America Can Fight the Wildfire

The Democracy Renovation Agenda can help us douse the flames of domestic and global chaos.

America Can Fight the Wildfire

The Democracy Renovation Agenda can help us douse the flames of domestic and global chaos.

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I— A Three-Part Agenda to Fight the Wildfire

II— Fighting the Wildfire with Upgraded Governance

III— What it Means to Bet on Ourselves

IV— Safety Without a Police State

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A Three-Part Agenda to Fight the Wildfire

A wildfire of rapid change blazes around the world, and within America.

The wildfire is global economic turbulence fueled by two forces bigger than the United States. These are globalization (and now de-globalization) and technological transformation, both of which are also driving climate change and historically unprecedented levels of human migration. The wildfire has sparked cultural destabilization in societies around the globe, including in the U.S. The economic turbulence manifests itself at home in our nationwide housing crisis and stagnating opportunity. After freeing the bear of American democracy from the trap of partisan party capture, we Americans will be able to fight the wildfire.

So what do we do about it?

We have three major steps to take. The preamble to the Constitution can be our guide. Let’s recall how our ancestors defined the job of fighting the wildfire:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

This is our job too. We’ll get a more perfect union by renovating our democracy. We’ll promote the general welfare by rebalancing power in our economy and society, especially by redirecting tech power into channels that are good for people and good for democracy. We’ll provide for the common defence and domestic tranquility by pursuing safety as the outcome of strong, fair institutions that recognize the power and blessings of our liberties.

The overall picture is pretty simple.

First, for that more perfect union, we’ve got to make sure our instruments of governance are fit for purpose. This means our institutions of representative democracy need to work. They need to be responsive to our needs and get stuff done for us. Otherwise, autocracy is calling. There is more democracy renovation needed than just getting rid of party primaries. There’s cultural work to do as well as institutional reform. We need to put civic education at the center of our education system. If we renovate our institutions but not our civic culture, all the hard work of institutional change will have been in vain.

Second, for the general welfare, we need to take power back from technology and put it in our hands — the hands of ordinary people. We need to take our kids back from tech so that we parents shape their development, not algorithms. We adults need to declare independence from tech, reclaiming mastery of our own minds, souls, and habits of attention. And we need to put tech to work for us, fueling an economy that gives us all a meaningful and rewarding part to play.

We need technology strategies that work to complement human labor, not replace it. We’ll feel better back in the driver’s seat, and our economic opportunities will increase. And we need to take control of our time back from a tech-powered economy that above all extracts our life force down to the minute.

We need this so that we can pursue not work-life balance, but life-work-civic balance. Life should come first. We need a world where life feels good, is supported by good schools and good jobs, and leaves enough time for all of us who want to take up a civic role.

Third, we also need to deliver domestic tranquility and common defense while preserving our liberties to pass on to our children. Just as we want to win the AI war – both the competition with China and the war for our human souls — without ceasing to be a free society, so, too, we want to secure the border and keep our streets safe, without turning into a police state. We have to protect personal liberties, including due process and freedom of speech, while at the same time we defend ourselves.

Safety is the outcome not just of force, but of strong, fair institutions. It requires economic stability, educational opportunity and the fostering of civic trust, health-care systems that support positive mental health, and social cohesion. All the work we do on democracy renovation and securing the general welfare will also support safety and domestic tranquility. Our work on border security, immigration, and policing should always be set against consistent efforts to create strong, fair institutions. There will be a lot of work to do on this front. We do need to keep irregular border crossings to a bare minimum, but we also need to clean up the system of legal entry, develop a structure for earned legalization for the millions of long-term but unauthorized residents embedded in families and workplaces, and develop a renewed capacity to work with global partners on fresh global conventions.

With these fundamentals in place, we’ll also be in a good position to tackle climate issues, not only mitigation but — because it is already necessary — adaptation.

We can make constitutional democracy work in the 21st century with responsive, resilient governance; deliver the general welfare by shifting power in our economy and society back to ordinary people; and secure domestic tranquility and the common defense by putting respect for the blessings of liberty at the heart of our work.

