Post-Extinction Event Projects No. 3 and No. 4: A New Pioneer Act and a Remodeled House
Post-Janaury 20 AoS Chronicle No. 20
Dear TRP readers, today’s is the 91st post since The Raspberry Patch, moved from earlier blogfields, was planted on Substack on January 4, 2024. All but one or two posts have been long-form essays and have appeared on consecutive Fridays, almost without fail.
This 91st post, alas, will be the last one for a little while; I have a knee-replacement surgery scheduled for Thursday, and after the cut-and-paste knee job I’ll need to focus on exercising and generally recovering my leg strength, getting off pain meds, and finishing my review of the Age of Spectacle manuscript. That review is taking longer than I had hoped what with working the veg and flower gardens at Belching Chicken Farm, hosting our summering family here at Antebedlam, trips to Annapolis and Maine, and surfing the endless flotsam heaved up by the Trump 2.0 Administration. I hope to get back to TRP by Labor Day. Hope is not a policy; we all know that. But I’m not making policy, just writing…
Before getting down to the business at hand today, let me note some publications outside TRP post number 89 on July 4 in accord with our custom: “The Twelve Day War: Truths and Consequences,” Quillette, July 5, 2025; and “No Way to Run a Superpower,” RSIS Commentary 153/2025, 14 July 2025. The Quillette essay is long-form, but even so I did not have room to say all that might usefully have been said. For a good description of relevant regional context I did not delve into I recommend a newer Quillette essay: Joseph Nichol & Adi Asi, “The Fall of Hezbollah,” July 17, 2025. Quillette’s content is not free but you could do worse than to subscribe to it.
Also out now is “The civilization of the book and deep literacy,” Electra Issue 28 (Spring 2025) [Fundação EDP, Lisbon], (Portuguese version: “A civilazação do livro e da literacia profundo”). This is a really beautiful, beautifully illustrated magazine; I am proud to have my work appear within a special lead section on books that includes essays by the French historian Roger Chartier, Harvard University historian Robert Darnton, Spanish media historian Rita Luis, Cambridge sociologist John B. Thompson, and University of Lisbon historian Diogo Ramada Curto.
Due out soon, appearing perhaps before or just after Labor Day, are: “Cyber-Plutocracy Will Catalyze American Collapse,” The International Economy (Spring 2025); and “Entwinings: Literature and History, Fathers and Sons, Writers and Readers,” The Hedgehog Review, forthcoming Autumn 2025. The International Economy comment is just that, a short comment I mentioned in passing in an earlier post. The Hedgehog Review essay is a true long-form, being a much fuller and far more interesting version of the brief research note that appeared as “A Suggested Source for a Reference in Summer,” The Edith Wharton Review Volume 40, 1-2 (November 2024).
And now “let’s get to the point, let’s roll”….and some of you anyway can finish that Tom Petty lyric fragment without any help from me….
Post-Extinction Event Project No. 3: A New Pioneer Act
I argued some many years ago now for a New Pioneer Act (NPA) that would be established by Federal law to mandate U.S. states and territories to create special equity zones as demonstration projects for a revivified American democratic ethos.
As I described it in detail—so no need to repeat it all here—in “A New Pioneer Act,” National Affairs (Winter 2017), the nation needs a New Pioneer Act, that being a renewal and updating in tandem of the 1862 Homestead and Morrill Acts. An NPA would, like the National Volunteer Service/Baby Bond idea, help spread equity among younger age cohorts, help rebuild hemorrhaged social trust, and advance the movement for a healed and healthier regenerative form of American agriculture, better integrate our state universities with our communities, address a range of environmental issues (not least biodiversity crashes), create a huge number of new jobs, innovate institutionally to get past the drag of legacy infrastructure investments, break the spiral of inner-city hopelessness, and more.
Then, four years later in “The Quadrivium Fix,” American Purpose, March 19, 2021, I emphasized that de-densifying the American living space, at least to the extent it may be possible at least at first, makes more sense than ever in an era of zoonotic pandemics beyond, so far, SARS and COVID-19. I still believe that to be the case.
Let me now describe a bit further my vision and rationale for a New Pioneer Act project, and discuss how the idea can be adjusted to fit a post-constitutional extinction event leading to the possible fragmentation of the union.
