Notes Towards a Third American Founding
What kind of world will we build in the ruins of Trump 2.0? It’s time for the American left to start dreaming big dreams again.
Often, American left-liberalism feels like a host of nebulous, competing ideas. We need a new grand narrative capable of making them cohere into a winning proposal, as well as concrete action points for delivering on it.
In a previous post, I set out a rough draft for A New Playbook for the Democratic Party which takes seriously the current grievances of the Party’s base. However, simply addressing the current frustrations of the Party faithful will not be enough to secure a bright future. We will also need bold, visionary thinking about the future.
As of now, however, visionary thinking seems to be in short supply; instead, we have an American left in ideological disarray and a Party leadership playing possum. Too often of late, progressive politics, which should be relentlessly forward-looking, has appeared as doubly reactionary insofar as it just reacts to the reactionary far right.
This is bad. It makes us beholden to the frames and narratives set out by our opponents rather than those of our own making.
If this is to change, we need to define ourselves and our goals positively, not in opposition to the worst excesses of the Trumpist right-wing.
Rather than constantly playing defense, we need to go on the offense. It is not enough to be a bulwark against the right. We need grand, positive visions for the future. These visions will require powerful grand narratives, rhetorical strategies, and a coherent political agenda which call back to what is best about America without lapsing into right-wing jingoism. And what is best about America is precisely this: our refusal to be yoked to history.
People are sick of feeling panicked, always awaiting the next moment of impending doom; they want inspiration, a vision of a bright future looming just over the horizon. This requires a message and agenda which rather than dwelling endlessly in the follies of the past or the horrors of the present emphasizes our perpetual ability to transcend history and make ourselves and our country anew.
What we need, in other words, is a Third American Founding.
If the First Founding established the nation, and the Second Founding abolished slavery and defined citizenship, then the Third Founding must drastically reform the political institutions which sit at the heart of the constitutional order. This, in order to save democracy from the authoritarian encroachments of Executive overreach and elite capture by billionaire techno-oligarchs. Easier said than done, but it’s necessary nonetheless.
Two Foundings, One to Go
As many historians have noted, the USA has had not one, but two foundings. The First Founding was a decades-long process which ran from the Declaration of Independence, through the Revolutionary War, passed over the Articles of Confederation, and eventually culminated in the writing and ratification of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This process was one of radical collective imagination and rhetorical self-creation; for arguably the first time in modern history, a new people arose by simply imagining themselves as such and declaring themselves so the world. These “founding fathers” (and mothers) were a self-authored people; they literally wrote (and read) themselves into being. It was not enough for early Americans to fight for independence against the British; they first had to do a lot of arguing and storytelling in order to be able to even imagine the possibility of independence in the first place.
This First Founding was revolutionary in some respects, but it was incomplete: it declared universal liberty while preserving the institution of chattel slavery. This has led many to claim that the entire project was insincere. Even if so, it was not the end of story. The Second Founding happened in the wake of the American Civil War. Again, this was the culmination of the long-term process of writing and reading which included abolitionists, novelists, and the formerly enslaved themselves. The Civil War rent the union asunder. Lincoln, long more concerned with preserving the union even at the expense of allowing slavery to continue, eventually signed the Emancipation Proclamation. However, as this was a wartime measure, its legitimacy could be challenged in the courts; furthermore, it offered emancipation but not full citizenship to the emancipated. It took the Reconstruction Amendments to enshrine the citizenship and rights of newly freed African Americans. However, even this Second Founding was subject to democratic backsliding, as a terroristic program of white supremacist “redemption” swept the nation, installing the system of Jim Crow segregation legally in the US South and informally in the US North and West. That regime lasted long into the 1960s before being (at least legally) dismantled by the Civil Rights Movement.
At least one author has proposed that a Third Founding has already occurred with the imposition of immigration quotas in the 1920s. But this fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of the Founding movements, which was to extend the scope of liberty, not to restrict it. I can imagine some readers wondering whether the New Deal constituted a Third Founding. This too is not quite right. The New Deal built state capacity, established several social services, and extended the power of the Federal administration, but it did not fundamentally change either the core democratic institutions of the country or the core definition of its electorate. (One may ask whether passage of women’s suffrage constituted a Third Founding, but I would posit that this was just a completion of the First and Second).
A true Third Founding has yet to be imagined. But we can see its contours beginning to take shape. The problems facing American democracy today are easy to define, but we lack a coherent vision for addressing them. This, because we lack a coherent idea of ourselves and our purpose in contemporary times. Thus, I propose that the most urgent job of the contemporary American left is to forge a narrative and a vision for the Third Founding; to do so, we will first have to spend a lot of time trying to imagine just what that Founding will mean not only for Americans as a people, but more importantly for America as an idea. It means countering the right-wing notion that America is a promise already permanently fulfilled, and instead positing America as an aspirational project always in the process of its own unending realization—a promise ever imperfectly fulfilled.
