(October 2022-April 2023. Written over the course of many months, this is really five essays in one: Make America Young Again, Refind America, Refine America, Redefine America, and Refound America. Conceived in Saratoga Hot Spring in Wyoming; Make America Young Again and Refind America written in Minnesota, Refine America written in Swansea and finished in SF, Redefine America written in Palm Springs and finished in SF, Refound America started in Swansea and mostly written in SF. I will be publishing each essay separately as well, but they’re meant to be read as a whole. Proposes a unification of the conservative and progressive impulses at the essence of what America is at its best, and discusses how to recreate America. This essay collection essentially lays out my vision of a new story of American politics.)
(EDIT: February 2024 I rewrote the intro essay, ‘Make America Young Again’. The old version of this intro didn’t work well with the rest of the essay. I am reforming that original intro essay into a future separate article, ‘America as Anti-Hero’, because that original essay didn’t really fit the original name as well as this new one. This new intro essay ‘Make America Young Again’ shares 0 lines from the previous. It is entirely new; it is shorter, and more beautiful. It can also be found as a stand alone essay without the transition here: (https://beatinpaths.com/2024/02/19/make-america-young-again/))
Make America Young Again
Once, America was a child, a new story which imagined no past at its back and a future of infinite possibilities ahead. It was open to anything, endlessly creative and adaptable, ready to become anyone. America represented the right to recreate oneself. We declared independence from the past, throwing off the weight of history to make our own destiny. America embraced change, experimentation, novelty, progress. The essence of America was the ever-springing Fountain of Youth.
But these days, America feels old. Everyone can feel it. It’s not just because the hands on the levers of power all seem to be elderly, and it’s not just because More than 1 in 6 Americans now 65 or older as U.S. continues graying. America’s sense of senescence permeates across multiple levels of metaphor. Our culture, our government, our institutions feel old, enervated, ossified. This is not necessarily a function of mere years— many elders can preserve a childlike spark of curiosity in their hearts. To become truly old is to become stuck in one’s ways, path dependent, the narrowing of water into well-carved ruts.
Paths of experience carve most deeply into human psyches during times of trauma and crisis. Thus, the man who tells the same stories of his youthful struggles over and over, a man who hasn’t been able to kick most of the habits he formed in his 20s and 30s. His adaptations to the old world worked well enough, so his mind no longer feels the need to adapt to the ever-new world. The FDR era of the Depression and Second World War was our last true crisis; America recreated itself to overcome the adversity, a New Deal was struck, and we have been stuck with those institutions, expectations, and ways of being as a nation ever since.
For the last 80 years, America’s debates have been confined— politically, culturally, imaginatively— within the invisible parameters left behind by this era: the right pushing back on some of the promises of the New Deal, the left struggling to expand or merely maintain it. The metal, heated by crisis, cooled into a strong shape. That sword stayed sharp for the first couple decades after forging, but now it is rusty. Those who wielded it are gone, and it is no longer the right tool for the task. We’ve settled into a false sense of a ‘permanent normal’— that history is over, that the institutions our grandfathers built are final.
Here’s the thing about the world: it always changes. But aging people tend to more and more stay the same. Humans have a lifespan of forgetting and remembering, a trade over time of fluid intelligence for crystallization. While every individual who makes this deal inevitably dies, tribes can be forever reborn. This is why children are precious. To be a child is to see a new world. To be a child is to be a new world.
The true genius of America is that childlike spirit, which the Founders were wise enough to build into the very DNA of the nation they were birthing. The Constitution is a living document, a self-improving government, the first of its kind. We are expected to edit it. Certain Founders believed that every generation should rewrite the Constitution for themselves to adapt to the needs of the time from fresh points of view; only then, they reasoned, would people truly be self-governed by the living, not the dead; ruled by reason and right rather than power and the past. This was truly revolutionary. But left untended, the inertia of history regains the upper hand. Can you name off the top of your head the last time we added an amendment to the Constitution?
The essence of America worth preserving is precisely this declaration of independence from the past. Thus, paradoxically, genuine American conservatism and genuine American progressivism converge. The true American conservative conserves the torch of progress lit by our ancestors; the fire is always the same fire, different. Fuel must be added; old things must change to stay truly themselves.
America is a living thing, a child always growing. Our Founding fused the principle of Experience (laws, institutions, a written Constitution) with the principle of Innocence (openness, reshaping beliefs in the face of reality, embracing one’s own folly and imagination), and the result is this magical superorganism that can recreate itself. And, just as with a hypothetical self-improving AI, the sky’s the limit for an autopoietic America that remembers how to be young. We are like a tree that can prune and water itself. Individuals, psychologically, must water all rings of their tree; to be authentically myself, I must integrate and honor my baby self, my 5 year old self, my 10 year old self, and so on up through the rings of this aching 25 year old spine. So, too, with nations. America grew up too fast. We have remembered too many things, and forgotten what’s most important. To make America young again is to honor the spirit of the seed: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…”
That is another sense in which America is a child— we are responsible for raising it. In democracy, we are all each other’s children. To love our neighbors as ourselves is to see the child in them, to recognize the same child in us. This is the way to weave a more perfect union.
An invisible halo of light radiates around the head of every human baby; this is the shine of the future. The bell of the universe is forever ringing with the pure laughter of a playing child. To hear it is to realize we are already saved. The sequoia seed of who we are has been replanted. It is already a New World.
America will be young again.
What follows is a series of four interconnected essays: Refind America, Refine America, Redefine America, and Refound America. Each of these explores a different way of making America young again. America needs to refind and rekindle the torch that made it special in the first place, and use the best of its past to light the way forwards. America needs to once again focus its energies on frequent refinement, editing, evolution, letting go of what no longer serves its ideals while reforming itself to better align with those ideals. America needs to redefine itself with a new identity, a mix of the best of the past & the best of the future, an identity worth being proud of & worth living up to. Ultimately, America needs to reignite the revolutionary spirit which birthed it and once again take up the mantle of the Founders in order to refound a new America, an America that can last much longer than a quarter millennium, an America that can grow as large and as long as a giant sequoia.
This is how we will make America young again.
Refind America
The first step for our movement is to refind America. To refind America means to engage with the American past in order to find the resources to make a better American future. It means to rediscover the best of the American inheritance and bring it to life again in the modern world. It means taking the question “What Made America Great?” seriously; more importantly, it means deciding what elements within American greatness made America good.
Refinding America embraces an essentially conservative impulse, the impulse to preserve what works, preserve what is good, preserve our sense of being in touch with eternal things. In a fragile world, it is important to pass on successful beliefs and rituals from our ancestors; conservatives recognize that the memory of the species is a sacred and tenuous thing, the only thing that keeps us from reverting to a much lower quality of life. This conservative impulse is an essential element in human societies; all societies need a balance of stability and change. The stability creates space for change; the stability ensures continuity along time for the changing entity. There is some optimal balance to be found between preservation and innovation; too much of either throws societies off balance. Too much conservatism and you get an enervated society stuck in maladaptive patterns; too much progressivism and you get a stack of severed heads in Paris, or a foundationless power vacuum easily co-opted by a Stalin.
