That is our question too. Can we rededicate ourselves to the cause of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal?

Lincoln also called the Declaration of Independence the apple of gold, held up in a frame of silver, which was the Constitution. He was drawing on Proverbs, where the word of a wise man fitly spoken is said to be an apple of gold held up in a frame of silver.

I’ve been working on, writing about, and speaking about the Declaration of Independence for more than 25 years — more than a tenth of the life of our nation. For that matter, I am astonished to reflect that I have been alive for more than a fifth of the life of the nation. My mother and father have been alive for nearly a third of the life of the nation. We are still that young as a country! In America years — a concept like dog years — we might think of ourselves as still little more than a pimply, hormonal teenager, still developing our frontal cortex.

Across those years of reflection, I have come to understand what Lincoln meant when he called the Declaration of Independence the apple of gold. It was low-income night students in a class I taught in Chicago more than 25 years ago who gave me the critical insight. The Declaration tells an economical story of human agency. A group of people looked around and diagnosed their circumstances. They found them wanting. They determined to set out in a new direction, first laying out some principles to guide them. Then they clarified their diagnosis of the ills they faced, chose action steps, and set out. My night students were in my class because they, too, had surveyed their circumstances and found them wanting, and had determined to set out in a new direction. They resonated immediately to the Declaration of Independence, connecting to its story of agency.

Astonishingly, I also learned that few of them had encountered the Declaration of Independence before my course. Their inheritance — a golden apple — had been withheld from them. Why? Most generally because a generation of people had decided that a text attributed to Thomas Jefferson, who held people in bondage, could not be taken seriously as the founding text for our nation.

But, of course, Thomas Jefferson was not the solo author of the Declaration. Nothing in democracy is ever a solo act. The committee that he chaired also included John Adams from Massachusetts and Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania. Adams never held people in bondage and always was against enslavement. Franklin had held people in bondage earlier in his life but had repudiated the practice by 1776.

Before the end of the Revolutionary War, both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania would abolish enslavement, drawing on the principles and language of the Declaration, and lay the foundation for abolitionism. (Vermont did so as well, though it was still its own country at the time.) In that Revolutionary period, free and enslaved Black Americans like Prince Hall and Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman also seized on the idea that all people are created equal to describe their own deeply felt and held sense of agency.

I’ve also written at length elsewhere about how the word “men” was meant in a universal sense at the time. And the contrast between the lofty principles and the slow start to abolition, the continuation of enslavement throughout most of the country, the ongoing subordination of women, and the expropriation from and suppression of Native Americans all require acknowledgment and explanation.

Yet Lincoln was right to observe that without the principle that all people are created equal, there could be no moral justification for revolution. Without that principle, it was little more than a power grab. Without that principle, it would condemn people to nothing more than an ongoing brute-force struggle over who had power. The Civil War, in other words.

But with that principle firmly in place, something else would be possible — a government for the people, because it was by the people. That, in incredibly economical summary, is the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. It is what we commit ourselves to when we acknowledge and embrace the principle that all people are created equal. We are equal in all of us being people with purposes, trying to make tomorrow better than yesterday. That striving communicates our natural right to and need for freedom — to steer our own lives in our private spheres and to steer our collective lives together with others in the public sphere. We can all have freedom only when we commit to that collective steering.

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The golden apple is the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, which communicates the standards and principles of popular self-government, grounded in the proposition that all people are created equal. This is our collective inheritance:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Right now, a chorus of voices from all over the country and all sides of the political spectrum is calling out that government is not currently for the people. There are crises in housing, health care, child care, and prices. There is forever war and there are technological overlords restructuring our economy and society willy-nilly. There are limits on the freedom to form new businesses and to deploy one’s lifelong savings for investments of one’s own choosing in a timely fashion. There are challenges to the health of young people and limits on their opportunity. And there is incredible wealth accruing to those who hold power simply because they hold power.

Facing these clear indicators that our government is not currently “for the people,” Lincoln would ask us to consider whether it is also by the people. If it is not, that is where we need to focus our energies.

And indeed our government is not currently by the people — because of corruption, and because of the restriction of the right to vote. On the latter point, thanks to gerrymandering, closed primaries, and low-turnout primaries, 60 million Americans no longer have a meaningful vote in federal elections.

To rededicate ourselves to this nation — conceived in liberty, and already several times rededicated to the proposition that all people are created equal — requires us to embrace the hard work of fighting corruption and broadening the suffrage. We must form a movement on both fronts, joining the people who are leading those fights. On the first front, they are American Promise and Issue One. On the second front, they are the Coalition for Healthy Democracy and FairVote (disclosure: I’m involved with all of them).

Yes, we are in a time when we need increased devotion to the cause of government that is for the people because it is by the people. We have much to be proud of as Americans on this Fourth of July — if also nearly as much to lament — but our goal should be to give future generations more to be proud of than to lament. That requires devotion to the principle that all people are created equal.

The golden apple. Pass it on.

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As several of you pointed out, I neglected to comment on one of the complaints from party leadership that merits attention.

The MassGOP said in its statement that All-Party Primaries “would undermine core democratic principles by eroding the ability of political parties to select their own nominees.”

This is misleading. Seeing why requires paying a bit more attention to how parties operate than most people can usually stomach. Bear with me for a moment, because it’s important.

Right now, with conventional primaries, parties rely on public welfare to determine the person who will be their official standard bearer. Taxpayers pay for the state-run party primaries that have for decades now generated a “party nominee.” Even taxpayers who are not enrolled in a party pay for this process. In Massachusetts, 65 percent of voters are not in a party, but they too are forking over hard-earned money to pay for parties to select a “nominee.” In Massachusetts, they can participate in that primary, yes, by choosing a party ballot in a primary election, but often they are independent for a reason!

This arrangement dates to the turn of the 20th century, when state governments took over the party primary process. The effect was to make our two major parties something strange: private clubs running on a public subsidy. Their membership shrinks — as it has, consistently, over the past two decades — but the taxpayer funding for their primaries flows on. They are like businesses with a dwindling customer base and a guaranteed public revenue stream for a core part of their operations.

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Those public funds also flow even though the parties hold conventions, paid for by party members, at which members vote on which candidate the party should endorse. In deciding whom to endorse at their member-funded conventions, parties behave like the private associations they are. They can and do use their conventions to choose standard bearers via their endorsement process.

Here’s the truth: All-Party Primaries in no way hinder parties from exercising their First Amendment freedoms of association to identify their favored candidates.

This is settled law. In Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party (2008), the US Supreme Court upheld the kind of all-candidate, top-two primary that is proposed for Massachusetts precisely because it does not determine the parties’ nominees. A so-called “blanket primary” — where all candidates appear on the same first ballot and then the top Democrat and the top Republican advance — is unconstitutional, as the court held in California Democratic Party v. Jones (2000). The court ruled that that “blanket primary” method did amount to letting outsiders pick a party’s official representative. But an all-party primary that advances the top two vote-getters regardless of party takes nothing away from the party’s right to endorse its own standard-bearer. The party’s nominating function is left entirely intact; it simply moves where it belongs — the party’s convention, carried out through its endorsement process.

In our Massachusetts ballot initiative, which improves on the Washington and California versions of the all party primary, those party endorsements can appear on the ballot, if a candidate accepts them. The parties are not only able to choose their standard bearers; they will continue to be able to communicate those choices to the broader electorate. Nor will outsiders be weighing in on their choices. Voters will see all the candidates, as well as the information about which candidates are standard bearers for which parties. They will even be able to tell if a voter is a standard bearer for more than one party, as candidates can carry more than one endorsement on the ballot.

The MassGOP is right that the taxpayer-funded nomination process would disappear. What it cannot honestly say is that parties would lose the ability to select their own standard-bearers. That ability survives in full. What changes is who pays for that process. The other thing that changes is the contest on the public ballot: all candidates who meet the public’s requirements for candidacy, as expressed in state law, will appear.

That is the heart of the matter. The All-Party Primary insists that state-run elections belong to the voters and taxpayers, not the parties. The voters who pay for the election should get to see all the candidates. And candidates, running in elections funded by voters, should face all the people who fund them, all the time.

All-Party Primaries restore parties to being what they should be — private networks of people coordinating around shared ideas and policies. Parties can continue to choose their nominees, as the Supreme Court has recognized. But they can’t block other people from running and claiming ideological affiliation with their agenda, and their endorsed nominees will have to fend off challengers all the way through.

Our major parties will have to re-learn the muscle of being private associations. Currently, in Massachusetts, they carry out the endorsement process only for statewide elections. They would have to re-learn how to do endorsements in legislative districts.

But this is as it should be. A party that must persuade the whole electorate, rather than bank on a closed primary, has every incentive to organize through the grassroots, sharpen its agenda, and tie voters to it. We can already see what that kind of organizing looks like: the gains that the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party are making come precisely from doing this work — building membership, contesting races and earning support voter by voter. They are functioning like private associations rather than relying on a public subsidy to manufacture a nominee. All-Party Primaries would extend that same discipline to everyone. They also require everyone to earn votes from the whole electorate at every stage. They push parties out of their feather-bedded nest.

Here in Massachusetts, we’ve at last discovered how to get the two parties onto the same page. It turns out to be simple. Challenge their political duopoly — also known as the two-party doom loop, as political scientist Lee Drutman puts it — and the two parties will stand shoulder to shoulder.

The two-party duopoly is a self-reinforcing dynamic that locks politics into cycles of partisan escalation that deepen voter alienation and institutional gridlock. Low-turnout party primaries, gerrymandering, and excessively restrictive rules on party formation established by the duopoly are among the contributing factors.

In my home state of Massachusetts, a group for which I’m the convening chair, the Coalition for Healthy Democracy, is tackling that doom loop with a ballot initiative to do away with traditional party primaries and replace them with an all-party primary. In an all-party primary, all candidates from all parties run on the same first ballot. Voters pick their favorite, and the top two vote-getters go on to the general election. Most Massachusetts cities already elect their mayors this way, so it’s a pretty familiar method. Alaska, Washington, and California also have an all-party primary.

Our initiative has some small additional elements that the municipal elections and other states don’t — endorsements can be printed on the ballot, and candidates can carry more than one endorsement, a form of fusion voting. The purpose is to make the ballots information-rich.

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Here’s an example of what this kind of ballot would look like:

This kind of election system does many positive things. It increases primary turnout. It moves the decisive election from the primary to the general, where turnout is vastly higher. It reduces the rate of incumbent retention. It speeds up diversification of state legislatures. And it increases the rate of competitive elections needed to hold public officials accountable and make our democracy responsive.

And guess what: The party establishments hate it. And they have the same complaints!

Although Massachusetts voters from every demographic group and both major political parties are net positive on this proposed reform, the state committees from both major parties have passed resolutions against it. What’s really surprising is that the chairs of both the Massachusetts GOP and the Massachusetts Democrats complain about the policy in nearly identical language:

MassGOP in a Monday statement said the system “would undermine core democratic principles by eroding the ability of political parties to select their own nominees, marginalizing smaller parties, stifling ideological diversity, suppressing general-election turnout, and amplifying the role of big money while disadvantaging grassroots efforts.”

And from MassDems: “We’ve seen the unintended consequences of all-party primaries in other states: general elections between two candidates from the same party, smaller parties shut out entirely, and grassroots candidates who simply can’t compete against self-funded opponents.”

Astonishing to see the sudden empathy of both major party leaders for third parties. They clearly didn’t check in with the Forward Party and Green Rainbow Party, which have both endorsed the measure.

