’s doing any good.

A lot of people appear to think you can win political and ideological battles by destroying enemies. They genuinely believe they can win an ideological war through personal destruction, wrecking the psyches and lives of their opponents. They strafe enemy soldiers online, and hope to take their generals off the field through cancellation, all in the belief this will cause rival ideologies to disappear. Anyone with awareness of how the world works knows it’s more like bombing Pearl Harbor, with the enemy simply building new ships and replenishing its ranks filled with a terrible resolve.

None of this will do any good because, as I’ve come to appreciate, ideological battles aren’t really battles between people. Ideological battles are wars between ideas, and ideas behave like angry ancient gods.

UNDERSTANDING THE GREEK GODS

I recently reread The Odyssey, and it changed my view of human conflict. I had always thought of the Greek gods as something like superheroes. They were giant powerful humans with magic powers who intervened in human events. In the middle of some human struggle, Zeus would show up and start tossing lightning bolts. Ares might appear in the middle of a fierce battle and mow down rows of soldiers for one side. During a tense moment, Athena could appear to impose wisdom. In fact, when the gods of Greek mythology intervene in human events, it’s rarely in their guise of gods. They almost always operate through humans.

Each ancient gods represents human emotions and ideas that reside deep within the human soul—anger and bravery of war, the cool deliberateness of wisdom, or the raw and destructive power of nature and masculine action. When humans fall into difficult situations, these emotions and ideas claim minds. A warrior is possessed by the hot temper and bravery of war. A diplomat in a tense situation discovers the cool calculation of wisdom. A man is flooded with the fire of passion, the foolishness of pride, or the anger of vengeance. He falls under the sway of some god’s domain, becoming a tool of that god’s agenda.

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These gods are less characters and more ideologies given shape and name. Ares was not a man—he was rage. Athena was not a woman—she was strategic wisdom. They’re aspects of human nature embodied into human personalities, agendas, and forms. They think and act like people, have desires, enact plans, and have agendas for the world. They intervene in human events, but mostly through ideological possession that turns humans into tools of their divine agendas. They get into disputes and conflicts with other gods, but waged through the humans they control. Through these clashes waged over the earth through human action, they transform the human world.

Even when the ancient gods take direct action, it’s often in the guise of humans. At a delicate time, Athena arrives in the guise of an old man to say just the right thing to influence Odysseus. Are we meant to believe this is actually Athena in a costume, or simply an old man captured by the ideas Athena represents? Athena later goes to the docks to obtain a boat as Odysseus’s son to push him into making a journey. Are we meant to understand he obtained the boat himself, but under the influence of Athena’s domain? Poseidon sends a storm at the right moment to put the crew into a difficult but necessary situation. Are we meant to believe Poseidon did this, or that the chaos of nature instilled fear and danger causing men to panic and react?

I think the ancient Greeks understood ideology better than we do. The emotions, values, and ideas that drive humans aren’t mere abstractions, and aren’t entirely under our control. They’re forces acting in the world with their own logics, agendas, and plans achieved through the possession of humanity. Humans appear to be acting in the world, but they’re not really acting as purely rational and independent entities but tools of the feelings coursing through their bodies and ideas colonizing their minds. These forces follow a logic and intent. They have their own beliefs, agendas, and plans. These are the true agents of action and change. The humans are mere puppets.

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Modern political ideologies behave like these ancient Greek gods. The Greeks were concerned with forces like anger, wisdom, and pride. We add modern ideas like conservatism, liberalism, communism, progressivism, capitalism, democratic socialism, and nationalism. Even ideas like America, liberty, constitutional democracy, and the American Dream fit the bill. These ideas are powerful self-replicating agents, almost like Dawkins’ memes. They have domains, interests, and agendas. They exist inside us and act like the archetypes of Jung. Once a person is under their influence, they form opinions, protest, vote, and post on social media in these ideas’ service. They shape policy, forge alliances, and wage wars through their human hosts.

Each idea acts as an ancient god. They’re new gods after Nietzsche proclaimed the old ones dead.

Ideological fights aren’t really battles between people. The real combatants are the ideas themselves. The ideas have wills. They have agendas. There’s logic to their actions and a desire within them to transform the world according to their rules. They’re almost sentient, powerful consciousnesses at war with one another seeking to transform our world through their schemes.

If you think politics is about fights between people over interests, you fight people to win. You try to hurt them, destroy them, and eliminate them from the field. What if people are merely thralls drafted into service of ideas that have enslaved their wills? Destroying the people then does nothing, since there’s always more fodder to replace them. Even the generals on the fields are functionally irrelevant because they’re not truly driving events. You can’t defeat a god by defeating worshipers it enslaved. You must actually defeat the god.

THE BIRTH OF BETTER GODS

It’s pointless to hate the followers of an ideology you hate. They’re mere vessels of the ideas. If you want to win a war against an idea, you must defeat the idea itself.

The ideologies are gods manipulating people and events behind the scenes. Like the ancient gods, they’re single-minded and relentless. They have goals they pursue. They push policies and ideas. They capture institutions. They transform nations. They even launch wars. When their agendas conflict with the gods of other ideologies, they push back hard and eliminate agents. They capture minds and bodies, claim institutions, and even control entire nations to advance their goals just like Ares, Athena, or Zeus.

Defeating people without eliminating the idea that drives them at best creates a short-lived cease fire. When better conditions arrive, the war starts up again. You see this in conflicts across history over land, nations, or religions, that stopped and started over centuries. Time and again, one group tried to annihilate another. They occupied their land and put them under the other’s boot without extinguishing the idea of the rival nation or values that drove it forward. With time, the flames of war began again. After the Second World War, on the other hand, Germany and Japan weren’t just defeated, but their ideas were broken and discredited, putting Germany and Japan on a different democratic path. The same happened to communism, discredited by the failure and collapse of the Soviet Union. Although the god of communism wasn’t entirely killed, it was so wounded it has lost most of its global power and a new Russia arose around ideas of Russian nationalism.

Destroying opponents personally is like Clausewitz’s clueless Napoleonic generals seeking to string together victories in bloody battles, while Napoleon zeroed in on fights that would allow him to break their nations. Political hatred is fighting the wrong enemy. If you want to win the war, discredit the ideas they follow. Extinguish the idea. To kill the idea, destroy the god.

Those with a more combative view consider this naïve. Politics, they say, is warfare, and wars must be fought with fire and blood. Arguments are for the ivory tower. People don’t really care about ideas. Those who push immoral ideas must be held morally responsible and punished. They’re not mere victims of ideology, but perpetrators. Democratic politics is a team sport about controlling institutions, so the other team must be weakened so that your team can win. No one is saying be nicer. No one is saying ordinary people read wonky policy white papers. No one is saying to fight campaigns around high-concept abstractions no one understands. Attacking people on social media, getting people cancelled, insulting the appearance of rivals, cutting off friends for how they vote, or refusing to talk to your uncle at Thanksgiving because of politics, is pointless. It accomplishes nothing and diverts focus, resources, and society from what actually matters to winning ideological wars.

It’s the ideas that matter, because it’s the ideas really waging war through us. If you want to make the world better and defeat opponents looking to move your country in the wrong direction, discredit the ideas to defeat their gods. There’s no point hating mere soldiers enslaved to a powerful ancient god. Target the ideas with real and devastating arguments. Forget the propaganda meant to trick people, but prove their false gods never had the magic they claim. Expose the stupidities and lies. Demonstrate how their ideas are wrong and cannot work. Challenge their assumptions. Expose the contradictions in their arguments. Collect better data and evidence. Conduct studies and be truthful about the result. Run real-world experiments and pilot projects. Study history. Build functional institutions. Enact reforms and demonstrate through the result why they work. Show the rival gods to be weak, powerless, and ineffective and they will crumble.

Then give birth to wiser ideologies and set them into our world. Craft a new compelling story about how to build a better world. Develop new ideas that inspire others to charge into battle on your behalf. Fill your churches with adherents, and drain the churches of your rivals until their false ideas fade into obscurity. Watch your better ideology awaken with its own consciousness and mind, and see it transform the world around a better vision.

Politics isn’t a clash between rival people. It’s a clash between ideas. If you want to win this war, focus your fire on the thing that matters—not your enemies but the ideas your enemies follow.

What do you think about ideologies as gods? Join the conversation in the comments.

Shawn wrote a piece here on Substack that touched a nerve. Not only did Shawn’s essay garner over 1000 likes and hundreds of comments and restacks, but it popped up on all my other social media feeds. It apparently was also featured on Hacker News and some mainstream media. As Shawn explained in his piece, he’s struggling to find work in his field after losing his job through no fault of his own to AI. He has submitted hundreds of resumes, dramatically lowered his expectations, and is now working as a DoorDash delivery driver to survive with no relief in sight. What shocked me was just how divisive this piece turned out to be.

To some people, Shawn’s rapid descent from educated middle-class engineer to member of the precariat resonated just as it had with me. However, others minimized Shawn’s situation or even blamed him. I restacked Shawn’s essay with a note about how his experience made me angry. A surprising number of people got angry that I was angry at Shawn’s situation. This wide division in the tenor of the comments matched what I read across social media.

Shawn’s experience hasn’t only angered me because I sympathize with how cruelly the world has treated him. What makes me angry is what Shawn’s experience means for this dangerous moment in America. If a highly skilled software engineer like Shawn can be tossed aside by the system despite doing everything right, we’re living in a society in which the ladder is broken. If someone like Shawn, who has a solid education, worked hard for over twenty years, and made all the right choices everyone asked him to make, no longer has a fair shot at a basic good life in America, the future of our nation and democracy is bleak.

This broken system really is a national emergency requiring action. However, those in power aren’t doing much about it beyond mumbling nice words and throwing up their hands. Shawn’s sad tale should make you very worried. His experience may soon be yours.

Shawn’s Story Has Nothing to Do with Personal Morality

To a lot of people, Shawn’s tale is fundamentally one of personal morality. They focus on whether Shawn deserves his situation. Whether Shawn did everything possible to avoid his situation is irrelevant.

For what it’s worth, Shawn has done absolutely nothing wrong. Throughout his life, he did everything America asked of him. He earned his education, and even studied a practical field everyone has always said will permanently be in demand. He was conscientious and he worked hard. He kept up to date, learning new skills on his own initiative. After he lost his job, he did everything he could to find another. He applied to hundreds and hundreds of opportunities with no result. He was willing to take a major step back in his career. He was willing to try new fields. He was even willing to move into a trailer and deliver DoorDash. He did everything right, and he still lost.

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You can quibble over his decisions if you’re inclined. A few years ago, Shawn moved out of the Bay Area to New York to work remote. Remote work is less plentiful than it once was, and New York isn’t exactly a hotbed for software engineering. While Shawn now lives in a trailer, he actually owns three houses that he rents out because it doesn’t make financial sense to immediately sell them. They’re in disrepair, underwater, and one houses his elderly mother. Perhaps he could sell them at a loss for a quick one-time cash injection. Many people also nitpicked the kinds of jobs he was pursuing, or think he should give up and climb the ladder as a manager of a local store. He says he has considered all of this, and how exactly would that work?

Maybe Shawn would’ve had better luck adopting your preferred strategy. After eight-hundred applications and no job, I’m pretty sure Shawn, desperate to keep his head above water and delivering DoorDash, has probably already thought of everything you came up with in five minutes and has good reasons for his choices.

The comments I found most concerning were the ones that were simply indifferent, asserting no one owes Shawn a job. They present themselves as market realists. The economy is always changing. We can’t stop progress, nor want to. Those who get caught in the crosshairs must adapt. If they can’t, they must do whatever they can to survive. There’s no point crying for coal miners or autoworkers. We don’t tend to consider the Luddites who smashed textile machines during the Industrial Revolution as the good guys. It’s not the job of the state or society to give you a cushy job and good life. As one comment I saw online said, “Boo Hoo.”

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I know all these arguments about how technological change always creates victims but benefits society in the long run. There was a time I would have made them myself. I started out my political life a hard-core free-market fundamentalist and borderline libertarian, and still believe in markets and capitalism, although my more hardline views are now tempered with experience. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not this disruption creates a better economic system in the aggregate because, if nothing changes soon, we may never make it there to benefit. It’s important to remember the Luddites weren’t entirely wrong. Their lives actually were destroyed and never would recover, sacrificed for everybody else’s progress. Society adjusted in the long run, but it was quite a raw deal for them.