As noted, the NPA would renew the Homestead Act and the Morrill Act of 1862—both bold Whig-like initiative of President Abraham Lincoln, who of course was a longtime member of the Whig Party before its collapse in 1852 after the death its two great leaders: Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. A renewed Homestead Act/Morrill Act would be designed with a mind to applying the most modern and ecologically sound agronomy available, for, after all, the original Homestead Act, while successful in the round in its main purposes, brought in train some unanticipated debits—like the Dust Bowl, for example. We now know much better, with regenerative and no-till methods focused on soil health, how to avoid such nasty surprises.
The NPA, if enacted in the context of a still-united United States, would require the Federal government to turn over areas of Federal land to the control of state governments. This could be done through a long-term leasing arrangement possibly, but other modes of transfer may be preferable under post-extinction event conditions. There should be at least one NPA zone in each of the 50 states to start, and one each in most of the larger U.S. territories (Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa, maybe not in Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia). Under strict environmental monitoring from the EPA and the Forest Service as part of the Interior Department, new pioneer communities would be built from scratch by U.S. citizens approved by each NPA administrative unit for membership. The basic idea, as with the Homestead Act, is that whosoever is part of building equity in a new community earns an ownership stake in that equity.
Among the benefits of the NPA would be new affordable housing. Recent data shows that the average American family cannot afford to buy a home in 71 percent of the United States where housing stock currently exists. That needs to change, and one way to change it is to build new housing in new areas. The varied job creation that would be stimulated by creating new communities should not be underestimated. As for the importance of affordable housing—and nowadays environmentally responsible new housing—we should remember the punch-line from “The Natural”: If we build it, they will come.
We need to revivify the American Heartland, and that need entails shifting population from the coasts and major midland cities like Chicago and St. Louis toward the less densely populated center. Doing that can encourage experienced Federal workers, presently being downsized by the Trump 2.0 Administration for other far less benign reasons, to return to the states from which they came to bolster the professionalism of state and local government. The NPA can be designed to incentive both of those shifts, either in the absence of a constitutional extinction event or after one. This will give us a golden opportunity, and be a goad, to build new state-of-the-art infrastructure in transportation, communications, medical care, and education, and so to escape the expensive burden of maintaining less efficient legacy infrastructures.
Most of all, we need to democratize starter equity, to democratize opportunity, in American society. We desperately need a more level playing field to staunch the dangerous separation of Americans by class, which in our case overlaps for historical reasons with ethnic/racial characteristics. A New Pioneer Act would go far in doing that, but it is not nearly enough.
Again, please refer to the origin concept essay cited above for more details, but suffice it to say here that in order for NPA zones to work as intended, a certain level of autonomy will be necessary. That means national-scale private institutions like banks and insurance companies cannot be permitted to operate in NPA zones, lest they distort the small-market nature of NPA zones with smothering gigantisms—especially so if Federal government capacities to monitor and regulate those entities collapse after a constitutional extinction event.
Let me also note that NPAs, while protected from certain distortions in the larger economy, are not to be isolated from society or economy. Each NPA zone must operate over all at a profit within the larger regional economy in which it is nested. And while best-practice agriculture will be the focus of many, perhaps most, NPA zones, not all of them will need to be designed that way. Many may become craft-oriented, producing bespoke high-quality goods of various descriptions for both local/domestic consumption and export.
Some of these goods may be fairly high-tech, too, and that is where new partnerships with nearby institutions of higher education come in. Not only will ag schools be connected integrally to NPA zones, with NPA members able to earn advanced degrees in he process, but also engineering departments, as well.[1]
Obviously, only some few people, probably very tiny numbers at first, will be drawn to the New Pioneer Zones described above. If life gets more hellish in the aftermath of a constitutional extinction event maybe more people will see NPA zones as refuges-from- insanity opportunities—adding to the already existing, but very small, Intentional Communities movement. We don’t know, and we cannot predict with confidence. Polling data shows an unprecedented number of Americans willing to emigrate if the Federal state collapses and all hell breaks loose; maybe NPAs could mitigate a future trend in that direction. It’s not a joyous prospect to imagine some of the nation’s best-educated people pulling up stakes, filling multiple duffle-bags with their money, and leaving the country.