Jaw-dropping to see the complaints about money from a GOP whose party has just endorsed a self-funding gubernatorial candidate in our current system, and when Elon Musk, Andrew Cuomo, and Tom Steyer have all just proved that a boatload of money comes up short in an all-party primary system. (Locally, Josh Kraft, son of Patriot’s owner Robert Kraft, also came up short in a self-funded bid for mayor of Boston, which uses a top-two election system).

Gob-smacking to see the concern for grassroots candidates in a state with a 99 percent incumbency retention rate. It literally can’t get any worse than it is.

The one thing our parties can agree on is that they want to keep our dysfunctional political system exactly as it is.

This means we now know precisely who and what have locked our current dysfunction in place: the party establishments, R and D. And on the Republican side, it’s a Trump establishment now.

So, Renovators: Here are the facts. There is no way out of our dysfunction other than to go through the fire of fighting it out with the party establishments. Can’t go over, can’t go under, can’t go around. Have to go through.

Are you with us?

Let’s roll.

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PS- We still have a few more signed copies of Radical Duke for folks who join our founding tier Elm Society subscriber group. Don’t miss out!

More than a decade ago, my research team discovered a mystery parchment Declaration of Independence in a small archive in southern England. We had to figure out who it belonged to and how it got there. The answer involves a British Duke and the radical writer Thomas Paine.

Charles Lennox, Third Duke of Richmond, great-grandson of Charles II via a mistress, was born in 1735, died in 1806, and had all the privilege of the age. Yet he became one of the great political reformers in his era.

The duke’s age-mate, King George III, little more than two years younger, came to the throne in 1760 determined to break the power of aristocratic Whig families like the Richmonds. The king’s early efforts to consolidate power triggered reactions, though, and not only from affronted elites but also from middle-class members of Parliament and working people who watched the king squeeze power out of the legislature. They kicked back with sharply worded anonymous newspaper essays as the king and his ministers converted the House of Commons into an appendage largely dependent on the government’s will. They railed against the government’s entanglement of Britain in foreign wars and the economic blows that fell on ordinary people as a result. This in turn led to the suppression of printers and writers. What voice the people had to criticize or counter royal power seemed to be being stripped away over the course of the 1760s.

The aristocrats of the day faced a choice — ally with the middle classes and working people to forge a popular politics capable of establishing a counterweight to the throne. Or mainly seek to defend aristocratic prerogative. Among the dozens of dukes, earls, marquesses, and other peers who populated the House of Lords, only the Duke of Richmond plunged fully into popular politics.

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Richmond spotted rising talents outside of the aristocracy among workingmen like the legally trained Edmund Burke and the corset-maker Thomas Paine. He spurred on their radical writings — some of them even secret and seditious. Together they forged arguments against the corruption of a decaying monarchical system. They pounded the king for stripping people of their basic liberties. They conceived an agenda to restore balance to the constitution (the word they used even for their unwritten system of constitutional order) by recovering Parliament’s independence. A country steered by a legislature — with its synthesizing will — avoids domination by any one person. Only when Parliament could steer the nation would the people be free, and to be free was the natural right of all.

Richmond believed that two things were necessary to restore balance to the British constitution and secure basic liberties. The radicals had to fight corruption and achieve universal male suffrage (yes, there was a limit to his radicalism). During an intense period from 1768 to 1772, his network of radical protégés castigated the king in famous newspaper essays called the Junius Letters, and Richmond made parallel arguments in the House of Lords. Their polemics forced the collapse of the king’s government. Their final writings as Junius initiated the debate about expanding the right to vote.

By 1774, Paine had sailed to America, where he would make his most full-throated argument for American independence and revolution. Meanwhile Richmond remained in England and kept up the grassroots organizing. Three different factions of radicals had emerged with diverging ideas of where to take the challenge to the king. The radical Whig aristocrats wanted what they called “economical reform” — rooting out the corruption of the royal patronage system that put so many members of Parliament in the king’s pocket. The landed county gentleman wanted that plus a broadening of the suffrage to include more of their category of property holder. The city radicals in London and its suburbs wanted universal male suffrage and for elections for Parliament to happen every year, not every seven years, as was then the practice. Only Richmond had a foot in each camp. He knit the radicals together and also recruited younger men into the work.

One of the most important things he did was give his blessing, and financial support, to societies that formed to publish the ideas of the reformers and to spread them throughout England. First there was the Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights in the 1760s. Then there were the Junius Letters into the 1770s. Then there was the Society for Constitutional Information in the 1780s. They churned out pamphlet after pamphlet laying out a vision for a politics that might move beyond autocratic monarchy.

Those societies made the philosophical and political case for popular sovereignty and educated the whole of England in their arguments, but they also formed community. The Society for Constitutional Information cost a guinea to join, or something around $100 now, and all paying members could attend committee meetings to debate what would be published. Later workingmen’s associations formed, modeled after the earlier middle-class ones. When the London Corresponding Society emerged, it charged only a shilling to join, and one penny a week after that.

Here at The Renovator, we are trying to build something similar: a community of people developing the ideas and plans of action to slay the demon of corruption and rescue a meaningful voice and vote for the American people. Not everyone believes in democracy anymore, and this is because in many ways democracy has not been working for people. Recuperating the cause of freedom and self-government in America requires rescuing democracy from its own deficiencies. This is what democracy renovation is about.

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Signing on as a full member of The Renovator community with access to Renovator assemblies costs a little less than a guinea — at $60 per year. Like Richmond, Paine, and Burke, we are trying to lay down the foundation for an era of transformational change to renovate the rights of the people. Like the Society for Constitutional Information, The Renovator seeks to be not just a publication but a network that knits together different pieces of transformational thought. In addition to calling on our free subscribers to join as paying subscribers, we’re also giving out free full subscriptions to leaders of democracy renovation organizations and young democracy entrepreneurs. We are trying to build a cross-class coalition and weave together many streams of reform. We’re still small, but we’re growing. We’d love to grow with you.

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And what about that mystery Declaration we found?

The ceremonial parchment of the Declaration of Independence appears to have belonged to the Third Duke of Richmond and reached the archive via the office of his solicitor. The parchment is likely to have made its way from America to the duke as a gift via Thomas Paine. While we may never know exactly when the parchment changed hands, what we do know is that between them, Richmond and Paine contributed mightily to the transformation not only America but also Britain. Britain, without a revolution, would achieve a highly restrained constitutional monarchy and, albeit after decades, universal suffrage. We believe the United States too can once more find a path to defeating concentrations of power and recuperating the rights of the people.

When I give talks about democracy renovation, people often ask me what they can do. Well, the first thing you can do is fully join the Democracy Renovation community. Come on in and help us build a movement.

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P.S. When the Duke joined societies such as the ones above, and others paid one guinea, he typically paid 10. In addition to our standard membership, we also have a category of Founding subscribers. The next 25 people who join at the Founder level of $300 per year will all receive a copy of Radical Duke signed by me.

What do I mean by next-generation politics? With the exception of a small remaining establishment core — old guard members of both parties — pretty much everyone in America agrees that our politics are failing to deliver on the promises of democracy. Our system is leaving too many people disempowered, trapped, exhausted, alienated, and angry. All meaningful political efforts are now directed at tapping into or overcoming this problem — from Trumpism, to the Sanders/AOC/Mamdani/Platner/DSA/Working Families Party movement, to the Democracy Renovation movement.

Platner’s win in the primary, despite serious personal liabilities, confirms irrevocably that the Working Families Party umbrella is a real political force in American politics.

How do the three movements relate to each other? The first two are already transformational forces in electoral politics. The third plays on a different field — ballot initiatives, and municipal, state, and federal legislative reforms to our institutions.

Honesty requires acknowledging that this third movement has not been transformational yet. There have been some victories — ranked-choice voting in New York City, Maine, and Washington, D.C. All-party primaries plus ranked-choice voting in Alaska. Twenty-five state legislatures, including most recently Oklahoma and Idaho, have passed resolutions calling on Congress to introduce the For Our Freedom Constitutional Amendment, undoing Citizens United. The introduction in Congress of bills to increase the size of the House of Representatives and establish proportional representation.

An asymmetry separates the two electoral movements and the democracy renovation movement. The first two efforts have a view about substantive policy. Trumpism says: Close the border and enforce tariffs, and you’ll lift the economic fortunes of working Americans. Working Families Party progressivism says: Tax the rich, provide universal health care and a green transition, and you’ll lift the economic fortunes of working Americans.

The third movement takes a different tack: Put control of our institutions back in the hands of the American people, and over time you’ll get policy that supports working Americans — and all Americans. How do you put institutions back in the hands of the whole American people? Root out corruption and restore a meaningful vote to all Americans. As scholars like Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson have shown, eras that have seen democratizing reforms of this kind have been followed by egalitarian policy.

What will that egalitarian policy look like? The Democracy Renovation movement doesn’t want to deliver that answer. It wants to create the conditions for having that debate. For instance, on economic fairness, maybe it’s a wealth tax, a revamped inheritance tax, mark-to-market taxation of capital gains, or a land value tax. Or maybe it’s predistribution rather than redistribution: baby bonds, a sovereign wealth fund paying citizen dividends, employee ownership and sectoral bargaining, a first jobs guarantee. Or maybe it’s an abundance agenda — zoning and permitting reform, occupational licensing reform — that attacks the artificial scarcities driving up the cost of housing, energy, and entry into good work. These are the debates a healthy democracy should host — but cannot currently, because small, unrepresentative slices of the electorate settle them in advance.

The Democracy Renovation movement is committed to two central goals for our political institutions: root out corruption and broaden the suffrage. Members of the Loyal Opposition — those committed to freedom and equality through constitutionalism and legislative supremacy — have to stay laser-focused on these. That might look like a weakness, but it’s a path to legitimacy.

The weakness of the two electoral movements is that they too often depend on the hollowed-out state of our party system and on capturing political institutions through low-turnout party primaries.

Platner’s win yesterday looks decisive when it is described as winning 72 percent of the vote. But look at the absolute numbers. Platner secured about 150,000 votes out of the 948,734 registered voters in Maine, or 16 percent. He won fewer than half of just registered Democrats, who number 343,488. Donald Trump’s rise and current lock on political institutions similarly depend on needing percentages of the electorate no larger than this to secure political control. Small subsets of the electorate establish the menu of options for the rest of the electorate. When everyone else joins in in November, they hold their nose and vote for the least bad option.

These kinds of results are a recipe for instability. In the short term, they seem to gain power for a political agenda, yes, but they also bake in dissatisfaction and alienation. The results bring about an experience of necessity for voters, not choice; of regrettable entrapment, not legitimate direction. Policy-making authority won this way is a house built on sand.

The democracy renovation movement instead seeks to ensure that every winning politician will have the solid foundation of a genuinely majoritarian mandate, not one artificially created by means of a set of bear traps for the voter.

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The agenda-driven electoral movements will be constantly tempted into short-term gains for the sake of immediate power. They will be tempted to oppose democracy renovation efforts that require office holders to win authentic majorities. Such opposition is a mistake, for it undermines the path to the legitimacy any movement will need to secure its gains for the long term.

The good news for Maine and for Platner is that the state does use ranked choice voting to require that candidates achieve a full majority, so a victory in the general will carry legitimacy just as Mamdani’s majority victory in New York did, even though Maine’s primary system is afflicted by the same low turnout problems as everywhere else.

What is the lesson in all of this for the Democracy Renovation movement? Is it that we need to work harder to find candidates who can carry the reform agenda into the current electoral environment? Do we need to ask our currently reigning next-generation pols, and those who support them, whether the candidates who benefit from minority-rule mechanics would be willing to dismantle them? Or do we need to create more space for that much needed wide-ranging debate on policy choices to get us out of our current mess so people can see what is being foreclosed? I’ll come back to this in a next column.