Whether or not the Industrial Revolution worked out isn’t much of an argument because there was only one Industrial Revolution in history. It destroyed lives, but ultimately worked out in the long run. That doesn’t mean this revolution will turn out the same way, because we only have a historical dataset of one. This revolution is different as it may not just change the nature of work, but the amount of work that human beings can do. It may concentrate power differently in a very different global world, leaving millions of people behind and without a chance. A lot of economic history was pretty bad. We used to have child labor. We used to have sweatshops. We used to make people work fourteen-hour days. Just because these things happened in history doesn’t mean it’s wise to bring them back.

All of these are less real arguments than dangerous rationalizations. It’s like when someone gets cancer and a busybody aunt peppers them with ugly questions about what they must have eaten wrong to cause their own disease. Many people find it terrifying that our world is precarious, bad things happen to good people, and it might one day happen to them too. They try to explain away the misfortunes of others as moral failures because that would mean, as good and wise people, they will avoid them and stay safe.

You’re not safe, and this has nothing to do with Shawn’s choices or morality. What happened to Shawn has happened to a lot of people in America over the last few decades, and it’s increasingly going to happen to many more. Shawn’s individual choices are irrelevant because there are lots of guys like Shawn. Did they all do something wrong?

The reality is Shawn did everything right, and the system still threw him to the wolves. I wish I could tell him everything will be okay, but I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t think he deserves what happened to him. I also don’t think he can grind and hustle his way out of it. Shawn neither wants a handout nor does he claim anyone owes him anything. He wants to work hard and do something that will decently support him in this new economy. The economy doesn’t want to let him.

That’s what makes me angry. Tens of millions of desperate Americans who did everything right are in danger of getting locked out of the opportunity to lead a basic decent life. America’s system of social mobility and opportunity is falling apart. This should be a national emergency, one our leaders are jumping up and down in panic to urgently address. They’re not, and I don’t think they will anytime soon.

What perplexes me is how the idea that we should do something other than abandon tens of millions of coming Shawns makes other people angry. I realized they don’t truly understand how success works in complex systems. Working hard, having talent, making sacrifices, and doing everything right is necessary, but doesn’t guarantee you’ll be okay.

The Tragedy of Dr. Douglas Prasher

Perhaps you remember the story of Dr. Douglas Prasher, the molecular biologist who pioneered using green fluorescent protein (GFP), the protein that glows in jellyfish, as a genetic tracer. Prasher was the first person to have the idea to genetically sequence GFP so we could attach it to other proteins in a cell, allowing us to identify and track them. This created a medical miracle, one so important it won the Nobel Prize in 2008. When this monumental discovery was recognized in Sweden, however, Dr. Prasher, at the age of 57, was driving a shuttle van at a Toyota dealership for $8.50 per hour.

Dr. Prasher’s downward trajectory wasn’t a story of bad decisions, mental illness, alcohol, or drugs. It’s just a story of hard choices and bad luck. Prasher started researching GFP in the late 1970s when he was working in a lab at the University of Georgia. He had just about managed to sequence the DNA of GFP when his research grant ran out. He tried to get another grant, but NIH, failing to understand the importance of his research, turned him down. Discouraged, Prasher left the lab, handing off his pioneering research to another scientist.

From there, Prasher ran into increasing bad luck. He took a job at USDA to study agricultural pests, but then USDA wanted to transfer him to Maryland. Prasher couldn’t move his family, so he found another job at NASA. After just one-and-a-half years, NASA slashed that program leaving Prasher without a job. He looked for another position, ideally one that wouldn’t disrupt his family, but this time struggled to find one. After a year or two of searching, his savings had dried up and he had to accept the job at the dealership. Then in 2008, the scientists who had taken over his research won the Nobel Prize.

Prasher’s former colleagues were more than gracious about his contributions to the discovery—they explicitly told anyone who would listen that Prasher’s work was just as, if not more, important than theirs had been. They even paid to fly him out to the ceremony in Sweden, so he could watch from a seat in the audience.

This story is said to have a happy ending because, after countless news stories about a Nobel-caliber scientist driving a van, NASA reached out to offer him another job. Prasher later moved to the lab of his former colleagues to finish his career working on the discovery that launched it. What this supposedly happy version doesn’t acknowledge is the years in which Prasher struggled and suffered, thrown away by a society that wouldn’t give him a chance. Once he had fallen out of the system, no one wanted to hire a former biologist now driving a van for minimum wage. If even a Nobel-caliber biologist isn’t safe from the unpredictability of life, what chance do you have of it never happening to you?

People who lecture that life is all about hard work and drive fail to appreciate that success also requires opportunity. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how hard you work, if no one will open the door to give you a chance. When the system throws you away and locks you out, it doesn’t matter how good you actually are or what you’re capable of accomplishing. People are eager to ignore this depressing truth because it’s terrifying. We all live much closer to the knife’s edge than we think.

Success happens inside a system, and now that system in America is breaking down.

Why Success Happens Inside Systems

The world has many invisible tracks. Every system has its rules and guardians, and those guardians decide if they want to let you in to play their game.

If you were born a medieval peasant, it didn’t matter how smart you were or how hard you worked. You could make your life somewhat better or worse through your actions, but no amount of work or talent would change the fact that you were a commoner and a peasant. Many doors would be forever closed to you, and many opportunities you couldn’t ever earn. Perhaps in a one-in-a-billion fluke some noble might take you under his wing and guide you upward, but that kind of unlikely luck is so rare we write fairy tales about it.

There’s a track to become an investment banker. There’s a track to become doctor and another to become a nurse. There’s a track to become an actor in Hollywood. There’s a track for marketing and another for engineers. Each track has rules and ladders to climb, certifications, progressions through different jobs and roles, and approvals from groups of people. To move to the next spot, you need to reach the previous spot first. There’s always some unspoken road you need to travel to get there from wherever it is you are. If you fail to check the right boxes, your resume gets tossed aside. Increasingly this isn’t even done by humans in HR departments, but algorithms looking for keywords and patterns in hundreds of resumes per job instead of looking for a person. Access to opportunities is mediated through gates that favor the already-successful, and exclude those already left out.

Even seeming solo efforts like entrepreneurship and sports have their own tracks. Silicon Valley is a system, and like any it has its gates and rules. Two computer science students from Stanford with a great idea for an app can get into the right events, meet talented people, and get a VC to take their calls, while two forty-year-old self-taught engineers from Arkansas, no matter how brilliant their idea, probably can’t. The NBA is also a system with its ladders like high school tournaments, college recruiters, and drafts. There are people you must meet, things they’re looking to see, and people who decide your fate. We no longer live in a world in which most of us can hitch up our covered wagon and pioneer a farm on our effort alone. We live inside complex systems in which most of us depend on others to let us play their games.

That isn’t saying “it takes a village” or “you didn’t build that,” because you absolutely did build it through your good ideas, hard work, and grinding when others didn’t. It’s saying hard work and good ideas mean nothing without opportunities to use them, and those opportunities come with gates. You must be smart, work hard, and hustle to win at anything, but there are thousands of other people looking to climb the same ladders. There are always gatekeepers and rules that decide which of the many smart and talented people get to play the game. These things are related, since the moxy necessary to get a system to give a nobody a chance is a kind of talent. At the same time, these decisions aren’t always rational or fair. When they decide to lock you outside the gate, you might as well be that medieval peasant trying to get opportunities reserved for aristocrats.

The more talented people and the fewer opportunities, the more the opportunities control who wins. This is why people complain about Hollywood “nepo babies.” Everyone who makes it in Hollywood is extremely talented and works insanely hard, but there are more talented people than jobs. When deciding who to hire, it helps if your dad has a famous name and famous friends. Every competitive industry works the same—in your case, maybe your dad could get you an internship at Goldman Sachs.

A lot of people only see the climb and pretend that’s all there is. They don’t see the system the climb exists inside because they’re already inside it, its vast power invisible. The system only becomes visible when you fall out and realize there’s no way back inside. That’s what happened to Douglas Prasher and Shawn K.

Why I’m Angry

The modern industrial age is over. The post-industrial is here. It’s more than just AI. It’s a host of factors that uprooted the industrial economy and hollowed out the middle class. It’s moving manufacturing to China. It’s businesses becoming global entities. It’s changes in our business culture, treating workers as replaceable costs. It’s a meritocracy that believes leadership is a reward instead of a responsibility. It’s a cultural of managerialism. It’s an economy of leveraging information providing increasing control. It’s all of it together, with AI just the final blow.

Industrial America was a system. That system promised that everyone in America willing to work hard and follow the system’s rules would have a decent life. There were enough opportunities for everybody. There were clear rules for how to get them. Not everyone could become a rock star or a CEO, but everyone willing to play the game could buy groceries, health care, a car, and a decent house. You didn’t need to be extraordinary, and you didn’t need to get lucky. The system was set up so every American who wanted to participate in the system would be okay. What worries me is this post-industrial era looks like a world with more people looking for opportunities than opportunities.

A functional society has to ensure the system produces efficiency and prosperity as a whole. It must produce wealth, create things, and outcompete its neighbors. It must unleash innovators and disruptors to invent new technologies that make us collectively richer, and through us make America stronger. On the other hand, it also must ensure its systems create good individual lives. If ordinary Americans work hard and contribute, they must be able to put affordable and healthy food on their table, buy a home, provide an education to their children, and take care of their health. Ordinary people must be able to plug themselves effortlessly into the system and contribute. A society sacrificing this second goal for the first is begging for its own collapse. No matter how much prosperity it collectively creates, all the people it leaves behind eventually will—quite understandably—tear it down.

In today’s America, the system no longer rewards virtue, competence, or contribution. You can do everything right—get the degrees, do good work, show up with integrity—and still end up broke, invisible, and adrift. The old story about effort leading to dignity is breaking down, and in its place is something colder, more chaotic, and morally disorienting. As the moral logic of work collapses, people like Shawn K find themselves exiled not just from the economy, but from any story about what a good life is supposed to look like. If you think this is something that only happens to other people, you aren’t paying much attention. The same forces that destroyed the life of Shawn K may soon come for you.

This is the challenge of our era. Ordinary Americans no longer trust they will have an opportunity to work hard, contribute, and get back a decent basic life. The system we all depend on is broken. Shawn K got an education and studied a good trade. He gained new skills. He worked hard for over twenty years and became an expert in what he did. He isn’t complaining that anyone owes him a job. He isn’t asking anyone to take care of him. All he wants is an opportunity to work and a chance to contribute so he can take care of his family. If we can’t build an America in which every American gets a basic decent life, our system will not last no matter how productive or efficient it appears to be. This is a national crisis.

I foresee an America with tens of millions of Shawns. America will not survive that. America is supposed to be a great nation, a superpower with a powerful middle class. The Luddites in their class-based society had no choice but to tolerate what was done to them. Americans will not accept such a terrible step down and back. They will fight. They will elect people willing to break a system that isn’t serving them. If that doesn’t work, they’ll break the system themselves. This isn’t a statement about what I want to happen, but what I know will happen. Our leaders have a responsibility to ensure the path to opportunity functions out of simple self-preservation. If we continue to abandon people like Shawn, people like Shawn will eventually abandon us.

The only reason I can see for why calling this out make so many people angry is habit and inertia. They’re used to old mid-twentieth-century debates between markets and the state, and instinctively repeat ideas they’ve heard for years about keeping the state out of markets. They’re still inside the system, and therefore can’t see its walls slowly crumbling from outside. Their ideas are out of date, created for a different time in which the system was still producing expected outcomes. Thirty or forty years ago, when people were thrown out of work it probably was somewhat their fault and something they could do something about. Intervening then would probably do more harm than good. The best way to ensure everyone had a chance at the American Dream was to leave the machine producing it alone. We no longer live in the industrial twentieth century, and its time to let these notions go. We must see clearly what America is today, and then ensure the system we’re building for the future works as well as the one that’s gone.

I want to see America continue to thrive with a market-based democracy. That means our leaders need to deal with this serious and looming threat. There are things we can do, but we actually have to do them. The sooner we start, the more likely it is we peacefully make it through the transition. What are our leaders doing to ensure our systems continue to create good paths to opportunity? How are they working to ensure the system continues to make a place for everyone who wants one? The options aren’t between government making someone give Shawn a job, or doing nothing. They aren’t between halting progress, or allowing the next few generations to get destroyed. There’s a third option, managing change so ordinary people who simply want to work hard and lead a decent life can do it. Prosperity and growth and innovation are all worthless if they don’t lead to a nation in which everyone willing to participate can sign up for a decent life. The purpose of the people isn’t to serve the state and the economy. The purpose of the state and economy is to serve the people.

