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The End of the First American Republic. The Rise of the Second. Part 3 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-31
It is becoming increasingly clear just how bad things will be when it becomes obvious to all how badly American wealth and power—not to mention the vibrancy of American society—are being damaged by Trumpism. This diary will show that it is vital that we be prepared with specific plans to deal with the crisis as it matures, and explain why each element of the plan is vital to its success. While preparing for and participating in the 2026 elections is important, we have to recognize that there may be no meaningful elections. If we do regain power through elections, we have to do more than just stop the bleeding. We will have to recover, as quickly as possible, the productive capacity of the nation by repairing our national unity. If we cannot offer Americans a prompt and measurable improvement to their lives, they will not support us.
This diary will cover which issues need to be re-framed and why, and propose some steps on how it change could be financed. The final diary, which may be delayed some weeks, will propose specific legislative changes. Since the author is not a lawyer, he especially encourages lawyers to critique the latter.
The previous two diaries in this series dealt with
It's easy to be overwhelmed by apocalyptic visions of what may be coming. Paul Krugman has provided a sobering economic description of the US headed toward Third World status, with stagflation and a falling dollar, and recovery possible only with major political reform [1]. Even that analysis misses many knock-on effects that we can expect. These range from Chinese annexation of Taiwan (reasonably projected as a consequence of American weakness to occur in 2027 [2]) with the potential control of the manufacturing capacity of South Korea and Japan [3] by China, to the loss of medical personnel and scientists at a time of rising epidemics. Global warming will make everything more difficult and costly.
Under these pressured circumstances, it will be a temptation for Americans to drop one dictatorship in favor of another, whether plutocratic, theocratic or communist. To do so would be to guarantee that conditions will worsen. It is at that moment when—for simple, practical reasons—we must restore democracy. This will be difficult at a time when people are desperate for relief. Democratic means are inherently slower than autocratic means and the discussions they require are inherently more complex than our current Foxified media permit. Crisis moments tend to be accompanied by a surge in ordinary crime at just the moment when the judicial system needs to process the extraordinary and often complex crimes of the former regime and adjudicate a fair resolution of disputes arising from those crimes. Only if we are extremely disciplined and prepared will we succeed.
When the time comes when it is possible to renew our nation, things are likely to be bad. Bad conditions heighten conflict, as people become desperate to get what they need to live, even as support systems collapse. We will need to have wide agreement about what changes must be made. We will need to work quickly and frictionlessly to alleviate widespread suffering. A new Republic is much more than a new Constitution and new laws. A Second Republic must serve to inspire people to work together, developing the bonds of trust and affection that have been deliberately severed by internal forces seeking to weaken government and by external forces seeking to weaken the nation. In short, we are going to have to persuade people who don’t share our worldview that it is in their interest to work with us.
First Principle: Don’t expect people to act contrary to what they see as their interests.
Corollary 1: Expect to have to work with former opponents.
Corollary 2: Expect to have to speak to them in their own language.
Implication: We need to identify our opponents’ key requirements. Our plan will need to meet those.
The Declaration of Independence has inspired so many millions of people over the centuries because it represented a great leap of faith that all members of society are central to the success of the community, and that therefore even the most despised have rights. Instead, over time:
Some classes of people—at first slaves and Native Americans, later Chinese, and Hispanics, and more recently “illegal aliens”—were dehumanized and demonized, while certain classes of people (e.g. “job creators” and “gold card citizens”) were elevated
Rights ceased to be regarded as universal and the central role of impartial justice in reconciling internal conflicts was devalued.
