The Garden: A Second of Two Hypothetical American Post-Constitutional Futures
Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 17
This past Friday we confronted the Abyss as the first of two possible American post-Constitutional futures, the theme premised on the real possibility that the Trump 2.0 Administration may presage an extinction event for American constitutional democracy and the rule of law. Today, we look at a second post-extinction possibility: the Garden.
Of course by shaping this extended TRP essay this way I don’t mean to imply that only two possible post-Trump extinction futures exist. I am about as far from and as leery of the two-valued, either/or orientation as can be. Whenever I see “my way or the highway” formulations meant in earnest I expect lazy ideological thinking, and whenever those formulations are propelled into the world I expect tragedy.
But examining extremes as a heuristic way to establish possibility parameters is inbounds as analytical exercises go. Engineers do it, medical researchers and doctors do it, even physicists and statisticians do it as a way to distinguish an average from a mean. Talmudists do it regularly, stretching a legal point or a point of moral reasoning to logical extremes just to see what it is made of. When it comes to social, cultural, and political analysis, we have a sensible homily drawn from everyday life that usually fits any uncertain circumstance: Fear the worst, hope for the best, and expect something in between.
Last week’s essay, the first part of the whole, was admittedly tenebrous, even stipulating a possibility of accidental nuclear war by dint of AI-infused firing systems. But perhaps it was not darkly succinct enough to be the two-by-four to the forehead I designed it to be, on the premise that frightening projections can have benign utility, to wit: If you cannot bring yourself to image genuine tragedy, then you cannot mobilize yourself to do something effective to prevent it. So let me turn down the light still further before we turn it up again to enter the garden.
A friend of mine, a magazine editor as it happens, asks me from time to time to participate in a symposium he puts together. Here’s the question for his newest one:
Looking ahead at the year 2035, what shocking developments do you predict could unexpectedly materialize? Remember, this is not a forecasting exercise, but an outside-the-box speculation on matters that today seem improbable, if not impossible.
Participants were allotted a maximum of 500 words to supply an answer; mine read like this:
The accelerating transformation of the information science revolution from analog to digital to the near advent of general artificial intelligence will catalyze the headlong collapse of social orders and even fragment many of the states that embrace these technologies without significant reservations or effective regulation. One consequence will be that those societies in the upper tier of global wealth and power today will decline relative to currently poorer societies that cannot now produce advanced cyber technologies, but, with cautionary examples arrayed before them, may learn to manage information-science tools wisely as their institutional capacities mature.
The United States will be affected sooner and more thoroughly than other advanced societies because its peerless scientific-technical infrastructure is held within fiercely competitive private hands. Meanwhile, the inherent tendency of the technology to reward giant-scale operations will favor oligarchical forms of political economy and thus further reify laissez-faire attitudes toward the effective regulation of cybertech. Indeed, it is already doing so with alacrity these past five months.
That condition will be reinforced as American business and government elites remain locked into their narrow IBG-YBG flip-it short-term mental habits, rendering them mostly blind to the potentially radical negative socio-political and ultimately economic effects of digital-cyber and especially AI technologies. The same optimistic myopia that greeted the dawn of the internet age is repeating itself on the portal of the AI era. Evidence: In a recent International Economy symposium on AI, every participant saw it as the next productivity boost savior, with none uttering so much as a word of caution. [“American’s Productivity Disappointment: A Symposium,” International Economy, XXXVIII:1 (Winter 2024)]
Unconstrained and compounding revolutionary cybernetic information-science advances will seed social division, violence, and ultimately collapse. One route to oblivion is that the hell-bent race to infuse AI into great- and medium-power military organizations will produce highly crisis-unstable postures that could trigger a WMD holocaust.
Another more likely and less suddenly dramatic route is that the pervasive degradation of what macroeconomists euphemistically call “human capital” at the hands of digital/AI addictions and other cognitive derangements will render most American adults into economic externalities, creating a labor profile massively out of whack with a changing education value-added job market. That will generate stark social divisions that will sire twinned social trust and political stability diseconomies at scale. [For recent scientific evidence see Nataliya Kos’myna, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,” MIT Media Lab, June 10, 2025.]