This conservative impulse can be good or bad, depending on what it is you’re preserving. Preserving slavery is bad. Preserving wilderness is good. Preserving inherited wealth in the hands of monopolists or imbeciles is bad. Preserving the wealth-generating idea that genuinely free markets should be open and dynamic is good. Preserving old out-group hatreds is bad. Preserving the right to free speech is good. Preserving cultural barriers of class-based or race-based gatekeeping is bad. Preserving the timeless power of Great Books is good. Preserving an identity of America as closed, infallible, invincible, and domineering is bad. Preserving an identity of America as open, fluid, evolving, and dedicated to ideals of democracy and liberty is good.
We need to work through our history as a society with depth and breadth, guided by values. We need to absorb as much of our past as we can, and do so with an eye towards our ideals. We need to deal with all of the good and bad in our story. We need to embrace the good and release the bad. We need to use the good to heal the bad. We need to cultivate a healthy, intelligent conservatism. We need to be careful not to conserve the bad, but also careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. When people say they hate America, they are engaging in sloppy thinking. America is an unimaginably massive composite noun; it contradicts itself; it is large, it contains multitudes. For every overzealous logging operation, there was activist resistance; when America expanded into an overseas empire, some of America’s public intellectuals founded the Anti-Imperialist League; the sin of slavery does not mean we should lose sight of the incandescent lessons of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, Jean Toomer, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King Jr. We also must be careful not to fall into the easy trap of seeing any figures in American history as all-good or all-bad, because everyone contains both and everyone is a product of context; many corporations have done good things for Americans and the world, despite all of the ways in which some have also done bad. There are some great things about American capitalism worth preserving, as well as things which are not.
The impulse of conservatism is often easily co-opted by established interests; keeping everything the same benefits those already in power. It is psychologically easy to sell sameness-as-such, without specifying what particularly you are interested in preserving. This is why America in the last 60 years has witnessed the abuse of Christianity by the wealthy in order to secure political power for corporate tax cuts. Despite the fact that Christ spoke explicitly against the hoarding of wealth, the wealthy play upon Christians’ desire to preserve their culture and use that for their own gain, hurting the material situation of most American Christians in the process. In fact, these corporations are partially responsible for the very cultural decay that American Christians understandably wish to conservatively forestall. Conserving the teachings of Christ is good; conserving corporate welfare is bad.
A new American conservatism must be more discriminate in what it chooses to conserve and what it chooses to relinquish. A better education system will be helpful in this effort to work through our past, but we can’t wait 30 years for a new education system’s effects to be felt. Thus, the current generations of Americans must engage in an unprecedented effort of self-education on a wide scale. We need Americans of all ages to voluntarily and collectively work through their past. We need to rediscover the best values at the heart of America, and use those values to guide us. Parts of our past that do not serve those values need to be recognized & relinquished, while parts of our past that do serve those values need to be celebrated & developed.
In order to work, this will need to be a far-reaching cultural project driven by dedicated individuals. It must become culturally popular and high-status, it must become something people want to engage with. Given average Americans’ famously low appetite for learning history, this will be quite a difficult uphill battle. For my part, I am working on a Great American Novel Project, which I hope can be a catalyst for such a modern reckoning with the American inheritance. The idea behind the Great American Novel Project is to read my way through all of the best American history, literature, poetry, philosophy, etc., or at least as much as I can, in order to bring all these different voices into dialogue within myself. Hopefully, then, I can refine the grand discourse of the American past in order to present it to modern-day Americans as a well-developed starting point for discussion. Hopefully, my work can act as a sort of conspectus of American thought, a relatively comprehensive and high-quality tour through the American intellectual inheritance that makes it easy for Americans to explore their culture themselves. Furthermore, I hope my in-depth exploration of the American inheritance can perform some of the necessary work of revaluing different aspects of America, helping to decide what is worth preserving and developing. Of course, my voice will not be the last on anything, just a catalyst; this will require broad public involvement.
There is a great web of dialogue between America’s brightest idealists and thinkers; the threads of this web span across America through time and space. The more one follows these threads, the more one sees how they all connect; a big picture begins to emerge. The central thread of American values is liberty. America at its best is dedicated to the growth of freedom itself, freedom of all kinds, freedom in all directions. Liberty is power; it is possibility and the realization of possibility. The growth of liberty is like the evolution of organic life; it becomes more diverse. Novelty emerges. Potential complexifies. In America at its best, freedom is philosophically equivalent to the Good. The best Americans are the ones who in some way facilitated or fought for the unfolding of freedom in the world, and this is the central thread of American thought that ought to be most fiercely conserved.
With the proliferation of liberty as the Good, the best American idealists have tried to push America towards an ever-evolving ideal of democracy. When I talk about the ideal of democracy (really liberal democracy, but it’s best to keep things simple), I am not talking about a political system. I am talking about the idea that ‘the more things interact, the more things develop.’ The more voices in a discussion, the more ideas refine towards truth. The more elements you mix together, the more complex molecules you can form. Freedom is a social thing. To maximize one’s own freedom, you should want to maximize everyone’s freedom. Sure, there will be some conflicts, some situations where different freedoms have friction with one another, or where freedom and fairness come into opposition; but on the whole, more freedom for everyone leaves everyone better off. A society in which elites allow a smart poor kid into Harvard will be better off than a society which leaves those talents uncultivated.
The ideal of democracy tells us that all things touch, that all things have value, that all things have voice; to allow more and more novel interactions between these things produces more and more unique goods in the world. The ideal of democracy tells us that if everyone is empowered with the support of society to develop their own liberty to the fullest, then everyone benefits. The ideal of democracy recognizes the great truth that society creates individuals while individuals create society; robust individuals are the beating heart of a strong community, and a strong community generates robust individuals. The ideal of democracy is the ever-evolving dream of finally solving the great riddle of our species, of reconciling the tension between our individually-evolved selfishness and our group-evolved altruism, of balancing our imperfect eusociality (more on this can be found in The Unfinished Fiction of the Nation). It is the dream of optimizing the relationship between our individuality and our sociality, of maximizing collective freedom and maximizing individual freedom. It is the dream of making the whole world into a single tribe, a compassionate and creative tribe that brings out the best of human potential. It is the dream of creating the conditions to unleash more unique, more diverse, more creative, more free, more powerful human beings. It is the dream of an ever-evolving utopia.
Essential to this ideal is an embrace of the fact that the universe is always becoming, always evolving and changing. When two people enter into dialogue and come up with a new idea, they are in alignment with the ever-changing universe by expanding possibility. They have created a new freedom. Thus, the ironic thing about conservatively embracing the best ideas from the American past is that the most profound American thinkers all in some way embraced the idea of the world as always becoming. An ultimate American idea to conserve is the insight that nothing can be conserved forever, that all things die and metamorphosize, and that the best thing humans can do given a world of flux is to be flexible and changeable themselves. A truly conservative American would agree with Emerson or Jefferson by acknowledging that, since all things evolve, mankind and its institutions must also evolve every now and then to keep up. To be a true American conservative you must be liberal, as in classical Enlightenment liberal, concerned with the protection and expansion of human liberty. To be a true American conservative you must be a little bit progressive, as in aware of the need for human institutions to be periodically renewed or updated in order to stay vital. In order to preserve what we have, we often must change them to adapt to a new world. Although we cannot always preserve old forms, we can preserve their spirits precisely by giving the old things new forms.