In any event, to enlarge a genuine democracy of opportunity we need a program of scaled up National Voluntary Service (NVS) Baby Bond concept--an idea we have of course already described--connected to the NPA project. The point here is that the four main projects described in these post-extinction event essays are not one-offs: They form an integrated idea built around and aligned with the basic principles we articulated earlier.
To take just one example for the sake of illustration: NVS categories will all teach skills in their initial phase, and all NPA zones will stand up guild-like craftworks—from glass blowing to blacksmithing to shoemaking and clothes-making to bookbinding to woodworking to fine arts to building musical instruments….whatever residents want and are capable of learning. At least some connectivity between what NVS volunteers learn and what NPA craft jobs are available would be inevitable, in the sense of distributed networks of apprenticeship opportunities. It would not be the least surprising if some NVS graduates would wish to live in NPA zones. They may also be sensitive to the need for media temperance protocols in their midst. Integrated: See what I mean?
Post-Extinction Event Project No. 4: Remodel the House
We need to make the House of Representatives more representative. As is well known, from the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 the House grew in size with each decadal census. That stopped in 1911. The result is that the ratio of representative to constituency has skyrocketed from the Founders’ ideal of about 1/30,000 to 1/700,000 and more. No wonder the average American citizen feels lost in a sea of anonymity.
Over the years since 1911 many proposals have been advanced to expand the House. But all have failed for fear of enlarging the Federal government further. Today, however, there is a way to square this particular circle: We can enlarge the House significantly without siting it in Washington, D.C. Given the communications technology at our disposal, it is now both possible and desirable for a larger Congress to spend only ten weeks a year in Washington, five to eight weeks liaising with State Houses in the respective state capitals, and all the rest of the time living and interacting with voters in their own home constituency. They could conduct business, attend committee meetings, and vote using remote technologies the same way that all advanced public and private organizations already do.
The benefits of re-localizing the House of Representatives are potentially enormous. It would be far more difficult for lobbyists to do one-stop-shopping with members of congressional committees physically dispersed. Moreover, the density of face-to-face interactions between congressmen and their constituents would remind them constantly of whom they are really supposed to be working for. And if they do not acknowledge the reminder they are very likely to be turned out of office at the first ensuing opportunity.
Obviously, if there is no more a United States as we know it, if effective governance and genuine popular sovereignty devolve to state and local levels, the idea of enlarging and remodeling the House of Representatives must be adapted, temporarily at least to new realities. There is a way to do that: simply by downshifting the structure of government one level. So instead of congressional delegations being better integrated with state houses, as in the original concept, state houses would be better integrated with county and town councils. State house members are elected according to geographical districts, just as congressmen are, and in some states liaison between state house representatives and local government is strong—but in others it is not so strong. Connections between local and statewide democratic institutions can be tightened, strengthened, and better coordinated and financed in many ways—we've just not room to detail them all here.
More important, only a sliver of citizens typically engages in local and state politics today, but that can change—and will change—if the salience of state and local government rises as the presence of the Federal government ebbs. In that regard, too, note that it is very possible to improve the quality of access to the political process among typical citizens.
For example, in Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb of the District of Columbia, a grassroots organization called EPIC (Empowering People in Communities) has been doing just that in recent years. In an unusually affluent place where local government types and developers have been known to shut out the public the better to engage in lucrative self-dealings—a sort of local niche form of plutocracy—some residents have organized lustrating resistance to such practices. EPIC’s website (epicofmoco.com) puts the organization’s mission succinctly and well:
. . . to inform, educate and support residents who have been traditionally, historically and geographically marginalized in the decision-making process, regarding complicated land-use policies, surrounding housing and transportation . . . Our purpose is to facilitate a culture of participation by creating equitable access, and meeting people where they are: in their communities. This will be achieved by educating community members on land-use and transportation policies; by providing information and access to opportunities to learn more; by educating community members on how to sign-up and participate in public hearings; by providing computer access when needed; by removing systemic barriers which prevent community members from having a seat at the proverbial table and being their own advocates.
There is no reason that clones of an organization like EPIC cannot arise in every state, every town, every county from sea to shining sea. They could, and they should; it just takes a little civic-minded volunteer leadership and a truly small pot of money to get started. In a post-constitutional extinction event context the significance of such efforts could be cumulative huge. Hang that iconic Norman Rockwell town hall meeting painting on every community building wall; genuine face-to-face democracy can rise again, if we want it to badly enough.