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Fighting the Wildfire with Upgraded Governance

So far, I have laid out an agenda for fighting the wildfire that is bearing down on us as a consequence of social, economic, and climate change on a global scale. That agenda has three parts. We need responsive, resilient governance from a constitutional democracy that works. We need a path to securing the general welfare through shifting power in our economy and society back to ordinary people. And we need strategies for domestic tranquility and the common defense that put the blessings of liberty front and center.

I know we’re all itching to get to the second and third agenda items — the economic and security questions. But we need to spend one more beat focused on how to have governance institutions that work. We can’t do anything else unless we figure this out.

Think about it this way: Donald Trump is moving his substantive policy agenda forward apace because he first figured out a governance agenda: a maximalist unitary executive. That approach may deliver energy and theoretically even effectiveness in government, but it also obliterates what the authors of the Founding Fathers called “republican safety” — protection of our basic rights and liberties.

We need an approach to governance that delivers both energy and republican safety. How do we get there?

I realize that the technical, engineering work involved in setting up the institutions of democratic governance isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It certainly isn’t sexy. But unless we get serious about the science of democracy, and figure out some new engineering for our institutions in our new conditions, we might as well kiss self-government good-bye.

The good news is that in addition to getting rid of party primaries, as I have argued in previous columns, there’s much we can do to upgrade our democracy to make it effective and resilient in these turbulent times. Democracy renovation isn’t just the one change — it’s a whole suite of actions.

Step 1: Gerrymander-proof Congress.

We do that by getting back in the business of growing our House of Representatives as our population grows, something we did until about 100 years ago. We combine a bigger House with reorganized, multimember districts so that voters elect three members at once, instead of just one, and we use ranked-choice voting for those elections. That will give us a House that proportionally reflects the full range of interests and opinions. And there’s a bonus: This arrangement is largely immune to gerrymandering, as modeling by mathematician Moon Duchin and others has shown. It would take ownership of our political institutions away from the politicians and restore it to the people.

Step 2: Help Congress work.

Our bigger Congress also needs to work a heck of a lot better. And it needs to recover legislative supremacy with respect to the executive branch.

Our ancestors overthrew a monarch precisely to create modes of governance that did a better job of channeling the full diversity of perspective of the population into decision-making, leading to negotiated settlements and a stable society. Right now, we are careening back and forth between different versions of executive power. President Biden wanted equity to be a whole-of-government project. President Trump wants to make getting rid of DEI a whole-of-government project. We’re all wrecked by whiplash.

Enough. The people’s voice, channeled through Congress, and therefore built out of both majority and minority opinion, is the path to legitimate negotiated settlements to our problems. A partisan unitary executive simply cannot fulfill this vital democratic function, precisely because its lopsided agenda will always represent too partial a point of view.

Our renovation work order: We need to re-empower Congress to find negotiated settlements to our problems. That means an overhaul of how Congress operates— its committees, its rules, everything. Congress needs a re-org in the same way that private-sector organizations sometimes need to function better and more efficiently in relation to their mission.

Step 3: Put tech to work for us.

All the way through our system of government — from the municipal to county to state to federal level — we need to put technology to work upgrading representation.

Representation has three basic components: citizen participation, decision-maker decision-making, and government implementation, whether through the enforcement of regulations or delivery of services.

Call these the three vertebrae forming the spine of the representative processes that define our representative democracy. We need to deploy technology to improve the experience of citizen participation, to help decision-makers better understand the interests of their constituents and broaden the space for solutions, and to more effectively implement government decisions.

All three parts of representation can be more efficient. But efficiency isn’t our only goal: We also need to deliver open, accountable, and transparent government. New technologies can help us do all of that a lot more powerfully. There are models in Taiwan, Japan, and Estonia to look to.

Step 4: Rebuild our education system around civic education.

We need STEM education, for sure. But we also need to make certain that every generation grows up understanding the design principles of constitutional democracy and how to operate our political institutions, as well as having the motivation to participate in self-government. If we renovate our institutions but not our civic culture, all the hard work of institutional change will have been in vain.