Take the example of the Founding Fathers. Conservatives like to reference the authority and ethos of the Founders when making certain arguments. Some conservative judges like to make their judgments based on a strict interpretation of ‘the letter of the law.’ But the Founders themselves didn’t intend to be used this way. As good classical Enlightenment liberals, they knew that change was the only constant. They had many differing opinions on just about every element of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and some of them were probably right and some were probably wrong. Some of each got into the final compromises, and the Founders were aware of how fallible they were. They fully expected that the Constitution would be edited significantly over time. In fact, they counted on it. Jefferson famously said that there should be a new American Revolution every 20 years or so with each new generation; he believed that was the only way to keep institutions fresh, adaptive, and alive. He knew how living words can lose their spirit and become dead dogma over time. The most brilliant thing about the Constitution is not the language in black ink, but the blank white spaces around, the possibility of edits and lively additions to adapt America to changing times. Thus, idolizing the Founders and Constitution as immovable and infallible artifacts to be preserved is actually a betrayal of their spirit. The way to truly conserve the spirit of the Constitution is to change it, and the way to truly conserve the spirit of the Founders is to Refound America. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The spirit tends to do that.
Refine America
To refine America is to reform America towards a more ideal version of itself. We want to refine America guided by the core ideals of democracy and freedom. The central promise democracy makes to individuals is that ordinary people will get the chance to become freer and greater. Reforms are good insofar as they increase our collective ability by acknowledging and equipping the ordinary genius of men and women.
America was designed for refinement. The most brilliant innovation of the Founders was that the expectation of further innovation was built into the system. Baked into the structure of our Constitution & our government is the meta-ability to alter the structure itself. We can edit the nation to adapt to an ever-changing world, to improve our systems as we learn more about the way things work. The Founders showcased a deep intellectual humility in doing this; they knew what the wisest men know, which is that nobody ever knows anything for sure, and that certainty is bound to change with time. They empowered the American nation-state with the ability to avoid the traps that most human institutions fall into, the traps of inertia, stagnancy, enervation, staying the same in the face of changing environments, eroding away like an empty castle in a hurricane. They made the American government self-editable, reconstructable, fluid, dynamic, responsive, adaptable; in short, they aligned the structure of the state with the needs of all organic beings under evolution. They made the government a little more alive.
The urge to refine and reform the American nation-state is an inherently progressive impulse. At its best, the progressive impulse is the animating principle behind America’s great effort to achieve itself, to become more ideal, to adapt to changing times, to become more democratic, more free, more prosperous, more human. At its worst, the progressive impulse can lead to instability, resentment, violence, and social collapse. There is some optimal balance to be achieved within the progressive impulse, just as there is within the conservative impulse, and just as there is between the two.
The goal of refining America is revolutionary reform. There is an old, worn-out debate on the left between ‘reform’ & ‘revolution,’ as if the two were in conflict. Reformists are often derided as insufficient & weak; revolutionaries are often derided as deluded & dangerous. The truth is that we need both in balance. We must maintain the high utopian aspirations of revolution to fundamentally reshape our societal systems; yet we must also recognize that the only way to safely accomplish this revolutionary reshaping is through the accumulation of many reforms. A society is like a living thing; when you perform surgery on a living thing, you must be careful. You shouldn’t try to do heart surgery and a liver transplant at the same time. It is very easy to topple the tower of cards. The fact is that our modern systems are so complicated and so entrenched in our lives that it is impossible to change it all in one revolutionary swoop, as much as we’d love to dream of that. All of our loved ones will be hurt in the inevitable collapse, since the modern political economy is essentially a hostage situation. We must rebuild the Ship of Theseus piece by piece in order to ensure sufficient stability & continuity for society while making necessary changes & important experiments. Ideals of revolution, when wielded pragmatically, can inspire us to make the massive reforms we need. We must not shy away from anything; everything is on the table; nothing is sacred save human freedom. We must be willing to edit, eliminate, or replace any aspect of our systems from the bottom up or the top down. Revolution is the idea, reform is the method. Over time, many reforms add up to a sustainable revolution.
The two existing lefts in America are pusillanimous, and have essentially given up their legitimacy. The mainstream neoliberal American left cedes the center of the battlefield to the right and the current system; they accept the existing arrangements of our particular market economy as inevitable, eternal, and unchangeable. They merely attempt to alleviate some of the harm of a system they tacitly support; they attempt weakly to humanize it, to edit it; their highest goal is to negotiate a discount on the suffering unleashed by a system they fundamentally accept. They attempt to maintain the post-FDR social democracy deal made between the people and the government in the wake of the Depression and the War, while the right slowly chips away at it. Their only weapons seem to be outdated bureaucratic state interventions from the 1930s or tax-and-transfer policies meant to soften the damage of runaway inequality. But tax-and-transfer is a weak way to build social solidarity, and not enough to found a flourishing society upon. By accepting the basic structure of the system, they are continually fighting a losing battle with the powers that be. This left does not dare seek a cure through radically changing our political-economic structures to become more genuinely democratic; they are content with selling painkillers. They are the good cop in the good cop / bad cop drama. They are the pride flag on the Predator missile. They lack the institutional imagination to make genuinely profound reforms to our current system, and lack the courage to replace anything major. Furthermore, their elite leaders are often too personally invested in the status quo to be counted on for any significant revolutionary reforms. They want to have their cake and eat it too, benefit from the current system while also socially posturing against it They have the pragmatic institutional power to reform, but they lack the revolutionary imagination.
The other American left, the ideological left of university professors and Gen Z Tumblr expatriates, is no more capable of the progress necessary. In contrast to the neoliberal left, the ideological left has plenty of revolutionary imagination, but lacks the pragmatic power to reform. This left explores and embraces a wide diversity of potential revolutionary ideals, from Marxism to Anarchism to a whole range of Socialisms and beyond. However, they lack political willpower, and are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to make real political impact. Real political impact requires focusing on areas of agreement. It requires reaching out to those you don’t normally associate with, and it requires meeting them halfway. It requires respecting and loving those who know less than you. It requires pragmatically working with others, even those you disagree with. It requires alliance and compromise. It requires appeals to average people, appeals to people’s identities. It requires accepting the existence of the nation-state and leaning into it for pragmatic purposes. It requires some form of positive nationalism or patriotism, something to inspire people to want to join you in your revolutionary reforms. But the existing ideological left remains, by and large, unwilling to play the game of pragmatic politics in this way. Since Vietnam they have been quite content feeling smugly, impotently correct from the sidelines. They will spectate the news and ironically comment on how messed up everything is without doing anything about it. They will posture on Twitter, at faculty meetings, or in a group chat, but they will not outreach to poor white communities. They enjoy the spectacle of politics but not the hard work and messy substance of politics. They would rather be purely right and powerless than half-right and empowered to make imperfectly positive changes. They use political identities as a way of drawing the boundaries of their tribe; cancel culture is basic tribal psychology with a righteous veneer. This disturbing trend seems to be fueling an increasing Balkanization of the left, as people are inclined to denounce more and more potential allies for various impurities, redrawing the moral tribe smaller and smaller. This is the opposite of what you should do if you’re looking to build revolutionary majorities to make real political progress.