The opportunities afforded by greater dynamism and organizational coherence in state and local government are capacious. Consider just a few of dozens of possibilities, since we lack space to articulate them all in a single Substack post.
First, Americans can create in all fifty states a form of new micro-industrial policy that connects state government, universities, and private enterprise. Several models of such triangulation already exist and are well known: the University of Texas at Austin-Dell Computer nexus; the Carnegie-Mellon/robotics/Pittsburgh synergy; the CIT/Silicon Valley synergy; and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Research Triangle.
We must scale up and spread this model. This triangular dynamic is critical to improving the quality of state government, generating new good jobs, and revitalizing community at the state and local levels. To work it cannot be, must not be, the result of a Federal-heavy initiative--a problem that won’t arise by definition in most post-constitutional extinction event, fragmented-union scenarios. The Federal government, if it still exists in some coherent form, can supply ideas and encouragement, but states and local communities must do the heavy lifting. We do not need a national industrial policy; we do need federally encouraged and possibly coordinated state industrial policies if we can get them. But if we can’t, we can proceed without them.
Second and similarly, it is worth noting in light of the still-recent pandemic crisis in which we found ourselves, that yes, as many have argued, we need more government in terms of investment in and the building of a better public health infrastructure. We have in recent decades foolishly underinvested in that, as we have underinvested in all kinds of infrastructure. But we do not need more government at the Federal level; we need more government for public health at the state and local levels. It is passing strange that so many otherwise intelligent people have been unable to grasp this elementary distinction.
Third, much related to the creation of more micro-industrial policy cores, we must find a way to keep capital within state and local zones. The trend now is for nearly all money—whether from pension funds or corporate profits—to go to New York and from there to banks and investment fund managers around the world. This trend needs to be modulated, because it contributes to the corrosive urban/rural divides that plague us. We must recreate resilient local business cycles so that a crash of the great wave of the single global business cycle we have foolishly allowed to come into existence does not drown us all in economic catastrophe.
Moreover, in order for social trust at the community level to be revivified, money has to support new and creative relationships, not just garden-variety business operations. Money can’t do that if it’s thousands of miles away, in the pockets and accounts of people who local residents will never meet and never know. What we need, as quaint as it might sound at first, is a new sort of savings and loan system—the old one having been foolishly undermined by the Carter Administration in 1979. We might lose a percentage point or two of interest profit on capital, but that’s nothing compared to what we would stand to gain in terms of democratic vitality and social coherence. There’s a point in that classical film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and it’s not about Clarence the angel.
A successful movement toward subsidiarity obviously depends on the viability of local economies. An innovative micro-industrial policy, as described above, is not enough to assure that local economic vitality. After all, not everyone is going to be suited to working on the edge of technological innovation. It is therefore essential for the health of our communities that we also decentralize and re-rationalize American agriculture—and that’s where the NPA plays a key role as a model and accelerant of reform.
But because the decentralization and re-rationalization of American agriculture is so important, it cannot be limited to new NPA zones or wait for NPA models to spread and scale up. Continental Grain and the other behemoths of capital-intensive American agriculture do not think in terms of gardens; they think in terms of profits, and they are not much less flip-it/short-term oriented than the rest of American corporate culture today. If they are “too big to fail” than antitrust should be brought to bear to break them up. This is a controversial matter and a complicated one, as well—so it is best left to a future discussion.
The Subsidiarity Imperative
The need to rebalance the Federal system away from excessive centralization toward greater subsidiarity has been on the lips of conservative politicians for decades. But nothing much has happened. At least until very recently, the Federal center’s forward creep, or gallop, depending on one’s perspective, has continued mostly unabated. Even the Reagan Administration’s “government is the problem” mantra did not stem the engorgement of government scale, merely slowed it down a tad. Why?
One reason is fairly simple: When conservatives successful at the polls have arrived in Washington, most such congressmen have been wowed by the capital’s atmosphere and sucked into fundraising routines by party leaders that far transcend their local roots. They soon forget about their promises of working for subsidiarity.