Courts abandoned the principle of equity [4], in favor of proceduralism, further corrupted into “originalism” and “textualism” or worse
Religion lost its force in pressing the state toward the perfection of the general welfare and increasingly became a political tool for hire
Wealth became the principal measure of human worth
Corporations replaced family businesses, increasing the distance between the wealthy and the rest of society. Corporations became so large that they may feel no national loyalty
Employment became so mobile that a sense of community has weakened
Elections became so dominated by money that the wealthy are grossly overrepresented in Congress and the state houses
Elected officials increasingly saw their positions as careers by which they could advance and enrich themselves, and less as an opportunity to advance and enrich the nation
Progress in reducing inequities in education slowed and, to some degree reversed
Jobs involving critical manufacturing skills and knowledge were sent off-shore and were increasingly replaced by jobs that often actually subtract from national productivity, such as fraudulent debt collection and political lobbying, or even outright criminality
Many people do not feel motivated to protect the current system, feeling that democracy fails to deliver prosperity and social stability. Our primary goals, therefore, are to communicate a clear and attractive vision for the re-founding of the nation; provide fast and effective relief for economic pain, lawlessness and crime; and producing a new Constitution and legal system only when people support the vision and understand by personal experience why it is worth sacrificing to defend. It has to work in that order. It has to deal with the social discontents: a sense that life has been devalued, that social change is happening in a rapid and uncontrolled way, that there is no security. It also has to deal with economic discontents: a sense that work has been devalued, that economic improvement is happening too slowly and in a chaotic and unjust way, that there is no security.
Straightening the frame. We have to change are not just laws, but attitudes. We need to recover a national sense of membership in a great enterprise, achieving a step in human evolution into a people imbued with empathy and appreciation for human diversity, a sense of justice, a hunger for learning, and especially a joy and kinship with Creation. What is so striking about so many of the very wealthy is how miserable and small they are. Why else would they seek the impunity to rape over the freedom to love and nurture? Or the power to kill and wound over the power to heal and preserve? We have something better than they do. We need to let our fellow Americans in on it.
Major reforms to media. Democrats have had such a hard time getting their message out because the media, especially social media, is not the free press envisioned in the Constitution. With all deference to the many good journalists out there, Americans are very poorly informed even on basic civic issues [5], and even less so on current events. There are three tools that could be applied to reform this. Cable and Internet news could be brought under the Federal Communications Act [6]. To eliminate problems of affordability and reduce the power of advertisers, Americans could receive a voucher to purchase media of their own choosing. Professional organizations such as scientific, medical, legal, and historical societies could serve as arbiters of factuality in journalism to influence the licensing of broadcasters. Social media is so toxic mostly because of the collapse of standards in journalism, opening the way for conspiracy theories to circulate.
As a fourth tool, tax subsidies could be provided to outlets that qualify as bonafide news organizations, a prime qualification for which should be abstention from circulation of a narrow range of falsehoods especially detrimental to the nation, such as lies about: vaccines; slavery, the genocide conducted against Native Americans, and the Holocaust; and exceptional criminality or deficits in intelligence of certain groups. This has to be narrowly circumscribed to allow plenty of honest error. The protections of the First Amendment should apply to individuals and not corporations. Right-wing outlets, especially social media, have been used to menace judges and silence witnesses. This has to end, and media have to be restored to the purpose of communicating information. These are a precondition to functioning civil society. We also need a strengthened public broadcasting system free from political interference. This could be used to educate the public on critical issues, especially civics, health, and world events.
Educating the public on civics. A side effect of subsidizing news while taxing entertainment should be to increase the amount of programming devoted to civics. A great deal of public frustration with government arises from misconceptions about how government functions. One example is that many members of the public think that divided government is good, an idea the business community certainly promotes, but contradicted by the historical record in which America made its most important reforms—the end of slavery, recovering from the Great Depression and winning World War II, the advances in caring for the elderly and in advancing civil rights, and recovery from the Great Recession—during periods when government was ideologically united.
We should consider making a basic understanding of civics a condition to voting. Immigrants can’t become citizens and vote until they can pass a basic citizenship test. That could be extended to the general population. To ensure that it isn’t used for voter suppression, it could be based on a pool of standardized questions. We also should consider simplifying elections at the state and local level. Conservative forces love to lengthen and complicate ballots to reduce voting in down-ballot races. Standards need to be developed for what constitutes a ballot of reasonable length and clarity.
The elephant in the room: religion. The Democratic Party has become a house divided. About half of Democrats identify as Christians—including 12% evangelical Protestants—and another 8% are members of another religion, while the remainder aren’t religious. The Democratic Party, in this way, resembles the nation as it was at the time of the Revolutionary War. There are lessons to be learned from how they handled it.