The left we need would pragmatically pursue revolutionary reform in alignment with the ideals of liberty and democracy. It would embrace the messy work of politics, accept imperfect improvements given constraints, and not shy away from experimentation; however, it would also not lose sight of its radical revolutionary ideals, and work towards reforms of the deepest structures of the American system. It would embrace the fact that our social systems are created by us, and no element is unchangeable with the power of the human imagination. This left would abandon the need to adhere to worn-out or imported European social theories, and abandon the need for moral purity or in-group prioritization. Instead, this new left will focus on inclusivity, which includes including privileged groups and those who have voted conservative. This left will emphasize its commitment to increasing human liberty and increasing human community; freedom and democracy are universally beloved by Americans of all political affiliations. The new left will not need Marxism or any other imported ism; ending the oppression of the working class is a goal that can be couched in pro-American, pro-democratic language (as well as pro-Christian, pro-liberty, etc.) The new left needs to align its reform mission with the mission of the American nation; it needs to use a positive form of nationalism to inspire Americans to live up to their highest ideals. This is how every great American progressive movement has succeeded— by pitching their reforms in pro-America language, exhorting the nation to better honor their highest values rather than scolding it. Pride is a better motivator than shame. For much more on the value of positive nationalism, please read The Unfinished Fiction of the Nation.
A new left aligned with American identity and positively dedicated to both individual and collective empowerment will be able to enact revolutionary reform. Revolutionary reform takes place over time. It’s slower than revolution, but is more stable and entails less risk. While we must be somewhat careful and attempt reforms in the ‘right’ order, we will never really know what is right until we try different ideas. Experimentalism and looseness are key. During the Depression, FDR threw a bunch of meatballs at the wall; some stuck, some didn’t, but the ones that stuck were worth the failed experiments. Experimentalism has long been part of what defines America, and we need to reconnect with that spirit. For too long, Americans have indulged in a peculiar institutional idolatry with regard to their system of government. Americans accept and embrace frequent change and experimentation in many aspects of their lives, particularly their technology and culture. But for some reason, Americans assume that the Founders got everything exactly right 200 years ago, that America perfected the art of statecraft and that all other nations ought to more or less imitate our perfection. Of course, this is not the case, and there is much we could improve. America’s experimental ethos ought to be applied to its fundamental structures of government.
Historically, great structural reformation in America has only occurred in response to crisis. The American Revolution, the Civil War, the Depression/World War II era— every 80 years or so, a major crisis forces America to reinvent itself. First the Founding of the nation; then the ‘Second Founding’ of the Reconstruction Amendments after the bloody Civil War; then the FDR social-democratic New Deal between labor & capital, along with the rise of the war machine, nationalization, & big government. Of course, it has now been 80 years since the last crisis. While I hope I am wrong, it seems like we are too far along to prevent the next crisis. The key, then, will be to seize the opportunity presented by the crisis in order to build a better system for the next 80 years. There is probably a wide variance for how well the opportunity can be leveraged— one of the goals of the Great American Novel Project and the Sequoia Papers is to make good ideas available for America’s rebuilding. I think the most important reforms we should prioritize in the coming years are those which make reform itself less dependent on crisis. While adaptive cycles of disequilibrium and equilibrium are inevitable in society, the instability of the system and the amplitude of corrective swings matter a lot. People suffer in crises, and the more shocking the crisis is, the more people suffer. Crises are more shocking for an organism that hasn’t updated in a while, that hasn’t continually re-adapted to the ever-changing environment. We should seize the next crisis to implement reforms which make America more adaptable without need for crisis, so that future crises hurt less.
The goal is to raise the temperature of politics. To raise the temperature means to increase the rate at which changes, decisions, and actions can be made. James Madison introduced two key features into the American government— a system of checks and balances, as well as various mechanisms to slow the pace of politics. We ought to preserve the former and discard the latter, as Roberto Unger argues. The modern world requires a more responsive, high-energy American government. The sum of revolutionary reform is a bloodless, democratic, constantly simmering revolution. While I could get into specifics about what kind of reforms I’d like to see, from deepening democracy, to reinventing education, to democratizing the market economy, this essay is not the place to get into specifics. What is most important right now is meta-reform— reforms that enable us to reform more, reforms in the mechanisms of reform. All other positive reform is downstream from this.
Redefine America
The project of redefining America is intimately intertwined with the projects of refinding and refining. To redefine America is to change what America ‘is’, the idea it represents, the social-linguistic identity of America, the imagined noun we use to attempt to grasp an evolving verb. By changing our understanding of what America ‘is’, we change our direction; the choices we make determine who we are, and who we want to be determines the choices we will make next. Ideas matter. Redefining America means getting clear about what America actually wants to represent, who it wants to be, where it wants to go. It means reconstructing our past, refining our present, and orienting ourselves to a future identity worth living up to. For a much deeper dive into redefining America, please read my essay ‘The Unfinished Fiction of the Nation.’
We redefine America when we re-engage with America’s past in an attempt to refind America. Every time we construct a history, we reconstruct it; every time we tell a story, we recreate it; every time we try to grasp our past, we reimagine it. The very act of engaging with the past makes it present, and therefore inherently different than it was, somewhat like how observation changes the thing observed in quantum mechanics. Somewhere between the world and ourselves is our idea of the world, formed in interaction. Redefinition is a form of poetry. While our constant reinterpretation of the past is no doubt tied to some sort of ‘objective’ past, our act of imagining it unavoidably means we turn it into a story, a story fictionalized out of bits and pieces of fact. Thus, we have a bit of good-faith storytelling leeway to work with when telling our story and redefining America through refinding America. In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty writes “Nobody knows what it would be like to try to be objective when attempting to decide what one’s country really is, what its history really means, any more than when answering the question of who one really is oneself, what one’s individual past really adds up to. We raise questions about our individual or national identity as part of the process of deciding what we will do next, what we will try to become.” The point of the past is the present, and the present we identify puts us on paths to different futures. To redefine America is to write a story; certainly we must take all the facts into account, but the story we tell with those facts is entirely up to us. Do we see the story of America as one of unforgivable sin and failure? What kind of future does that story indicate? Or do we see the story of America as an ongoing and imperfect struggle for freedom, a struggle with a rich history and future worth fighting for? Are the oppressed victims or heroes? Do the bad guys define America more than the good guys? Is anyone all good or all bad? Who have we been, and who would we like to become? The stories we tell about our past create the conditions for our creation of the future.
We also redefine America through the process of refining America. When we reform any aspect of America, our understanding of what America is reforms with the physical or social changes. The idea adapts to the new materials; the identity adapts to the new reality. To refine is to redefine. Furthermore, redefinition can orient efforts to reform. If we redefine America as a set of positive ideas of liberty and democracy, then this new story can enable reforms in the directions indicated by the identity of America we construct. To redefine America in such a way as to make evolution itself a core aspect of American identity would be a higher-level instantiation of this idea.
We want to create a new national identity worth conserving and worth progressing towards. We want to create a new national story worth being proud of and worth living up to. National pride is a precondition for national improvement just as self-love is a precondition for self-improvement. If we would like to inspire America to live up to its highest ideals, we must define those ideals, tell the story of America so far in terms of those ideals, and then orient our next actions towards the greater realization of those ideals.