Another reason is that the party which ends up on top, or thinks it will soon end up on top, of the political heap lacks incentive to do away with the very Federal power they can use to drive public policy, and on the side detour related dollars to enrich themselves. Not to pick on the Dole family too much, but the late Bob Dole and his wife Elizabeth were lifelong public servants, and we know what public servants’ salaries are like. So how did each of them end up with fortunes totaling tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars? For that matter, how did Marjorie Taylor Greene come by millions of dollars to wager on insider stock purchases, as she reportedly did after April 2 tariff “Liberation Day”? Just sayin’; the point, I hope, is taken: Our politic elite is and has for a while now been not only morally hollow and mostly brain-dead; it has also been venal to remarkable excess.
But an even more daunting reason for the poor record of enhancing democratic subsidiarity is that the structures of Federal excess have over the years become baked into the Federal code. The functional structure of over-centralization, networked by its own internal legal logic, has become prodigious, complex, and very hard to tease apart. A good if slightly unexpected example concerns the culture-war issue of homosexual marriage.
It is impossible to find a reputable and honest constitutional law expert who will claim that the legality or illegality of any kind of marriage is the business of the Federal government. Federal powers are specifically enumerated in the Constitution, and all others are left to the states, local government, and the conscience of communities and individuals. It is ludicrous and ahistorical in the extreme to contend that the Founders and Framers spent so much as a moment pondering the rights of homosexual to marry. So then how did “gay marriage” ever become a Federal issue in the first place?
Partly because of very broad interpretations of the 14th Amendment, but more because the Federal code over the years has invaded domains like inheritance laws, visitation rights at hospitals, and all sort of other rights minutia that gave the Federal government, with the approval or abstinence of judgment of the courts, standing in deciding on matters of marriage beyond their natural setting at the local level, the level where diverse faith communities traditionally held sway over such questions. Federal “standing creep” has not been limited to marriage, but overlays practically everything of importance in law in the United States, and by so doing it has eviscerated the role, status, and reputation of state and local government in a way that the Founders—most of them anyway—would have scorned.
Many have argued that unless the excessive centralization of American government is staunched and reversed, governance in the United States will remain dysfunctional, and probably grow worse as the mismatch between our industrial age legacy habits diverge ever further from the netcentric reality of our contemporary world. (Indeed, it may be that all large countries, not just the United States, face a crisis of scale thanks to a combination of technologically induced disintermediation and hyperconnectivity that they have barely begun to appreciate….a prospect that horrifies some but would have cheered Leopold Kohr no end….more on Professor Kohr later but, meanwhile, if you’re curious, by all means go do a little internet noodling….if won’t hurt you.)
The costs of not having reformed excessive Federal centralization are many. First, we’ve never had a fair chance to get a grip on our crippling national debt for having failed to address this problem in a serious structural way. Second, institutional dysfunction has grown, harming economic efficiency and political coherence alike. Third and worse, as already noted, this dysfunction has breed progressive alienation and cynicism among We the People, vitiating the essence of the social contract that defines American civic virtue.
Fourth and worst of all, we delayed so long doing anything significant about the problem of Federal obesity that many came to believe in the need for drastic measures, since the tight webbing of the legal structures of over-centralized federalism has made successful incremental reform impossible. That is one reason we got, once and then again, Donald Trump, who has been able to preach a political gospel of government downsizing and reform while, in truth, he has been all about paving the way for the Big-Box, Net-Effect looting of the economy by his anarcho-libertarian digigarch billionaire buddies. The semi-literate, conspiracy-addled populist hordes fell for it all, swallowed it like ice-cold beer on a hot summer day, and to this moment few of them have any idea what has hit them over the past ten or so years, and particularly since January 20.
And to the extent that the populist MAGA hordes have been awakened, what has been the stimulus for it? Farmers’ awareness of how their interests have been savaged by tariffs and other policies? No. Small business owners and mid-size importers and exporters realizing how tariffs may well put them out of business? No. Small town awareness of what cutting $930 billion in Medicaid will mean for them and their families? No. Then what? The Epstein File circus, of course—but why?
Because, as explained in earlier TRP posts, the entire phenomenon of the Trump 2.0 phenomenon is based on a regnant conspiracy theory, the twin Big Lie about November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021. That twinned Big Lie depended upon and was linked to a prior and parallel series of lies that flowed support for the MAGA counter-humiliation movement into the main reservoir of fakery, namely the Big Lie that bore the brunt of political saliency. So Frazzledrip and Comet Pizza, QAnon and Pepe the Frog, the whole sack full of odiferous surrealist crap was prologue to getting the gulled to believe in the Big Lie….and of course the Epstein File was a big part of that prologue to the brain-addled faithful, since Epsteinesque pedophilia and Hilary Clinton and Huma Abedin supposedly eating the faces off of kidnapped dead children in the non-existent basement of a Connecticut Avenue pizza parlor do seem, sort of, to go together…..Ashli Babbit, after all, forfeited her life believing such idiocy.