The opportunity to bear witness to the courage of the people on the stage was cleansing. We were washing away the viciousness of our age.

Powell’s speech is available online and worth reading. He anchored it in the Declaration of Independence, invoking “the timeless ideal that all of us are created equal.” This ideal should sustain an unbreakable commitment to the rule of law, for only by respecting the rule of law do we indeed hold everyone equal, fending off domination by any one individual. Powell quoted John Adams: “Ours is a government of laws, not men.”

The unity of these two ideals — of human equality and respect for the rule of law — has done something special for America. As Powell put it, “The United States has long been the leader of the world’s freedom-seeking people — the indispensable nation. Other countries know us as a nation built on integrity, and that integrity must be maintained.”

Politics always puts pressure on integrity. Pursuit of victory bends the light and distorts vision.

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Earlier this year, in this Substack, I began to argue for the need for a Loyal Opposition in America — people who will come together across party lines to check the abuses of an overreaching executive. We need that Loyal Opposition, but the Loyal Opposition also needs to be fueled by commitment to universal human dignity, the rule of law, and integrity.

I made the mistake of putting forward Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie (R) as an exemplar of the Loyal Opposition. He has been standing up to President Donald Trump, yes, but he has done it without embodying the spirit of the laws, which requires a commitment to rule of law rooted in respect for universal human equality. Massie has warmly embraced people who traffic in antisemitism, including some who wear “American Reich” T-shirts, invoke Jewish conspiracy tropes, and even self-describe as antisemitic. He has included such individuals in special events for favored supporters at his home.

We cannot defeat autocratic executive overreach by opening gates to bias — that is just to trade one form of domination for another. Members of the Loyal Opposition should be defined by steadfast commitment to the ideal that we are all created equal. That commitment is the price of entry into the club.

I made a mistake with Massie.

The Democrats are also making some mistakes these days. An exceptionally antisemitic Democratic candidate placed first in a primary in Texas’s 35^th Congressional District in March. Among other things, Maureen Galindo vowed to turn a local immigrant detention center “into a prison for American Zionists.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) did call her language “vile” and “disqualifying,” and she lost the run-off, but the fact that she got as far as she did with a Democratic electorate is cause for alarm.

The fact that Graham Platner with a nearly 20-year-old Nazi tattoo on his breast, the meaning of which he surely understood, and with self-explanations that routinely strain credulity, has gotten as far as he has is also cause for alarm. Yes, the Democrats are now in a pickle in Maine, and so the temptation to accept the unacceptable is immense.

But the simple fact is that rule of law constitutionalism — the way of life that Powell celebrated in his speech — has always depended on norms. It is impossible to legislate and regulate every last item of behavior. Our nation’s checks and balances rest on people willing to put lawfulness at the center of their spirits. When that is absent, as it is in the current administration, we see how much the institutions strain. The entire constitutional order is backstopped, finally, only by character.

If the Loyal Opposition is going to prevail against what Trumpism has unleashed, its members must be willing to stand up not only to Trump himself, but also to those within our own ranks who abandon personal integrity — and to those who indulge the toxic scapegoating of antisemitism instead of holding fast to our sacred commitment to equality.

For more than two years, I’ve been working with many colleagues to establish a university-wide faculty senate at Harvard. We have made good progress and are (hopefully) in a final stage of design before it can be presented to faculty for consideration.

Two recent events at Ivy League institutions increase my confidence that renewed and healthy forms of shared governance could transform higher ed for the better: the recent vote of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences to fight grade inflation by capping A grades and the recent report by Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education.

Contrary to what many a politician might have people believe, faculty members are mostly not wild-eyed radicals. Mostly, we are nerds who love learning. Over the past 15 years, we have experienced our campuses as being swamped by a cultural tsunami, in the form of social media culture, washing in from outside. The key features of this fast-moving flood include: peer pressure and shaming; ideological purity tests; reductions in attention spans; a taste for meme wars instead of argument; and a mental health crisis among young people.

Truth is, we have been overwhelmed, and we haven’t liked it any more than anyone else has. This is a part of the higher ed story that people have by-and-large missed. Faculty themselves want change. We want the love of learning back.

Both actions — the vote at Harvard and the report at Yale — reflect that yearning. The Arts and Sciences faculty vote was decisive: 458 to 201. It came after many, many months of deliberations. (Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty meetings have not yet, for some reason, incorporated the lesson that successful deliberative bodies need to place time limits on speakers.) People on both sides of the issue spoke eloquently and with a good-faith motivation to do right by students. Significant evidence was introduced to the discussion. Potential unintended consequences and downstream effects were considered. The committee drafting the proposal listened and learned — and revised and improved what was on the table.

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The Yale report is equally serious in its commitment to love of learning and fostering intellectual growth. In its pursuit of the sources of the distrust that many Americans now feel for universities, it honestly prioritized our biggest problems: cost; admissions; and speech, censorship, and intellectual pluralism.

Here, too, faculty brought all the rigor of earnest scholars to bear.

The cost problem, they determined, is made worse by the fact that leading private universities in fact are terrible at internal accounting. Yale, they reported, can’t even really say how much it spends on academic vs. administrative functions. (Yale is not alone in this limitation.) In other words, faculty assessed their institution and found that its failures flow from intellectual mistakes and weaknesses. That’s actually good news: The problems should be eminently correctable.

Admissions introduces similar concerns. No one knows how it works. We all deserve a transparent account and clear statement of threshold requirements for gaining entry to Yale, the report argues. The report writers don’t want this knowledge about admissions simply for knowledge’s sake. They recognize that baseline knowledge and facts about the process are necessary to anchor an experience of fairness. Again, it is the faculty’s own high standards and appreciation for intellectual clarity that support the precision of the Yale Committee’s diagnosis.

The Yale Committee reports much campus dissension on the subject of intellectual pluralism, yet here, too, an intellectual purpose shines through. They conclude that section by writing, “While such issues remain contested, nearly everyone we spoke to agreed on one thing: Echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.” The report offers multiple pathways to avoiding echo chambers on campus, all motivated by an overarching commitment to intellectual excellence.

The Harvard faculty vote and Yale report recommendations do not amount to earth-shattering amendments to campus practices. In many ways, they are quite modest, common-sense adjustments to secure a healthier intellectual environment for students and faculty alike. But here is one thing they do deliver emphatically: Proof that the faculty can be trusted.

Building shared governance where it scarcely or only partially exists (Harvard, Yale) and refashioning it at those places where it has gone off the rails can serve us well. We do have positive examples of healthy shared governance at Duke, Chicago, and Stanford. I’m sure there are other places too.

Now, with these two recent faculty actions, university leaders and faculty alike can have more confidence that investment in shared governance can pay dividends — as we act on our shared desire to serve a public that supports us in so many ways.

If you’ve already seen these articles, thank you for reading and please feel free to share your thoughts below — and if not, I hope you enjoy!

From the New York Times: Nothing Beats Polarization Like Civic Learning

“Ten years ago, only one in four Americans could name the three branches of government. By 2025, seven in ten could. A decade before our nation’s 250th birthday, we were on our way to being a nation that had forgotten how to explain itself to its own children. What changed?”

READ MORE: “Nothing Beats Polarization Like Civic Learning”

From The Atlantic : What the 18th Century Can Teach the 21st: Britain had a revolution too—slower and quieter than America’s. Did the British do it better?

READ MORE: “What the 18th Century Can Teach the 21st”

By a constitutional and functional definition of full enfranchisement — one that requires every voter to have access to a meaningful election without compelled partisan affiliation — only a small minority of states fully protect voting rights. Under this framework, as many as a quarter of Americans face structural disenfranchisement.

An analysis based on U.S. congressional and state elections has brought me to the startling conclusion that Americans are fully enfranchised in only 12 states. These are states where all voting-age citizens, regardless of party status, have the opportunity to place a vote in the decisive elections in their state — regardless of whether that is the primary or general election — and also can do that on the basis of free association with the party of their choice, not compelled association. This means that we have only partial enfranchisement of Americans in the other 38 states.

Where are all voters fully enfranchised? There are three categories of states: (1) in states with all-party primaries, where all voters get all the choices on their ballots for every election; (2) in states with open primaries and competitive general elections, where everyone has a vote in a decisive general election, regardless of party affiliation; and (3) in states with closed primaries but competitive general elections, where everyone has a vote in a decisive general election, regardless of party affiliation. In none of these states is any voter forced into “compelled association” with a specific party to cast a meaningful vote. They can and do choose parties, but those choices are truly choices of free association. These are the states in the top row in the chart below.

The states in the bottom row, where enfranchisement is only partial, face two problems. They are states largely without competitive general elections, whether because of gerrymandering or demography. In the absence of competitive general elections, voters can access a meaningful vote only through the dominant party’s primaries. In one set of states, voters do not need to pre-register or permanently register with the party to vote in the primary. Such voters have “universal access” to that primary. In other states, voters must be pre-registered with a party and/or temporarily choose party affiliation. In both sets of states, the price of a meaningful vote is affiliation with a party that some voters will not endorse. Voters who do not endorse the dominant party may have access to a meaningful vote (especially in states that grant universal access to party primaries), but only at the cost of compelled association, which raises concerns as a potential violation of the constitutional right to free association.

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The First Amendment protects against state-coerced expressive identification. A series of cases, including Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977) and Janus v. AFSCME (2018), built on the First Amendment to rule that freedom of association implies a corresponding freedom not to associate. Can voters be called enfranchised if their only path to a meaningful vote is through compelled association in state-funded party primaries? We might ask the same thing about candidates. Can citizens be considered free to run if their only substantively meaningful path to the ballot is through compelled association?

In Janus, the court held that public employees can’t be forced to subsidize union speech they don’t endorse. I would argue that it should similarly hold that voters should not be forced to affiliate with parties they don’t endorse in order to access meaningful electoral participation. Of course, no one is forcing people to go to the polls to vote in the primary of a party they don’t endorse. But when states structure elections so that meaningful participation is conditional on partisan affiliation, a constitutional question arises: Has the state organized the electoral system to require compelled association as the price of a meaningful vote?

If we count up the voters in congressional elections in states in the bottom row of the chart who either voted for the non-dominant party and did not have a meaningful vote or else associated against their preferences and affiliated with the dominant party in order to vote in the meaningful election, a rough estimate suggests some 60 million Americans are routinely in the position of either casting an ineffectual ballot or accepting a partisan identity they don’t endorse. (Forty-seven million minority-party voters in the relevant states plus about 12 to 18 million estimated compelled-association voters.) This is roughly a quarter of American voters. Call this problem structural disenfranchisement.

This problem has grown over time, as the accidental consequence of Progressive-era decisions to convert party primaries from private associational convenings to state-administered and largely state-funded elections. The current gerrymandering wars are accelerating a pattern of disenfranchisement that has been building for the past four decades. We are not the only electoral system in history that has seen shrinking access to the franchise over time. In 18^th century Britain, the share of the population with meaningful electoral voice declined over the century. We are experiencing a similar dynamic now.

This problem also bites in ways that connect to racial disenfranchisement. Louisiana recently transitioned away from a “jungle primary,” in which all voters had access to a primary ballot with all the choices, to a closed party primary, locking out Democrats from participating in the current contested Senate election. This means that the roughly 9 out of 10 Black voters in Louisiana who vote Democratic were structurally disenfranchised from the meaningful decision in the current Senate election. While they retain the right to vote in the general election, that vote will be in a non-competitive, non-consequential election. In other words, about 600,000 Black voters in Louisiana who had a meaningful vote in the last U.S. Senate election do not have one this year, or at least not without being compelled to change their party affiliation.