We want to use the amoral power of nationalism for moral purposes. For too long nationalism has been associated only with immoral usages; warmongering, fearmongering, the demonization of some arbitrary ‘other.’ Demagogues have long played with the great power of national tribal identity in order to get people to do all sorts of things. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The same power can be harnessed for good purposes. The power of national tribal identity building can be redirected towards refinding and refining. It can be redirected towards prosocial policies and positive developments for humanity. It can be redirected towards the spread of liberty in the world. It can be redirected towards charity, growth, connection, adaptation. It can be redirected towards grand national projects for the betterment of the planet.
An important aspect of the effort to redefine America will be to rehabilitate America’s public image on the global stage. After all, what is an identity but how one imagines oneself to be known by others? In 1943, during World War II, former Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie flew around the world to visit many of the smaller or less developed countries involved in the war. In his travels he found that many countries had a positive image of America and Americans. Whereas people in many countries had negative feelings about some of the other colonial powers at war, they often saw Americans as morally distinct from and better than, say, the British. They saw Americans as the good guys, less imperialistic, having humane ideals, caring, dedicated to a future of peace and democracy. Willkie called this positive global impression America’s ‘Reservoir of Good Will.’ This reservoir was essential to getting much of the world on board with America’s far-reaching plans for the postwar order. It allowed America to build the international world we know today. American ‘soft power’ has long been just as important as American ‘hard power,’ and in some ways it’s more important. Forcing people to do what you want sinks in a lot less deeply than getting people to want to do what you want because they like you. America’s cultural influence has more lasting effects on global behaviors than American military bases. Being perceived as ‘the good guy’ is invaluable. And yet, we have lost the reservoir of good will. It was drained by Vietnam, it was drained further by CIA actions in Latin America, and it ran dry when we decided to go alone into the Middle East. Rehabilitating our damaged image abroad will be difficult, but we must refill the reservoir. It is very dangerous to be at the top without truly loyal friends. While redefining America for Americans is important, redefining America for the rest of the world cannot be overlooked.
Identities are powerful, sticky, self-referential things. Once you have an identity, you take actions to ‘live up to’ that identity, actions which then reinforce the identity— clearly, this can set up feedback loops, ever-tightening spirals converging on stable sameness, restricting the future cone of possibilities. This reification of identity is what makes adulthood so boring compared to childhood, when one can experience feelings of limitless potential.
There is, however, an escape from this feedback loop if you’re willing to go meta. The only identity which can escape, resist, or at least grow in productive tension with the tendency towards identity reification is an identity of identity recreation, an identity whose essential characteristic is the destruction and redefinition of itself. With this meta-identity as a throughline, the organism bearing this identity is free to evolve much more rapidly to an ever-changing environment. It is free to progress proactively— in other words, it need not wait for a crisis to force it to change violently and dramatically. It can edit itself more fluidly and painlessly over time. It is like an AI which can edit its own code. It can stay young and full of potential forever. Embracing an identity of identity-redefinition is the solution to the problem of both needing identity and needing adaptability.
At its best, America has embraced this meta-identity of identity redefinition. This is the identity of America as an ongoing experiment, a continually changing process. It is America defined most essentially by what it could be, not what it has been. In this view, the most real America exists in the future, not the past or present. America is an ideal to move towards, not a history to restore. Historically, this view of America as an essentially future-oriented entity has been very powerful, particularly in eras that saw significant progressive change such as the 1850s and 1910s. When you identify the nation with recreation, with novelty itself, you unlock many benefits. The meme of the ‘New World’ is a meta-meme, a meme that facilitates the creation of more memes downstream. When we begin to identify with novelty-creation as valuable in itself, we are able to build the ‘New World’ in limitless directions. Progress in art supports progress in philosophy supports progress in science supports progress in politics. I discuss the meta-meme of the New World in more depth in my essay ‘America & The Shape of the Far Future’.
When we redefine America, we gain the power to refound America.
Refound America
Humans are unsurpassed in their ability to ‘find’ the world, to experience reality and come to discover it. If we are to believe Plato, this finding is really a ‘refinding’; all discovery is, in a sense, the universe ‘remembering’ a possible part of itself it had forgotten in our finitude. But humans are most exceptional in our ability to ‘found’ reality, to refound reality, to create the world. We can imagine an idea— an idea that’s not felt by our senses, only implied by extending the environment— and make it real. We can see spirit and concretize possibility. We can found a new world in our hands like clay, we can form a home out of sticks and mud. We can build an institution out of concrete and bring it to life through minds believing in the same idea, through hands continually making the idea real long after the first mind dies. The mind of Hamilton still shapes the institutions of America, as the mind of Steve Jobs is still coursing through Apple. The minds of Americans today can recreate the institutions of this nation in order to make a richer, freer, and more loving world for future generations.
We must regain the energy of the Founders at all levels of our society. Every American ought to be a Founder of something. We ought to frequently found new associations, clubs, unions, reading groups, and churches. We ought to found new institutions, museums, libraries, and media publications. We ought to found new government organizations, think tanks, international organizations, and research teams. We ought to found companies and nonprofits— the Silicon Valley startup founder is an admirable and deeply American archetype. We even ought to found new cities, and experiment with new ways that humans can live and prosper together. Every day is a New World. If anything, there are even wider vistas of possible worlds to found outstretched before us today than the original Founders could ever imagine.
Just as much as we found new institutions, we should refound old institutions. In a becoming universe, an ever-changing environment, living things need to evolve & adapt to survive & thrive. Insofar as something stops changing, it starts dying. Human institutions are the same way. They need to be frequently shaken up in order to stay adaptable and keep up with a changing world. When we found or refound institutions we want to make them strong yet pliable, and build in mechanisms to edit themselves over time. We want to avoid reification, calcification, ossification, enervation, noun-ification. As we iterate on institutions through frequent refounding, we should try to avoid institutional traps, dead-ends, and pitfalls discovered in our past iterations. The key here is experimentation. Experimenting with reality is how we learn and improve. It’s better to experiment with ten different iterations of something, finding a few iterations that work well in different ways and other iterations that fail in different ways, than to get something ‘right’ on the first try and decide never to change. Experimentation yields information.
America at its best has always been an experimental nation, with a culture that historically encouraged experimentation in art, technology, science, commerce, and ways of life. We Refounders ought to reinvigorate this experimental ethos. There are certain domains in modern America that are not as experimental as they could be. Progress has slowed in many research and technology areas as noted by Peter Thiel, especially slowing in areas that build in the world of atoms rather than bits. Many institutions are ossified, victims of Goodhart’s Law and small thinking. America looks remarkably homogenous across the vast continent along its interstates and in its corporations, food, hotels, land-use, zoning. American art is not able to be as experimental as it could be due to lack of funding and economic opportunities for artists to take risks. National media has led to remarkably homogenous national politics dominating local and state political variation; national media has also led to certain elements of American culture, accents, folkways, and popular imagination being relatively homogenized. Despite its legacy as a nation of cultural experimenters from 1800s communes to 1960s gatherings, Americans for the last 50 years have been subjected to a remarkably narrow, standardized set of bourgeois cultural expectations on how to live, from school through the workforce. Market capitalism can be very good at standardization, and market capitalism can be very good at diversification; it depends on how we tweak it, how we value it, and how we use it. We ought to become a nation of experimenters again, and not in narrowly prescribed domains, but broadly across every level and mode of our civilization. We ought to encourage a culture that values experimentation itself in all forms. This should start at the local level, with cities willing to take risks and experiment with new ways of living together and creating together; successful local experiments can spread to larger levels, and the more general attitude of experimentalism in other areas will spread alongside each particular experiment. This is discussed further in ‘How a City on a Hill Can Reignite America’ and ‘America & the Shape of the Far Future’.