So for month after month after month Trump spun up his clueless conspiracy-addled naifs into expecting revelation, expecting the climax, expecting justice, expecting victory over the evil Satanists….and then….and then….as the long-awaited moment of truth passed without so much as a frisson of excitement, he tells them to shut up and gets angry with them for persisting.
Well, possibly without realizing it, Trump has just created the mother of all two-headed carnival calves, the mother of all Ripleys (if you remember Chapter 6 of The Age of Spectacle manuscript, and if you don’t you can flip back to the TRP archive and study up) but this time a massive leg-puller than works against him. He has confronted the MAGA faithful with a classic A/not-A shiny cognitive object, and it is as exhilarating and as riveting as can be: Either Trump has defected and joined the cabal of evildoers….or, finally grasping the truth, the whole MAGA storyline itself has been a hoax from the start. A, or not-A: Which is it? The deliciously exciting suspense cannot be extended perpetually; it has to be resolved. This need for resolution of the A/not-A, either/or but nothing in between structural dilemma—common to magic tricks and optical illusions and con games of all sorts—is what is tearing MAGA apart right now: To choose A is to lose the leader, but to choose not-A is to lose one’s faith, one’s self-esteem, and perhaps one’s mind to boot. Tough choice. Big, big deal, too, not despite but because, in a surrealist para-fictional-fixated mindset, it has nothing to do with the real world, nothing to do with policies, not even those that abrade on core economic interests.
A dozen years ago, I freely admit, this isn’t where I thought the nation’s head would be today. Before the onset of the first Trump Administration, it seemed to me and others that a prospect of bipartisan support for bold subsidiarity-focused reform had arisen, at least tentatively. How so? Conservatives and constitutional originalists were already primed to be persuaded that the nation had wandered too far from the Founders’ design. But some liberals, too, seemed open to the need for reform because excessive centralization had abetted plutocracy and corruption below and beyond levels of minimal tolerance. Even as COVID bore down upon the nation, we seemed to be standing at a rare moment when the acute partisan polarization of our political culture might be healed through a collective effort at advancing intelligent, prudent subsidiarity.
Alas, it was not to be. Trump was neither competent enough not interested enough to do anything constructive along those lines. Joe Biden, someone perhaps capable of grasping the basic idea of a creative package of subsidiarity-aimed reform, was the right man at a fraught moment for his job as President in some ways, but not in this way. Biden’s idea of boldness, called for in his January 2021 Inaugural Address, demanded a sharply downward redefinition of the word. To call his administration’s infrastructure plan bold, for example, was and remains risible. Like Hilary Clinton before him, he never articulated a theory of the case as to what ailed American politics and society—because he simply did not know—and so he never managed to tell We the People why he wanted and deserved to be President, except that he wasn’t Donald Trump. Biden, who never had a single good and bold idea enacted into law in his entire long Senate career, was never an idea sort of guy. He has been a consummate back-patter, a get along to go along guy, and from the group of Democratic Senators who held sway when I was a Senate staffer in the late 1970s he was simply the last man standing in 2019-20—with the party almost totally bereft of electable young talent having been brought along to constitute a new generation of leaders.
And of course it did not help that COVID pushed many people, already deeply nervous for a host of reasons, over the edge and into the funhouse, into the maw of the surreal.
Crisis as Opportunity
Be all that as it was and as it may be, it is so much sanity juice passed under the bridge now. Societies do go temporarily mad. History offers many examples, over many centuries from every habitable continent.[2] But these episodes of madness do eventually ebb and end. What then, and what then specifically for us?
