3 September, 2026
This report applies the argument developed in How the hell did we get here? Why the West is a mess and Getting on the road to somewhere: How the West can own its mess to the United States.
Executive Summary
The United States is not simply experiencing a collection of separate crises. Economic insecurity, monopoly power, financialisation, racial inequality, technological disruption, loneliness, partisan hostility, administrative weakness and democratic erosion interact. Russell Ackoff called such an entanglement a mess. Treating each symptom in isolation shifts costs around the system while citizens become exhausted by private coping.
America’s mess is larger than those confronting Britain or Australia because American power is larger. The United States anchors global finance, leads much of the technology sector, maintains worldwide military commitments and influences the rules other countries inhabit. Its constitutional deterioration therefore has consequences far beyond its borders.
President Donald J. Trump did not create every underlying condition. Decades of concentrated wealth, weakened worker power, racialised exclusion, hollowed places, partisan sorting and institutional failure prepared the ground. Nevertheless, his administrations have accelerated the danger by attacking independent constraints, politicising public administration and treating personal authority as superior to institutional obligation. Constitutional defence is now the first requirement of renewal.
Defence alone is insufficient. A republic that merely survives each emergency without improving ordinary life will reproduce the anger and powerlessness that make another emergency likely. Americans need foundations they can feel: affordable essentials, secure work, accessible healthcare, useful education, trustworthy administration, genuine political voice and places where relationships can grow.
This report proposes eight connected missions. Rebuild constitutional guardrails and a capable, accountable civil service. Put a secure floor beneath ordinary life. Restore power to people who live by work. Place technology and finance under democratic purpose. Rebuild regions and communities rather than concentrating opportunity in a few metropolitan islands. Make democracy participatory between elections. Renew social connection, emotional maturity and voluntary service. Finally, build an upstream, antifragile federalism: national rights and resources combined with state and local experiments that can fail safely, learn honestly and scale what works.
The federal government cannot do this alone, and cannot be allowed to avoid its responsibilities. States, Tribal Nations, cities, counties, unions, businesses, universities, faith communities, veterans’ organisations and neighbourhood groups all possess knowledge and capacity. National government should protect rights, equalise resources, confront concentrated power and coordinate missions. Other institutions should adapt delivery, create participation and expose failure.
Implementation must be sequential, transparent and open to correction. Early action should defend lawful government and demonstrate visible competence. Medium-term reforms should connect housing, health, work, technology, place and participation rather than create isolated programs. Progress should be judged by outcomes citizens experience, not money announced or forms processed. National standards must protect rights and redistribute capacity; local freedom must adapt delivery and generate honest learning. Every reform should reconnect reward with contribution, risk with decision, and authority with accountability.
The United States still has extraordinary assets: wealth, research universities, natural resources, technological skill, civic organisations, millions of veterans and volunteers, and a rooted belief that problems can be solved. The choice is not between naive optimism and managed decline. It is between continued fragmentation and disciplined hope.
Perfection was never on offer. A more capable union is.
The promise was always improvement
The Constitution does not promise a perfect union. Its opening sentence speaks of forming “a more perfect Union”. That small word matters. More implies movement, comparison, correction and unfinished work. The American project was never complete, and its authors were not describing a country that had already reconciled liberty with slavery, democracy with exclusion, or federal power with local independence. They were setting a direction while leaving later generations the difficult work of making the promise less contradictory.
This report begins here, because the United States does not need another fantasy of national perfection. It has had enough fantasies. One says that America is uniquely virtuous and therefore cannot seriously deteriorate. Another says that the country is irredeemably corrupt and therefore not worth repairing. Both relieve citizens of responsibility. The first denies the mess. The second declares ownership pointless.
A more capable union is a less glamorous ambition and a more demanding one. Capability means being able to understand a problem, coordinate legitimate action, deliver what was promised, learn from failure and improve without waiting for catastrophe. It means protecting people against arbitrary power while giving institutions enough authority to act. It means treating freedom as something citizens must be able to use, rather than a formal right surrounded by unaffordable choices.
My previous two reports described the West as a mess and asked how it might get on the road to somewhere. The diagnosis was deliberately broad. Economic insecurity weakens agency. Weak agency narrows participation. Thin social connection makes people more vulnerable to anxiety, humiliation and manipulation. An attention economy rewards outrage. Institutions divided into silos optimise their own targets while pushing costs into households, hospitals, schools, courts and the future. Politics then promises a single enemy or lever because a truthful account of interacting problems is harder to sell.