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The comparative politics literature provides substantial evidence that the smaller the electorate and the less competitive the elections, the greater the corruption and the less responsive governance institutions are to the needs of the general population. Structural disenfranchisement of 25 percent of American voters is a major degrader of American democracy. We can be sure we will not have the quality of governance we all crave while one out of four of us is structurally disenfranchised.

In other words, we have a major voting rights crisis on our hands that extends even beyond the challenges introduced by Callais. It is time for us to reckon with the need to re-enfranchise 25 percent of the American electorate.

How can that be done?

Here is where the power of the analysis of structural disenfranchisement really comes into play. The reform movement swirls with debate about whether independent redistricting, semi-open or open primaries, or all-party primaries are the right way to go. The short answer is that it depends on context. Where underlying demographics would yield competitive elections in the absence of gerrymandering, then independent redistricting linked to open or semi-open primaries is the necessary step to re-enfranchise voters. Where states already have open or semi-open primaries and the necessary underlying demographics, they could take the single step of independent redistricting to achieve the necessary change. On the other hand, where underlying demographics would not yield competitive elections even with neutral districting, for instance in Wyoming and Massachusetts, then the only option is the all-party primary.

Of course, even if we know what reform would most efficiently re-enfranchise voters in each state, that does not mean those reforms are politically feasible. Please see the chart below for how the reform pathways apply to each state and an assessment of political feasibility. Fourteen states have institutional pathways through which reform could be enacted (typically through ballot initiatives), while 24 states do not. This brings our problem into crystal clear relief.

In states with initiative processes, the all-candidate primary is the strongest single reform and is achievable. In states without initiative processes, the all-candidate primary remains structurally necessary but is also politically blocked. For those states, what can we do to re-enfranchise voters whose Constitutional rights are going unprotected? Renovation will require federal-level intervention (currently absent), state or federal constitutional litigation (an uncertain path), or long-term electoral change (a slow journey).

To open pathways to renovation in blocked states, we will need new political coalitions as well as fresh legal arguments to bring challenges. Here are some ideas.

First, on the litigation path:

A compelled-association challenge to closed primaries in safe-district states. Advocates could develop new arguments that conditioning meaningful electoral participation on partisan affiliation violates post-Janus principles. While this is an untested legal strategy, it merits exploration.

A right-to-run challenge. A case might be made under Bullock v. Carter (1972) and related cases that gerrymandered safe districts foreclose viable candidacies, violating the candidate-side of the right to participate in elections.

A Voting Rights Act/structural-enfranchisement intersection. The Louisiana fact pattern (a Black electorate that is 90 percent Democratic, new closed Republican-decisive primaries in safe Republican districts) might potentially anchor a hybrid VRA/compelled-association argument.

And on the federal legislation path, we might pursue the Beyer-Raskin Fair Representation Act, which achieves proportional representation via multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting. While the sponsors have been proposing this for several sessions running, its moment may have arrived.

Along any of these paths, I believe that to concentrate our attention and intensify our energies, we should focus on our urgent crisis of disenfranchisement.

We need to re-enfranchise the 60 million American voters who no longer have a meaningful vote. Are we ready for a new Voting Rights movement?

Note: Charts were created with assistance from Claude. While I have fact-checked them, I may have missed something; I have also made some judgment calls about how competitive states are, and I welcome challenges, corrections, and improvements to my categorizations. Also, to be clear, the number of American voters experiencing compelled association presented above is a very rough estimate based on scholarly data about voters who move across party lines in their voting behavior. I welcome further review and evaluation of that estimate.

Juli will be joining our next First Thursdays Renovator Assembly on May 7 at 7 p.m. EST. What is the Renovator Assembly, you may ask? It’s a forum for The Renovator’s paid subscribers to come together for mutual aid and solidarity.

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As Juli knows well, democracy renovation is hard work. She secured victory in 2020 only to have to defend it against a repeal attempt in 2024 and now again in 2026. The retention campaign won by 743 votes in 2024, with late-arriving ballots from far-flung Native communities making the critical difference.

So Juli knows better than most how much resilience is required to win and defend election reforms like these. Establishment insiders from both parties tend to oppose reform and have long-standing infrastructure that provides powerful protection for the status quo. That’s the machine. The reform coalition, by contrast, is made up of dissenters trying to get closer to the voters. Our movement consists of cross-partisan reformers. We are Democrats, Independents, and Republicans who seek to form a supermajority for democracy. Often, participants are also trying to build a “democracy first” caucus within their own parties, or sometimes they leave those parties to join something like the Forward Party.

At the Renovator Assembly, Juli will share some hard-earned wisdom, and also tee up questions for breakout group discussions. This is an opportunity for Renovators to replenish their spirits and strengthen their work through reflection and community connection.

Speaking of Alaska also reminds me to share some more information about our All-Party Primary initiative on the ballot in Massachusetts this November. Someone asked me the other day why we weren’t moving forward with Top 4 like Alaska’s system (there, the top four vote-getters in the primary advance to the general election, where ranked-choice voting is then used to ensure that the winner has majority support.) The Top 4 design eliminates the rare spoiler problem that, for instance, causes anxiety in California’s Top 2 system.

The question felt like an invitation to a therapy session. In 2023, we submitted a ballot initiative for Top 4 to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, but the office declined to certify it. The grounds? An All-Party Primary and Top 4 general constituted two separate policies, not a single combined policy. The AG’s office ruled that the steps would have to be taken one at a time: First, the All-Party Primary, then Top 4 with Ranked Choice Voting. We considered whether to contest the ruling, but at the same time conducted polling on the viability of Top 4 in Massachusetts. To our disappointment, we learned that the RCV element was not yet winnable for statewide elections, even though it’s gaining traction for municipal elections.

Given those combined hurdles, we scrubbed our options, looking for that sweet spot where feasibility and impact overlapped. We committed ourselves to not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The answer was the All-Party Primary with a Top 2 general. In Massachusetts, that approach attracts majority support from Democrats and Progressives, along with enough Republican support, to win. The aim is to place the decisive election in the general and, especially for a largely one-party state, meaningfully improve voters’ voice and choice. It’s not a silver bullet, but it moves us in the right direction.

To reduce the spoiler danger, we added party endorsements to the ballot, so that voters have all the information they need and parties can still organize effectively. In fact, parties that have to organize for the entire electorate become stronger.

Still, at the end of the day, I am a huge fan of the Alaska system, so we drafted our All-Party Primary ballot initiative with language that would make it easy to layer in Top 4 and Ranked Choice Voting as a second step, if Massachusetts voters develop the appetite for that.

It’s plain as day that here in Massachusetts, what we have isn’t working. More than half of our elections have only one candidate, the lowest of any state. The time for change is here. I also believe that the best way to determine the most valuable path to change is to focus on what’s best for voters, and to ensure that they are not taken for granted

Lastly, while I’ve got you, don’t forget to join me on Wednesday (tomorrow!) at 1:15 pm for the Headstrong Club. I’ll be talking with Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security adviser, about Iran.

How do I know transformation is coming?

For one thing, more democracy reformers are biting the bullet and jumping into the electoral ring. And they’re faring better than you might expect. I’m thinking of “democracy scientist” Sam Wang running for Congress in New Jersey, a state that was glad to send a “rocket scientist” to Congress; civic educator Ace Parsi running for Congress in West Virginia; tech and democracy maven Kinney Zalesne running for D.C. delegate; and democracy communicator Sam Hiersteiner running for Select Board here in Concord, MA. I’m sure there are many more. Please send me their names! As for these four, they all have my endorsement. I’ve pitched in for them, and I hope maybe you will too. Let’s see how far they can take us.

A second thing: More state-level democracy organizations are starting to adopt a holistic approach to democracy renovation. Partners In Democracy, an organization I founded in Massachusetts that is now led by Jerren Chang, is working on civic education in the state for both kids and adults, on driving structural change in democratic institutions, and on designing digital civic infrastructure to re-empower citizens to communicate with their representatives. These are all mutually reinforcing activities. None can succeed without success in the other lanes. That’s why it’s so important for democracy renovation work to be holistic. Now there is also Courageous Colorado, which is working to bring the same approach to the Rocky Mountain State. And there is undeniably a civic education renewal underway in the country. Forty-six of 50 states — so states red and blue — now have civic learning advocacy coalitions working closely with CivXNow, a national advocacy organization for civic learning.

Third, citizens assemblies and deliberation opportunities — in both real-life and digital forms — are springing up all over the country, from work with L.A. fire survivors through Engaged CA to an assembly that launched this month in Maine to tackle questions of education policy for the state.

In this context, it’s all the more important that the debate is also heating up about which reforms to pursue and the right tactics for pursuing them. I was glad to see Lee Drutman respond in the UnPopulist to my own recent essay arguing for a transition from traditional party primaries to all-party primaries. Lee’s piece, though, had a funny structure. While many people advocate for all-party primaries on the grounds that they will help elect more moderates, I did not make this argument in my piece. Lee, though, argued against that idea, conflating others’ arguments with mine.

In fact, I agree with Lee. There is no guarantee that an all-party primary system will lead to the election of moderates. All-party primary systems will elect the people who are the most broadly appealing to the electorates in their districts: a Mamdani in New York (where the race was a de facto all-party primary) or a Wu in Boston; or a Murkowski re-elected to the Senate against a MAGA challenger in Alaska.

The argument I did make was this:

Candidates from these states span the political spectrum. This reform seems to have brought Washington State a somewhat more progressive politics, while California has seen some moderation (possibly also the result of independent redistricting there). Louisiana and Alaska are both more conservative. But the crucial thing is that across the spectrum, these states have politicians who are more willing to make deals across party lines. They don’t have to live with the fear of being primaried for stepping out of line. And deal-making is good for doing work for America.

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Here, in truth, we come to the difficulty of understanding what we can learn from America’s laboratories of democracy: our states. Currently, our laboratories are functioning with very few scientists equipped to extract the necessary learnings from them.

First, how do you analyze deal-making? An initial instinct might be to look at co-sponsorship of bills, but that is only one aspect of how deal-making shows itself. Of the seven senators who voted to convict Donald Trump in his 2021 impeachment, the only survivors currently in the Senate are from states without traditional party primaries:

• Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — Top-four primary plus ranked-choice voting general election (adopted by voters in 2020, first used in 2022). The new system directly enabled her to survive the backlash and win reelection.

• Susan Collins (Maine) — Maine uses ranked-choice voting for federal elections (adopted 2016, first used 2018). Collins is up for reelection now.

• Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) — Louisiana had a similar all-party primary in place, though the state Republican Party killed it last year to try to make it easier to punish Cassidy, who is currently up for re-election.

Traditional partisan primaries:

• Richard Burr (North Carolina) — retired, did not run again.

• Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania) — retired, did not run again.

• Ben Sasse (Nebraska) — resigned to become president of the University of Florida.

• Mitt Romney (Utah) — retired, did not run again.

Another thing one would want to look at is behavior on committees. Also, one would need to look not only at the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives but also at state legislatures. We aren’t remotely close to having a body of scholarship that permits us to have a definitive view of this question.

I want to unpack a little further my argument that all-party primaries valuably change incentives for elected officials. Here is what they do definitively: expose more incumbents to competition; modestly lower the rate of incumbent retention; and shift the meaningful decision from the primary to the general election in a significant proportion of elections. These three features are their greatest value. Taken together, they reconnect elected officials to the population as a whole. The comparative politics literature does provide evidence that this yields less corruption and more responsiveness. Lincoln understood this intuitively when he argued that government would be “for the people” when it was “by the people.”