A major misconception on the right is that America was founded as a Christian nation. It was settled by Christians fleeing Christian nations. The colonies wasted enormous amounts of energy in sectarian conflict. The net upshot was that the Founders chose to exclude not only Jesus but any mention of God from the Constitution entirely, granting “Nature’s God” and humanity’s “Creator” one mention apiece in the Declaration. In the Treaty of Tripoli [7], the US specifically denied that the US was a Christian nation. If the public could be brought to see that the Founders—most of whom were Christians—consciously rejected the formulation of the US as a Christian nation specifically because they knew it led to internal quarrels, it would calm the waters. It might also help if the Christian right was reminded that the early Church did not expect favorable treatment from government—that indeed, the Roman government tended to kill Christians—and that when they talk of being “persecuted” in the U.S., they might ask themselves if they really wish to compare themselves to the early martyrs.
An excellent framing for outreach might be that the only way the US can become a Christian nation is by feeding the poor, healing the sick, doing justice in the courts, and treating all human beings with the respect one would give a creation of a supreme being. Jesus said that “My Kingdom is not of this world” specifically because he understood that politicizing teachings on social justice divides people. Rather than attack religion per se, the non-religious would do better by holding the religious to practice what they preach.
One final note. Much of the bitterness directed against religion is based on anger about the sexual abuse, especially abuse within the Catholic Church. First, such abuse did not occur only in the Catholic Church. The Southern Baptists have had their scandals. The Methodists are being sued. Even the Buddhists have had their scandals. Other organizations, notably the Boy Scouts, have had child abuse scandals. And yet most abuse occurs not in churches or in organizations but in the home. Wherever. it occurs, it’s a serious problem, one that impacts later mental health problems and contacts with the justice system. It’s an issue that left and right should be able to agree on addressing.
Restoring domestic tranquility. Another major area where the public needs education is on crime. The right has created hysteria about street crime while normalizing and even legalizing white collar crime. While reducing street crime is a critical factor for promoting community peace and business, the costs of white-collar crime dwarf those of street crime. As of 2020, costs were $400 B for white collar crime vs. $16B for street crime [8]. The financing for everything necessary to all but eliminate street crime could be obtained by ending white collar crime. We need some hysteria about how badly our crime-fighting efforts have been misdirected by the media.
The right frames street crime as a racial issue. While trying to identify the root causes of crime may be fruitless, race is definitely not a root cause. Simple common sense says that people commit crime because they want something, they don’t have the means to obtain it lawfully, and they don’t have the inhibitions to stop them from using unlawful means. Better incomes mean that people have the means to buy things lawfully; the US has some of the worst income inequality in the developed world [9]. Almost 50 years ago, Eugene Lang demonstrated that properly funding education radically improved the likelihood of graduation and going on to higher education [10]. Education generally raises incomes. There is no excuse for our failure to make what was Lang’s experiment a reality everywhere.
Certainty of detection and capture is a powerful means of inhibiting unlawful action; the US has a shockingly poor rate of solving crimes. Defunding the police is not a solution, but shifting the emphasis to solving crimes might be. The US also has a shockingly high level of violence, both domestic and public, which stunts the development of empathy, a powerful inhibitor of crime. Reducing the availability of guns in the hands of minors and known offenders and treatment of addiction would certainly help reduce street crime, but are only a part of the solution. And, yes, having social workers de-escalate episodes caused by mental health issues rather than sending in police with guns drawn ought to be standard in most situations.
Educating the public on economics. Ross Perot very nearly became the first political independent since George Washington to win the presidency. While his personal flaws ultimately doomed his campaign, he won 19 million votes from the centrist, middle class coalition that the press keeps telling the Democrats they need to attract. He did so by treating voters as intelligent, showing them charts to explain economic issues. That he was so wrong about so much doesn’t obviate the simple facts that Americans don’t understand the economy and want to, the media isn’t teaching them (and is often actively disinforming them), and that Democrats communicate disrespect by sloganeering rather than educating.