Yet the supposed leaders in a position to do something are still fiddling in their tuxedos, praising what a strong ship it is while the hull takes on fatal water. On the front line of this reality is Shawn K.

What do you think about Shawn K and his essay? Join the conversation in the comments.

The problem with describing someone as a centrist or a moderate is these labels presume the legitimacy of the phony left-right spectrum and are therefore self-defeating. They rhetorically assume a person isn’t serious about their beliefs, but taking a half-hearted position between the only two legitimate orientations, the progressive left and conservative right. They presume anyone who isn’t fully on board one of these two teams is a weak fence-sitter splitting the difference and afraid to take a stand.

To call someone a centrist assumes there’s a center place to occupy. The word assumes by definition that all political opinion in the world lines up into some neat line between two pure poles of left and right. It presumes the people in this supposed center are just taking bits from more pure ideals, participating in a political buffet instead of standing on their own.

To call someone a moderate assumes they philosophically agree with everything Team Red or Team Blue believes, but are trying to be careful and take things slow because they lack the courage of their convictions. It assumes they’re someone who completely agrees with the radicals but is afraid of going too far too fast, instead of someone who believes entirely different things.

To call someone an independent makes it sound like anyone who refuses to fall into line with one of the dominant tribes is a weirdo outsider with fringe beliefs.

In reality, the people we call centrists or moderates aren’t splitting differences, moderating opinions, or standing in the center of some made-up and arbitrary line. They’re people with strong and well-considered beliefs that don’t come from the same place as the progressive left or conservative right. Their politics is based around different ideas and seeks to accomplish different goals. They might ally with one side or the other out of necessity or convenience, but they’re not moderating anything. They believe strongly in something else.

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The left-right spectrum is bunk. There are more than two political orientations across humanity. Human opinion is a splendid cacophony of competing beliefs, issues, values, and ideas wound into a multitude of compelling philosophies. Across the history of our species, people have believed and advocated for countless different things for a multitude of interesting reasons. There’s no single middle point between all of these ideas for anyone to occupy.

No one even knows how to reliably define what makes an idea left or right in the first place. Many people over the years have tried to define these terms, and none of them have ever succeeded in any consistent and predictive way. It isn’t true that the left is more supportive of equality and working people, since sometimes that describes the populist right. It isn’t true that the right is more resistant to change, since that depends entirely on what it is you’re trying to change. There’s no rational reason why support for labor unions has to go with a pro-choice position on abortion—and in fact in the real world plenty of people support one but not the other.

The ideas we call the political left and right, just like the concepts of liberal and conservative, are reverse-engineered descriptions of whatever it is the two major coalitions in a democracy happen to believe. Democracies always trend toward two big coalitions vying for a majority. Out of habit and convenience we label one the left and the other right. When the particular issues and ideas each team supports change with time, so do the definitions. This should be obvious in an era in which our political teams are in flux, with ideas we recently called left moving right and vice versa.

I could write the better part of a book refuting the idea of the left-right political spectrum, and in fact I sort of already have. I wrote an entire chapter about the problems with the left-right spectrum in my book The Next Realignment, and back when I was on YouTube I made a video about it.

The polls and political scientists will tell you America is polarized. Personally, I suspect a majority of Americans today are in their hearts followers of neither ideology dominating politics. Polling shows we’re getting close to twice as many American identifying as independents as partisans of either party. Gallup found in 2023 that a shocking 63 percent of Americans believed a third party was needed. From what I can tell, both major political ideologies at the moment are mostly controlled by people with unpopular and bad ideas, and no ideas. Ordinary Americans might attach themselves to one team or the other, but only to oppose the side closest to advancing their worst ideas. Then everyone gets frustrated when nothing important happens because they’ve empowered people with no ideas at all. Americans call themselves conservatives or liberals out of tradition, but deep down wish there was a more enticing option.

Between bad ideas and no ideas, I choose neither. I bet you do too. I’m not interested in staking out a center point between two sets of bad ideas that everyone knows will fail. I don’t want to moderately pursue bad ideas with a bit less zeal. On the other hand, moderating no ideas just means going nowhere a little slower. I have no interest defending and propping up a status quo that’s clearly failing and cracking up. I think what we all want is to make America work again and restore the promise of the American Dream.

Labels like moderate and centrist just convince people they have no options and are morally obligated to go along with things they don’t believe. Ideological minorities with unpopular ideas use these words to claim you owe them your obedience, when you don’t. Worse, they convince you to enforce this false loyalty upon yourself. Moderates who call themselves center left come to believe they must be loyal to people who hate them, just as do moderates who call themselves center right. At the same time, each hold the other in contempt, when in reality they mostly believe the exact same thing.

I would love nothing more than to rhetorically free us from this madness. I would like to clear these labels away so my people can see we’re now part of one new political tribe with its own political identity. What does our tribe believe?

We believe America must undergo serious reform. We know many of the complaints that have plunged our politics into chaos have merit. We agree the middle and working class Americans have gotten a raw deal. We know America isn’t keeping its promises, many institutions are broken, and too many important parts of our society no longer work. We can see that too many of our leaders have failed and are unworthy of their positions. We know in this time of radical technological and social change, America hasn’t even started to do the necessary work to adjust. Most of all, we know Americans need more control over their futures and a fair and equal chance at the American Dream.

The people who say important parts of America are broken are right, and there’s no going back to the twentieth-century status quo. At the same time, serious problems require serious solutions. Nothing in our old political playbooks provides compelling answers to these new questions, but neither does jerking about impulsively and simply tearing things down. It’s our task to identify the true sources of our national decline and then reverse it with a flurry of thoughtful and serious national reform.

We’re not centrists, moderates, or even independents. We need a label of our own, one we can wear with pride. It should be a badge clarifying who is on our team for change, and who is not. It should unite our allies currently divided across the left and right around a fresh vision for the future. It should be a flag in a new and vibrant color that’s neither red nor blue. I’m eager to discover what this new identity will be. For now, what I know is we’re no longer conservatives or liberals but something different—Newists who believe in freeing ourselves from bad ideas and outdated dogmas so we can create something better for this new age.

What do you think we should call the Newists? Join the conversation in the comments.

100 days later, nearly all those initiatives are under assault. Musk has left Washington, leaving DOGE orphaned. Immigration enforcement is mired in controversial fights over hard-to-justify episodes like deporting people to a Salvadoran gulag. Historic relationships with Europe are shattered for little apparent gain, the world is now suspicious of American aggression, and Canada turned so anti-American it’s boycotting American goods. Tariffs were rolled out haphazardly with frequent unpredictable changes causing market disruptions, global anger, and a trade war that will likely radically jack up prices in a few weeks. The only parts of the agenda that appear to be achieving what Republicans promised were the parts about tearing old systems down—for example, the campaigns against universities and DEI. The parts about building a new version of America are trapped in backtracking and chaos. Trump’s approval ratings have fallen to the low 40s, shedding the middle Americans and independents Republicans picked up from Democrats. Republican-curious powerbrokers from places like Silicon Valley appear to be backing off.

Why did an agenda that looked unstoppable a few months back suddenly run into a brick wall? It’s not Democratic intervention—the Republicans still have full rein to do anything they want. I have a theory that it has to do with tactics and a worldview meant for insurgents and underdogs attempting to run the system.

A STRATEGIC THEORY OF DONALD TRUMP

To understand the last hundred days, we need a fresh strategic profile of Donald Trump. The two most popular ones obviously are wrong. Some have long believed Trump is just an unprincipled idiot, one who got lucky by attaching himself to an ugly social wave. On the other hand, others assert he’s a strategic genius outplaying opponents in a long game of fifth-dimensional chess. In reality, there’s little evidence for either, and his successes and his failures all stem from a unique strategy based around pushing limits without suffering consequences.

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It’s difficult at this point to still dismiss Trump as a lucky fool. Even those who hate everything he represents have to reckon with the reality that he’s clearly doing something that consistently works. On its face, it’s ridiculous that a small-time real-estate guy could somehow become a national celebrity, earn a fortune, publish a bestselling book, put his name on countless products, host a highly-rated reality show, and then so completely take over a major political party that it became his personal vehicle. Any single one of those accomplishments should have been impossible. Obviously, there’s some unique and powerful strategy at work that fueled such unprecedented success across multiple domains for over fifty years.

At the same time, there’s little evidence Trump’s successes were the result of careful planning and thinking ten-steps ahead to set up dominoes that would fall perfectly years later. Trump’s management style was never smooth and considered, but chaotic, marred by false starts, backtracking, and memory-holing failure. Throughout his multiple careers as real-estate mogul, celebrity, and politician, he consistently made promises he didn’t keep and pronouncements that didn’t work, later moving on without acknowledging the failures. He alienated people, violated agreements, and famously nearly bankrupted a casino. In his first term as president, he achieved few of his goals—he never built the wall. He left office so unpopular a Democratic Party that struggled to even find a candidate booted him from office, less a win for Democrats than a Republicans loss. Trump is less strategic mastermind than movie protagonist who routinely sets off fiery explosions and somehow walks away unscathed and closer to his goals.

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In reality, all of Trump’s successes are the result of an unusual strategy. He pushes limits to discover holes in established systems others will not use, but without suffering the consequences. Over his long career, instead of going into situations and trying to learn how systems work, Trump charged in and began relentlessly pushing on all the walls to see if anything might open. He did this with zero concern for established norms or rules, or recognition of received wisdom about what’s necessary for success or likely to work. He rushes in and tests limits to find openings other people ignore or do not see. Most times, he runs into impenetrable barriers. Every once in a while, an invisible door opens and he races through, getting closer to his goals.

The world, of course, has always had its share of anti-establishment insurgents who exploit existing systems for opportunities. Most succeed for a time until the system notices them and either buys them off to incorporate them, or uses laws and sanctions to take them down. What makes Trump unusual is he seems to have a magic power to understand exactly how far he can push before the system pushes back. By instinct, he presses on walls and doors until one surprisingly opens and he steps through. He then rapidly moves forward waiting to see if the system will push him back. If the system does push back, Trump jumps backwards and pretends nothing happened. If it doesn’t, he continues striding forward toward his goal. He has a talent for understanding just how far he can push things until something bad will happen, and calibrates so nothing ever does. This has allowed him to consistently identify opportunities, pushing systems as far as they will go, but no farther. He finds hidden doors without the system getting organized enough to stop him, exploiting opportunities others fail to see or choose not to pursue. He iterates through failures until he obtains success. This allows him to win any reward he wants.

For decades, Trump used this dance to claim prizes others couldn’t claim, and then danced back before a hammer came down to punish him. He makes deals, and then backs out on commitments he doesn’t want to honor, and often gets away with it. He says things others wouldn’t and, if they turn out to be popular, doubles down. If they don’t, he pretends he never said them or meant them. A lifetime of this dance has rewarded him with incredible personal success. It allowed a minor real estate developer to become an international celebrity, media star, and now the head of a major political party and the president.

As a politician, this same strategy allowed Donald Trump to identify problems the Republican establishment, and then the American establishment, failed to see or wanted to ignore. As he pushed relentlessly on political norms and third rails, Trump revealed neglected issues, national discontent, and opportunities everyone else in politics refused to touch. This catapulted him upward, building a movement of deeply loyal followers, routing the old establishment, and allowing him to humble a Democratic Party that couldn’t see past the old playbook that now was out of date. This strategy, however, was always an insurgent’s strategy based around exploiting a dominant system. That means it only works for insurgents when there’s a dominant system to exploit.

For his entire life and political career, Donald Trump always had a bigger system he was operating inside that he could expertly navigate and exploit. As the American president, however, he is the system. Controlling Congress and the White House, Donald Trump and his Republican Party don’t just represent one faction inside the greater American system. They are the American system. America itself is more than just one country inside the international order. As global hegemon, America is the international order. America set up the Western alliance system it leads, set up the rules of global trade, and maintains the dominant international security arrangements with its military. America is the lynchpin of the global order it created for its benefit. An empire can’t exploit loopholes against itself. The only thing that accomplishes is tearing it’s own power down.