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There are a few lessons from this exchange for how we handle the debates necessary for democracy renovation.

We desperately need to strengthen the science of democracy so that we can get better answers to questions like the ones I’ve posed above. We also need to make sure that we are responding to the actual arguments our fellow renovators are making; we should steelman, not strawman, their arguments.

At the same time, the hard fact about democracy renovation is that one has to make judgment calls. So, too, did the founders in 1788, as they surveyed the experiments in 13 colonies and tried to discern useful lessons. They did not have the benefit of statistical social science to answer their questions about whether unicameral or bicameral legislatures were better, and so on. Nor are we likely to have the voluminous body of scientific evidence that we often cite as the gold standard for decision-making. Our states are all so idiosyncratic in their institutional construction that it is hard to draw generally applicable lessons from their functioning. The work that needs to be done is too vast, and the resources for research in this space too paltry, to achieve that at anything other than a very slow pace. The question is: How can we improve the caliber of our judgment?

I’ve learned one other thing from the exchange with Lee and this reflection on the fact that the work of democracy renovation will ultimately depend on judgment. We should all perhaps acknowledge where we are making judgment calls and offer rather softer claims about what we think will or won’t work. This would help open more space for experimentation, the only way we will learn enough to start improving our judgments over time.

Lee is an advocate for proportional representation and fusion. I am an advocate for all-party primaries. I want to acknowledge that both pathways will bring benefit. For that matter, I helped integrate elements of fusion into the current Massachusetts all-party primary ballot initiative. I also stand by my judgment that all-party primaries — by transferring the meaningful vote to the general election — valuably reattach our elected representatives to the people.

The question, though, of what design in each state will best ensure that that state has government for the people, because it is by the people, will surely be a state-specific judgment call. The north star is to adhere to that design principle: government for the people because it is by the people.

Journalist and podcaster Astead Herndon has launched a new show, “America, Actually,” whose purpose is to probe “the first steps of a new story for a changing nation.” As Herndon puts it, “The question of ‘who do we want to be?’ is open, and answering it will require the type of journalism that prioritizes the messy over the clean.” Claire Atkin, the CEO of Check My Ads, which tracks digital advertising, recently posted about her own growing appetite for “realistic, but positive depictions of the future.”

That’s what we’re here to deliver at The Renovator. But here’s the challenge:

Many people don’t have an appetite for the realistic and the messy. Our toxic politics thrives on promises of total transformations that are actually impossible fever dreams. All undocumented immigrants will be gone! Everyone will get a universal basic income that will make not having work no problem at all! We can create a national health care system that means you’ll never wait for an appointment, you’ll always have the doctor you want and you’ll never lack access to meds you depend on! We can solve the problem of too-expensive higher ed with a stroke of a student-debt absolving pen!

We’ve gotten addicted to the chocolate cake of politics — the idea that one person can almost instantly rewire social systems to give us what we want.

I’m afraid that actually renovating our democracy is more like eating your vegetables. It takes work in the trenches in state and local politics. It requires healthy civic habits day after day after day.

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Now, for real, I actually enjoy vegetables — specifically lettuce, broccoli, bok choy, sugar snap peas, beets. Lots of veggies. (I’m not so hot on carrots.) Eating vegetables can be exceptionally enjoyable. But it does seem that many of us may need to detox from the thickly frosted, sugar-soaked politics of the past decade.

Let’s retrain our tastes to savor renovation successes that mark real progress. Some real stories: In Maryland and Utah, the governors and state legislatures have a new approach to fighting child poverty. It doesn’t involve new centralized and top-down programs. Instead, it empowers cross-sector leadership networks at the local level that take on responsibility for diagnosing child poverty in their own communities, map out a plan to address it, and hold themselves accountable to the plan. The model is Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. The two state governments are investing in these local leadership and action structures.

In other words, Maryland and Utah are investing in civic infrastructure. They are also driving a mindset shift away from government as default problem-solver. Instead, they are empowering citizens to solve their own problems by providing tools and building blocks needed to make it doable. This mindset shift is a really big deal — a change from chocolate cake to vegetables.

I recently had policy-makers from both states visit my class to talk about this state-level policy agenda. My students asked: “Who opposes this?” It turned out there wasn’t much opposition. The legislation passed in both states with strong, bipartisan support. In both places, there is a real sense of positive motivation and engagement moving the work forward.

Another story about the same policy approach, this one taken locally in Spartanburg, S.C. In Spartanburg, a neighborhood resident leadership group known as the Voyagers has collaborated with a nonprofit mixed-income developer, as well as a set of local educational leaders, to drive one of the most exciting neighborhood turnarounds in the country. The initiative involves some $150 million in capital investments, including a brand-new community center, an early learning center, and more than 500 units of new or renovated housing. Some results: Violent crime has dropped by 84 percent; third-grade reading proficiency has jumped from 6 percent to 51 percent.

How’s that for protopian? To learn more, watch this short video about Spartanburg leader Dr. Russell Booker. A longer video telling the story is coming out soon. I’ve seen it, and it’s powerful stuff!

The hard part is a new aspect of policy work: network governance. These initiatives will work if and when local leaders are able to self-govern through network structures effectively and states get good supporting networks to govern themselves. The people in any given municipality working on these place-based initiatives aren’t integrated into a single hierarchical organization. Instead, they are partners and collaborators — peers learning to work in egalitarian horizontal relationships.

That takes the skills of self-government, which is the hard and messy part. But I’ll send out a link to the Spartanburg documentary when it’s publicly available. When you watch it, you’ll see how good it feels to eat your vegetables.

But after President Trump’s threat Tuesday — that if his deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz were not met by 8 p.m., “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” — we must put compartmentalization aside.

These words were different. I want to try to make a case for why.

Some things, once you see them, or once you hear them, can never be unseen or unheard. What exactly occurred? There is some danger that the broad cultural degradation of language will lead us to miss the significance.

Trump’s callous abusiveness has been plain to most of us even since the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced in October 2016. Some of us heard it even sooner, as when in December 2015 he said about fighting terrorists, “You have to take out their families.” For more than a decade, his logorrhea has filled our airwaves and our minds with insults, gaslighting delusions, racist memes, racialist fantasies, and sheer falsehood. His mind is a nasty place, and he’s thrown the doors to it wide open and asked us all to move inside.

There is a long list of ways people have made their peace with this invitation. Some shut out the news. Others tell themselves things like: “Take Trump seriously but not literally.” “The bluster and unpredictability give him negotiating leverage.” “He may be a bully but at least he’s our bully, sticking up for America.” “Don’t worry; Trump always chickens out.” “The character is awful, but I like the policies.” “Oh, it’s just hyperbole.”

We choose our preferred mantra and whisper it, then try to go on with our lives, pretending the torrent of vicious words doesn’t matter. We shrug when Trump drops an f-bomb via Truth Social, as part of negotiating with Iran: After all, kindergartners drop f-bombs these days. That’s the broad degradation of language that we have accepted.

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But Tuesday was different. The president used a threat of genocide not to whip up a rally crowd, not to insult a political opponent, and not to offer colorful commentary on some policy or other. He did it as an act of statecraft.

Remember that a threat is equally a promise. As a question of statecraft, President Trump promised a genocide. This means he said to the world, “America’s tools of statecraft include genocide.” The words were delivered in an exchange constituting a negotiation. They were words that did things, not merely expressed things. Threats from a person with access to nuclear weapons issued in the context of a negotiation must be taken literally. None of the usual hand-waving ways of looking past his words pertain.

This time the president did not speak for himself; he spoke for America. Because his statement was literally a part of a statecraft announcement, it had a different status than the many other things we have heard. He treated Denmark and Greenland badly, too. There, too, he put his abusive language to work for purposes of statecraft. But those cases did not involve a promise of genocide.

Sadly, our country is not innocent of genocide. Andrew Jackson wrote to the Cherokees as the country moved toward the policy of Indian removal: “I have no motive, my friends, to deceive you. I am sincerely desirous to promote your welfare. Listen to me, therefore, while I tell you that you cannot remain where you now are. Circumstances that cannot be controlled, and which are beyond the reach of human laws, render it impossible that you can flourish in the midst of a civilized community. You have but one remedy within your reach. And that is, to remove to the West and join your countrymen, who are already established there. And the sooner you do this, the sooner you will commence your career of improvement and prosperity. ... The fate of your women and children, the fate of your people, to the remotest generation, depend on the issue.”

America has just once again identified genocide as one of its policy options. This is what we cannot unsee.

We cannot live with this. I know I can’t. So here’s my ask: If you have a relative with whom you have stopped discussing politics to keep the peace, the time is here to say something. What might we say? “The President has just broken with the character of America. Would you agree that we do not want America to count genocide among her tools? If that’s the case, then please call your congressman and let them know you do not support the president’s new approach to foreign policy. We are the nation dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal and deserve protection of their fundamental human rights.”

You may not get a positive response. But only if we all say something about this one do we stand a chance of puncturing the obsequious surround-sound bubble around the president that makes this all so much worse.

Democracy’s tent should be big, but I think there is a clear agenda. At the Stoneham rally, we expanded the chant. “No Kings! By the People, For the People!” The best way to avoid an unbounded and overreaching executive — the best way to protect people from abusive power — is to ensure that the people, through their legislatures, remain the strongest power in the polity. Not a whimsical, arbitrary maximalist executive. Not corporate broligarchs. But all of us ordinary citizens.

As Maria McFarland pointed out here at the Renovator recently, the people have had at least one major victory. Ever since January 24, when Alex Pretti was shot by a federal agent in Minneapolis, I’ve carried as my personal slogan, “Pretti, Good, and Liberty!” This reminds me that the behavior of our government has broken through the fences necessary to keep any of us free and safe. Protecting liberty requires reversing that dynamic.

I am not alone in that opinion. No Kings activists around the country have been calling their members of Congress about Department of Homeland Security abuses. Ultimately, Congress held hearings and grilled DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial page weighed in.

And Noem got fired. The people rebalanced power. That was government by the people, for the people.

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I’d like to propose a full agenda for how to rebalance power to the people, with three federal packages and a complementary state-level agenda. All of these have a bipartisan lineage and are designed to address structural failures, not to secure some partisan advantage. We need both federal- and state-level actions because representation failures can no longer be solved just by reform at the state level; gerrymandering and House malapportionment require federal solutions.

At the same time, elections are governed by states; state and federal elected officials act based on electoral incentives. As a result, state reforms that alter those incentives can drive improvements in representation, accountability, and governing behavior nationwide. Also, state-level civic infrastructure can reinforce reforms: Reforms create new incentives, while civic engagement fuels the durable civic culture required to deepen and strengthen government that is for the people because it is by the people.

Here’s the agenda I’d like to float:

An Anti-Corruption and Representation Package

• Comprehensive restrictions on money in politics, including passage of the For Our Freedom constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United.

• A stock trading ban for members of Congress.

• Federal action to prevent gerrymandering.

• Expansion of the House of Representatives to restore representational balance.

• Passage of the Fair Representation Act, enabling multimember districts and ranked-choice voting for House elections, and ranked-choice voting for Senate elections, to provide better avenues for majoritarian accountability.

• State Voting Rights Act passage with proportional representation as a structural remedy to vote dilution.

Information for America Package

• Digital governance and privacy reforms, modeled on the state-level Digital Choice Acts, as well as Section 230 reforms so that platforms can be held liable for their algorithms.

• Transparency and accountability standards for major platforms and AI providers.