The facts are on our side. The economy grows faster during Democratic periods of control (partly because Republicans tend to create financial crises) and, as a consequence, the stock market does better. Republican presidents are responsible for about two-thirds of the debt relative to GDP since 1980, which was the first time since the 1950s that debt/GDP rose. Gas prices, adjusted for inflation, were never above historical norms during Biden’s presidency. All of these facts are easily found from data on the Federal Reserve site. Try searching on Fred gas prices inflation-corrected to see how easy it is (the gas prices are on the blog rather than on the main site). Why don’t our voters know these things?
Educating the public on immigration. Unfortunately, Democrats have unsuccessfully framed immigration largely as a rights issue, using slogans like “No human being is illegal.” Republicans have successfully framed immigration as a zero-sum economic and crime issue. One irony is that it is generally Republican-friendly corporations that recruit immigrants to come to the US illegally. It is drug war and anti-communist US policy pushed by Republicans and all too many Democrats that creates refugee crises in countries like Honduras. A second irony is how very few Democrats point out that Americans love low-wage restaurant workers, farm workers, construction workers, elder care, and meat packers but don’t want to let them to live here legally. Most Americans just want immigration to be orderly. They need to be shown that it could be but for the push of bad US policy and the pull of employers seeking to exploit cheap labor.
The dangers of Big Government. FDR created Big Government in part to counteract the power of Big Business. The rise of Trump has made it clear that Big Government is itself a very serious danger. Whole agencies, including horrifyingly enough the Department of Justice, are being turned against The People. Power needs to be devolved from the executive back to Congress, independent agencies, the states, and—as with abortion—the individual. Many of our state governments suffer from problems of corruption and subversion by moneyed interests. That’s a problem worthy of Congress’ attention.
At the same time, some companies are too big for government to serve as a balance. The top retailers, banks, fossil fuel companies, pharmaceutical companies, media companies, and tech companies have too much power. We need to preserve the advantages of giantism while creating competition. The breakup of the Bell Telephone Company [11] might be a useful historical case. Although the monopoly has largely managed to reconstitute itself, and although there may have been some downsides, consumer costs did fall. Perhaps the answer would be to break the giants into smaller pieces, but allow collaboration through consortia to promote basic research, as is done in Japan [12] and awarding contracts to consortia of smaller companies where scale is an issue, notably in defense.
Reforming an unjust justice system. The necessary reforms are too numerous to enumerate, but they come down to three simple principles. First, people have a absolute right to security, of protection from crime. Prison should be to protect the community, not to punish those who endanger it; solitary confinement is a particular abuse. Recognizing that we sometimes convict the wrong person, prison life should be secure and offer medical and mental health treatment, vocational training, and any other measure designed to recover prisoners from a life of crime. Second, all court proceedings should be reasonably balanced. It is fundamentally unjust when one side has a disproportionate advantage in legal counsel; that applies as much to SLAPP suits and suits to rein in corporate misbehavior as it does to indigent defendants. As a corollary, basic legal services need to be affordable. No one should stay in an abusive relationship or be hounded by fraud debt collectors just because they can’t afford a lawyer. Third, the power to arrest and hold people needs to be clearly based in protection of the community. Arresting protesters and charging them with felony arson for lighting a trash can on fire is ridiculous. So is letting a presidential candidate who threatens judges and targets witnesses stay out of jail when criminal contempt is clearly indicated.
Confronting oligarchy. Many of the businessmen who grew up in the Great Depression, people like Eugene Lang, understood things that modern businessmen apparently don’t. They understood that business needs its customers to have money to buy their products. They understood that without the power and prestige of the United States, conducting business would be much harder. They understood the value of schools, libraries, public hospitals and public health, infrastructure, a strong legal system, and the other elements necessary for a strong civic society. They were willing to pay taxes.
These businessmen stood in stark contrast to the Robber Barons of the 19th century. Now, unregulated capitalism is back and, with it, financial crises and national decline. The current oligarchy needs to understand that, like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, they are imposters. They have taken a powerful nation and loaded it with debt, a respected nation, which they have reduced to global ridicule. Instead of creating new wealth, they are turning the wealth they inherited in the form of a prosperous and dynamic country into cash. They are flimflam men, profligates, losers. Some of them may be so lost in their own narcissistic dreams that they cannot see that they are destroying their own lives and legacies. But if even a few can be shamed into starting to care for their country again, it could go a long way toward reducing the toxicity they exert on the political system.