An unconstrained AI-driven hyper-plutocracy that exacerbates both income and status inequality in a time of normative egalitarian pretense will melt the socio-ideational infrastructural glue that holds American society together. The nation will convulse and fracture and the consequences, while unpredictable with specificity, will be nasty, brutish, and altogether unpleasant for the vast majority.
Other nations, with value hierarchies standing athwart traditional Western sorts, will then rule the global roost. “The first one now will later be last,” sang a folksinger in 1964. He will be proven correct by 2035.
Is the Abyss dark enough for you now? Yes, perhaps I again over-dramatized the matter a bit, but that’s because the readership of this magazine is, for the most part, accurately described as one displaying “narrow IBG-YBG flip-it short-term mental habits, rendering them mostly blind to the potentially radical negative socio-political and ultimately economic effects of digital-cyber and especially AI technologies.” These are readers, again for the most part—exceptions nearly always exist—whose cages I sought to shake because I know they will not invest time or neuronal exercise on long-form essays of The Age of Spectacle mien. So this was the least I could do, and probably also the most; so I did it. Could be that I will not again be asked to participate in International Economy symposia.
Just one more piece of ominous news you may have missed before we get moving up and out of the darkness. On Friday morning, June 20, President Trump posted this:
Zero border crossings for the month for TRUMP, versus 60,000 for Sleepy, Crooked Joe Biden, a man who lost the 2020 Presidential Election by a “LANDSLIDE!” Biden was grossly incompetent, and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD. The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING. A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America. Let the work begin! What this Crooked man, and his CORRUPT CRONIES, have done to our Country in 4 years, is grossly indescribable. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
So what, you ask? Just more bloviating mendacity, more proportionate projection, since it’s obvious to anyone who can read and think who are the criminals and grifters. Just as there is virtually no evidence of election fraud in 2020 there is no evidence of corruption in the Biden years. Trump never mentions any particular Biden crony or any particular detail of corruption, just as never details the “massive and overwhelming evidence” of fraud in November 2020, because it doesn’t exist. So what’s new?
What’s new is just this part of the tweet: “A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America!”
It is apparently easy to miss its meaning, as George Conway and Sarah Longwell seemed to do during a Bulwark live discussion a short while later. But its meaning is this: Whether a Special Prosecutor is appointed or not—and it wouldn’t be a bad thing since he or she would again find near zero evidence of Trump’s delusion—the assertion, “This cannot be allowed to happen again,” is a signaled seed of a state-by-state “Stop the Steal” 3.0 MAGA “lawfare” campaign to distort and perhaps void the November 2026 midterm elections.
Preparations for such a campaign are probably ongoing right now. Remember that the entire Trump 2.0 Administration’s November 4, 2024 election victory is based on a twin Big Lie about what happened on November 3, 2020 and on January 6, 2021, doubled down upon and proselytized for four years. That being the case, Trump & Co. cannot not prepare to steal the midterms, for a Democratic victory in which the party regains control of the House and/or the Senate would shatter the whole mendacious smoke-and-mirrors convolution the Administration is based on, to wit: If the MAGAts lose in November 2026 then it means they might also have lost in November 2020. So yet another Big Lie will be needed to protect its earlier lies….and so on ad infinitum so long as we still have elections in his country. You know the old 19th-century saw, “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” Sir Walter Scott was not just whistlin’ Dixie. MAGAtry is sunk so deep in its web of lies that being found out on the other end of losing power is unthinkable.
Indeed, and therefore, the November 2026 midterms may be the last election held under the auspices of the Constitution as currently practiced. Let me remind you that Donald Trump himself proclaimed on July 26, 2024, as he urged the attendees of the Turning Point Action’s “Believers Summit” audience in West Palm Beach, Florida to vote, that:
You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.[1]
The man lies as he breathes, when he is not in the throes of delusion, but at other times, occasionally at least, he is so indulgently unguarded that he utters a self-damning truth as though absent-mindedly tossing a banana peel on the sidewalk. This was one of those times.