• Support for journalism and local news.
  

Re-Empowering Congress Package

• Activated constraints on executive overreach (e.g. war powers, emergency authorities, administrative delegation).

• Institutional reforms to congressional procedure and capacity (e.g. committee powers, staffing salary and talent pipeline, expertise, calendar control).

• Reducing excessive power concentration in party leadership and the speaker.

State-Level Agenda

• Election reforms like all-party primaries that expand the electoral base, increase representation and representational fairness, and reduce partisan gatekeeping.

• State-level money-in-politics reforms as in the examples of ME, MN, CT, Seattle, and NYC, which have achieved meaningful limits on corporate spending in politics (ME, MN) and robust public campaign finance programs (CT, Seattle, NYC).

• Local and municipal experimentation with ranked-choice voting and proportional representation, building proof of concept and public familiarity.

• Civic learning, engagement, and coalition-building infrastructure, including:

  • Adult civic education and engagement opportunities.

  • Nonpartisan spaces for citizens to articulate shared democratic concerns and connect those concerns to institutional reform.

  • Civic strategies explicitly designed to support reform coalitions, not standalone dialogue disconnected from decisions or actions.

• Deployment of technology to strengthen everyday connections between people and public institutions, improving responsiveness, transparency, and trust at the point of contact, for instance MAPLE in Massachusetts, a platform that lowers the barrier to submitting testimony to the state legislature or CalMatters in California.

Ok, time for a Renovator poll. Could you get behind this agenda? Call it the By the People, For the People agenda.

Also, with apologies, there’s no First Thursdays Renovator Assembly this month. Happy Passover! So we’ll dig in on the By the People, For the People Agenda during the May 7^th Assembly. Mark your calendars! 7pm ET, by Zoom.

I might have decried the decision to launch a war without congressional authorization. But let’s be honest: Congress has been debating whether to authorize military action in Iran since June and taken no action. On Jan. 23, Trump announced that he was sending an “armada” toward Iran. On Jan. 26, The USS Abraham Lincoln and its carrier strike group arrived in the Middle East. Congress had plenty of opportunity to exercise its authorities and chose not to. Every person who chants “No Kings!” should follow that with “Save Congress.” A Congress that brings a consequential debate to conclusion and decision in a timely fashion is the only answer to a president who operates as king.

And sometimes, the place to point the finger is at Congress, not the president. This is one of those times.

I do decry the remarkable underestimation of the Iranian nation. In the 1990s, I worked for an Iranian documentary filmmaker who was narrating the story of pro-democracy women writers and artists in Iran. I spent hours watching her raw footage from bustling Tehran, ancient Isfahan, and beautiful mountains, plains and valleys. In one especially powerful stretch of footage, throngs of bare-chested young men marched through Iranian streets to commemorate the Battle of Karbala, a founding event for Shia Islam. As they marched in a ritual of mourning for a martyr, the young men beat their own backs with short leather thongs. I had never seen such intense commitment.

That Iran is home to a long-lived and impressive civilization is clear. That its modern regime also posed a substantial danger to global peace — and its own people, so many of whom were killed in January simply for assembling to express their grievances with their government — is equally clear. Finding the path forward between those two facts has been a generational challenge for American presidents.

What has disturbed me most of all, though, is how we are fighting this war: Operation Epic Fury. In ancient Greece, the mythical Furies terrified people, not because anger itself is scary (though it is), but because when the Furies appeared, they inevitably unleashed cycles of vendetta that were exceptionally hard to end. Revenge begets revenge.

One of the most important trilogies in ancient Greek drama, the Oresteia, reaches its climax in the conversion of the Furies into the Eumenides, or the “well-minded ones,” who successfully replace a culture of revenge with stable and bounded practices of justice. That idea is foundational to Greek culture and therefore for the Western civilization that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claims to defend.

The entire purpose of civilization, the playwright Aeschylus argues, is to redirect the Furies toward productive pursuits. Civilizing humanity requires taming them. To unleash them is to choose to undo civilization.

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Two recent essays have captured my concern about the failure of the Trump administration to appreciate what it means to protect civilization — meaning peaceful, cooperative social organization. One is by Iraq War veteran and novelist Phil Klay and one comes from Iranian-American author and scholar of religion Reza Aslan.

Both writers reflect on how civilization can be preserved even under the exigencies of war, even under the necessity for realpolitik.

As Klay writes: “If war is politics by other means, and if all government rests on opinion, as the Federalist Papers suggest, then the ultimate outcome of wars is going to be a matter not simply of military successes but also of the long-term effect of the use of violence on the warring populations.” He invokes Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who “told Americans we must arm our allies in Europe to prevent: ‘A new and terrible era in which the whole world, our hemisphere included, would be run by threats of brute force.’”

A world run by threats of brute force is precisely what the Trump administration is giving us, by their own admission, if we take Stephen Miller at his word.

Notice that Klay is worried about the effects of that world of brute force on “warring populations,” plural. Danger lurks not only for the Iranians, but also for us. Shift the frame for a moment and consider the case of Israel and the Palestinians. When one reads about the brutal violence against Palestinians committed by Israeli settlers, it is hard not to see the long-term effect of the use of violence on warring populations, on both sides.

How can we take the project of civilization seriously during wartime? The word “civilization” is for starters desperately out of fashion. Perhaps it’s easier to use if we understand it simply as referring to a collective capacity to resist the temptation to descend to the level of the Furies.

Aslan writes that for decades, as he has written and spoken about Iran and tried “to explain its history, culture and politics to American audiences,” he has consistently made the case for “engagement, diplomacy, cultural exchange and economic ties that open the country to the world, giving the United States both leverage and responsibility in shaping the regime’s behavior.” This approach, Aslan argues, would be the best way to help Iranians fight authoritarianism.

In other words, his advice has been: Reinforce the powers of civilization. Drive the cause of civilization itself forward.

A mistake people make about the American Revolution is to think that first the Americans fought a war and toppled a government, and then they figured out what to build. In fact, the reverse is true. The colonies began writing constitutions to turn themselves into states in January of 1776. By July 4, 1776, five colonies had already done this work. In other words, the purpose of war was not so much to destroy but to carry forward a project of civilization — a commitment to stable institutions designed to support the safety and happiness of a people.

The end is in the beginning, and the beginning in the end. If the goal is peace, and civilization, then the beginning should carry those seeds. Operation Epic Fury, with its name and approach to warfare, promises the ongoing degradation of human civilization. This is a great danger to all of us, even if the war somewhat reduces the specific near-term threat from Iran.

As Klay puts it, “Power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, cruelty is not the same as strength, and a politics built on such ideas promises ruin, delusion about the limits of our power and a betrayal of the promise of our founding.” These are wise words. The voice, I think, of the Loyal Opposition.

I’m delighted to share that Phil Klay will join me for the next episode of the Headstrong Club, our Last Wednesdays Substack Live, this Wednesday, March 25, at 2:15 pm. Don’t miss it!

These patriots from both parties want to re-establish Congress as the first branch. Rein in an overreaching executive. Provide protection against retaliation, chaos, and abusive power. Fix the rules so no one can again abuse power with impunity or profit corruptly from government service. And work for a constitutional democracy that is representative, accountable, governable, and responsive to ordinary people.

In Congress, members of the Loyal Opposition have come together to defend and use the War Powers Act, to assert rights of review on tariffs, to restore science funding, and — as Sam Daley-Harris pointed out in a recent post — to restore global aid. These LO members are not necessarily moderates or centrists. They include libertarians like Thomas Massie (KY) and Rand Paul (KY), progressives like Ro Khanna (CA), Maria Cantwell (WA), and Peter Welch (VT), and conservatives like Jerry Moran (KS) and Todd Young (IN).

That diversity drives home a critical point: The Loyal Opposition is not about moderation. It’s not about centrism. It’s about constitutionalism and constitutionalists. It’s for the people who believe that government will be for the people — and not for crony capitalists, would-be monarchs and oligarchs — only when it is also by the people.

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There’s a problem though. These members of the Loyal Opposition probably don’t have any deep sense of being on the same team. Current partisan politics offer little space for members of the Loyal Opposition to help each other politically. This presents the greatest challenge for bringing the Loyal Opposition into true existence.

To make the Loyal Opposition a real political force there are a few puzzles to solve.

For instance, three Republican House districts — unlikely to be flipped by Democrats — have Loyal Opposition representatives who are facing MAGA primary challenges or attacks from President Trump: Thomas Massie (KY-04), Jeff Hurd (CO-03), and Young Kim (CA-40). Will other members of the Loyal Opposition have their back?

Could Democratic members of the Loyal Opposition, in other words, imagine counting it as a win if these three survive? If so, what help could they lend? Vocal public help is hard to imagine, as Democratic backing is more likely to hurt than help these candidates.

Right now, there is essentially no organization that raises grassroots money from ordinary voters for the specific purpose of supporting cross-partisan, independent-minded, Congress-first candidates. Anybody want to step up to build that vehicle? Send me a note if you do.

Maine presents another puzzle. There, Sen. Susan Collins, clearly a member of the Loyal Opposition, is battling for her political survival against two strong Democratic contenders: Gov. Janet Mills and oyster-farmer Graham Platner. If the Democratic nominee is Platner, there’s a very good chance he wins. Maine is one of the most important Senate pickup states for the Democrats. Neither Platner nor Mills has yet signaled that they would be likely to serve in the legislature in the sort of cross-partisan way that defines members of the Loyal Opposition.

Here, I think, the question of what you do depends on which political party you call home.

For Republicans, having a Republican member of the Loyal Opposition is currently preferable to having a Democratic one. Republicans need to support Collins.

On the other side, however, a very interesting situation presents itself in the battle between Mills and Platner. Democratic LO members don’t have to support Collins just because she’s in that tribe. Just as Republicans would rather have an additional Republican member of the Loyal Opposition, Democrats reasonably prefer an additional Democratic member.

Maine has an exceptionally distinguished tradition of political independence. Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both the House and the Senate, stood up to her co-partisan, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with her famous 1950 floor speech, her “Declaration of Conscience.” She denounced McCarthy’s debasement of the Senate and said, “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.” Democratic Sen. George Mitchell was famous for his ability to negotiate compromises, ultimately being tasked with brokering peace in Ireland because of his skill. Republican Sen. Bill Cohen stepped up as secretary of defense for Democratic President Bill Clinton.

This is no tradition of establishment complacency. Democratic Mainers who want to see the Loyal Opposition grow stronger should test their candidates to see which one is willing to forge a new generation of independent-minded leadership for Maine. Either Mills or Platner could position themselves that way. Mills has the pragmatic experience and profile of a governor. On the trail, Platner charges that the enemy is oligarchy. The Founders would have agreed. They designed tools to fight exactly that problem — the Emoluments Clause, congressional control of the purse, and legislative authority over trade. Platner has an opportunity to channel the populist energy of his campaign into the specific institutional reforms that would make oligarchic capture of government off-limits, not just a rhetorical stalking horse. Platner, as a constitutionalist, would be a powerful force.

I agree fervently that we need to break oligarchy’s grip on government. The reason oligarchs have so much power right now is that Congress has ceded its authority to the executive, and the executive has been captured by billionaire interests. Think Elon Musk and DOGE, and so many government contracts steered to cronies.

But to fight oligarchy, electing populists isn’t enough on its own. We’ve also got to rebuild Congress as an independent institution that can’t be bypassed by executive orders. Tariff review legislation isn’t a weak tea procedural reform; its purpose is to block any president from unilaterally restructuring the economy to benefit personal friends. War power resolutions aren’t constitutional extras; they ensure that billionaires and defense contractors can’t push the country into war without democratic consent. The Congress-first agenda is the anti-oligarchy agenda expressed in institutional language.