A Second Reconstruction
When and if Democrats ever return to power, they will find themselves at the helm of a greatly diminished American state. It will take time to repair the rifts in relations created by Trump 2.0 foreign policy. The Federal bureaucracy will be effectively in ruins. It will take time to rebuild state capacity, rebalance Trump’s ballooning budget deficits, and purge corrupt Trump loyalists from the ranks of the bureaucracy. The electorate will remain bitterly divided; many Republicans will inevitably and unfairly try to lay these failures at the feet of Democrats in spite of all evidence to the contrary. This is a reality we will need to confront and prepare for, not something that we can just shrug off or ignore. We will need to try to win back these voters and bring them into the fold. (As we’ve learned only recently, we ignore these voters at our own peril.)
In other words, we will need to go through a serious period of radical reconstruction.
Reconstruction is not just about rebuilding. It will mean instituting revolutionary reforms. The Amendments of the First Reconstruction radically redefined American citizenship. The Second Reconstruction will require us to fortify the first by, in part, rethinking the structure of our core political institutions.
Executive power has been ballooning for decades, even as Congressional capacity has deteriorated. The nefarious Unitary Executive Theory espoused by the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Trump can only prosper if there is a strong executive branch capable of flouting the Supreme Court and unencumbered by a Congressional branch which either can’t or doesn’t want to rein it in. We are now seeing precisely what happens when rash, foolish, and unaccountable people are allowed to take the reins of almost limitless executive power while an impotent Congress stands by and watches. It must never happen again.
We have also seen what happens when a Supreme Court of questionable legitimacy and little democratic accountability begins to drop the pretense of objectivity, offloads independent administrative power onto a gridlocked Congress, and provides broad immunity from accountability to Presidents with pretensions towards Kingship.
If we are to fix these problems, we will need to rethink the very structure of self-governance; meaning, we will need to amend the US Constitution.
That’s no easy task.
We Know What’s Wrong
Right now, the structure of the US Constitution creates winner-takes-all incentives which practically ensures the creation of a two-party system. These parties are in turn famously vulnerable to elite capture vis-à-vis the privatized nature of campaign financing; in other words, campaigns live and die on virtually unlimited donations by big financiers, and are thus easily captured by the big business elite. This makes Americans feel as if the Parties are unresponsive, and that they are doomed to be constantly forced into compromised coalitions under unpopular leadership. Americans deserve more than just two choices every election, and Congress would be more responsive if it were forced to forge coalitions both before and after elections rather than only during primaries.
A Rough Legislative Agenda for the Third Founding
What needs to be done? By my estimation, the Third Founding needs to articulate a notion of citizenship which is about making people feel empowered and heard. Americans need to feel as if every vote matters. Amongst other things, it will mean replacing the electoral college (more on this below, esp. Section 1.d).
But it will also mean having legislative ideas which appeal to an updated, aspirational narrative of American belonging. We need to overcome the forces which entrench polarization, not double down on them. This will mean taking seriously the complaints of working class people who feel sidelined by the Democratic Party, while also uprooting the fake solutions offered to them by MAGA and providing convincing, popular alternatives.
Here are some of the ideas I find necessary or compelling:
Amend the Constitution to strengthen checks-and-balances & empower individual voters. This will almost certainly require Constitutional Amendments to the US Constitution (no easy task, but sometimes a popular proposition). I’m no legal scholar, but by my humble estimation these Amendments need to do the following:
Invalidate Citizen’s United. This requires an amendment. Then, institute a system of public electoral funding which gets big money out of politics once and for all.
Ensure that there can never again be anyone who can seriously pretend towards becoming a “king” in America. Rein in Executive Power, making sure that courts have the ability to override Executive Orders quickly and that they have the means of forcing the Executive to comply. Equip them with limited power to intervene to stop the Executive branch when it is non-compliant.
Democratize and diversify the Supreme Court. Instead of lifetime appointments, seats on the Supreme Court should rotate amongst the highest circuits of the Federal judiciary. Judges should serve for only a set number of years before they are rolled out and someone new is rolled in. This would help insulate the Supreme Court from a certain degree of ideological capture or personalist loyalism.
Abolish the electoral college and replace it with ranked-choice voting. This would break up the winner-takes-all effect, democratize politics, and make it viable for third parties to compete. It would also make everyone more confident that there vote matters no matter where they are. If third parties made it into congress, it would incentivize congressional coalition building.