The real surprise, then and since, was not Trump’s casual uttering of a truth amid one of his mostly incoherent weaves, but rather that even with the banana peel of mischievous truth right in front of them, tens of millions of American voters slipped and fell on it anyway. As Charlie Sykes made clear already years ago, Trump and his associates tell us exactly who they are and what they intend.[2] Yet an electoral plurality of We the People either managed to miss the signs this past November or got them and either liked what they learned or didn’t care. And that, far more than the malignant narcissistic personality disorder of one magnifico, is why the extinction event, very likely, is nigh.
At Last, the Garden
None of the nasty and brutish things mooted above and last week have to happen, in America or anywhere afflicted by similar cultural depredations. It is true that in retrospect many human tragedies appear to have been over-determined, just as it is true that natural as opposed to man-made rogue waves swamp things, like boats, or else Gordon Lightfoot would have had no reason to sing of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Sometimes bad things happen and even in retrospect we realize that, circumstances having gotten to a point of no return, there is nothing reasonable we could have done to prevent them.
But this isn’t one of those times. We have to believe in human agency and in historical contingency, or many of us would never get out of bed in the morning. But we have to believe in it because it really exists. It’s true: We can turn this rig around, and even if it turns out that we don’t, we can still rebound in the fullness of time and build American political life back better…..if we can built back the culture and the society necessary to support it. Optimism is a force multiplier, as a boss of mine used to say; and pessimism is a shovel with which we dig our own tragedies.
But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. To resurrect an constitutionally decrepit and even fully fallen America after the extinction of the constitutional republic we created in 1776 and then worked to improve for 250 years, we will need to do three things. (I will just briefly sketch them in this TRP post, and we will use future posts to elaborate these three restorative obligations.)
First we need to lift our heads and dream; we need to summon visions of a better future for America, and for the world in which America plays and will continue to play, for better or for worse, a significant role. We need to do some visionary “loose thinking” about what human flourishing looks like a decade or three down the road. Certainly we need to articulate goals—goals being a conjunction of principles and projects—but after all a goal is just a dream with a deadline. If the dream is impoverished, so will be the goal even if it is met. “Dream no small dreams,” wrote Goethe, “for they have no power to move the hearts of men.” And move the hearts of Americans, even more than encouraging minds to grow and grow up from the frozen adolescence into which too many of us have become trapped, is precisely what needs doing.[3]
Second, matching some disciplined “strict thinking”—I’m following Michael Polanyi here, better as a guide in my view then “slow/fast thinking” Daniel Kahneman—with our loose creative thinking, we need to redact our dreams, distilling them into core principles we can believe in, share, and teach onward. Social movements, to be successful, must utter lucid sentence after lucid sentence starting with “we,” because “I” doesn’t suffice for the work ahead. Expressive individualism, the cultural hallmark of the late-20th century lazy Western Left, hasn’t and can’t build anything of lasting use, and at its self-indulgent extreme it is even worse than that: It is red meat as presage to massive negative follower effects. Going on a decade ago the late Michael Kelly put his finger on the type sure that it is possession of the true faith, calling that faith
. . .an ideology of self-styled saints, a philosophy of determined perversity. Its animating impulse is to marginalize itself and then to enjoy its own company. And to make itself as unattractive to as many as possible: if it were a person, it would pierce its tongue. . . .[T]he progressives . . . rallied, God bless their little pea heads, behind Ralph Nader. . ., the personification of holy self-marginalization.[4]
But building is exactly what we need to do going forward past the nadir of post-constitutional extinction, and what we need to do anyway even if we dodge that bullet. We are social animals who share an environment and we must act in concert to achieve anything both worthwhile and sustainable.
Third, we must translate our principles into upward building tiers of explicit socio-economic and political projects, and those projects, if they are to push a new politics before them, must attract as wide a manageable participation base as possible.
Visions+principles+projects: That’s the interwoven tripartite formula for a successful and worthy social movement, and the formula works recursively. Successful and expanding projects validate and spread awareness of sound principles, and validated principles nourish still finer dreams. So around and around we go on the wings of a rising virtue cascade, dreaming, believing, and building until we have amassed enough irresistible force to remake the country, the nation, and then the state.