It's a common problem—strategies that get us to the top rarely work once we reach the top. Uber grew quickly as an insurgent by ignoring local taxi regulations and challenging local governments, until Uber became the taxi industry. Then its strategy began to fail, until it found new executives and an establishment strategy for success. Establishment politicians who build careers around climbing ladders face similar problems when they run out of rungs to climb. Presidents like Bill Clinton, who only know how to remain popular, waste years continuing to try to win the office they’ve already won. Our greatest strengths often are our weaknesses. The tools that help us climb the mountain rarely serve us at the top.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR AMERICA

I suspect the last ten years will be viewed in history not as an era of divided politics but a chaotic era of transition and discovery setting up something else.

The last ten years of Republican politics identified a lot of neglected issues. It exposed places the old system was cracking, and growing resentments among significant segments of Americans we couldn’t continue to ignore. However, the political strategy that identified these opportunities and used them to ride into power was never sufficient to create and implement concrete and thoughtful policies for change. That’s why the strategy that put Republicans into office with so much fanfare looks tattered after only 100 days. This will continue to be a problem until Republicans understand the difference between challenging an empire and running an empire.

However, this is more than just a Republican problem. It’s a political system problem that should concern the Democrats as well. Trump didn’t create the doors he walked through. He succeeded because the system really had hidden cracks to exploit that the establishment ignored. While it’s no longer sufficient to point out neglected problems like an insurgent, it’s also no longer an option to dismiss or ignore them as unwelcome intrusions upon a status quo that already has broken down. Status quo politics from Democrats also will no longer work, dismissing the problems Republicans identified as beneath them, or problems of the enemy, instead of the most powerful problems in America.

Everyone now knows the invisible doors are there. They’ll remain the center of our politics until America develops solutions to fill them. It’s time to transition from rebels as aristocrats into leaders, rebuilding and making the system work.

What do you think about the insurgent strategy? Join the conversation in the comments.

This conflict in perspective has launched a national war over the role of experts in America. One part of America cries out to “trust the experts.” The other part wants to overthrow them. Both sides are right, but framing the question wrong. The question isn’t whether we should listen to experts. It’s how to harness the expertise we need, while ensuring experts and administrators respect democracy and stay within their lane.

WHAT IS EXPERTISE?

Expertise is about how to reach a goal. Democracy is about what goal we ought to reach.

Imagine someone you love is in the hospital. A surgeon walks in and tells you that your loved one desperately needs surgery. The surgeon is an expert. He has a medical education you lack, and years of experience treating patients you don’t have. If the surgeon thinks surgery is the way to save your loved one’s life, you should probably listen. You also should let them perform the surgery instead of going onto YouTube to research how to conduct surgery for the first time by yourself.

Now imagine that after surgery your loved one falls into a coma. The surgeon comes back into the room and examines your loved one amid all the beeping machines, and proclaims it’s time to pull the plug and let them die. The surgeon explains it’s his expert medical opinion that your loved one’s life is no longer worth living. The equipment keeping them alive is expensive, the bed could go to other patients, and based on what the surgeon can see their life simply isn’t that important. Your outraged family objects, but the surgeon tells you he went to medical school so it’s his judgement alone that matters.

We all know that surgeon has absolutely no business making this decision for your family. Nothing in his credentials, education, or experience makes him a better judge of whose life is worthy than anyone else. You and your family, who love the person in that bed, have far more right to make this decision than a random doctor, even if he went to Harvard. He’s overstepping his authority, using a claim of expertise to make a decision outside his expert lane.

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Expertise is a special skill in knowing how to achieve a goal. What credentials, education, and experience teach is how to accomplish something others have already done. It’s a form of copying and practice. If you want to know how to do something and get the intended results, you learn from the experience of those who have already done it. You study what they did, copy what they’ve learned, and then practice it for years until you gain an innate understanding and judgment for yourself.

No education or experience, however, can teach you what the goal ought to be. That’s a matter of values every human being possesses that education cannot teach. These questions are about what sort of society we want to live in, what we value, what policies we like, and what trade-offs we want to make. Everyone has different answers to these questions, and all are equally valid no matter where you went to school. There’s nothing you can learn in books that makes you an expert on what other people ought to want. Everyone has equal dignity as a human being to make these decisions without others overriding their decision based on what they think others ought to want.

That’s the difference between expertise and arrogance. It’s the difference between judgment and stolen power.

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We deal with these questions all the time. An expert can tell you how best to fix the engine in your car. They can’t tell you whether it’s worth it to you to fix it. An expert can relate to you the events of history. They can’t tell you whether you should think the results were bad or good. An expert can tell you the likely economic impact of raising taxes. They can’t tell you whether those trade-offs are moral, fair, or worth it. An expert can only tell you how to accomplish something. They have no special claim to knowing what it is we should want to accomplish.

This distinction is rarely made, which probably is why some experts fail to understand it. It’s easy to mistake fancy credentials, social status, and economic success as badges of general wisdom instead of simply markers of skill in one narrow little domain. People who are experts in some field tend to get respect and power from it, which they mistakenly believe translates into a general right to rule. After all, they’re smarter and wiser than ordinary people because they have an elite degree and are an expert.

Our public fight over expertise claims to be about whether we should defer to experts. The real issue is when we should defer to experts, what actually counts as expertise, and when experts are stealing authority to make decisions that belong to everyone in a democracy.

THE ROLE OF EXPERTISE IN A DEMOCRACY

Navigating the proper role of expertise in a democracy is a reasonably new problem, which is probably why we’re so bad at it. In essence, we have little expertise with expertise.

At America’s Founding, any ordinary American farmer could learn and understand most of what the American government did. Back then, expertise was mostly confined to the few who read ancient history, philosophy, and medicine in Latin for royal societies. The issues that governments considered were ones any ordinary person with a basic education could grasp, and therefore participate in and argue about. Industrialization and modernity changed that. As America become more complex, by the early twentieth century government increasingly had to handle problems requiring more study and skill than the average person had time, education, or inclination to acquire.

After America couldn’t get out of the Great Depression, many believed democracy needed more expert management. It was an era of hubris, when many educated Americans were seduced by the dream of social science—a vision of neutral experts administering disorderly human societies with efficiency and order. We built the beginnings of an administrative state, with agencies staffed with experts dedicated to overseeing matters within their expertise. We clumsily grafted these new institutions onto America’s constitutional system, creating a layer that was technically part of Article I but in reality functioning as a new branch of government outside the normal separation of powers.

At first, this awkward creation more or less worked because it was small, specialized, and focused. As America grew in power and complexity, as technology has advanced, as the economy globalized, and as the administrative apparatus grew, we’ve now reached a near-breaking point in which public matters often exceed the ability of any ordinary citizen to fully understand. With private institutions governed by experts also gaining power, the problem is also spreading beyond just government. We’ve never seriously grappled with how to synthesize a necessary administrative apparatus with the requirements of democracy.

We need experts because the modern world is complicated. We also need experts we can trust. Increasingly, Americans don’t trust the experts, and for good reason. They’ve failed. They told us to trust them because they knew better, seized the authority to make decisions for us, and guided us the wrong way. If this were simply about making mistakes, however, it would be human, understandable, and fixable. When the problem is arrogance—experts extending their power outside their expert lane and substituting their values for the people’s—that’s something else entirely. For example, experts had critical knowledge and experience to help us decide how best to treat COVID. Nothing in their medical degrees or years in treating patients gave them any special insights over education or judgments about trade-off between reducing infection and harming the socialization and education of a generation of children. They had no expertise to decide whether protesting was more important than sitting with a dying parent.

It's therefore understandable when ordinary American push back. They recognize experts seizing power that isn’t theirs, substituting their private judgments for democratic decision-making, often in ways that just happen to match their worldviews and that benefit their own class. At the same time, that doesn’t mean we have no need for expertise. Ordinary Americans are perfectly capable of deciding where they want America to go. They often lack the technical knowledge to know how best to get there. Anyone can decide it’s important to bring manufacturing back to America, and that it’s even worth some economic sacrifice. Not everyone has the basis to know whether a specific and technical regime of tariffs will actually achieve that goal.

RETHINKING EXPERTISE

The question of how to build institutions that harness expertise while keeping experts in their lane is one of the most neglected in America. As our society grows more complicated, we have no choice but to rely on experts. To maintain faith and trust in democracy, we must build institutions that constrain experts from intruding on decisions that belong to citizens. I don’t blame ordinary people for getting angry at experts who royally messed up. I also don’t fully blame experts and professionals. Humans are flawed. People always think they know more than they do, mistake credentials for wisdom, and use power for their own benefit. The real source of the problem is our cobbled-together system that was never well-designed for purpose and hasn’t worked the way we intended.

There’s little to be gained from debating whether we need experts. We do. However, we must ensure experts only receive deference within the narrow scope of their actual expertise. On questions of what we should do, experts are just ordinary Americans like the rest of us. We must build better institutions that harness expertise as a tool to help us reach the future that we, the people, choose.

What do you think about expertise? Join the conversation in the comments.

What in the world are they thinking?

THE FLAWED LOGIC OF BERNIE AND AOC

It isn’t hard to grasp the chain of logic that might cause a Democratic consultant to believe Bernie and AOC would make good figureheads for a refreshed Democratic Party. The party’s support among working people has collapsed, and its leadership looks like a gerontocracy with too many top figures who entered politics back when disco was on the radio. As self-identified “Democratic Socialists,” Bernie and AOC claim to speak for the working class, and AOC is associated with youth. Problem solved!

That so many Democratic leaders have lined up behind this concept is a red flag. Does anyone truly believe middle-aged guys in trucker hats from Ohio and Wisconsin who left the Democratic Party to vote for Donald Trump deep down really wanted the Squad? Moving in this direction is alarming evidence that party leaders still fail to understand their party’s problems, and therefore have no chance of ever fixing them.

Pretend for a minute it would genuinely help the Democrats to embrace a high-value symbol that Democrats now want to win back working people and youth. Bernie-AOC is so far from accomplishing that it’s completely out of touch.

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Wait, isn’t Bernie the Democrats’ most popular voice for the working class? Sure, Sanders is an old-school 1960s New Left Marxist by background. Throughout his career, he fought to increase social welfare programs and shift power from large national corporations and the people he calls “the millionaires and billionaires” towards labor. He’s now associated with the issues of his 2016 campaign—increasing taxes on high incomes, campaign finance reform, and finishing the last Great Society dream of universal healthcare or “Medicare for All”—and these remain the centerpieces of this Oligarchy tour. This was a legitimate working-class agenda when Bernie entered politics in 1972. Does anyone think this is what working people who shifted Red in 2024 want?

If the Democrats showed up at a MAGA rally and asked the working people there wearing red, white, and blue T-shirts what they wanted, do you think the answer would be Medicare for All and campaign finance reform? Or would they talk about respect, power, and jobs? I expect they would talk about deindustrialization, immigration, economic security, arbitrary power in corporate HR departments, affordable homes, and the price of eggs. They would talk about social and cultural power, the influence that a professional class that reliably votes Democratic has over their lives, and the disdain many with power seem to have for folks like them.

Bernie’s brand of “Democratic Socialism” isn’t what today’s working-class Americans who moved Red want. In fact, Democratic Socialism wasn’t ever a workers’ movement attracting middle-aged guys who work with their hands, but one of lefty Millennial college students who were anti-capitalist in the sense of Occupy Wall Street and WTO protests. It was a movement that produced the Squad, an intersectional group of mostly minority women invested in social justice and cultural politics—Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman. Is a movement fronted by controversial figures like Ilhan Omar the way to win back working people who moved right?

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Wait again, what about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Isn’t she the real headliner? Isn’t she young, attractive, and exciting? Doesn’t she have a bold agenda appealing to young Americans that Democrats desperately need to win back? Sure, back in 2018.

It’s clear a lot of Democratic leaders now see AOC as their best star. She’s a savvy politician, and we all remember her as the young and attractive bartender who energized America’s youth when elected to Congress at 29. She was known to be a bomb-thrower who understood social media and eagerly challenged her party’s leaders. She personified the college-educated activists who were her party’s future. The problem is that moment is over, and AOC’s image is increasingly out of date. Ocasio-Cortez is now 35 years-old and an establishment politician in early middle age.

Ocasio-Cortez gave up her bomb-throwing image a long time ago in order to join her party’s establishment and climb its ladder. She no longer represents change, but the interests of Democratic power brokers and the consensus Democratic platform. She isn’t even still that young. If AOC were to run for Vice President or President in 2028, she would be a 39-year-old establishment Democrat. A 40-year-old politician isn’t old, but it’s no longer a fresh-faced kid. JD Vance is 40.