The wildfire adds urgency to our project of democracy renovation. We need to clear away brush, create fire breaks and install sprinkler systems, but how can we do any of that while caught in a trap surrounded by wolves?

One thing we can take heart in: Wildfires aren’t new. The fire we face is a big one, but fires of change have always burned across the world — which is why we need to do the work of renovating our institutions into good working order. As we break free, these steps will help us form a more perfect union with the capacity to deliver the general welfare in a world in constant flux.

But one more thing.

These steps will help us deliver a way of governing the people that is both by the people and for the people. A maximalist unitary executive certainly governs the people, but it squeezes out self-government by the people, trampling that in every direction. Neither does it operate for the people. Why? Because absolute power corrupts. Power shared among the people is what we need in order to have government in the interest of the people.

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What It Means to Bet on Ourselves

Now it’s time to turn to securing the general welfare, which means it’s time to turn to the economy. The general welfare isn’t just about material well-being, however. It’s also about our mental and spiritual health. That’s because when people are subject to arbitrary power, it diminishes their well-being materially and psychologically. Some of the answers to what we need to improve our economy will flow asking some simple questions about our lives: Why and where we are miserable? And what can we do about it?

The core idea is this: We need to rebalance power in the economy. Where power is too concentrated, we need to shift it away from power holders. Where it is too attenuated, we need to build it up. Let this be our guiding insight: The benefits of a productive economy flow in the same direction as the allocation of power in the economy, so the more that power is broadly shared in the economy, the more opportunity and prosperity will be broadly shared.

We need to put this principle to work at the top of the economy — in the tech sector — and also at the bottom — in communities living in poverty.

The question of how new technologies affect our lives cannot be separated from questions about the economy or our general welfare more broadly. The tech sector is too dominant and pervasive for that. It has become the major driver of national and global economies. Seven of the top ten most valuable companies are tech companies. The combined market value of Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia makes up almost 20 percent of the total S&P 500. As tech goes, so goes the economy, so goes our way of life, so goes how we feel as human beings.

That’s why the first and most important element for getting the general welfare back on track is taking power back from tech companies and putting it into the hands of ordinary people.

We need to claim mastery of our own minds, souls, and habits of attention, and put tech to work for us, fueling an economy that gives us all meaningful and rewarding parts to play. We’ll feel better back in the driver’s seat, and our economic opportunities will get stronger.

In short, we need to declare independence from tech. There are two key steps.

Step 1: Take back our kids. As Jonathan Haidt has powerfully shown, the digital age is destroying the well-being of young people. Tech companies frack their attention, and the resulting harms to mental health are staggering. No silver bullet can reverse this. We need a layered, all-of-the-above approach that includes regulation such as cell phone bans in schools. Age-appropriate design and access. Robust data privacy. Parental empowerment through easy-to-use time caps and dashboards. Cultural shifts like digital sabbaths and teaching digital competence so young people understand how they can be taken advantage of or harmed with digital tools.

And there needs to be a single message communicated consistently to tech companies: Let our children go.

Step 2: Shift power in the economy to the people. In the global landscape, there are currently three paradigms for governing AI: an accelerationist paradigm, an effective altruism paradigm, and a pluralism paradigm. Only the last — pluralism — puts power in the hands of the people. We need to fight the first two paradigms and encourage the third.

In the accelerationist paradigm — think Peter Thiel and Palantir; Elon Musk and Starlink and SpaceX — the goal is to “move fast and break things,” speeding up technological development as much as possible to achieve new solutions to global problems such as labor costs and climate change, while maximally organizing the world around the success of high-IQ individuals. In the accelerationist paradigm, which evokes aspirations like something out of sci fi, the wishes and welfare of ordinary people are outrun by the sheer speed of change: Labor is replaced; the earth is made non-necessary via access to Mars; smart people use tech-fueled genetic selection to produce even smarter babies.