And make no mistake: Conventional American politics as it exists today will never fix the mess we are in; indeed, conventional politics bears a large share of the blame for the mess we are in, because We the People let our deal go down. That has been the American past: Whenever the nation stalled or regressed on the path of perfecting its ideals, with only one clear exception (the New Deal), it was not the tenured political class that pulled us out of our troubles. It was a social movement arisen from below, usually in the context of one of the three Great Awakenings in American history, that either forced the political class to act or else replaced it; the clearest example, probably, being how the anti-elitist, anti-plutocratic Populist movement that took over the moribund Democratic Party in 1896 eventually propelled Republican Progressivism under Theodore Roosevelt to remake the American republic.
The real social histories, too, of the abolition movement, the labor movement, the women’s suffrage movement, and the civil rights movement, among the main events in the tapestry of American progress, demonstrate the primacy of social movements over normal politics in the achievement of major reform, and that dynamic stands as testimony to the wisdom of the Founders that they created a system of governance that not only allowed for extraparliamentary energies to arise but mindfully enabled them. Insofar as a revived democratic politics is in our future, it can only result—just as it has in the American past—from a social movement rising up and taking control of extant (or new) organized political forces, whether we call them and form them into political parties or something else is almost besides the point.
Dreaming a Garden
To bring people together in a social movement means having a radioactive idea that can cross a lot of differences of opinion and perspective. That idea, looking forward, is most likely environmentalist in essence, but it needs massaging as images go to attract the necessary mass appeal and commitment. When I dream about the American future I see a garden. I see interspersed amid stretches of stunning wilderness beauty a vast network of glorious gardens stretching from sea to shining sea. I see fruited plains and flowering meadows visible from purple mountains’ majesty. I see these gardens as composing the single most beautiful ensemble of gardens in the history of our planet, and I see the American garden-plex spilling gloriously into those of others in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
Why a garden? Because a garden is a perfect blend of nature and human artifice, and because it is, as Mac Griswald said, the slowest of the performing arts. Life needs art in order to become a form of art. Art is not separate from work, or should not be. Art is not separate from love, or should not be. Art is not separate from sadness and difficulty either, nor should it be. Art is a form of soul that can be shared with others.
More than that, we assume that we make gardens—we plan them out, we prepare the soil and set out our tools, we acquire and nurture seeds, care for young plants, tend and weed, fertilize and prune, compost and rotate, all the tasks for which we build skill and appreciation year by year. And this is true. But by dint of all this planning and doing gardening also makes, or better, re-makes us. Gardens tutor us, if we let them, in self-discipline and patience. Gardens instruct us on how to achieve serenity and calm. Gardens deepen our capacities for appreciation and gratitude, supplying on-ramps, if we’re lucky, for those rare occasions for radical awe that express the fullness of our humanity. And if we work with others, gardens offer lessons in cooperation and intergenerational responsibility.
Gardens also teach us, whether we know it to start or not, a fair bit about botany, hydrology, meteorology, entomology, ornithology, bio-chemistry, agronomy, geology, and, if we’re into veg, gastronomy. These and broader, I dare say practical, philosophical lessons abound beyond counting. Did you know that the quality of any recipe you prepare cannot be greater than the quality of the ingredients you use for it? So do you now see, by way of philosophical metaphor, that the quality of your intellectual and spiritual life cannot be greater than the quality of the experiences you choose to expose yourself to? You do see it, no?
The early Zionist pioneers used to sing a song with these lyrics:
אנו באנו ארצה
לבנות ולהבנות בה
Never mind transliteration or notes on how Semitic language roots work to create reflexive verbs in creative abundance: It means, “We are going to the land to build and to be built by it.” I think often of this lyric when I’m in my garden (sometimes I also think, a bit differently, of Peter Sellers playing Chauncy Gardiner in Being There, but I don’t walk on water and let’s not go there for now). I’m not only helping to nurture flowers, fruit, and vegetables, I’m not only building a basis for greater self-reliance and personal autonomy, and I’m not only exercising my body (such as it has become), I’m learning and feeding my soul, too. And I’m therefore making myself capable of better, more compassionate dreams, from which to distill…...