America is also an ‘experimental nation’ in a deeper sense; the nation itself is an experiment. The nation of the United States of America is one of the boldest and grandest experiments in world history, a radical experiment in self-government, an experiment in how human beings can live with one another. The Founders understood the new nation through this experimental lens, and expected future Americans like us to continue the tradition of innovation, as evidenced by Thomas Jefferson’s belief in the need for a revolution every generation, discussed in ‘Refind America.’ However, revolution need not always be as bloody as he imagined; as discussed in ‘Refine America’ section, revolutionary reform is a more civilizationally stable way of frequently recreating America through cumulative reforms underpinned by revolutionary aspirations.
In order to Refound America, Americans will need to get over their peculiar case of ‘institutional idolatry.’ Roberto Unger has written frequently about Americans’ curious belief in the unchangeable perfection of their founding documents. It is odd that a nation so historically dedicated to innovation and reinvention in so many other domains— science, technology, business, and the arts— specifically and uncharacteristically refrains from extending the same experimental ethos to their Constitution. In the popular political discourse of modern America, the Constitution is constantly appealed to as a perfect document. It is invoked in political debates as the ultimate authority, unchallengeable, unquestionable, unchangeable. It is now popularly implied that if the godlike, fetishized Founders did something, it must be correct; excluding, of course, the fact that those Founders all disagreed with one another and expected us to change and build upon their work. We act as if the Founding Fathers discovered the ideal formula and structure for democratic government in the 1700s, and that other countries are optimally democratic insofar as they copy our successful model. This, despite the fact that the Founders themselves intentionally created an editable Constitution; this, despite the fact that many of the most important elements of this supposedly perfect system were introduced after the Constitution as a series of ten “amendments,” the Bill of Rights; this, despite the fact that, for 200 years after the ratification, Americans continued to edit and add to this structure with another 17 major ‘amendments,’ many of which radically reshaped the original system. This, also, despite the fact that we have rarely successfully exported our supposedly perfect system to other nations. For example, our peculiar split between executive and legislative elections is rare among first-world nations; most other successful democracies vote for legislatures that then choose a prime minister. I am not implying that this is an inherently superior system; I am saying that there are many different ways of structuring functional democratic governments, and that likely there are myriad experiments performed in other nations that could be useful to our own. Furthermore, there are many possible experiments across all levels and domains of nation-building that have never been tried by any nation. These could potentially be beneficial to America and help us further our development towards better embodying our worthy ideals of democracy, representation, and liberty. If America is to truly live up to its ideals, it must overcome its institutional idolatry.
Refounding America will involve political reforms. We must be willing to experiment with new systems of political decision-making as well as innovate and iterate upon our old systems. This must be guided by a collective intellectual project of defining our political values and recreating our systems to better express and implement those values. If we truly believe in representative democracy, then we must first clarify and articulate that ideal and what it means. We must come to a collective understanding about what our ideal is and then experiment with our systems in order to better ‘represent’ the ideal. This will mean political reforms and electoral reforms, perhaps involving a massive rehaul of our electoral system in order to better represent the refined will of the people. This will mean easier voting, no gerrymandering, and a rethinking of the ways in which the Senate and Electoral College distort the will of the people. This will mean a rethinking of the two-party system, and quite possibly its death, thus honoring George Washington’s original advice to avoid entangling our politics with entrenched factions. This will mean new government agencies and old agencies made new. This will mean rebalancing federal power distributions with state and local levels. This will also likely mean new states.
When making these political reforms, we will have to have a serious public debate about the virtues of democracy and the virtues of expertise, authority, and leadership. When we reform our political system we will primarily be attempting to better align our systems with ideals of democracy, of refining and representing the ‘will of the people.’ But while we may dream of an ideal future world in which pure democracy can be unleashed, and a highly educated and responsible public can effectively rule itself on all levels, we must at the present engage with the reality that there are massive differences in individual human powers, agency, access, and information. There is still great need for expertise, authority, and leadership in our society. This is a core problem of democracy addressed in the famous Lippmann-Dewey debates. We must engage in this century-old debate and create a new deal between the two sides, both of which have value. Representative democracy is pragmatically superior to a pure democracy in large groups for this reason.
In refounding America, we ought to keep in mind what we know about how human beings actually work. The original American founding, at its best, attempted to concretize institutions based on Enlightenment ideas. It was a time when a small group of people had been learning a lot about the world, and they did the best they could to institute those ideas. When we refind America, we can draw from both their successes and failures. And when we refound America, we should incorporate what we have learned in the 300 years since the first Enlightenment. In truth, progress in the accumulation of knowledge has sped up so much since the first Founding that we have experienced many equivalent ‘Enlightenments’ since then. We would be wise to incorporate into the structure of our society what we’ve learned about how human societies work— all our discoveries in psychology, economics, political science, philosophy, biology, and beyond.
In a wonderful little book called “The Gardens of Democracy,” authors Eric Liu and Nick Hanaeur summarize the shifts in worldview from the First Enlightenment of the 18th century to the Second Enlightenment of the 20th century. The essential shift can be understood as a movement from ‘Machinebrain’ to ‘Gardenbrain.’ Machinebrain treats people as cogs: votes for political machines, consumers for marketing machines, employees for industrial machines. Where Machinebrain sees humans as fixed gears, Gardenbrain sees humans as complex, interrelated, dynamic ecosystems. The world is a complex adaptive system, not a linear equilibrium system; the elements within it are networked, not atomized; humans operate in that system as emotional reciprocal approximators, not rational self-regarding calculators. We go from mechanistic to behavioral, predictive to adaptive, efficient to effective, equilibrium to disequilibrium, independent to interdependent, individual ability to group diversity, selfish to reciprocal, win-lose to win-win or lose-lose, competition to cooperation. Most importantly, we come to understand that true self-interest is mutual interest. This shift has profound impacts on how we can imagine constructing a healthy society.
For example, Enlightenment Machinebrain sees the economy as a perfectly efficient system, either on its own or with a bit of ‘regulation’ depending on your party. Second Enlightenment Gardenbrain sees the economy as a garden, something organic to be tended; nurturing the growth of positive things is just as important as weeding out the negative. Government is a gardener whose primary task is to promote the organic power of free markets towards pro-social goals. Markets are great tools, but their greatest benefit can be enjoyed when we encourage those tools towards valuable projects. Government’s role is not to pick winners, but to pick which games to play; the government says we should reinvent our energy sector, and then unleashes and empowers the market forces that will come up with solutions. True wealth is more solutions, not more problems; market forces are happy to create either if the incentives are there. A truer, healthier capitalism would encourage growth from the middle out, promote high recirculation of wealth, empower citizens with education and capital to maximize the number of able and diverse competitors, break up opportunity monopolies, encourage true competition, and harness market forces towards valuable national goals. When we refound America, this will mean recreating the American political economy, combining the best elements of capitalism and democracy in order to democratize the market economy and unleash widespread prosperity.