AOC isn’t even a member of America’s youngest voting demographic, the Zoomers, but a Millennial and elder Millennial at that. She embodies the Obama-era Millennial “Yes We Can” aesthetic that actual young people now consider cringe. Gen Z politics is entirely different from what now middle-aged Millennials understand, with Zoomer men no longer even part of the left, having moved hard toward the MAGA right. I hate to break it to you Millennials, but you’re no longer young people but lawnmower dads and wine moms. If AOC wins a New York Senate seat, after lining up all the powerful big names and moneybags necessary to do it, she will no longer even be the buzzy and interesting anti-establishment AOC. She will now be Senator Ocasio-Cortez. Crowning Bernie and AOC the fresh face of the Democratic Party feels like something 50-year-old marketing executives would come up with by checking boxes from a Deloitte study about what the kids like.

Bernie and AOC is a clumsy attempt to answer the question “how can Democratic leaders win back voters without changing the party’s message, coalition, or agenda?” The real answer is they can’t.

ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION

The biggest problem with Bernie-AOC as an idea isn’t even that it won’t accomplish its intended goal. The goal is wrong. This is an attempt to slap fresh paint on a organization that isn’t working without making real changes. Democratic leaders think they just have a messaging and marketing problem, when they have a substance and ideas problem.

Working people, young men, and increasingly the middle class, aren’t abandoning the Democrats because they failed to market their great ideas. People left because they didn’t like the ideas. They’re deeply worried about real problems affecting their lives that Democrats have shown no interest in or intention of solving, and mostly deny are even problems. This has opened the door to anyone at least willing to take these problems seriously, whether or not they have good solutions themselves. Democrats complain Republicans haven’t yet offered workable answers and are causing damage flailing about looking for them, while Democrats won’t yet even acknowledge the problems. The answer to that isn’t a fresh face, the same old message, and campaign finance reform.

What are the Democratic Party’s answers to the very real new problems of the middle class? What major structural changes do Democrats propose? How are they going to tear into the system to make things work differently? What systems are they going to tear down, and what new ones will they build? How are they going to restore Americans’ faith in democracy and the American Dream? Or is their only message to once again empower the same people, to implement the same ideas Americans have already rejected, so the same people can rule over them telling them they know best while failing in the exact same way as before?

It’s obvious why the Bernie-AOC national tour is an attractive answer to the people currently helming the party. They don’t think anything is substantively wrong. They just think they made mistakes selling their agenda. Embracing the solution of changing a few faces loosely associated with the demographics that have left them gives them a mental path to fixing things without actually having to change things. They can delude themselves that a path forward exists that doesn’t alienate any core constituency, reject any idea, touch anything insiders believe sacred, or disrupt the status quo. It’s a coping mechanism that feels like a solution, but absolves leaders of making the difficult but real changes they need.

What Democrats need now is soul-searching, innovation, and disruption. They need their own answers to address the problems that caused people to abandon the Democratic Party and blow open the Republicans. America needs two parties offering innovative and workable answers to this new world, where arguably it still has none. Worry not, if our two existing parties truly can’t restore stability and provide real solutions that restore opportunity and prosperity to ordinary Americans, others will come to do what they cannot.

What do you think of Bernie and AOC as figureheads of the new Democratic Party? Join the conversation in the comments.

The core problem is that, for many Americans, anger about immigration was never about the immigrants. Obviously, some portion of America just doesn’t like immigrants. People increasingly express these opinions in the public square, and some public figures echo them, whether seriously or performatively. If you listen to some Democratic Party leaders, however, that’s the only reason anyone might have to oppose America’s last few decades of immigration policy—they’re hateful bigots who dislike people who are different. That’s not a reasonable interpretation, and it’s absurd to dismiss a majority of America as irrational bigots.

In fact, the majority of the energy around immigration has nothing to do with immigrants themselves. Anyone who has spent time around politics knows political issues are rarely just about the issue. Issues and policies are more often symbols voters latch onto as evidence for more abstract concerns. It’s often difficult to put a finger on very real but abstract causes, while it’s easier to point at their visible symptoms. This is why immigration became a flashpoint; it’s an easy-to-identify symbolic indication of two deeper national problems lurking underneath the immigration debate.

Immigration policy has first become a symbol of the disregard many American elites have begun to show toward democracy, viewing themselves as a rightful ruling class unbound to the opinions or interests of ordinary Americans. For decades, Americans expressed discomfort with immigration policies, but when they tugged at the levers of democracy to change them they found to their dismay those levers were no longer connected to the machine of state. No matter who they voted for, who they voted out, what they said in polls, or which party won, nothing ever changed. Washington’s leaders from both parties ignored them, and the policies they objected to continued on full steam ahead.

This was particularly alienating because the policies to which people objected were themselves violations of democratically-enacted law. Government officials didn’t simply pass immigration policies people didn’t like through Congress after vigorous national debate. Believing the law too restrictive, but knowing they couldn’t win the argument democratically, they simply did it. They allowed large numbers of people to enter America illegally, and then turned a blind eye and refused to enforce the immigration laws the people’s representatives passed. Since they couldn’t win their goals through democracy, they simply ignored the law and leveraged their power over enforcement to get their way.

Everyone at the top of American society was in on this. Leaders from both parties were in on it. The heads of large companies were in on it. The media was in on it. Each believed they were justified because they thought their policies were moral and popular sentiment was wrong. Democracy wasn’t yielding the answers they liked, so they used their power to sidestep troublesome democracy. This made immigration a potent symbol of the powerlessness of ordinary Americans to affect the system with their voice or vote. It communicated that the law was only for the little people, voting was a farce, and people with power will do whatever they like no matter how ordinary Americans think or vote.

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The second reason immigration policy became a flashpoint is because it signaled a national abandonment of the idea of America. Despite what some people tell you, Americans are an exceedingly welcoming people both by nature and national creed. We’re genuinely proud to be a nation of immigrants who abandoned past allegiances to join our new family as Americans. This doesn’t mean America doesn’t have a culture and national beliefs, or that these culture and beliefs aren’t important parts of America’s success. There’s nothing immoral or exclusionary about celebrating hot dogs, apple pie, or the Fourth of July. There’s nothing wrong with having pride in America or honoring our national achievements and heroes. Most important, while America has been far from perfect, the ideals of America are clearly good—ideals like democracy, freedom, social equality, treating people with respect, rewarding hard work, following the rules, and the American Dream. Just because past leaders sometime failed to live up to these American ideals doesn’t mean those ideals weren’t real or worthy of celebration.

National cohesion is real and it’s important. We need to believe we’re a national family that’s all in this together. We need to trust each other. We need to know it’s okay to feel pride in ourselves and that our nation is good. Those who ran the immigration regime challenged these once-uncontroversial ideas. They didn’t think it reasonable or moral to ask those joining a national family to embrace its common culture and ideals. This wasn’t about celebrating wonderful personal differences like national foods, styles of dress, accents, languages, cultural names, or where we go to worship. It was about America’s ideals like a belief in democracy, liberty, social equality, trust, and the American Dream. Well-meaning people in the establishment simply didn’t think these concerns were valid, and openly hoped to subvert them. They claimed nationalism was exclusion, cohesion was discrimination, and ideas like democracy and social equality were ideas no one had to teach or inculcate. They rejected assimilation as immoral. Many seemed to believe, if some Americans once did evil in its name, America was irredeemable.

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Most Americans, however, still believe nations need common identities and rituals because social cohesion is important. They want to feel good about their nation. They believe American ideals like democracy, liberty, social equality, trust, and the American Dream are good. They believe these are things you have to work toward and maintain to create a good nation that allows people to flourish. They welcome immigrants because, as Americans, they want people to share in America’s ideals, but they also expect newcomers to want to become Americans. In rejecting these ideas, those who ran America’s immigration policies irresponsibly turned immigration into a symbolic rejection of the core idea of America.

In other words, most Americans were never angry about our immigration policies because of immigrants. They didn’t have a problem with people coming from around the world and choosing to become Americans. What they expected was their government to follow the law and respect democracy. They expected the people who sought to lead them to believe in and support America’s ideals. They were angry because the officials making policy turned immigration into a symbolic signifier of a ruling class indifferent to undercutting the foundations of America.

The administration’s immigration policies over the last few months, however, seem to believe the problem actually is the immigrants. They claim the problem is one of numbers, that President Biden allowed millions of new immigrants to enter America illegally. Their remedy is to quickly make those people leave whatever the cost. They see a short window to respond to what they view as an emergency, and refuse to be held back by quaint ideas like process, personal liberty, or notions of democratic legitimacy. This has everything in reverse. If America truly is upset at elites flouting the law and democracy to get preferred outcomes, how is the solution to flout the law to get preferred outcomes? If Americans are worried about a rejection of America’s culture and ideals, why further violate those ideals? Instead of insisting on the rule of law and enforcing it to the letter, this simply ignores it in the opposite direction. Instead of honoring America’s culture and democracy, it casts them further away as fictions in a world ruled by tribalism and power.

What Americans want right now is to believe again in their democracy. They want to know their government is honest, transparent, and works for them. They want to know their government is more than a club of rival gangs struggling over power, but a system constrained by laws they influence, control, and trust. They want to once again believe America is good. They want to know American ideals like democracy, freedom, social equality, treating people with respect, rewarding hard work, following the rules, and the American Dream are more than slogans but shared values. They want to go to a Fourth of July parade and buy a red, white, and blue bomb pop while listening to a band playing the Star Spangled Banner among a throng of fellow patriotic citizens all feeling a well-deserved sense of national pride. They want to welcome new Americans, but want them to truly join us as Americans. It increasingly appears no one in power on either side of our current political divide gets this. This is why Americans are angry about immigration, and until some political movement that gets it rises to prominence this issue will continue to roil politics.

What do you think about the meaning of the immigration debate? Join the conversation in the comments.

In America, there are four classes of institutions we’ve entrusted to safeguard the truth:

• The mass media entrusted to tell us what’s happening in the world

• Academia and the sciences entrusted to safeguard knowledge about how the world around us works

• Major corporations entrusted with information about markets and the things we need

• The state entrusted with the ultimate truth of power

These institutions serve as four guardians of truth. For different reasons, each is now failing in that duty.

When people wonder why America is currently in turmoil, a major reason is that Americans have understandably lost faith in these guardians. Before we can fix America’s problems, we must find a way for these institutions to earn back the faith they’ve squandered.

WE NEED INSTITUTIONS THAT SAFEGUARD TRUTH

All civilization depends upon institutions that safeguard truth. Arguably that’s all civilization is—a collection of institutions responsible for maintaining and passing down the truth.

Imagine you want to determine the temperature at which water boils. You could run a series of experiments yourself. After a hundred experiments boiling water under various conditions—different quantities of water, containers made of different materials, different ambient temperatures—you would have a good idea of at what temperature water boils. Alternatively, you could read the answer in a book written by someone who has already done that work.

Examining the truth of every fact you rely upon is a terrible waste of time. Often it’s impossible, since it can take centuries of iterating, generation after generation, before we know something is true. A Neolithic cave dweller, no matter how smart or wise, couldn’t discover the foundations of quantum mechanics starting from scratch even after devoting an entire lifetime to the problem. If we had to determine the truth of everything ourselves, we would still believe the sun revolves around the earth, lightning comes from angry gods, and health has something to do with humors.

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This isn’t to say we must defer to experts with credentials. I know from personal experience in the years I spent litigating cases as a lawyer that any conscientious, committed, and reasonably intelligent person can figure out almost anything. I variously had to develop an expertise in the medical effects of cholesterol medication, software engineering for desktop operating systems, chemical manufacturing of polyester fibers, the commercial real estate market, and many other things, and each time I ended up knowing as much about how these matters pertained to my case as any of the PhDs whose expert reports we lawyers helped to draft. Credentials and degrees are simply proof that someone has done the baseline work to become capable of researching an area, but anyone can do that work.

The real problem is the human lifespan is far too short for each of us to become an expert in everything we need to know. We need to make decisions about what’s safe for us to eat, what to do when we get sick, how to produce the things we need, or how to make sure our children grow up safe and happy. As democratic citizens, we also can’t make decisions about who to vote for, what policies we want, or what our government should do, unless we have a good understanding of what humanity knows to be true. We have no choice but to rely on others who can put in the necessary years of work to determine the facts of the things we need to know.