In the effective altruism paradigm — think Sam Altman and OpenAI; Sam Bankman Fried and FTX and Anthropic — there is equally a goal to move fast and break things. But this paradigm also incorporates recognition that replacing human labor with tech will harm masses of humanity, and so the commitment to tech development goes hand in hand with a plan to redistribute the productivity gains that flow to tech companies via universal basic income policies. The masses therefore become ever more dependent — politically and economically — on a shrinking and increasingly wealthy elite.

In the pluralism paradigm — think Audrey Tang in Taiwan — technological development is focused not on overmatching and replacing human intelligence but on complementing and extending the plural kinds of human intelligence with equally plural kinds of machine intelligence. The purpose here is to activate and extend human pluralism for the goods of creativity, innovation, and cultural richness, while fully integrating the broad population into the productive economy. Thus, the pluralism paradigm pursues technology that supports freedom, self-government, and democracy. The state of Pennsylvania’s recent commitment to deploy technology in ways that empower rather than replace humans is an example of this paradigm. So is Utah’s recently passed Digital Choice Act, which places ownership of data in social media platforms back in the hands of users and demands interoperability of platforms, shifting power from tech corporations to citizens and consumers.

What about empowering communities living in poverty? In addition to wrangling the tech sector into a shape that supports the general welfare, we can take steps to return power to ordinary people. Step 3 of this agenda for the general welfare involves putting more decision-making power and responsibility for fighting poverty in the hands of local communities.

Well, a good example is Maryland’s ENOUGH Initiative — Engaging Neighborhoods, Organizations, Unions, Governments, and Households — which is a first-in-the-nation, place-based, anti-poverty program led by the Governor’s Office for Children. This initiative replaces top-down policy blueprints with a process for empowering communities to find solutions. What is distinctive about ENOUGH is that it brings a full range of stakeholders together for joint decision-making about local actions that can be taken to improve the lives of children.

The nuts-and-bolts matter a lot (this is a Renovator theme, you will notice), so stay with me as I get into them a bit:

To participate in ENOUGH, communities complete a needs assessment and asset map, and co-design a “Neighborhood Action Plan” laying out roles, timelines, and accountability measures. Grants then fund approved actions, backed up by coaching and data support from the Governor’s Office for Children. These Neighborhood Action Plans are organized under four pillars, but each one develops its own place-specific mix. Here are the pillars, along with some exemplary policies for each one:

Early learning and schools — Kindergarten-readiness programming; parent coaching such as HIPPY (Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters); supports tied to nearby community schools.

Healthy families and navigation — Maternal supports, substance-use services, and resource/benefits navigation so families can actually access health care, food, and cash/benefit programs.

Economic security and jobs — Youth financial literacy, paid workforce development, small-business support, and pilots to smooth the benefits cliff as parents move into higher-wage work.

Safe and thriving neighborhoods — Homeownership and affordable-housing expansion, food-insecurity initiatives, gun-violence reduction, plus place-based improvements that make daily life safer and easier (transportation, recreation, etc.).

Maryland’s ENOUGH initiative builds on the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone created by Geoffrey Canada. Under ENOUGH, as in the Harlem Children’s Zone, stakeholders in a community are empowered to do holistic success planning for all the kids in that community. That’s the critical, empowering element: It’s by working together across siloes that adults in the community can best see and provide what kids need— all the way from early childhood education to guidance counseling in high school.

The general welfare isn’t just about a number like GDP. Growth, incomes and productivity matter, for sure. But the general welfare is also about how we feel. Agency is a human need: Having the power to steer our own lives feels better than being subject to the arbitrary whims of others. An important aspect of ideas above for how to rebalance power in the tech sector and anti-poverty efforts is empowering parents to lay a strong foundation for the thriving of their children.

Happily, a productive household is the most powerful building block imaginable for a healthy economy. When we take our kids back from tech, forge an economy that integrates workers instead of pushing them out, and empower people to lay foundations for flourishing in their own communities, we are betting on ourselves — and that is the safest bet there is.

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Safety Without a Police State

Now domestic tranquility and the common defense. Their shared purpose is safeguarding the blessings of liberty. Just as we want to win the AI competition with China without ceasing to be a free society, so too we want to secure the border and keep our streets safe without becoming a police state. As we defend ourselves, we also have to protect personal liberties, including due process and freedom of speech.