A new understanding of the role of the media in a democracy will also be an essential element in refounding America. It is often said that the media is the ‘fourth branch’ of government, and this gets at a deep truth. Democracy is based on public discourse; the essence of democracy lies in debate, dialectic, the truth-refining power of human discussion. The basic faith of democracy rests on the belief that, if enough people talk long enough and deeply enough about an issue with maximum relevant information, then more than half of them will come to the best answer more than half of the time. Democracy is a function of language, a manifestation of the superorganism of the tribe, a process of the species. The ideal of democracy assumes an ideal informational environment. The shape of public discourse is the shape of democracy.
Thus, the mediums through which we engage in this public discourse have a massive influence on how our democracy functions. It is abundantly clear that our current profit-driven corporate media and social media ecosystems are not ideal informational environments. Rather than optimizing for informing the democratic public with the most relevant, salient, substantive information possible, our warped corporate television media optimize for entertainment, spectatorial lack of agency, and whatever buys eyeballs until the ad break. Rather than building the most ideal infrastructure for productive, open, and intelligent debate possible, our warped click-driven social media encourage poor quality discourse driven by addictive algorithms incentivizing low-level psychological engagement, tribal in-group formation, and rage-based tabloid gossip. Both mediums have a bias towards selling our worst, most animal elements back to ourselves rather than towards enlightening us to higher values and better, more rational versions of ourselves. Both mediums have a bias for emotionally triggering information rather than highly useful information, which leads to increasing vicious feedback loops of polarization tearing democracy apart rather than building unity. In other words, the current mediums through which democracy primarily operates are inherently and structurally toxic to democracy.
A refounded America will therefore require new media for information dissemination, information access, and information discussion. I will be writing a future essay to dive more deeply into this topic, but for now I will sketch out some preliminary thoughts towards these necessary evolutions in democratic mediums. Firstly, I believe democracy will require information mediums insulated from the profit motive. Information dissemination, access, and discussion mediums based on the profit motive will always prioritize the wrong things for the sake of attention and engagement, like information that sells to our basest psychological impulses and existing biases. A healthy democracy must prioritize free, useful public information and debate oriented towards truth, salience, rationality, and the pragmatic solving of societal problems. The point of information is to take action, not to endlessly debate issues for sport and get nowhere. Philosophically, democracy is based on the idea of information as communication between equal subjects with an inherent telos of mutual understanding and optimal group decision-making; currently, a model of information as power to be leveraged against others for limited individual gain is dominant instead.
Secondly, we must have a robust media-theoretical discussion about the differing value of particular mediums to democracy. In ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death,’ Neil Postman convincingly argues that television as a medium dedicated to spectatorial entertainment is simply a poor medium to base a democracy upon; I discuss this further in ‘American Nihilism & Its Discontents,’ ‘The Unfinished Fiction of the Nation,’ and future essays. Democracy developed best in societies based on the typographic medium for various reasons. Typographic language encourages people to think rationally and abstractly, to string concepts together through complex association chains, to work through ideas with depth and a sense of context. Furthermore, inherent in the modality of typography is the dialectic, conversation, the generative interaction of subjectivity, the productive essence of discourse itself; the nature of dialectic is to refine towards truth. Democracy is based on this function of dialectic; two people enter into debate, they both learn from the other side, and in their interactive discussion they both get a better understanding of the truth between and beyond them. Television does provide semantic content presented in language, but it is degraded by the influence of images and by the imperative to entertainment which leads to short-form, contextless, surface-deep discussion— is a one minute one liner in a televised debate really the best way to choose the leader of the free world? Radio and podcasts are better, because they involve longer form linguistic content. But the written word is still best, because with the written word you can see the entirety of a conceptual argument laid out, organized logically, all the parts building a structural whole. Furthermore, typography has one last, most important advantage: agency. When you passively absorb television news, you do so phenomenologically as a spectator. You are being presented a world ‘out there’ that has little context with your life, and which you cannot really respond to. But when you actively read a text, you are forced to imagine the content yourself. You engage in a form of dialogue with the text, an interactive dialogue that takes place within your own head. You are an agent in a world of context, a world in which you are a participant and a world in which you can take action. Democracy is all about self-rule, and it requires strong agency. I would argue that the spectatorial politics of the last 60 years are a direct result of the rise of television to the status of meta-medium, the primary medium of society which all other mediums must remediate into, and which trains people’s brains to think in the modalities of that medium. Therefore, a functional refounded democracy will require a return to the primacy of the typographic medium, so that we can engage in the work of democracy as agents. This will be a difficult problem to solve. I suspect it will involve a massive educational element & a massive cultural element driven by the recognition that the written word is essential to democracy.
Finally, a refounded American media system aligned with the ideals of democracy will require a new kind of public square designed to foster optimal discussion conditions. In other words, we need a new democratic social media. This new social media will have as its guiding principle the refinement of public information towards truth, so that we can take information and use it effectively to make the best possible decisions for pragmatic collective action on the problems that matter. Democracy lives in debate; we must create the new infrastructure for democracy itself. This new democratic social media, divorced from the profit motive, must be open and available to all. It must learn from all the successes and failures of previous social media. It must be able to encourage substantive debate, community engagement, and compromise. It must be able to balance needs for both expertise and popular input. It must contain mechanisms for allowing the best discourse contributions to rise to the top, as well as for allowing new voices to be heard for the first time. It must allow everyone to speak, while also having moderation mechanisms in place to prevent bad actors from polluting the space, distracting discourse with misinformation or disinformation or irrelevancy, and turning democracy into a Youtube comments section. In order to prevent abuse and keep discourse as free and open as possible, these moderation mechanisms must also be subject to their own checks and balances; just as a representative can be recalled by the people if he fails to fulfill his purpose, the moderators of the democratic public square must be accountable in some way. It will be important to cultivate a culture that values quality discourse as an end-in-itself if this is to work. No system can make discourse perfect by force; people have to want to make discourse as perfect as possible for themselves. Making it socially valuable and high-status to promote productive discourse will go a long way. Citizenship should be tied to accounts so that there are no anonymous or repeat accounts. Transparency, openness, and rationality ought to be guiding ideals for this new medium. We should explicitly teach people how to be good-faith arguers, and then operate under the assumption that everyone is acting in good faith. We should teach people about overcoming biases, the basics of rationality, and how to avoid common argumentative fallacies. We should incorporate everything we’ve learned in the last few centuries about how humans work in order to create the most ideal environment for intelligent discussion, and then create mechanisms for translating that discussion into action through polling, voting, and mandates upon reaching group decisions. Democracy works through various mediums whether consciously or not; our goal is to make democracy conscious of itself, and provide the best possible infrastructure for democracy to flourish. Experimenting with the possibilities for a new democratic social media on the level of the city first, as a sort of online town square, will be a great way to pilot and iterate upon this idea.