Require that electoral redistricting is done by an independent board of citizens rather than politically vested players.
Foster a generation-defining legislative agenda which appeals to broadly popular, non-partisan sentiments. We need a legislative reform agenda geared towards rebuilding state capacity, stopping climate change, ensuring equal opportunity & rights, and promising broadly shared abundance. The best way to do that it by combating elite capture and ensuring the provision of public goods.
Ensure that public goods can no longer be captured and pillaged for private gain. This means taking steps to ensure that unaccountable agencies such as DOGE can never again exist. For example, create a third check on Presidential appointees after Congressional confirmation, perhaps owned by the courts, to ensure the quality of appointees.
Make government fast and responsive, rather than complex, large and unwieldy. We need a bureaucracy unencumbered by the endless enumeration of increasingly complex, contradictory rules and less easily pestered by frivolous lawsuits. We instead to need to empower a nimble Federal workforce of smart, independent people to drive public projects and protect the common good.
Let America Get’r Done Again!
Address disruptive changes in the communication and media environment. Arguably, these are precisely which have led to the rise of global reactionary politics.
Remove Section 230 protections from all forms of algorithmic amplification. Force companies to use more pro-social technologies which discourage rather than encourage rage-baiting.
Mandate that Social Media platforms subsidize professionalized journalism. Right now, new media pilfers from high-quality journalism without giving anything back. It has eroded the quality of our information environment.
Require that both legacy and social media outlets de-emphasize opinionating. This only creates incentives for click-bait. Rather, we need to incentivize 1) investigative reporting and 2) evidence-based analysis.
Incentivize news channels to foster general audiences instead of micro-targeting niche ones. Require them to compete for a broad audience on the quality of their programming rather than their ability to identify and potentially brainwash a small segment of loyal viewers. I’m looking at you, Fox and X, but also at CNN and MSNBC.
Repair and improve our international partnerships and foreign relations. We’ve by now seen that the knee-jerk, popularized leftist critiques of free trade were too simplistic, even as the the knee-jerk, reactionary right solutions were predictably destructive. However, we will need an approach to the world which also ensures that the worst excesses of neoliberal globalization do not continue on unabated. I thus center this around not a “globalist” agenda which is easily coded as neoliberal, but what I would instead call a cosmopolitan populism which acknowledges the fundamental interconnectedness of the world:
Demand an end to global tax shelters.
Demand a global wealth tax on billionaires. Both potentially overseen and redistributed by a democratically elected international organization.
Support a global minimum tax on multinational corporations. Also perhaps overseen and distributed by international organizations.
Promote freedom and political equality of all people everywhere—in part, by radically re-imagining the contours of global citizenship as more in-line with universal human rights. This may mean taking a much harder line on presumed allies (especially, when autocratic) than we have previously done.
Reform immigration procedures such that people have safe and legal pathways to entry. Use technological means to streamline process and proceedings and to ensure a comprehensive register of immigrants.
Direct foreign investment strategically towards precarious countries. Gear it towards the stabilization of political and economic conditions such that people there have little reason to migrate en masse. End punitive measures like enforced austerity and instead oppose strongmen dictatorships which, after all, are what lead irregular migrants/refugees to most often flee in the first place.
Re-introduce USAID, but with redoubled focus on investments in medical science and research. Especially place a focus on disease prevention and containing the threat of global pandemics. Make sure that USAID programs deliver, and that they relentlessly advertise their value not only abroad but also at home.
Re-introduce soft power and cultural diplomacy initiatives, but leverage the networked technologies of the digital age. Gear them towards bringing citizens of disparate countries into direct contact with each other in healthy, prosocial ways. Foster social networking which creates peer-to-peer discussion across national boarders rather than within them, but do so also in ways which disincentivize rage-posting and the creation of echo chambers.
I know, I know: easier said than done. But first things first, after all.
Making any of this happen will require more than just crafty legislation; it will require not only electoral wins but the execution of a complicated procedural gymnastics. But even prior to this, it will require big thinking and popular legitimacy. And that kind of legitimacy can only come into being through the construction of a powerful progressive narrative which recommits the nation to its founding aspirations even as it redefines its destiny.
Wanted: Grand Narratives
The problem, of course, is that nobody seems to know what that narrative will be. We have lost some flair for the original; the left used to dream big dreams, imagine virtual utopias and fight to bring them into being. But in the wake of the 20th-Century, such utopian dreaming has become suspect. The left has lost its swagger; it lacks the ambition and confidence necessary to direct the flow of history. Increasingly, the left no longer dreams of redirecting the wild river of history; it seems instead hopelessly swept up by it.