Principles
From my garden-fruited visions many principles, with many variations of expression, can be derived. But to keep things manageable by keeping them simple, we may focus on five independent and irreducible items.
First, because any form of benign democratic self-government depends on some minimum of social solidarity, we need above all to staunch the hemorrhaging of social trust in our national society. Hence all our projects must share the preeminent goal that, whether by direct intent or indirect consequence, they build back the diminished quotient of social trust in American life.
Everything is easier—from safeguarding the sanctity of contracts to the maintenance of moral and educational standards—when we trust each other, and when our eyes are open to the cooperative, positive-sum relationships that we can bring into being, as did our forebears, if we want to and if we try. Everything is harder, and some things become impossible, when life is mis-imagined as solely competitive and conflictual, zero-sum and, as Jonathan Swift put it long ago, a matter of only “knaves and fools” in a tub. Since we are a symbol-making and symbol-dependent autogenic, self-completing species, we have a choice as to how to posit social reality and the choice is critical, for, as Erving Goffman once put it, “social life takes up and freezes into itself the conceptions we have of it.” America is in a bad way today because too many of us have lapsed into simpleminded, zero-sum Social Darwinism, mistaking its premises for immovable reality when they are instead hatchlings of our own ontological error.
Second, we must take human nature for what it is, not for what we might wish it to be. Hence our goal in principle must be to assure maximum equality of opportunity, not of station or material outcomes, for a false pretense of a simpleminded equality is a hindrance to genuinely deeper equality.
The ancient Greeks understood what most Americans have never learned, which is that equality is not one thing but at least eight: isotimia, equal respect or dignity for all persons; isonomia, equality before the law; isogoria, equal freedom of speech and hence political agency; isokratia, equality of political power, as in any collective leadership arrangement; isopsephia, the equal right to vote; isopoliteia, equal civil rights, including the right to standing in court; isodaimonia, equality of elemental material satiety; and isomoiria, having an equal share of a business or real estate partnership. And this finer delineation of equality helps us understand what Aristotle meant when he wrote in his Politics that, “The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” Forced homogeneity is an enemy of true equality just as mindless token diversity defined in group bio-essentialist terms is an enemy of true diversity of individual opinion. Life is complicated, a simple enough observation that validates Isaiah Berlin’s conclusion that the human condition is “a complex sum of contradictory truths.”[5] Many things can be true, many values can be precious—and yet be incommensurate with one another.
Every one of us deserves the assumption of dignity, but human talents as well as human frailties take many forms. Thomas Jefferson working as propagandist and speechwriter the mid-1770s, so to speak, proclaimed at age 33 that “all men are created equal,” but a private, older, and wiser Jefferson agreed with his immediate presidential predecessor John Adams that there is a “natural aristocracy of talent and virtue.” The dignity of every person must be respected, to be sure, but that implies not the homogenization of virtue but also the dignity of difference. What fool, or childish mind, would have every flower be the same or even be the same color? Human beings are like flowers in our gardens, all beautiful and, if you look closely enough, all different. From there we come to matters of taste, and as everyone knows, there is no accounting for taste.
Third, the nobility and necessity of creative work is beyond argument. Human beings are built by and through the works of their own hands. We are what we make at least as much as what we eat, and certainly far more than what we wear or even share.
To the extent we can achieve it, then, in preparation for a fulfilling life of creative work every child deserves a first-class education, eye-to-eye with teaching professionals who deserve vastly more recompense for their labor than they typically get, and every citizen deserves an opportunity to engage in useful remunerative labor. The nation’s aim should be maximum full employment not just or mainly for purposes of economic growth or aggregate demand to keep a hyper-consumerist society from eating its own befouled tail, but to build the human beings who are doing the building in which they are engaged. The process of building is as important as the product of it. As John Barth once put it, “The key to the treasure is the treasure.”