The same logic applies to the United States, but the American case is more intense. The country is a continental federation, a global military and financial power, the centre of much of the technology industry, and home to extreme concentrations of wealth alongside deep material insecurity. Its racial history is not a side issue that can be dissolved into a general story about class. Its constitutional structure contains both restraints on domination and veto points that can prevent democratic majorities from acting. Its states are sources of practical innovation and, at times, instruments for denying rights.
Therefore, America cannot copy Britain or Australia. It needs a plan equal to its scale, history and present danger. It also has more resources with which to act than almost any society has ever possessed. The question is whether those resources can be converted from concentrated capability into shared capability before distrust, private power and executive overreach hollow out the institutions required to make the conversion.
America’s mess is larger because its power is greater
The United States has not been on the road to nowhere in the sense of standing still. It has been moving rapidly, but different parts of the country have been travelling in different vehicles, towards different destinations, under rules written by people with radically unequal influence. The technology sector created extraordinary tools and fortunes while weakening privacy, attention, local journalism and bargaining power. Finance allocated capital and spread risk while also making extraction, speculation and short-term shareholder returns central to corporate decision-making. Trade lowered some prices and enlarged markets while many communities experienced plant closures and the destruction of identity, skills and purpose.
None of these developments has a single cause or a uniformly negative effect. The internet expanded knowledge and accessibility. Global trade raised living standards in many countries and gave American consumers cheaper goods. Finance can turn savings into productive investment. Large firms can undertake research and infrastructure that smaller firms cannot. The point is not that scale, technology, trade or markets are inherently destructive. It is that power without countervailing power changes the purposes institutions serve.
Worker power illustrates the shift. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that only 10 per cent of wage and salary workers were union members in 2025. In 1983, the comparable figure was 20.1 per cent. Union decline has many causes, including changes in industry and worker preferences, but law and employer strategy matter. When workers negotiate one by one while firms set conditions across industries, the language of free contract conceals an asymmetry. People who live by work become price takers in decisions about scheduling, surveillance, automation and security.
Housing and healthcare convert that asymmetry into daily precarity. In 2023, almost half of renter households spent more than 30 per cent of their income on housing. The Commonwealth Fund’s 2024 comparison placed the United States last overall among ten wealthy healthcare systems, despite American excellence in particular hospitals, treatments and research. A citizen may formally be free to change jobs, start a business or care for a parent, yet remain tethered by health insurance, rent, debt or an unpredictable schedule. Freedom without a usable margin becomes permission to take risks one cannot survive.
Geography compounds the problem. Raj Chetty and colleagues at Opportunity Insights have shown how sharply children’s prospects vary by neighbourhood, and how upward mobility is associated with less segregation and inequality, stronger schools, more social capital and greater family stability. Opportunity is not merely located inside an individual’s character. It is produced by relationships, institutions, public goods and the expectations surrounding a child.
Race is woven through that geography. Federal housing policy, local zoning, lending discrimination, unequal schools, dispossession of Native peoples and the uneven protection of voting rights shaped who could accumulate assets and where public and private investment flowed. Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us describes how racial zero-sum stories have repeatedly persuaded white Americans to reject shared goods rather than allow those goods to be shared equally. Economic universalism is necessary, but it cannot work by pretending the unequal starting points were accidental.
The mess is psychological and social as well as material. The United States Surgeon General has described loneliness and isolation as a serious public-health problem. Pew’s long-run evidence shows a decline in the share of Americans saying most people can be trusted. Partisan identity increasingly supplies belonging by turning fellow citizens into threats. Digital platforms are not solely responsible, but business models built around engagement have learned that anger, fear and moral condemnation hold attention.
When a society provides fewer places for repeated, ordinary cooperation, political identity is asked to do too much. A neighbour becomes an avatar of a national enemy. A disagreement becomes evidence of wickedness. A loss becomes humiliation inflicted by people who despise you. Emotional immaturity is then rewarded rather than corrected: certainty defeats curiosity, performance defeats repair, and the most aggrieved person acquires the loudest claim to truth.
This does not mean Americans are uniquely fragile or hateful. It means institutions are cultivating the responses from which they profit. A mature society does not assume citizens will always be calm, informed and generous. It designs environments in which cooperation is practised, power is visible, mistakes can be admitted and disagreement does not carry the threat of economic or social annihilation.
The immediate emergency: constitutional order before policy ambition
It would be evasive to discuss American renewal in September 2026 without discussing President Donald J. Trump directly. Trump did not invent economic inequality, partisan media, racial resentment, congressional dysfunction or the long expansion of presidential power. Democratic and Republican administrations both contributed to executive aggrandisement, secrecy, deference to finance and the weakening of congressional responsibility. A serious diagnosis must begin before Trump.