This is why we created institutions and charged them with determining, recording, and communicating the truth. These institutions learn what others know and report it. They conduct research and add the results to our collective knowledge. They share important facts about the things we eat, consume, and use. They tell us how those with power are using their authority to affect our lives. These institutions are essential to our survival, but only work when they have our trust.

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What makes them guardians of truth isn’t their intelligence or knowledge. In fact, these institutions frequently get things wrong, which is fine so long as they correct their errors. They’re guardians because of we demand from them integrity and judgment. They pledge to abide by sacred codes of honesty and transparency, fairly sorting through competing claims to reveal their best understanding of the truth regardless of their own interests, beliefs, or even the likely consequences.

This responsibility isn’t easy, since it conflicts with human nature and the incentives of wielding power. These institutions are continually under pressure by powerful groups to serve them instead of carrying out their mission. They’re often tempted to abuse their own power to alter society instead of informing it. Others will always be trying to seize control of them to enlist them in crusades. If these guardians fail to hold back such temptations and assaults, the civilization that depends on them will crumble.

FAILING GUARDIANS

Throughout my life, there were always places we could turn to determine what was true. There were media channels we trusted to report what was happening around the world, and to help put it into perspective. We trusted academics and universities to research claims and tell us how the natural forces of our world actually worked. Major corporations were trusted to tell us the realities of commerce—facts about the foods we ate, products we relied upon, and how we made our living. Most of all, we trusted government to behave like a democracy responsive to its people.

We trusted mass media to tell us what was happening around the world. When something happens in Colorado, or New York, or Paris, or Karachi we have no way to know ourselves unless someone tells us. When politicians in Washington take bribes, or fail to vote the way we asked, we need to know. When bond traders in New York or London react in a way that will affect our retirement savings, we need to know. We need to understand these facts, how they fit together in context, and what we think they mean.

We created academia and the sciences to research fundamental truths about the nature of our world. This includes not just professors and universities, but also organizations meant to research and learn the truth like public-minded entities and advocacy groups. It takes years to get up to speed in any field, and a lifetime to apply it to discover new knowledge. We need people willing to devote entire lifetimes to gathering this information and telling us what they’ve learned.

It may seem strange to consider, but major corporations are also guardians of the truths concerning our markets. We trust them to supply the food we eat, medicines we take, cars we drive, toys we give our children, banks that keep our money, databases that maintain our data, and products we put on our skin. In this role, they serve as gatekeepers to commercial and market truths. We need them to behave honestly and with integrity, or else our entire market system fails.

Finally, we trust the state to govern responsive to our needs and subservient to our Constitution and democracy. The state must take our interests into account, keep us safe, and obey our demands revealed during the last election. This only works if the state treats us as citizens with dignity and provides us with transparency, truth, and accountability. Otherwise, it’s an unaccountable ruler and we citizens mere subjects over which it rules.

Each of these guardians, however, has now broken America’s trust. That isn’t to say nothing they say is true, but rather that we no longer trust everything they say is true, or that they’re telling the entire truth. Too often, instead of providing true information, they provide what’s essentially propaganda. Information is cold hard truths you provide an equal so they can make good decisions according to their own priorities. Propaganda, on the other hand, is a message meant to manipulate someone to believe what you want them to believe. Even if based on technical truths, it’s provided with the goal of turning another person into a mere object to manipulate and control to substitute your goals for theirs.

Too often, these institutions have stopped treating us as equals entitled to cold hard unvarnished truths, but sought to shape our beliefs to control our actions. While most of what they say is true, not all of it is, and trust is only trust when you’re trustworthy all the time. Even when everything they say is technically true, if there are truths they refuse to share, or truths twisted into a narrative that’s intentionally misleading, that’s not acting as a guardian. If you’ve lied once, how can anyone know whether this isn’t another one of those times in which you’ll lie?

There are many reasons this might have happened. It might have to do with tribal politics, causing people to feel they have a moral license to manipulate to win their moral wars. Perhaps it has to do with a culture that increasingly celebrates cynicism and selfishness over service. Perhaps it’s the result of new technology creating tools and data allowing easier manipulation. Perhaps it’s universities focused on shaping the future professional elite instead of discovering knowledge, or corporations that no longer believe they have any obligations beyond their share price, or government officials with contempt for the people they’re supposed to serve who believe they have a right to rule them. Perhaps it was always this way and we simply didn’t know until modern technology exposed it. Whatever caused it, it’s deeply corrosive to democracy.

No one should blame the individuals trapped inside these institutions. Most mean well and do their best trapped inside dysfunctional machines. They genuinely want to meet their duties and honor the truth, but the institutions they serve are broken. There are too many bad incentives, pressure to compromise integrity, and bosses who demand to sacrifice truth for other goals. However, allowing these institutions, meant to be guardians of truth, to lose their trust has contributed to much of the current turmoil in America

REBUILD INSTITUTIONS OF TRUTH

It’s a common refrain that America is in turmoil because ordinary people in the public square say things that aren’t true. Anyone who truly believes this doesn’t know their history. In every era, there were crowds of people speaking to large audiences on important issues in ways the consensus believed was crazy. They sent out pamphlets, stood on soapboxes, held rowdy meetings in taverns, sent typewritten newsletters across the country, created organizations, held rallies, hosted radio shows, or communicated in many other ways. It also isn’t a new partisan problem, since there are people aligned with both parties that spread false and irresponsible ideas. The only thing that’s different today is the method of communication, and the failure of the institutions we trusted to backstop their claims.

In today’s America, how can anyone really know for sure what’s true? We can’t know for sure what happened if we weren’t personally there. We can’t vet whether a study has fudged data, whether it can be replicated, or whether its author was pressured by peers to slant a conclusion to fit a narrative. We don’t know whether the claims on a package might be misleading, or whether a price is fair, or whether our call is actually important to anyone. We have no means to determine what our government isn’t telling us, or what it’s misrepresenting to cover up mistakes, or what it’s hiding under questionable claims of national security.

If we can’t determine what’s true ourselves, and if there’s no one we entirely trust to tell it to us straight, we no longer have means to validate anything. We’re lost, forced to default to whatever flatters us or feels right. We dismiss things we don’t want to hear because there’s no reason we must believe it. This is why America is now politically chaotic. People are capable of sorting through bad information. The problem comes when there’s no longer any institutions they entirely trust to tell them which information is bad. Can you expect anything other than breakdown and chaos in our national debate? Can you blame anyone for falling back on believing whatever they want to believe?

This is the national crisis everyone is ignoring. If we want to fix America and restore stability, we must first rebuild institutions capable of earning back people’s trust. Before we can start to worry about practical reforms like creating policies, adjusting institutions, or correcting past mistakes, we must rebuild institutions worthy of popular trust. Yet I rarely hear reformers even recognize this problem, much less offer solutions. With AI soon bringing undetectable new tools to manipulate and obscure the truth, this problem is only going to keep getting worse.

Fixing this problem won’t be easy, and won’t be quick. It takes years of consistent good behavior to win back trust once you’ve lost it. Even in the best-case scenario, in which our institutions for sharing truths immediately cleaned up their acts, this problem will be with us for many years. This is why we must get started on it now. Any reform movement that doesn’t include a plan to restore faith in our institutions of truth isn’t serious, because it isn’t targeting one of the major sources of the problem it seeks to solve.

If we want to fix America, we must begin by restoring our four great guardians of truth—or risk losing the foundation of civilization and our democracy.

What do you think about the guardians of truth? Join the conversation in the comments.

However, while Abundance is the right idea, I have grave concerns about the way it has so far been presented to America. I don’t think Abundance should be relegated to merely a Democratic movement seeking to fix a broken Democratic Party. It has the potential to be more, part of a broader reform agenda to fix what’s broken in America.

Put simply, I fear Abundance becoming another Mugwump movement.

WHAT IS ABUNDANCE?

Abundance is more than the recent book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It’s an ideological movement that’s been growing in influence in policy circles for years. Anyone paying attention to the Washington scene has noticed more and more writers suddenly throwing around the word Abundance. An increasing number of think tanks have become de facto Abundance affiliates. It’s been the most successful new intellectual movement in the center and center left space in the last decade, if not longer.

I’ve been following Abundance for a long time. In fact, I was tangentially involved with some Abundance-related efforts some time ago. The basic idea should be reasonably uncontroversial. We have an official version of America with institutions charged with important missions to accomplish things we need done. Countless people get paid well to advance those missions. Yet those things never seem to happen. America is stagnating, institutions don’t carry out their missions, and nothing seems to work.

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As the Abundance book explains, we allocate billions to build the marvel of high-speed rail, and years later there’s no high-speed rail. We allocate billions to build broadband networks and charging stations, and years later we’ve built neither broadband nor charging stations. I think this discussion, however, is too narrow in suggesting the problem is only limited to building infrastructure through government. This same illness permeates every institution. It’s expensive schools that don’t really reach students. It’s a corporate sector increasingly organized to provide frustrating and shoddy services on purpose. It’s a Congress that refuses to do its job to legislate. It’s incentives that allow finance to eat the real economy. It’s an America that costs a lot, has a lot of processes, and is presided over by people with impressive resumes and paychecks, but provides a barely acceptable experience to the ordinary American.

As a movement, Abundance simply says America should be organized to actually produce the things it says it wants. When institutions undertake responsibilities, they should actually fulfill them. When governments allocate billions and make ambitious claims, they should actually achieve the results they promise. When we entrust national institutions to provide essential services, they should provide those services with excellence. We entrust our institutions with missions that are critical to people’s lives, so their primary goal should be to fulfill those missions with competence and excellence. It shouldn’t be to churn through money and go through the motions for the benefit of the people running them, nor should it be chasing secondary goals at their expense.

People always tend to make this case in the neutral language of economists. America’s institutions are wasteful and inefficient. America lacks state capacity. We have erected impediments to investment. How about, it’s infuriating? We need things done. We pay institutions to accomplish them. People who live in nice houses and are paid well to accomplish things simply don’t—and don’t seem to even care that they don’t.

Institutions ought to fulfill their missions. Things ought to actually work.

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In their book, Klein and Thompson pitch this as a message for Democrats looking to reform the Democratic Party. I get it. Klein and Thompson are coming at this as Democratic partisans. They believe in the twentieth-century Democratic Party project and Obama-era progressive coalition. Klein in particular has built a career championing Obama-era Democrats. Democrats are the party with a worldview centered around using government and institutional heights to achieve economic and moral progress. The failure of the Blue model of governance to accomplish things is a major drag on Democrats. If, when Democrats seek to carry out their agenda, their efforts don’t work, the Democratic project fails and the party gets discredited.

On the other hand, Abundance seems unlikely to resonate in a Trump-era Republican Party committed to the idea that government should get out of the way instead of into the driver’s seat. While an Abundance message in theory seems complementary to efforts like DOGE, in practice a message about getting more from government investment isn’t likely to resonate with a party committed to getting government to invest less.

At the same time, presenting Abundance as purely a Democratic idea for party reform misses the potential significance of Abundance and this political moment. I fear Abundance is the right idea, but presenting it as a Democratic reform instead of an American one places it in danger of becoming yet another failed Mugwump movement.

WHAT IS A MUGWUMP MOVEMENT?

In 1884, the Republicans nominated Senator James G. Blaine for president. Blaine was a distinguished Republican Party giant with a storied career who, like most Gilded Age politicians, had a reputation as a bit corrupt. His nomination outraged the Republican Party’s reformist good-government faction, which walked out to support the Democratic candidate. These good-government reformers were the Mugwumps.

Back in the late nineteenth century, the Republicans were what we would consider the more liberal party. The Republicans had long contained a large and powerful faction of good-government liberals who regularly waged war with their party’s more pragmatic and flexible establishment. In the Gilded Age, all of American politics was, even to jaded modern observers, shockingly corrupt. It was largely controlled by political machines and politicians in the pockets of corporations and money. For decades, Republican idealists—mainly prosperous old-money Protestants from the Northeastern establishment—fought for good government, to break up political machines, to chase cronies out of government, and to stop railroads and national corporations from corrupting politics. They were Liberal Republicans when they broke with Grant, Half-Breeds when they fought establishment Stalwarts, and now would become Mugwumps—a Native American word for “great man” used to suggest these reformers were holier-than-thou.