That goes particularly for the education of young people, who must invest the ten thousand or so hours of grappling with details into order to erect the edifice of competent thought, and there is no shortcut to it. As Lord Vansittart wrote, “education is truly what remains when we have forgotten what we knew.” And as Brink Lindsay commented in his June 9 essay “America’s Internal Brain Drain” on his peerless The Permanent Problem substack, “. . . for developing minds that haven’t yet put in the work, AI use along current lines subverts the realization of cognitive potential.” I could not have said it better or more succinctly, and believe me I’ve tried.
This principle, about the cardinal significance of creative education and creative work in building human mind and mien, has myriad implications for projects—indeed, almost too many to list, let alone elaborate. But just to illustrate—we’ll discuss specifics in future posts—the primacy of embodied cognition tells us that every child should have access to a musical education, every child should learn a touchskill-related craft, and every child should have access to working in a garden. Every single one, the experience being a social one matched to the child’s age cohort and developing abilities. It also means that no guaranteed national income scheme should be so excessively generous as to undermine the nobility of work, lest the bottom half and more of the adult U.S. population be reduced to dazed Eloi with debit cards.
Fourth, we need to bolster what social scientists used to call America’s intermediate institutions that bridge the gap between individuals and the state. Face-to-face social relations build respect, understanding, empathy, and compassion, and hence the potential for love in all forms. So does deep reading, especially of fiction, which takes potential empathy to heights unknown before the advent of mass literacy. Reading publics are more caring and compassionate publics—it’s as simple as that. None of these human virtues, including those having to do with deep reading despite the fact that reading is usually a solo activity, can be achieved solipsistically. It is no coincidence that the first thing in the Hebrew Bible that God proclaims to be not good is loneliness, certainly not to be confused with solitude, which it both does and does not resemble.
The political implications of social isolation and massive loneliness should be obvious, but in case you need a nudge here, note Hannah Arendt’s analysis of fascism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she observed that “a terrible loneliness throughout life is simply the plankton on which Leviathan feeds.” Isolated, atomized individuals have good reason to want to escape from reality: reality, after all, is not their friend. Indeed, the key “secret” to happiness, confirmed by years of academic research, is having access to the ways and means of developing and nurturing good personal relationships based on mutual trust and respect.[6] Too many young Americans live alone, addicted to their smartphones and gameboys, in their parents’ basements, to the point that this epidemic has become stock and trade for stand-up comedy routines—through there’s really nothing funny about it.
Isolation and loneliness are not only the plankton on which authoritarian Leviathan feeds, they are also the petri cell-culture dishes that grow crackpot conspiracy theories to social scale, that launch lone-shooters on suicidal mass-murder adventures, and that enable rightwing conflict entrepreneurs to grow social divisions that get nihilist arsonists like Donald Trump elected President, not once but now twice to bring us to the verge of a constitutional extinction event. And this is why, since reservoirs of not just social trust but also respect, understanding, empathy, and compassion are densest at family and community levels of society, that we need to rebalance the Federal system away from being overweighted toward the center back to maximum feasible subsidiarity.
Ah, but here lurks an implication too few have grappled with: We cannot safely shrink the Federal government without also putting bounds on the tech-driven gigantism of the American corporate sphere. We are in effect thrown back upon the core dynamic of the 1912 presidential election: to regulate the trusts, and with them the “malefactors of great wealth,” as Teddy Roosevelt argued; or to break them up, as Woodrow Wilson argued, so as not to have to dangerously enlarge the purview of the Federal government.
As we have seen in The Age of Spectacle analysis, an inherent characteristic of information technology innovation in digital form is to aggregate a very wide range of human transactions that were formerly more dispersed. The technology thus conduces inherently to oligopolistic, potentially even monopolistic, conditions, for it is not possible to amass such concentrations of money without prior concentrations of usable information. Digital information technology sizes its own business dimensionality in a way that may be unprecedented. Put a bit differently, the algorithms that the companies use to do their business reflect exactly the exponential relationship between their huge scale and their huge profits. This is the Net Effect, as we have called it, and it means, simply put, that we cannot rebalance the Federal government back toward greater subsidiarity without simultaneously rebalancing downward the out-of-control gigantism of the corporate tech world. That misfitting—smaller government but gigantic techno-corporate scale—is of course exactly what the anarcho-libertarians (or call them techno-feudalists or the broligarchy, it doesn’t matter) of the current administration want to achieve. True conservatives dare not help them.