We see this, most notably, in the Democratic Party’s inability to project a coherent positive vision of the future. The Party has a negativity problem, in that it only seems capable of defining itself in oppositional terms. It is, on the whole, very good at being against things (often, even itself). The Party is (ostensibly, at least) anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-sexist and so forth. All good things, but notably on the defensive. Liberal-leftists are ostensibly “pro democracy,” but is the right actually defining itself as anti-democracy (even if we think it is)? Is Democratic Party leadership really pro-democracy, or just anti-Trump? Similarly, one may say that they are pro-choice on reproductive rights, but the right rhetorically outflanks them on this by claiming that they are pro-life. This rhetorical trick casts “choice” as superficial and selfish, thus painting the left-liberal position as anti-life. In short, it is easier today to say what Democrats are against than to say what they are for.
Such negativity leaves the Party perpetually caught on its back foot. It is reactive rather than proactive. It plays defense rather than offense. Democrats often fight the last election rather than plan for the next. They tend to prefer the dominant media of the last election rather than that of the current one. They hardly ever win on their own merits anymore, but only on the demerits of their opponents. It seems as if Democrats survive by betting upon the catastrophic fuck ups of the Republicans.
The closest thing the party has to “visionaries” are, however much I agree with them, trying to reclaim aspects of a “social democratic” past which perhaps never really was. Bernie is a symbol of a post-WWII moment in which unions were strong and tax rates on the highest earners were appropriately high—but this is also the Leave it to Beaver moment of 1950s domestic repression which many on the right now romanticize. Even relatively young upstarts like AOC rely upon tropes from the past: The Green New Deal refers back to the time of FDR—a time marked by the Great Depression. Biden’s agenda was named “Build Back Better,” implying a better version of the what was before (presumably, a gesture towards the notably ambiguous achievements of the Obama years).
In short, it is as if all Democrats can offer are various “returns” to mythological left-liberal pasts rather than chart out a gloriously new future.
This is dangerous. The reactionary right already preys upon nostalgia; if the left does the same, we risk creating a political culture which chains itself to the past.
The Democratic Party may have theoretically admirable legislative ambitions, but their successes remain relatively modest, driven more by necessity than by big visionary thinking. Moreover, it lacks a heroic and captivating metanarrative capable of rousing people not only to #Resistance but to concrete electoral and legislative action.
This needs to change. It is no longer enough for the left to look backward to bygone times which were never as good as our mythologized ideas of history make them out to be. That said, it’s also not enough to wallow endlessly on the wounds left by the sins of history. Too much focus on either of these flattened notions of history threatens to leave us in its thrall. Too little, however, leaves us adrift, disconnected from each other.
What we need are new narratives; big ideas capable of making people feel empowered and thus moving them to action. But to do that, we will need to undo some of our own habitual thinking and ideological conditioning.
Overcoming Our Own Skepticism
Many liberals and leftists are rightfully skeptical of big visions and big stories; they view them as either ideology or propaganda. There is a real fear that the realization of any grand utopian vision will inevitably collapse into dystopia. But this is simplistic thinking, assuming that societies somehow settle into crystalized end-states. Indeed, fear of utopian thinking is itself mostly due to propaganda, namely decades of Cold War anti-Soviet propaganda. The truth is that in open societies, there is no such end-state; there are only aspirations perpetually seeking realization or dreams “too long deferred.”
What the Democratic Party is lacking today is the propensity to dream up big, captivating narratives. I use the word captivating here to mark an ambiguity which, I think, hinges on an anxiety about the power of narratives to either coordinate human activity towards emancipatory ends or to restrict the political imagination entirely.
Many on the liberal-left seem fearful that grand narratives only serve to hold us captive, serving as mental prisons. This can be true when it comes to regressive, old-fashioned metanarratives which actively discourage and even repress other modes of thinking.
However, stories can also be said to be captivating insofar as they can inspire, daring us to dream big dreams and work towards their realization. These kinds of stories do not yoke us to the outdated ideas of our ancestors, but propel open ideation and socio-political innovation. They weave us into their narratives as active agents, players in the writing of history. They are very different from reactionary or regressive narratives which merely demand that we all fall in line.
These kinds of progressive grand narratives are going to be a necessary precondition if we are to ever move out of the current era of political ping-pong, where we remain caught between neo-fascist reactionaries and weak-wristed liberal reactions. We need more than #Resistance; we need inspirational stories which project better futures than those we currently have on offer.
At its best, the call for a Third American Founding is just that; a call to collectively write powerful stories about our own futures. Without coherent narratives of where we want to go, it’s difficult to generate a politics capable of bring radical change into being.
We cannot redeem the past. But we can redeem the future. And we’d better start soon.