If you are a Maine Democrat who wants to join the Loyal Opposition, then putting this conversation on the table is the next step. Let’s see which candidate — Platner or Mills — has more to offer for the Loyal Opposition. And if you’re an independent, you have a choice. Collins’ version of the Loyal Opposition? Or whatever version Mills or Platner might offer before the campaign is through?

All right, two puzzles down. Now we need to figure out who might act on either of these action pathways, and what the puzzles are in other races and states. Is it possible to crowdsource an operational plan for how to make the Loyal Opposition real? I don’t know. But I’d like to find out. Tell me what state or race is creating puzzles for you when you think about your political stance through a Loyal Opposition lens.

Yet for all his impressive accolades, Adams arguably made his greatest impact through his choices of whom to place in positions of leadership and influence. In his years as a young lawyer in Boston, Adams developed the practice of writing down character studies of people he encountered. Independent-minded and cantankerous, he was nonetheless an exemplary judge of character and unafraid to delegate to those he deemed worthy. Beginning with the very creation of the new nation, Adams’ most significant achievements came from empowering others.

Since the fall of 1775, Adams—along with the Virginian Richard Henry Lee—had been pushing Congress to issue a declaration of independence from Britain. In June 1776, Congress decided to set up a committee to draft the declaration’s preamble. Many people would have jumped at the chance to articulate the principles that would define the American experiment. Instead, Adams ensured that Thomas Jefferson would be appointed head of the five-person drafting committee.

Why? It’s true Adams was one of the busiest members of Congress, ultimately serving on ninety different committees. His real reasons, though, went beyond workload. As Adams claimed to have put it in a conversation with Jefferson:

Reason 1^st. You are a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business.

Reason 2^nd. I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular; you are very much otherwise.

Reason 3^rd. You can write ten times better than I can.

Putting aside ego, Adams selected the man he believed would best articulate the moral case for the nation—a case that Lincoln would pick up and reinvigorate four-score and seven years later.

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Adams’ clear-eyed assessment of others likewise enabled the American Revolution to conclude on satisfactory terms. In 1782, Congress dispatched to Paris three American peace commissioners—Adams, the wealthy New Yorker John Jay, and the scientist-politician Benjamin Franklin—and charged them with keeping their French allies fully informed of all conversations with the British.

The French skillfully used this inside information to steer negotiations toward their own interests, even where those diverged from America’s. Franklin had been in Paris since December 1776. His wit and sociability made him a darling of French society, and he was on intimate terms with the French negotiators. As Jay and Adams saw it, Franklin’s social entanglements were making action on behalf of America difficult. Despite his protestations, Franklin had real conflicts of interest.

On October 29, 1782, Jay and Franklin argued about how to continue the negotiations with France and Britain. Jay proposed a different method and manner than Franklin’s relaxed approach. The commissioners, as Adams put it, needed “to be honest and grateful to our allies, but to think for ourselves.” Adams endorsed Jay’s proposal that they should start negotiating with the British without informing the French.

Outvoted, Franklin concurred. The three men delivered the preliminary articles of peace a month later, on November 30, 1782, after a full year of failed negotiations. It was Adams’ clarity about the character of those around him that enabled this breakthrough and put negotiations on a new path that finally led to peace.

As president, too, Adams’ choice of personnel was a key to his success. Beginning in 1797, Adams’ tenure was defined by the challenge of navigating conflict with France. An important ally during the Revolutionary War, France had by this time overthrown its monarchy, descended into brutal violence, and plunged into war with Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia.

George Washington, Adams’ predecessor and the nation’s first president, had established that the United States would remain neutral in the conflict. Believing a standing military to be a threat to liberty, Congress had even disbanded the Revolutionary navy and army. After Washington concluded his two terms and returned to his Mount Vernon home, though, the country’s emerging political factions kicked against the neutrality decision. The Federalists, led for all practical purposes by Alexander Hamilton, wanted to ally with Britain and restore the French royal family—with many supporting a larger and more assertive American military. The Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, advocated defending the new French Republic but remained deeply concerned that a strengthened military jeopardized the underpinnings of the American republic and risked domestic coercion.

The actions of the French worsened matters. Frustrated by American neutrality and the American refusal to repay to the French Republic debts incurred earlier to the King, the French began attacking and capturing American merchant ships. From October 1796 to June 1797, they seized some 300 vessels—about 6 percent of the entire U.S. merchant fleet.

Adams knew French aggression had to be stopped, but was also keenly aware of the danger of being dragged into a larger European conflict while the nation was still fragile and underdeveloped. Threading the needle between factions, Adams sought Congressional authorization for a military call-up and a naval force—intending to put both to work to enforce neutrality. He sought strength without entering the war.

The canny New Englander faced the daunting challenge of how to help his fledgling nation learn to wield military tools without militarizing as a society—the Republicans’ great fear. Adams assuredly made mistakes—deciding to sign rather than veto the Alien and Sedition Acts, for instance, which permitted the government to prosecute Americans for speaking and publishing criticism of their leaders. Yet he mostly succeeded, once again, by installing the right people. He put George Washington back at the head of the army and Benjamin Stoddert—a resourceful and forward-thinking merchant and former Continental Army officer—at the head of the navy. Both men were characterized by impeccable personal self-discipline and respect for institutions. These choices ensured that the military build-up would be targeted and constrained, and that the country would accept a reduced military role after the end of the conflict.

In many ways, Adams’ most important judgment call was his earliest. On October 25, 1764, Adams had married the slender, serious, brown-eyed Abigail Smith, a woman of great intelligence, candor, and political attunement who matched him in love of learning. Over fifty-four years of marriage, they developed shared moral commitments—for instance, their rejection of slavery—through conversations and exchanges of letters. This long-running conversation with Abigail equipped Adams with a navigational compass as he led his fellow colonists toward Independence, through constitution writing, into a restored relationship with Britain, and onto a new political footing. The strength of their relationship enabled Adams—and the nation—to flourish.

After arriving at the “President’s House” on November 1, 1800—the first chief executive to inhabit the soon-to-be iconic White House—Adams penned to his cherished Abigail the exhortation that would one day be carved into the fireplace of the State Dining Room: “May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof.”

That prayer called future generations to revere good character. Adams’ own ability to identify and empower honest and wise Men—and Women—played an essential role in shaping the trajectory of our young nation.

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This piece was published in collaboration with In Pursuit. In Pursuit is a landmark initiative of More Perfect, a bipartisan alliance of 43 Presidential Centers, the National Archives Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Karsh Institute for Democracy at the University of Virginia, and more than 100 organizations working together to protect and renew our democracy as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and beyond.

Each week throughout 2026, they will publish original essays from some of the nation’s most prominent voices—including former Presidents, First Ladies, and leading historians—as they reflect on the enduring lessons and complex legacies of those who have occupied the White House.

Check out the version of “John Adams” published by In Pursuit this morning. You may also enjoy their piece on George Washington, written by former President George W. Bush. Subscribe to follow along with their year-long exploration of leadership, character, and the American Experiment.

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George Washington by George W. Bush

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5 months ago · 1787 likes · 381 comments · In Pursuit and George W. Bush

We can scarcely turn around any longer without hearing such stories.

This dynamic contributed to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s break from MAGA. In November, on Truth Social, President Trump labeled the former Georgia congresswoman “Marjorie Traitor Greene.” Then, as The New York Times reported, “Terrified by the ensuing wave of death threats aimed at her and her family from apparent supporters of Mr. Trump, she could no longer see any upside to duking it out in the political arena.”

The dynamic operates further down the political food chain, too. A Houston mother attempted spoke out against the creation of a club inspired by Turning Point USA, the group founded by conservative activist Charlie Kirk, at her children’s high school. According to The Times, the woman believed that “the club could ‘sow division and hate.’” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had an answer: “The far-left tried to silence these patriotic young Texans, but we will never surrender.” The mom reported receiving death threats.

I had a similar experience with Turning Point. In 2017, I was added to the group’s Professor Watchlist along with defamatory claims about what I taught. Kirk appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, presenting my photo and those claims. I got death threats on my phone’s voicemail.

We need to name this problem.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this of Carlson: “Every time that dude puts my name in his mouth, the next day, I mean, this is like what stochastic terrorism is. ... It’s like when you use a very large platform to turn up the temperature and target an individual until something happens, and then when something happens, because it’s indirect, you say, ‘Oh, I had nothing to do with that.’”

The phrase Ocasio-Cortez used — “stochastic terrorism” — doesn’t get it quite right, but it’s close. It was coined in the early 2000s by a risk analyst, then appropriated and redefined by an anonymous blogger in 2011. It has been used to refer to a pattern whereby degrading or dehumanizing statements by a powerful person create a climate of hate or threat for a group or individual, and then someone acts in violence against that target.

The word stochastic comes from statistics and probability, and it refers to this aspect of the phenomenon: Who acts against the target is unpredictable, but that someone will do so is highly predictable. The killings of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk himself and the assassination attempts against Trump are examples of stochastic terrorism. At a certain point, the virality of inflammatory language makes it likely that someone is triggered to act violently, even if predicting who it will be is impossible.

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Rand Europe recently did a study of the pattern for a Dutch governmental agency. A goal was to clarify possible strategies for interrupting the resulting political violence, with the hope that naming and characterizing the phenomenon will make that easier. They conclude, though, that the phrase stochastic terrorism falls short. Causal links between an initial speaker, the sources of virality, and the violent actor are too hard to establish.

So here’s another concept: “stochastic intimidation.” We have to distinguish between cases in which the inflammatory speech results in violence and those where what results is intimidation through threats. What clearly exists is a pattern in which a speaker denigrates a target; the denigration goes viral; and someone delivers threats to the target. Who delivers the threat may be random, but that a threat will follow from social media fueled condemnatory discourse is nearly guaranteed. The cases where this pattern results in violence are the tail of the distribution of the phenomenon of stochastic intimidation.

This now very common pattern has driven many people out of public office, introduced a need for more proactive protection of journalists, and frightened ordinary citizens into keeping quiet about issues they care about. Silencing the voices of democratic citizens is the purpose.

We have laws against voter intimidation, against witness intimidation, and against threats to public officials and their families. In other words, where speech or action degrade a function necessary for the healthy operations of democracy, we have protected those functions. These laws are generally consistent with the First Amendment because true threats and certain intimidation and harassment conduct are not protected speech. It might be tempting to think we could also have laws against journalist intimidation, election worker intimidation, and citizen intimidation. There is a chance we could pull off the first two, modeled on voter and witness intimidation. Indeed, since 2020, several states have passed laws against election worker intimidation.

But the law won’t help us protect citizens generally from verbal intimidation and threats. That’s a game of whack-a-mole. One powerful speaker, connected to mechanisms of amplification, can generate hundreds of threats. Prosecuting all of them would be impossible. We have no legal way of braking the behavior of the amplifiers; and the powerful speaker is protected by First Amendment rights and often has the cover of plausible deniability. We will need to look for our solutions elsewhere — in institutional norms and practices and in our civic culture.

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In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a rash of shootings in post offices by disgruntled employees terrified the nation. This is where the phrase “going postal” came from.

The U.S. Postal Service was able to interrupt this pattern. It had to acknowledge a toxic, abusive management culture. Then the combination of a Congressional hearings and a USPS Commission process yielded a multi-prong strategy of response that included: “stepping up the current violence prevention program, improving job applicant screening, increasing training to improve the interpersonal skills of managers, and overhauling the dispute resolution process.” USPS also had to address a massive backlog of employee grievances, reducing a backlog from 135,000 cases to 15,000.