Ultimately, you can build all the systems you want, but what’s really necessary is to get people to want to do the right thing themselves, without coercion. Underlying all of our other problems is a more general & difficult cultural problem, a problem with American’s shared beliefs & values (or lack thereof). A critical aspect of refounding America will be the instantiation and propagation of a new democratic culture, a new civic religion. Democracy, as so many of our greatest American prophets from Walt Whitman to John Dewey have preached, is more than just a political system— it is a way of life, a culture, a personal orientation to the world.
At the end of the day, democracy is a faith. In the beautiful true illusions cast by the setting sun, today’s dream hints of a possible tomorrow, a glimpse of the art of a future sunrise. The best faiths are those that
Democracy as a faith fills all three of these conditions. Many great American democratic philosophers, poets, religious leaders, and writers have come to the same conclusion— belief in democracy is a faith that requires us to act in certain ways as individuals. The truth of democracy lies more in the future than in any system of the past or present. The history of democracy provides plenty of failures, but also provides successes which hint at the potential for a democratic future. Whitman, Jean Toomer, Muriel Rukeyser, Dewey, MLK… our greatest prophets have implied democratic vistas of possibility, and the fact that these ideals have not yet been realized fully does not imply that they have been disproved. Democracy lives or dies in the future, and that future depends on our present actions. Democracy may be true, and it would be wonderful if it were. William James wrote this about rumors of democracy’s demise: “Now, who can be absolutely certain that this may not be the career of democracy? Nothing future is quite secure; states enough have inwardly rotted— and democracy as a whole may undergo self-poisoning. But, on the other hand, democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker’s picture. The best of us are filled with the contrary vision of a democracy stumbling through every error till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with beauty.”
John Dewey once said that “Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature… faith in the capacity of every person to lead his own life free from coercion and imposition by others provided right conditions are supplied… faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly and free communication.” There is some evidence for this belief, given how democracy and freedom and education in America have already generated richer, more diverse individuals capable of some degree of self-rule; but it is impossible to ‘prove’ for certain. “All that can be said in its defense” says Richard Rorty, “is that it would produce less unnecessary suffering than any other [system], and that it is the best means to a certain end: the creation of a greater diversity of individuals– larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals.” As I wrote in the ‘American Pragmatism & American Idealism’ chapter of my essay ‘The Unfinished Fiction of the Nation,’ “I believe it is worth romanticizing the utopian potential of a genuinely democratic humanity. Democratic humanity could be Muchier, richer, more interested, more interesting, more diverse, more novel, more exciting, more imaginative, more exploratory, more experimental, more daring, more loving, happier… more everything.”
To live a faith in democracy means to take actions in line with that faith, actions oriented towards unleashing the fully empowered potential of individuals and of collectives. It means valuing lifelong education in every sense of the word. It means creating systems for the maximum exposure of humans to valuable information and creating systems for the maximum expression of human thinking. It means acting on behalf of a greater world for your grandchildren. It means acting in such a way that spreads pro-social democratic memes— lining up on the right, holding open a door for an old woman, empowering someone to build a risky startup, organizing a protest, sharing information, expanding the right to vote, listening to the neighbor you disagree with, forgiving people who wronged you, loving your partner, taking an informal vote among friends on where to go for breakfast. What we need is a democratic culture that imbues every level of our social life with the ideals of democracy. Humans need to feel as though they live in service of some higher, meaningful whole larger than themselves; faith in democracy and actions towards its future realization can fulfill this spiritual urge in human psychology. America, like all groups, needs this spiritual, moral, religious, group-aligning x-factor. The new American civic religion need not be an organized religion; in fact, it shouldn’t be, since democracy has faith in the intrinsic authority emanating from individuals. It needs to be instantiated by free individuals cultivating a culture of democracy which spreads through conscious ritual action, based on a belief in an ever-widening democratic future.
To Refound America, we will need a broad and dedicated activist movement. Have you heard of the 3.5% rule? Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth has presented compelling evidence that 3.5% is the magic number for the success of a nonviolent reform, revolution, or resistance movement. In other words, her studies across many different countries showed that once a given protest campaign enjoyed the active participation of at least 3.5% of a population, its success was statistically inevitable. This is an achievable goal in America— if 3.5% of the American people really dedicate themselves to activism on behalf of a Refounding America movement, it will pick up steam and come to fruition.
I would hope that some of the ideas sketched here would be incorporated into such a movement. As a placeholder, let’s call it R Movement— R for Refind, Refine, Redefine, and Refound America, as well as R for Our Movement. The goal of such a movement should primarily be sparking a refounding of America. This movement will require vision, fluency, and agency. It will require planning, improvising, and bases of activity. Groups of Refounders in individual cities can make a big difference on local and state levels, spreading the meme to broader swathes of American society. The new megaregion in Texas, for example, can be one such base, gathering Refounders together to work on planning and spreading the movement from the bottom up. Getting Refounders in positions of power and memetic influence will be helpful; a Refounder as President would move the needle the most, but broad support is the crucial thing. While we should discuss specific reforms, we should not let our belief in certain reforms preclude us from allying with others who have different priorities for potential reforms. It will be much easier to build alliances for the movement if we base it purely on desire for refounding as such, refounding itself. Some people will want to refound America one way, some will want to refound it another way— but either way will be preferable to the unchanging status quo. So, we gain traction for simply refounding America, something much more than 3.5% of Americans already implicitly agree on. We offer one group the potential to change America in X way, we offer another group the potential to change America in Y way, and we get them both to agitate on behalf of the same revolutionary spirit. The goal at first should simply be getting people to agree that something needs to change, and getting everyone to the table in order to then discuss exactly how to refound America. I hope that my discussions of Refinding America and Refining America have demonstrated how the conservative impulse and the progressive impulse can both be aligned behind a movement to Refound America.
The ultimate concrete goal of R Movement should be to launch a new Constitutional Convention. I will write a longer essay in the future on this topic. A Constitutional Convention is the ultimate self-editing mechanism built into the meta-structure of our Constitution by the Founders. At a new Constitutional Convention, everything would be on the table as it was for the Founders, every possibility would be up for grabs. Getting to that table will be difficult, but not impossible; there are multiple concrete paths for launching a new Constitutional Convention outlined in the Constitution, and a movement that crosses the 3.5% threshold could quite conceivably make it happen. For example, if ¾ of US state legislatures independently vote to launch a Convention, it will happen; this could be accomplished by groups of activists on a more local state-by-state basis. I would want us to take our time with it, to spend years debating what America and democracy are and what we want them to become. A Constitutional Convention would be the ultimate forum for the grand discourse of democracy itself. If successful, we could refind America by keeping what works and consciously reaffirming our commitment to the best ideas already in the Constitution; we could refine America with an attitude of revolutionary reform by editing any element of the Constitution or adding anything new to it; we could redefine America by explicitly stating its ideals and identity, and creating a system to better reflect them; in sum, we could literally refound America. The American Constitution was once the youngest, most innovative founding document of any nation on earth; now, it is the oldest active written Constitution left in the world. To refound America is to recognize that this can still be the New World, if only we have the will to believe. To refound America is to make America young again.
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 