If there is a meta-problematic in building back a better America from the trough of a constitutional extinction event, this is probably it. And it may mean, if I may drop a “big one” here, that this will prove impossible in a country as large as ours. We may need to find a political-organizational analog to “small is beautiful.” It may mean, if we are ever to get this rebalancing right, that Leopold Kohr will improbably emerge as the ahead-of-his-time prophet of the New America, or new Americas (plural). (More on Leopold Kohr…..later.)
Fifth, the democratic government that governs best is not anymore always the government that governs least, as Jefferson once said, for we no longer experience the same ecology of liberty that existed in the late 18th century. But it is and must be our aim to recreate a limited and self-limiting government that shields the liberty and autonomy of individuals, families, and communities. Government must not smother what some call the “strong gods,” but rather must protect them from opportunistic cynics to the one side and untethered meliorists to the other.
An important discursive sidebar here, if I may—because I must: An ambient sense of unease that “open society” liberalism has run its course, in the sense of having become so diluted that it no longer offers any secure core for basing an individual’s sense of identity, purpose, and community, has arisen and waxed in recent decades. The unease has taken several forms and has intensified from the time that Mark Lilla published The Stillborn God in 2007 through the twists and turns of critics like Patrick Deneen to more recent calls for the restitution of the “strong gods” by R.R. Reno and new State Department employee N.S. Lyons (real name Nathan Levine). Even liberals like Jonathan Rauch have called for deepening America’s Christian values.[7] And the New York Times, of all places, has started a new feature series about the revived American search for God.
The critique of “open society” liberalism—at least as Reno and Lyons make it—is prone to detours of dangerous mien. Not all “cores,” not all of the “strong gods,” are created equal. Liberalism as a civic philosophy has and still can shelter a private life in which religion can thrive, so the indictment that liberalism drives away or must hemorrhage all core values is false, as is the argument that only government grown too large and excessively tolerant can do that; obviously corporate industrial folklore can and does do it, too. Classical American liberalism merely insists that religious values be privatized and not be too publicly evangelized in a heterogeneous society—and that, precisely, is why nationalism as a core, as a “strong god,” differs critically from religion. Without the protections of liberalism advocates of a nationalist core, like J.D. Vance, tend to be illiberal all the way to the point of authoritarian and xenophobic, which is what the survivors of mid-century fascism warned against—and it was not just Karl Popper of “open society” renown who did so, but also Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom, Ernest Cassirer in The Myth of the State, and many, many others. This is why political (and I would argue following Louis Brandeis also corporate) power in a liberal order must be limited and self-limiting, to allow for religion privatized but to restrain nationalism which by its very nature cannot be privatized because it is defined as a public virtue. Power in an illiberal order is by nature unbounded, so insofar as nationalism conduces to illiberalism it also conduces to authoritarianism.
That said, just two further points remain to be made on this fifth and final principle. First, a government that for whatever reasons usurps the function of tending to the moral ballast of a society can further vitiate that society’s underlying organic social coherence—what’s left of it in the rush of pluralizing and destabilizing postmodernity—and cause it to further hemorrhage trust. James C. Scott, in his “anarchist’s squint,” explains:
Most villages and neighborhoods function precisely because of the informal, transient networks of coordination that do not require formal organization. . . . [T]he formal order of the liberal state depends fundamentally on a social capital of habits of mutuality and cooperation that antedate it. . . . [T]he formal order of the liberal state depends fundamentally on a social capital of habits of mutuality and cooperation that antedate it, which it cannot create, and which in fact it undermines.
More important, if that is possible, a classical liberal order that gradually shape-shifts into an overbearing state, even if it continues to think of itself as classically liberal, risks destroying
. . . the natural initiative and responsibility that arise from voluntary cooperation. Further, the neoliberal celebration of the individual maximizer over society. . . encourage[s] habits of social calculation that smack of social Darwinism. . . . [W]e are in danger now of becoming precisely the dangerous predators that Hobbes thought populated the state of nature. Leviathan may have given birth to its own justification.[8]
Just so.