Of course, tackling violence inside of a single bureaucracy is a substantially different project from addressing an emergent property of a distributed social system of communication and grievance. But some lessons might apply. The USPS didn’t solve workplace violence primarily through prosecution — it changed the culture, created early warning systems, and restructured grievance processes.

If the only civic culture that people have is one of tribal combat, the pattern of stochastic intimidation will keep recurring. Building a thick civic culture of pluralism, disagreement without dehumanization, and reflective patriotism is a generational project, but can address the root causes of this problem. That’s the culture change we need, and elites can help it along if they break ranks with instigators and name the instigation of stochastic intimidation as an unacceptable practice.

For early warning systems, we should establish social media platform design obligations such as a duty to interrupt amplification cascades. In other words, if we make platforms responsible for the virality that they cause, we can interrupt it when they are accelerating intimidation.

As to restructured grievance processes, we have to acknowledge the limits of criminal law in addressing stochastic intimidation — it can’t touch the instigator or the amplifier. But we might also ask whether civil liability frameworks could interrupt this pattern. Perhaps we could create a civil cause of action, modeled on tortious interference in the business context, to let a target sue either the powerful speaker or the amplifier who engage in a pattern of public communication that they know or should know will foreseeably result in intimidation against an identifiable target. In business contexts, you can be liable for predictable harms your conduct causes to third parties. Platform companies might themselves also be sued for civil liability on the model of tortious interference.

Greene said a threat aimed at her son was particularly decisive for her: “Derek will have his life snuffed out soon. Better watch his back.” According to The New York Times, the email came with a subject heading using Trump’s new nickname for her, “Marjorie Traitor Greene.”

Greene then texted the president, and The Times reports: “According to a source familiar with the exchange, his long reply made no mention of her son. Instead, Trump insulted her in personal terms. When she replied that children should remain off limits from their disagreements, Trump responded that she had only herself to blame.”

A White House spokesperson offered this comment on the situation: “President Trump remains the undisputed leader of the greatest and fastest growing political movement in American history — the MAGA movement. On the other hand, Congresswoman Greene is quitting on her constituents in the middle of her term and abandoning the consequential fight we’re in — we don’t have time for her petty bitterness.”

Stochastic intimidation is not a pretty name for the phenomenon that Trump and his staff here pretend to erase through redirection. But it is a real phenomenon. Its power to terrify and silence citizens is only spreading and growing. We must interrupt it.

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Stochastic intimidation is one of the president’s most powerful tools, but he is by no means alone in wielding it. Figures on both left and right, holding both high public office and that highest office of mere citizen, are suffering harm from it. The very staff who offer absurd statements such as the one above from the White House press office probably suffer from it. Odds are that their own effort to find a way to live with a constant barrage of threats is what leads them to pretend that the barrage doesn’t exist. That pretense might help them endure. It doesn’t help us all end the onslaught.

Here’s what will help: We have to acknowledge that the problem exists, that it has a name — stochastic intimidation — and that we need to stop it. I wonder what it would take to get us some Congressional hearings on stochastic intimidation and a commission on how to interrupt it.

Stochastic intimidation. Not a pretty name. Not a pretty thing. But a definite pattern to interrupt.

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Make sure to check out these new announcements for The Renovator Community! And join us next week, Feb. 25, at 12:15 P.M. EST for Danielle’s Substack Live with Bill Kristol!

But someone blocks the megalomania when it would actually drive America over the cliff. Often it seems to be Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and associates in the business world. More than once it’s been anonymous bond traders. Sometimes it might be White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The examples? Backing off on the Liberation Day tariffs. On Greenland. On bombing Iran (for now). On ICE and CPB tactics and abuses. These aren’t TACO — aren’t “Trump always chickens out” moments. Sometimes someone gets in the way of the megalomania.

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The MEGA Movement is also directing ferocious energy toward knocking down our constitutional order. It has proven impeachment useless. It has won immunity for the president and rhetorically transferred that sense of immunity to a wide swathe of the executive branch. It is rewriting the history of the January 6 insurrection. It is in a battle with Congress for control over the purse.

Now it has turned its attention to the remaining fence: the powers reserved to the states and to the people through elections and control over the election system.

Last week, Republicans in Congress introduced the MEGA bill. They call it the Make Elections Great Again Act. I call it the Megalomania bill. This bill moves forward an agenda that the president had tried advancing as an executive order to extend further federal control over state election systems.

Perhaps the most important provision of the MEGA bill is a ban on the use of ranked-choice voting for federal elections. Both Alaska and Maine already use RCV for federal elections, and one reason they do that is to ensure that the people as a whole — not a small partisan base — determine who represents them in office.

Because when the people as a whole control elections, and when a majority winner is required, the election system cannot be anywhere nearly so easily captured by corrupt or hyperpartisan interests, as has occurred across the many states without RCV.

Grassroots advocates who work on RCV have always understood that their measure was a counterweight to the forces of corruption. No surprise, then, that the forces of corruption are now taking aim at RCV. They understand its power, too.

But this isn’t a fight between a megalomaniac President and another branch of government. This is a fight between the president and the people.

Good news: The people are ready.

Here is Meredith Sumpter, CEO of FairVote, with a message to all Americans about why we need to stand up for our power to choose an election system that puts power back in our hands:

FairVote Reacts to the MEGA Bill

(https://youtube.com/shorts/PADGis1EpmE?si=4J-Tswd2BJFdUQJO)

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I’ve explained the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis to my kids as follows:

You know how in the second season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians the barrier that protects the camp for the demi-gods is cracking, and here and there monsters and giants who are lined up outside to attack are able to break through and mow down some of the campers? The barrier is not completely gone, but it is cracking enough to let enemies in.

Well, that’s what’s happening now. The rule of law and constitutionalism are like a magical barrier that protect people from arbitrary power. Protection from arbitrary power means people can live in peace going about their business — tending to chores, enjoying recreation, praying, laughing, and crying over life’s regular trials and triumphs.

But when the barrier starts to break — when people cease to believe in the value of the rule of law and when leaders cease to uphold constitutionalism as a matter of personal honor and character — well, then, monsters break through. People who think they can act with impunity are behaving like those monsters.

Alex Pretti was using his first amendment rights to document the behavior of ICE agents, but that magical barrier — our constitutional rights — did not hold for him. While he was lying on the ground, greatly outnumbered and also by that point unarmed, an agent or agents fired ten shots at him, killing him.

The barrier of lawfulness and constitutionalism in our country is cracking. It has not disintegrated everywhere. Not by any means. But it is cracking badly enough to let monsters through.

The Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity may have had relatively little legal consequence for an executive branch that was already exceptionally powerful, as Jack Goldsmith has argued, but it seems to have had a great psychological consequence nonetheless. The decision delivered a message that nothing the President does can be sanctioned for unlawfulness except for via conviction on impeachment. That, we know, is essentially a paper barrier. Without sanctions, the very concept of the unlawful begins to disintegrate.

The President has made clear that he considers himself unbound by anything other than his own will. While he expressed his self-reliance in a discussion of national security, his action in Venezuela makes clear that he considers policing and military powers merged. This means that his conception of his domestic power is probably just as unbounded as his conception of his national security power. His frequent threats to invoke the Insurrection Act are unsurprising and continuous with the pattern of his behavior.

With the President psychologically uninhibited in his actions, largely free of sanction, and liberal with his pardon pen for fraudsters and violent offenders, he grants psychological cover to others who carry out his orders or act in alignment with his agenda. This psychological unboundedness is then reinforced by the loophole in our legal system whereby federal officials, in contrast to state officials, cannot usually be sued for damages for violations of constitutional rights.

The most extraordinary thing about the Alexander Pretti shooting is that ICE and CBP agents know that every single step they take is fully surveilled 24-7. With all the whistles blowing, how could anyone not be aware? Yet despite knowing they were being watched, an agent or agents shot an unarmed man, who was lying down, when they had a five to one or seven to one ratio against him, and the shooters didn’t stop after the first shot, or even the second or third. The shots rang out to ten. What could more powerfully convey total confidence in impunity? To act with such a clear expectation of being free from potential sanction is the definition of lawlessness.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, of the House Judiciary Committee, has demanded that the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security produce records concerning their hiring of pardoned January 6^th offenders into the DHS agent pool. Some pardoned offenders are senior employees in both agencies. This is known already. The spirit of lawlessness has entered the heart of government.

When the magical barrier of constitutionalism and the rule of law cracks up, people die — Alex Pretti and Renee Good. But liberty dies too.

Too many people think that liberty refers only to freedom from interference from government. Some, mainly on the right, embrace that limited view of liberty and champion it. Others, mainly on the left, reject liberty or freedom as a governing ideal because they take it to have only this thin meaning.

But there is a rich meaning of liberty also. I am free when I am able to steer my own life in my private sphere but also when I am empowered to steer in collaboration with others through our public institutions. Self-government isn’t just about what I do alone; it’s also about how we together as democratic citizens shape the direction of our society. When the executive branch tramples the legislative branch, our constitution is out of balance, and we the people are no longer setting the direction for our society. We have become subject to the arbitrary will of one man, the very condition the American colonists had a revolution to escape. Immigration detainees in Texas protested the death of Alex Pretti by chanting, “Libertad!”

We need to heal the barrier of constitutionalism and the rule of law that both protects us in our private, personal rights and also ensures that government of the people is both by and for the people. Or to put it another way: treatment of the people by federal agents should be carried out to standards established by the people through our Constitution.

Congress needs to assert itself. The Democrats are right to block passage of the upcoming budget until constitutionalism is restored in the behavior of federal agencies. Republicans should take a good hard look at the situation and find the resolve to steer back toward constitutionalism.

States need to protect their citizens’ basic rights. Governor Hochul, in New York, is wise to push for a bill that will allow people to sue federal agents for violations of constitutional rights in state courts, and every governor should follow suit immediately.

And anyone who wants to join the loyal opposition should advocate for a changed approach to immigration policy. The border should remain sealed, but deportation should be limited to undocumented migrants with felony convictions, plus unlawful arrivals within some to-be-determined period of recency, for instance, one year. Finally, we need modernized earned legalization for long-settled immigrants. Yes, it’s time for amnesty.

The U.S. now has roughly 14 million unauthorized residents. This is 4-5% of the American population. According to the definitions of the Trump administration, every single one of these people is a criminal, even though their act of unlawful entry would in most cases be a misdemeanor. In 2025, with its violent and harassing methods, the Trump administration deported somewhere between 540,000 people (as reported by the New York Times) and 675,000 (as claimed by the Trump administration). In 2024, the Biden administration deported 650,000 people. Deportation carried out within the bounds of constitutionalism cannot reduce the undocumented population to zero. An amnesty and re-set will be necessary.

Earned legalization for long-term residents who are embedded in families and workplaces can stabilize labor markets and communities and bring wage and tax gains. To avoid the mistakes of the 1986 amnesty, this path to legalization would not be blanket, but hinge on background checks; fines and taxes; and English language and civics requirements. It should also include a probationary period.

In the meanwhile, what can each of us do?

1. Put lights in your window for Pretti, Good, and Liberty so that we can begin to see how big the community is that wants to stand up for constitutionalism and rule of law.

2. Let your representatives in Congress know that you want to see immigration policy redirected and ICE and CPB behavior transformed.

3. Let your state representatives and governors know that you want to be able to sue federal agents in state courts if they violate your constitutional rights.

Use your voice. And pass it on: For Pretti, Good, and Liberty!

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