Whether Blaine was truly corrupt is a matter of perspective. He was a powerful politician in an era in which American politics was staggeringly corrupt on the whole. He had an impressive career in politics, serving as House Speaker, Secretary of State, and now Senator. However, he had also been implicated in one major national scandal over trading political influence for stocks and money, as well as hints of other similar corruption. His actions were no doubt shady, but also sadly likely par for the course in a Gilded Age fueled by machines and graft.

Blaine’s nomination, however, was too much for the Mugwumps. They refused to back him for president and, then, taking a costly moral stand, walked out of the party to help elect Democrat Grover Cleveland, who had a reputation as a reformer. With their support, Cleveland became the first Democrat to win the White House since the Civil War. Cleveland was mildly better than most presidents of his era on corruption, although he didn’t markedly clean up the system, nor did his Democrats suddenly become the party of good government. The Republicans didn’t change much either. Most Mugwumps, now considered traitors without a party, got drummed out of politics, their political careers destroyed.

In other words, the Mugwump rebellion played out like most good-government reform movements in American history—John Quincy Adams’s National Republicans, the Barnburners, the Greenbackers, the Liberal Republicans, the Half-Breeds, or any of the many modern iterations. It did a bit a good, but couldn’t push back the political ocean, leaving the broken system it decried intact. Ultimately, when the reformist moment passed, the entrenched establishment that owned the system maintained control and things more or less remained as before.

As Tammany Hall machine boss George Washington Plunkett said:

College professors and philosophers who go up in a balloon to think are always discussin’ the question: “Why Reform Administrations Never Succeed Themselves!” The reason is plain to anybody who has learned the a, b, c of politics.

I can’t tell just how many of these movements I’ve seen started in New York during my forty years in politics, but I can tell you how many have lasted more than a few years—none. There have been reform committees of fifty, of sixty, of seventy, of one hundred and all sorts of numbers that started out to do up the regular political organizations. They were mornin’ glories—looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin’ forever, like fine old oaks.1

Most political reform movements in America end up like Mugwump movements.

However, one important Republican reformer survived the Mugwump disaster. By background and inclination, he absolutely should have been a Mugwump. However, seeing the political moment clearly, he decided to hold his fire until he could really make a difference. He stayed with his party and thereby preserved a political career that surely would have been destroyed before it made a difference. Theodore Roosevelt waited a few more years until he could embrace a movement that could actually turn these ideas into actionable reform—the historical Progressive Movement.

ABUNDANCE AS A DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT

Abundance shouldn’t be a Democratic idea to reform the Democratic Party. It should be an American movement to fix what’s broken in America—one that just happens to seek influence among (but not exclusively among) the Democrats. That’s the difference between a Mugwump movement and a paradigm-shifting ideology like the Progressive Movement.

The Democrats would no doubt be better off if they embraced Abundance ideas, although I don’t have much faith this version of Abundance can truly reform the current Democratic Party. The unstated problem is progressive factions don’t hinder building things by accident. The regulations that Klein and Thompson decry aren’t really the problem; the powerful groups of people who use those regulations and processes as tools to pursue other goals are the actual problem. This isn’t just an administrative accident we can clear up by tweaking a few dumb laws. Powerful people with influence are doing this on purpose.

This is why there’s already been so much pushback in Democratic circles against Abundance. Many progressive groups perceive it as hostile to their priorities, and for good reason—because it is. It’s a problem for the Democratic Party that nothing works, but it’s quite often in the interest of its constituent factions not to let them work. Factions that burden government to pursue priorities they rate higher than their official missions aren’t in politics to see those institutions perform their official missions; they’re in politics to seize control of those institutions to advance other priorities. Officials and operatives who twist and corrupt good government to pursue selfish goals aren’t in it for good government; they’re in it to pursue those selfish goals. For them, the Abundance agenda is a direct attack on their strategy and goals

Abundance Democrats seem to believe they can wrest control of this broken machine to fundamentally change it. The Democratic Party machine, however, holds together a lot of moving parts—factions, interests, agendas, and officials. This machine sustains loyalty and cooperation from all these groups by producing exactly what it has always produced. If you feed hostile new ideas into such a machine, it will either spit them out or mangle them into a rebranded version of what every gear inside it is designed to make. There isn’t a lot Abundance can offer these kinds of Democrats, but they’re internally stronger and naturally will fight back. Even if you were to somehow succeed in taking control, pushing these people from influence, what’s stopping them from just leaving and waging war against you from outside?

If you did somehow manage to reform the Democrats around these ideas, however, what then? If what you care about is improving governance in a few Blue pockets, that could happen. If you want to build a winning national coalition that can implement these ideas, sustain them over time, and create a new governing philosophy for America, how can a version sold as a technocratic Democratic reform achieve that? This is an era of national rebellion around the idea that America’s technocratic and professional elite ignored the interests of the majority, looked out for its own interests, and failed to govern wisely or well. It’s fueled not just by a failure of governance, but also a national breach in trust. Abundance as a Democratic Party reform not only fails to address this breach in trust, but essentially asserts the same professional classes that made the mistakes have now learned their lessons and so should be re-empowered once again because this time they’ll do better.

How does that address the discontent and calm the national storm?

The most likely outcome of making Abundance an internal Democratic Party reform is another Mugwump movement. It will likely do a bit of good before getting ground down by the machine it’s trying to fix. What’s most frustrating is Abundance can actually be part of the solution to our national problems and political discontent.

ABUNDANCE ISN’T FOR DEMOCRATS, BUT AMERICA

I would suggest don’t sell Abundance as a way to reform what’s broken with the Democrats. It’s a way to reform what’s broken in America. Roll it into a larger and bolder agenda that speaks directly to the causes of the rebellion tearing America apart.

A few years after the failure of the Mugwumps, the same Teddy Roosevelt who wisely skipped the Mugwump revolt spearheaded another reform movement that worked—the historical Progressive Movement. This movement, instead of trying to reform a dysfunctional political party like the Mugwumps had done, offered a comprehensive ideology and agenda directly attacking the true source of the discontent and popular anger tearing America apart—the one-two punch of the economic shock of industrialization and Gilded Age stagnation, corruption, and decline.

The Progressive Movement tied anti-corruption reforms like those the Mugwumps championed to other reforms like ending child labor, imposing maximum work hours, breaking up abusive monopolies with antitrust, creating public schools, ending sweatshops, and winning the vote for women. It presented all these reforms as related solutions flowing from one common ideology directly addressing the source of what was actually making Americans angry—the economic disruption, national dysfunction, crowded cities, abusive factories, political corruption, and sense of middle-class decline fueling national discontent.

The Progressive Movement also didn’t operate as an adjunct of a political party. It was organized as a force standing outside the system acting on politics. In practice, it mostly worked through Republicans, and in fact became a powerful bloc inside the party. However, where Democrats were willing to adopt Progressive ideas, it worked with them too. Eventually, the movement become so popular and powerful that Democrats under Woodrow Wilson sought to fully jump on board as well. Progressives won influence, and even control, of both national parties and got almost their entire agenda enacted and solidified. The 1912 election was essentially a national referendum over which candidate was the most Progressive.

This is the model Abundance should pursue. It shouldn’t be a Democratic Party movement. It should be an American reform movement working to influence politics with the goal of changing not just one party but the national debate.

Abundance also shouldn’t be packaged alone, but as one major solution within a larger agenda explicitly targeting what Americans are genuinely angry about. From the political left to right, Americans are angry at the system and people running it. They’re angry about ineffective government, but also ineffective private institutions, lack of transparency, poor leadership, corruption, middle-class decline, and unaccountable control. These all are related problems stemming from inter-related causes. Their root is a painful, but well-earned, collapse in national trust. Abundance is an answer to repairing this lack of trust, but not alone. Abundance is part of the solution to what’s broken in America, but America isn’t only broken because of anti-Abundance.

I think Abundance is bigger than many of its proponents realize. It’s not just an agenda about helping governments build. It’s an idea about making institutions work. It’s not just a way to reform the Democrats, or any single party. It’s a way to help address the collapse in national trust. I’m willing to support Abundance, but not as merely a Democratic Party reform. I want it integrated into an agenda meant to restore faith in the American system and to renew America.

I agree, America needs to work. We need more Abundance. This is a good idea worthy of becoming more than just another Mugwump movement.

What do you think about the Abundance movement? Join the conversation in the comments.

There’s no logical reason AI couldn’t in fact create such a utopia, but I doubt it. I worry it could just as likely throw us into a dark age of deprivation and oppression. This isn’t because I think AI will become conscious and super-intelligent and then oppress or kill us—although, honestly, that’s a concerning possibility. It’s for the same reason it’s a disaster when a small and poor country discovers oil.

THE PROBLEM WITH AN OIL WELL

It’s a counterintuitive fact of international development that among the worst things that can happen to a small and poor nation is to discover a valuable natural resource like oil. You would think finding oil or diamonds in a poor country would be a godsend. Since leaders now have something valuable to trade for hard money, they can use the windfall to build new infrastructure, roads, and hospitals. They can attract foreign investment to build up higher-tech industries. They can invest in healthcare and education. They can make their people happier, and their nation stronger and more powerful.

While rulers absolutely could do all this, what almost always happens is the opposite.

In the real world, what usually happens when a small and poor nation discovers a valuable natural resource is it becomes a horrible autocracy. The ruling class uses the wealth to fly about on private jets and buy expensive foreign goods. Instead of investing in infrastructure, or building a strong, prosperous, and educated middle class, the nation splashes money on a few showy projects. Rulers zealously guard their power and treat any challenge to their authority with brutality. The lives of ordinary people, neglected in squalor, don’t get better. They get worse.

When you think about it, the reasons this usually happens almost are inevitable.

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It only takes a relatively small number of people to extract the value from an oil well or diamond mine. You can even sign a contract with a large Western firm and be done with it. The wealth, however, is sufficient to buy off everyone you need to solidify your power. In a small nation, you only need to buy off a handful of key people—a few generals, the head of the national police, some figures in the media, maybe leaders in the church, and some local leaders like the heads of tribes or regional strongmen. If you keep this handful loyal, you can maintain a near-unchallengeable lock on power—and now you have plenty of money from which to give each of them a generous cut.

When you have an oil well, why fund roads or infrastructure? Why provide healthcare or education? Why create a prosperous and educated middle class that will only build up expectations and new blocs of power, making your situation weaker? Well-meaning and naïve do-gooders say you should do it anyway. It’s not just the right thing to do, but will benefit you and your nation over the long term. Investing makes your country smarter, healthier, happier, and richer, and ultimately more powerful. It creates new industries and thus more sources of wealth. It increases your influence and hard power. However, what the do-gooders fail to understand is that when leaders take this advice, they open themselves up to getting couped.

Resources spent on roads and hospitals are no longer going into the pockets of the key supporters you need to stay in power. If you won’t share it with them, inevitably someone less enlightened will. Someone more selfish and brutal can promise to take the money you’re spending on education and healthcare and give it to the generals, party officials, and police chiefs. Before long, an enlightened leader finds himself surrounded by gunmen in the presidential palace. Using any of the nation’s fruits to develop the country is just asking to get outbid.

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Why then do modern democracies spend money on roads and hospitals and college educations? Are we more enlightened? Are we nicer people? The cynic would say it’s because the rulers of modern developed economies like America’s derive their wealth and status not from oil wells but financial schemes and stock markets—tiny slices of a productive economy the middle class creates. Our rulers panic when the middle class is struggling not because our rulers are more enlightened. They panic because an unproductive middle class means the people producing their wealth are producing less, which means the economy slows, which means markets plummet, which means the source of their own wealth and power gets destroyed. They provide health care and education because a happy and productive middle class performing office jobs is the source of their own wealth and power too. In other words, you’re their oil well. If you think this is too cynical, ask yourself why the powerful care a great deal about middle-class education but little about the homeless and disabled? The homeless and disabled aren’t productive workers, so no one is incentivized to care about what happens to them outside of a little charity.

That is why a diamond mine in a small and poor nation is such a nightmare. Of course, there are exceptions. This rule doesn’t seem to hold in large nations with vast resources, or in city states with tiny ruling classes. It’s impossible to control a massive nation like America, China, or Russia with just one major oil field. There are countless fields spread over vast distances, as well as copper mines, lithium mines, timber, iron, and more—although as Russia demonstrates, it’s not entirely impossible to control them all. Tiny city states, on the other hand, like the Gulf emirates can control an entire nation with a group so small they don’t need to be always looking over their shoulders and therefore can act with a bit more foresight. Nations developed before finding a resource, like Norway, also generally don’t follow the rule, since they developed their modern economy and powerful middle class before they found the oil.