Safety is the outcome of strong, fair institutions, not just force. Safety requires economic stability, educational opportunity and civic trust. It requires health systems that support positive mental health. And it requires social cohesion. All the democracy renovation work we do, and all the energy we put into securing the general welfare, also promote safety and domestic tranquility. In this way, consistent efforts to create strong, fair institutions are the backdrop for our work on border security, immigration, and policing.

But there are three more targeted steps we can take.

Step 1: Re-engage the world as principled partners, not pay-to-play bullies.

Some of the challenges we face really are global in scale, and they demand a multilateral approach, not 194 separate strongman deals. We need to re-engage the world as partners with the goal of achieving new global conventions around migration, climate, and AI’s existential risks. An astonishing 123 million people were forcibly displaced around the globe in 2024, and flames of disruption are picking up speed. No country can address the impacts of this kind of human need unilaterally or with boss politics.

Step 2: Control the border without creating a police state.

We should want those who enter this country seeking a new life to do so lawfully. That way, from their earliest participation in our shared national life, they will be supporting and reinforcing our rule-of-law system. So we need effective border control to provide the American people with confidence in who is entering. Comfort with how entry works is a necessary part of reviving a culture of respect for the drive and ambition of those who seek a new life in America.

The overriding goal should be to reduce irregular crossings as far as possible while protecting the basic framework of liberal-democratic norms and rights. We can hold irregular crossings to a bare minimum by tying together real legal pathways into a more streamlined process (such as carrying out most employment, family and asylum entry work in-region) so that people “choose the door, not the wall.”

At the same time, we should target action at ports of entry on smugglers, not broad, indiscriminate sweeps, and enforce credible employer penalties (with due process) to reduce the attraction of illegal entry.

But this approach to limiting illegal entry does depend on a positive embrace of regular entry. Controlling the border without creating a police state also requires recovering our understanding of how immigration helps our economy, culture, and society. Our self-definition as a free society ultimately requires that we find ways to incorporate freedom-lovers from around the world; completely holding them at bay could be achieved only at the cost of losing our free society. Recognizing that our ideals are attractive to all humanity — and respecting that power of attraction — is fundamental to a free society.

Step 3: Provide modernized earned legalization for long-settled immigrants.

The U.S. now has roughly 14 million unauthorized residents. This means our economy has become dependent on the labor of people who are not fully protected in their rights. That’s a corrosive reality that needs to be addressed.

In the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln set as a policy north star the idea that America should be a society based on free labor. By this he did not mean that people shouldn’t get paid, of course. Rather, he meant that our economy should rest on the labor of people who are free because they are fully protected in their rights.

We currently suffer a pervasive problem of wage theft precisely because so much of the workforce does not enjoy the full protection of their rights. In other words, we have permitted the erosion of a free-labor economy.

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

The solution to the challenge of migrant labor that undermines the quality of American jobs is not to attempt to rid the country of migrants but to extend the protections of citizenship to those who have earned it through pro-social behavior over time.

Because Lincoln was right: We should be a society whose economy rests on free labor. Only one path is now available to us to achieve that — earned citizenship for those who have been working hard for their families, communities, and this country over many years.

Now, please note: This agenda comes straight from the Constitution. Remember how our ancestors defined the job of fighting their wildfire? They wrote in the preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

This preamble gives us our mission, too.

In a sense, we should never be at a loss for what the nation’s agenda should be. (Are you listening, Democrats?) It is always precisely this list of things. The main question debated in our elections is how we will secure justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty.

In this roadmap I’ve offered a vision for that. We can hit the mark by renovating our democracy, rebalancing power in our economy and society, and pursuing safety as the outcome of strong, fair institutions that recognize the power and blessings of our liberties.

But the very first thing we have to do is to free the bear from the trap. We need to free our politics from our dysfunctional party system so that our legislators can work for us again and get busy fighting the wildfire.

Together, let’s get on with it.

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