Second, it remains true that religion as a “strong god” is instrumental to the possibility of effective-enough limited government in an age of media-tech-fed exaggeration, excess, and spectacle made possible by unprecedented material affluence, and the temptations to decadence that always attend it. What Edmund Burke wrote more than 250 years ago is even more relevant for our times than it was for his:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
And just to hammer the point home as best I can, listen to John Adams, perhaps the most underrated intellectually of the Founding generation:
. . . we have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.[9]
This truth, spoken by Burke and Adams, creates a real dilemma to parse for liberal centrists, with some conservative temperamental inclinations, like me. Let’s parse what are called Christian Nationalists, a major segment of the Trump. 2.0 coalition. I have little issue with the Christian part of that compound noun, and long before Jonathan Rauch came around to the subject I wrote that I want Christians in the United States to be the best Christians they can be because that protects the Bill of Rights aspect of liberalism (as opposed to the ur-economic aspect) that shelters my freedom and autonomy as a non-Christian American citizen. But the nationalist part, well, no: That’s problematic, for reasons just sketched above. Alas, as King Solomon demonstrated, it’s no easy matter to cut a baby in two.
The next re-constitutionalized government in the United States, assuming for a moment that it can hang together as one polity, must enable the genius within us as a people, and it must sponsor greatness instead of usurping it. But it dare not allow the vitiations of the earned social habits of cooperation and trust that allow for limited government and maximal freedom. This is a balance that once lost is not so easily recovered.
Projects:
This is enough to digest for one post—maybe too much for some. So let me conclude with a mere tantalizing short list of four major reconstructional projects that align with our articulated principles of national revival, and that in turn align with our vision of America as an ensemble of gardens.
First, we must institute a voluntary national service/baby bond program in order to rebuild social trust and more fairly distribute equity among our youth.
Second, following on a suggestion by Brink Lindsay, we must build a media temperance movement. In that regard, too, digital addictions treatment must be expanded and made available to all who need them, lest we stand by and watch as we raise new generations of post-literate zombified imbeciles who, AI or no AI, will be helpless to sustain the level of widespread affluence and economic security we have achieved over the past century.
Third, we must create New Pioneer Zones, managed at the state level, to seed the transformation of our dead-end hyper-consumption economic habits into sustainable forms of human flourishing, and in he process save American agriculture from destruction at the hands of short-term agribusiness profit voracity, and reintroduce quality work-focused touchskill craft into the culture.
Fourth, we must expand the House of Representatives but not continue to site it mainly Washington, DC, and we must integrate state congressional delegations with State houses in new and creative ways.
Is that all? Hardly. Just be patient. It is a virtue, you know.
[1] Quoted in Michael Gold, “Trump Tells Christians ‘You Won’t Have to Vote Anymore’ if He is Elected,” New York Times, July 27, 2024.
[2] Charlie Sykes, “They Keep Telling Us Who They re: 8 graphic reminders,” The Bulwark, July 24, 2022.
[3] The reference here, to frozen adolescence at social scale, refers to the insightful analysis of Benjamin Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult (St. Martins Griffin, 2017).
[4] Kelly, “Our Hero,” The New Republic, December 2, 1996, p. 6.
[5] Quoted, without a source, in Mario Vargas Llosa, “Why Literature?” The New Republic, May 14, 2001, p. 32.
[6] See Susan Dominus, “How Nearly a Century of Happiness Research Led to One Big Finding,” New York Times, Magazine, May 1, 2025.
[7] See N.S. Lyons, “American Strong Gods: Trump and the End of the Long Twentieth Century,” The Upheaval (Substack), who follows R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods (Regnery Gateway, 2019); and February 13, 2025, and “Rauch, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy (Yale University Press, 2025).
[8] Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism, pp. xxii-xxiii.
[9] Letter, October 11, 1798, to the officers of the Massachusetts militia.