The general rule, however, is you never want to live in a place in which a small group can control enough wealth to control the country without your help. Resources spent on you are resources a rival can promise the army—and while they need the army, they don’t need you.

IS AI LIKE AN OIL WELL?

If AI does what its proponents claim, it seems an awful lot like a diamond mine or oil well.

When people tell me how people could use AI to make a better world, I wonder if they’ve thought through how people will use AI to change the world. If AI is a magic money machine that doesn’t require a large and educated middle class to generate wealth, why does anyone still need you? When rulers no longer need you going to your 9 to 5, why go to the effort of building you nice housing in which to live? Why build roads and infrastructure to places they won’t go, which they will never use? Why provide you healthcare? If AI can cheaply generate an entire economy’s wealth, it can buy all the generals, police chiefs, judges, and party bosses needed. A small group that controls it can make themselves kings, if not gods.

The wishcasting over the world AI could create reminds me of utopian arguments from the dawn of television. Optimists used to argue this amazing new invention would create a golden age, putting an education machine in every home. People could take classes, learn new languages, or immerse themselves in culture from their couch. They certainly could have—and some even tried. It turned out, however, most people wanted to watch sitcoms and game shows, and eventually shows in which strangers emotionally damage one another like The Real Housewives.

Tech oligarchs also are naïve to think they’ll be the ones controlling this new technology just because they built it. Business people always think that. They will at first, of course, and might even cooperate with the ruling elite for a time. Soon enough, however, the people controlling the army, police, and courts will want rid of them, at which point they’ll find themselves like Jack Ma or Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Innovators and business people are dangerous loose cannons and competitors for power, and far less obedient and reliable than a flunky. They always end up like Daggett in The Dark Knight Rises, who thought funding Bane gave him control over Bane—only to learn as his neck cracked that Bane was always the one with power over him.

We’ve been obsessing over the technical risks of AI, while overlooking this just as troubling human risk. We may not know what AI will do because, whatever anyone confidently tells you, no one has any idea how AI entirely works. Does a calculating machine inevitably develop an identity, beliefs, goals, and sense of self? We don’t even know where human consciousness comes from, whether the brain is just a computer from which consciousness emerges, or whether consciousness comes from somewhere else. We do however have an idea what AI will tempt humans to do with such powerful new technology. It will tempt them to turn the middle class into the disposable class and destroy democracy.

This is the part of the essay where I’m obligated to say something hopeful and offer solutions. My best hope is the cheerleaders of AI are simply wrong. Perhaps AI never becomes everything they promise. Perhaps countless firms develop competing interchangeable AIs, along with scrappy individuals building their own AIs in basements, and no small group can ever control the technology. Perhaps AI never turns out to be a magic wealth machine at all, but just another useful tool that makes us all a little bit more productive like a stapler. However, what if they are right?

Then we must start planning now. We should be seriously discussing the social changes and institutions we need to ensure the human incentives for using this technology align with creating a society we want. Smart people must start talking not just about technological risks, but also equally dangerous human risks. If we’re not careful, the magic money machine won’t create the utopian fantasy we were promised. Like a diamond mine, it will create an autocracy leaving all of us outside the tiny inner circle behind.

What do you think of the rise of AI? Join the conversation in the comments.

As far as I’m concerned, the test of a person’s worth is what they do when another soul is at their mercy. My paramount belief, more important than any specific policy, has always been to reject cruelty. America shouldn’t accept cruelty or tolerate the cruel.

That doesn’t mean America shouldn’t be tough. If you want a safe and prosperous nation, you have to chase away the predators. I don’t believe in the Rousseauian blank slate, that people are inherently good and corrupted by society. Some people are simply selfish or evil, and if left unchecked will hurt and take advantage of others for selfish gain. A healthy society needs clear rules backed by force, and sometimes, regretfully, a degree of brutality. However, enforcing rules isn’t cruelty because it doesn’t impose suffering for its own sake. It’s about creating a place the good, meek, and law-abiding can flourish under the protection of a guardian.

There’s plenty of room for compassion, of course. A guardian finds no joy employing violence, doing so only when necessary. A guardian also establishes just rules and enforces them impartially under the rule of law. Once a predator is stopped from hurting others, there’s time to educate, rehabilitate, understand, and forgive. A guardian need not be a cold machine or a bloody vigilante like the Punisher or Judge Dredd.

Until recently, I took for granted that most Americans felt this way too. America is powerful, and has no qualms wielding its power when needed, but always balanced that against its fundamental decency. Sometimes America made mistakes or hurt people it shouldn’t have. Sometimes wicked people rose to power and used America for wicked ends. Ultimately, however, we all agreed America should strive to be strong but good, and never cruel.

I’ve been thinking about this while watching the battle over immigration enforcement.

RECENT CONTROVERSIES OVER IMMIGRATION

What I’m about to say has nothing to do with anyone’s individual views on immigration enforcement. It entirely concerns how those policies are carried out.

It made national news when the government recently deported 239 Venezuelan men to a Salvadoran prison designed to be a living nightmare. This prison exists to punish and humiliate gang members who previously overran El Salvador and terrified its people. When the Salvadorean government went to war with the gangs and won, it created this embodiment of hell on earth for the defeated criminals. Our government made a deal to send these Venezuelan non-citizens there as prisoners, in part because it was cheaper than housing them in American prisons, but also as a deterrent.

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When I first heard about this, I presumed all of the deported men were known Tren de Aragua members convicted of crimes and serving sentences in the United States. Having them complete their sentences in a hellish Salvadoran prison sounded harsh, but I understood the intention and the symbolism. Non-citizens can be deported for any reason, and violent criminal gang-members are good candidates, and sending them to a horrific place seems fair treatment for foreign criminals seeking to spread a cartel into the United States.

However, the government refused to explain exactly how it determined these people were actually gang members and selected for a life in hell. Increasingly, it appears some of the deported were neither serving sentences, nor had they been convicted of any crime, nor did they have any proven gang affiliations. When ICE agents were asked to investigate, the only evidence they had that they were members of a gang was they had tattoos. If this is true, as it appears, (and the government so far isn’t saying), this obviously seems lazy and absurd in an age in which every other sixteen-year-old girl has tattoos. The government’s silence is telling since, if it could, I suspect it would have put out a statement to the contrary long ago.

I have no problem deporting violent non-citizen organized criminals, particularly if they might be coming to set up affiliates in our borders. I even accept sending them someplace outside the Constitutional standards of our prisons. However, I can’t help but imagine what it would be like to be an ordinary person with no violent criminal background and get whisked away to be beaten and abused for years in hell on earth.

Imagine you ended up in that prison, all because some ICE agent was careless or lazy in adding you to a list on which you didn’t belong. Perhaps they had a superior pressuring them to meet a quota. Perhaps they realized they made a mistake, but everyone involved wanted to move past it and protect their careers. Imagine an otherwise decent person who merely overstayed a visa and never intentionally harmed anyone being sent to such a place. Now imagine not caring about carelessly destroying someone’s life.

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Other stories, too, give me pause. Maybe you read about the Canadian actress and businesswoman who made headlines when she was whisked away to a terrible ICE detention facility. Apparently, while working in America, her visa was revoked because her employer failed to use proper letterhead on a document. When she reported to an immigration office at the border station to clear the matter up, instead of sending her home to Canada she was put in chains. Then she spent weeks in a horrible facility with no information, where she slept in a freezing room with only a mylar blanket and no pillow. She was only released when another detainee helped her contact friends and family, who gave her story to the press.

There are also the non-citizens students whose visas were revoked. My problem isn’t the free speech issue—and I’m a lawyer extremely passionate about free speech. As I’ve written before, the purpose of free speech isn’t self-expression but for citizens to pressure and replace governments. It’s kind and decent to allow guests the privilege of speaking against our government too, but as a philosophical matter it isn’t necessary for free speech because non-citizens aren’t meant to influence our democracy. We routinely deny visas for all sorts of reasons, and America has always aggressively deported non-citizens advancing movements or spreading ideologies it didn’t like—communists, anarchists, foreign spies—and Hamas is a recognized terrorist organization. We’re also not naïve to the fact that foreign powers sometimes use their citizens to influence our democracy, which we have every right to shut down.

My worry is the tactics. Why are we apparently sending teams of armed agents with their faces obscured by masks to rendition students off the street, whisking them to detention facilities for merely writing spirited op-eds? Why exactly is the black bag treatment necessary?

None of this is necessary. The administration won a mandate on immigration, and there are people in America illegally with no inherent right to stay, so whatever you think about the policy the administration has the right to do it. Why then carry the policy out so cavalierly, sloppy and indifferent to not just the law but also its impact on the human souls at your mercy? It’s not just about enforcing the law. It’s not being tough. Why potentially send a gentle person to a foreign hellhole, scarring them and permanently ruining their life? That’s not acting like a guardian.

The arguments I hear don’t make this better. I dismiss those who say “why do you care what happens to those people,” since I care about what happens to all people. I also dismiss arguments that say, since they’re here illegally they broke the law—we don’t cut the hands off people who speed in traffic. The argument that concerns me most, however, is that cruelty is necessary to scare offenders into compliance. Destroying a few lives is worth it to teach others the hard lesson that they must obey and comply. Those are the same arguments I loathed about cancel culture.

My biggest problem with cancel culture was never the substance of whatever the cancellers were trying to promote. It was the cruelty. Cancel culture would isolate some poor soul—Justine Sacco, the women in the dog park labeled Karen, Aziz Ansari, or others—for some transgression of language or unproved accusation, and then methodically destroy their lives. Vicious mobs would hound them from their jobs so they couldn’t pay their mortgage or feed their kids. People would pile on to abuse and frighten them, telling them to kill themselves or threatening to sexually assault them. Victims were forced to humiliate themselves in ridiculous Maoist apologies, which wouldn’t be accepted. Years later, mobs would find someone getting work again and the pile on would resume. Nothing was ever good enough. The point was total destruction. It was cruel.

The people who engaged in this wicked sport justified it with the same poisoned thinking—hurting and scaring people would improve society. They didn’t care if they picked the wrong victim, because the victim always belonged to some disliked demographic—why do you care about them? If they didn’t deserve it, they would say sometimes you need to crack some eggs to make an omelet. The cruelty, they claimed, was in the service of creating a better world.

Personally, I thought most of them did it because they liked to hurt people. Cancel culture provided moral license to destroy people under the guise of moral goodness, thus attracting the same sorts of people who would have joined the Inquisition, the Gestapo, or become a Soviet Commissar. Wrecking lives gave them a high because it made them feel just and powerful.

As Aldous Huxley wrote: “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation'—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

I don’t care about your goals, or if you’re right about the policies, or if your cruelty helps reach some noble goal. I find it all revolting. I cannot respect cruelty.

AMERICA WAS POWERFUL, BUT NOT CRUEL

Great empires become wicked and abusive because it’s in their interest and they can. The people ruling them don’t need to care about the opinions of the weak, and so they pursue their interests crushing anyone in their way with steel-toed boots. Whether it’s through indifference, laziness, if not sociopathic evil, they feel justified becoming monsters.

America was special because it was powerful, but not cruel.

America prioritized getting the answer right over selling narratives, saving face, or creating the illusion of strength. America valued fairness, correcting errors, and holding itself accountable. This made America strong, tough, and relentless, pursing its interests with vigor. It was capable of great violence, but sought to restrain that force primarily to protect and shield. Americans sought to use their power to create a giant umbrella over the world under which the weak and good could flourish. Americans were guardians. To be a guardian isn’t to be naive. It isn’t compassion run amok, divorced from the world’s harsh realities. A guardian holds out its shield to make a too-often brutal world safer for those who can’t.

I’m concerned about the bipartisan degradation of our American character, one spanning left to right. So many Americans are now filled with so much anger and frustration that they’re eager to punish enemies. Because they feel weak, they want to hurt the people they think wronged them. Because they’re afraid, they want to make others feel fear. They want to humiliate “enemies” to restore a sense of control.

That isn’t who we Americans are. Americans are strong, but never cruel. We’re a nation of guardians.

What do you think about cruelty in policy? Join the conversation in the comments.