Trusting the power of truth…and simplicity. Even with a favorable press, the public lacks the education to handle all the nuance in complex issues like economics, crime, and immigration. That doesn’t mean we should shy away from teaching them. It just has to be presented in a simple, easy to understand format. Truth has enormous power, especially when delivered by teachers who know their stuff well enough to speak simply. One example: in 2009, we had a choice of Medicare for All vs. the Heritage-designed Affordable Care Act (ACA). While the ACA has helped millions and lowered the rate of health care cost growth without savaging the health insurance industry, it did not provide an immediate improvement to people’s lives, as a “big government” program it was a great election issue for Republicans, it continues to cost more than nationalizing insurance would do, and Americans still don’t understand it. We could have bought out the health insurance industry and employed many of the people employed by it with the money wasted in just a few years of continuing to run our current health insurance system under the ACA. The Democrats’ love of complexity has been their ruin. We need to explain difficult ideas simply.
Second Principle: If you can’t pay for it, you can’t do it.
Corollary: if it doesn’t have a budget, it’s not a plan
The financing. The attitudes described in the previous section need to be reduced to specific laws and structural reforms, and they need to be done in a manner that improves people’s lives quickly and noticeably. We have to raise revenue, and—contrary to ideas that are floating out there—we cannot simply print money [13] or raise it all by taxing the rich [14], since high tax rates incentivize cheating, the use of tax havens, and simple flight.
Indeed, Republicans have been trying to print money since Reagan, and it has led to higher interest rates, the servicing of which has increasingly squeezed expenditures on better things. It matters (a lot!) on whether deficit spending goes toward improving productivity or whether it is wasted on defense boondoggles or gifts to the rich. And just because what we spend money on sounds good, like improving children’s health and education, doesn’t automatically make it so.
As for raising taxes, there is room to raise taxes on the rich—and especially end tax cheating-- and it should be done. While as of 2023 that could close the fiscal gap to maintain the debt:GDP at a mere 120% by raising taxes by 2.2% of GDP (somewhat over half a trillion dollars) [15], those measures alone won’t raise enough money fast enough to improve things. Among other things, analysis that calls the US a low-tax nation forgets that most nations provide much higher services, especially in healthcare, but also in many other areas, including childcare, public transportation, unemployment insurance, vacations, and sick pay. Also, since the debt burden is likely to be much higher at the end of Trump than at the beginning and the US credit rating lower, we can expect interest rates and therefore debt service payments to be higher, while GDP could well be much lower. We will need to lower the debt:GDP. Other factors like global warming and the decline of American global power will make dealing with debt that much more difficult. Wealth taxes, which do target the very rich more effectively than income taxes, are difficult to collect and would require a constitutional amendment.
Instead, consider that nationalization of health insurance to reduce healthcare costs to their European levels would raise something like $2T annually, immediately, and without the need for constitutional amendments. We could simply buy out the health insurance companies, with the threat of enacting Medicare for All as an inducement to sell at a reasonable price. Upwards of 100B dollars (annually) of savings would come from simply eliminating Medicare Advantage overpayments [16 ].
Defense spending is also notoriously inefficient. Getting a precise handle on how much is waste is difficult because the Pentagon can’t even pass a basic audit. It’s probably in the range of $100-$200B. The littoral combat fleet wasted $100B over the period of roughly a decade [17] Estimated F-35 sustainment costs have risen by about half a trillion over just a few years [18]. Some analyses assume that we are overspending on planning for potential conflicts with Russia and China. That’s probably wrong. What isn’t wrong is that procurement has to be made much more efficient, and turnaround time for iterations of weapons design much shorter. In addition to applying the antitrust remedy to the defense contractors, it might make sense to bring some design and manufacturing capability back in house.
Finally, as mentioned above, several hundred billion dollars in GDP could be recovered from prosecuting white-collar crime. That translates into at least tens of billions of dollars of additional tax revenue.
Part Four of this series will lay out how we may be able to navigate from our current, badly damaged constitutional order to a new one without breaking the constitutional order or taking the dangerous step of convening a Constitutional Convention, which could, unless carefully constrained by Congress, expose the nation to terrible danger.
[END]
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