No one knows the exact contours of the future. But if American society is headed toward the greatest social and political discontinuity in its history, even greater than that of the Civil War, we will have our hands full with the most important task at hand: Turning a crisis into an opportunity to “build back better” American democracy, the American economy, American society and culture, too. Whether in the context of a fragmented polity or not—and fragmentation may not be a wholly bad thing if it forced us to finally get serious about making subsidiarity work—we need to coalesce around a vision, some basic principles, and some core get-our-handy-dirty projects. Embodied cognition really is the ticket to many an achievement; we sometimes have to just start doing things to understand what we need to do. As enlightened tinkerers throughout history show us, sometimes messing around leads to insight just as insight can lead to inspired messing around.
In my view, the four bold reforms articulated here lately in TRP—the National Volunteer Service/Baby Bond program, a Media Temperance Movement, the New Pioneer Act program, and the House Remodeling of our citizen-meets-representative democratic institutions—constitute a worthy “to do” list. All these ideas can work at a national level if we escape a constitutional extinction event, but they can work, too, at more local governance strata if we don’t.
As difficult as it will certainly prove to do any one of these things in any context, given the current high level of political paralysis, the apparent near-brain death of our political class, and the unprecedented attempt by the Trump 2.0 Administration to scorn the law in favor of anarcho-libertarian looting and insider grifting and corruption at scales heretofore unknown, it will prove terminal not to try to do any of them. Since we must, we can.
If we are fortunate enough to escape a fully disastrous crash landing after next year’s midterms, fine. If we do experience acute crisis and national fragmentation, we must look for ways to eventually build back the United States into a single great nation, if only for reasons of national security. One advantage we will have if that comes to pass is that we will have been through such a gauntlet of challenges that reforms today that are unthinkable might then be doable. We will have defrosted our frozen imaginations under great duress, in other words. If as a result of a post-fragmentation fourth major historical realignment of American party politics arises, with the Constitution reestablished as the supreme law of the land, we might then, for example, consider repealing the 17th Amendment so as to further empower state government, and both revivify and augment the logic of the Electoral College.
We might even one day even be in a position to consider repeal of the 16th Amendment, so that revenue to operate the reconstituted Federal government would no longer come from income taxes, but from block grants from the states—wouldn’t that be something?!—augmented by excise taxes, a national VAT tax on selected kinds of consumption, and perhaps other sources like a well-crafted carbon tax. It amounts to a massive failure of imagination to have assumed for so long that the only way to finance Federal government functions is the way we have financed them since the Wilson Administration. Why is that method stuck in concrete when so many other aspects of governance have been deemed not to be?
You want bold? I have here given you bold. Let me leave you then, until just after Labor Day at the earliest, with a pep talk of sorts.
We have emphasized lately in TRP the importance of asking good questions, and of asking hard questions when so many of us seem too dazed to formulate good questions or to think at all. At some point in an onrushing crisis, however, questions must give way to tentative answers, and guide actions. Moses stops on the near shore of the Red Sea, Pharaoh’s chariots roaring toward the people, and he cries out to God with questions. And how does God answer him? Not by pelting Moses with words of wisdom and understanding, but by telling him to get off his duff and go forward—move, act, just do it.
There is, of course, a lesson here. It’s a story from the Torah, after all, from the Bible, so of course there is a lesson. The time is upon us to get ready with real answers, real plans, to our onrushing problems when an opportunity to implement those answers finally appears. That opportunity may be closer than ever, much closer than most Americans seem to think, to the extent that they think.
We all know the witticism that “the harder I work, the luckier I get.” It’s a related witticism, however, that we should remind ourselves of now: Louis Pasteur’s remark that, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” So let’s prepare our minds, shall we? I am not suggesting that we take a blasé attitude toward some near-term worst-case scenarios, not at all; but we as a nation certainly must avoid suicide for fear of being murdered. We need to see a possible crisis defied by a constitutional-extinction event and subsequent partial or advanced national fragmentation as an opportunity, just as the Chinese character for a crisis—危机—suggests: danger/opportunity.
Optimism is a force multiplier, said a wise man, and he was right. So pick up your chin and try to think constructively in these dicey times, try to imagine what can go right in the fullness of time as well as what might go wrong likely sooner than that. “Be strong, and of good courage.” That’s from the Bible, too.
[1] Combinations of best-practice agriculture and niche high-quality manufacturing are characteristic of Israeli kibbutzim and moshavim as they have evolved over time. So an extant model for what American NPAs might look like, at least in part, is at hand to be studied.
[2] See my “The Present Madness,” The American Interest, June 15, 2020 (linked to by Real Clear World, June 18, 2020).