It must not end before him. His administration has made the danger more immediate by treating independent institutions as obstacles to personal command. The White House has asserted greater control over independent regulatory agencies, created a category that makes policy-influencing civil servants easier to dismiss, and pursued sweeping reductions across federal institutions. Inspectors general were unlawfully removed, even though a court declined to reinstate them. Reporting in 2026 has described hollowed-out Justice Department watchdog functions as misconduct complaints increased. The Supreme Court’s 2026 decision in Trump v. Slaughter further widened presidential removal power over independent agencies.
Some of these actions are defended in the language of democratic accountability. The defence cannot simply be laughed away. Independent agencies can become remote. Public servants can mistake procedural expertise for democratic authority. Programs persist after failure. Presidents are elected and must be able to direct policy. Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America and Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works describe how accumulated rules and fragmented authority can make government incapable of achieving legitimate goals.
Significantly, accountability to an elected office is not the same as personal loyalty to its temporary occupant. A professional civil service exists partly so citizens receive lawful, competent administration regardless of party. Inspectors general, scientific agencies, election officials, prosecutors and regulators need enough independence to tell a president that a desired action is illegal, unsupported or corrupt. If everyone who can say no may be dismissed for saying it, law becomes advice and public administration becomes patronage.
This is why the difference between lawful accountability and personal command matters: it turns an abstract institutional argument into a measurable democratic risk.
Evidence of that risk should be handled carefully. V-Dem’s 2026 report estimated that the American Liberal Democracy Index fell by 24 per cent between 2024 and 2025, moving the country from twentieth to fifty-first place. No index should be treated as holy writ. Expert coding involves judgment, and reasonable scholars dispute how democratic qualities should be measured. Nevertheless, the direction aligns with observable developments: attacks on oversight, pressure on independent institutions, politicisation of administration and claims of executive authority that exceed ordinary disagreement over policy.
Constitutional defence is therefore not a distraction from bread-and-butter politics. It is the operating system beneath it. A worker cannot rely on a labour right if agencies enforce law only against the president’s opponents. A business cannot invest confidently if contracts and regulations depend on personal favour. A minority cannot trust formal rights if courts are ignored. A state cannot experiment constructively if federal power is used to punish political disobedience rather than enforce lawful national standards.
The first mission must be a broad constitutional repair agenda. Congress should clarify limits on emergency powers and impoundment, strengthen subpoena enforcement and protect the independence and resourcing of inspectors general. A modernised civil-service settlement should combine due process and professional candour with genuine performance management, simpler hiring, easier movement of technical talent and fair procedures for removing persistent poor performers. Reformers should protect competence, not every inherited process.
Election administration needs sustained, protected funding, physical and cyber security, auditable paper records and stronger protection for officials against threats. Independent redistricting should be encouraged nationally. Judicial ethics rules require credible enforcement, disclosure and recusal provisions. The Justice Department must recover a culture in which prosecutions are based on evidence and law rather than personal allegiance. Whistleblowers need routes that work before retaliation destroys their careers.
Most importantly, the rule must be general. Limits created to constrain Trump must constrain future Democratic presidents. A constitutional coalition cannot defend neutral institutions only when its own side is out of power. Emergency politics easily borrows the methods it claims to oppose. If renewal begins by building a more efficient partisan weapon, the republic has not been repaired; ownership has merely changed.
This creates an uncomfortable two-track strategy. During the present emergency, courts, Congress, states, professional associations, universities, businesses, unions, journalists and citizens must defend lawful boundaries and preserve records, expertise and independent capacity. At the same time, they must prepare constructive reforms that can improve ordinary life when political openings appear. Defence without renewal returns the country to the conditions that produced the emergency. Renewal without defence assumes institutions will remain available while they are being dismantled.
The assets are still extraordinary
There is a temptation, especially during democratic deterioration, to catalogue only weakness. Doing so produces analytical distortion and political paralysis. America’s capacity is not imaginary. The country possesses a huge and diverse economy, deep capital markets, fertile land, energy resources, advanced manufacturing, world-leading research universities, and a remarkable ability to attract talent. The National Science Foundation estimated American research and development performance at $885.6 billion in 2022, including more than $108 billion in academic research and development in the 2023 financial year.
The problem is not an absence of ingenuity. It is the conversion of ingenuity into widely shared capability. Public research helps produce technologies whose rewards may be privatised. Universities generate knowledge while surrounding communities cannot afford housing. Regions host data centres that consume land, energy and water while local citizens receive few durable benefits. Capital is abundant for acquiring assets and less patient when returns depend on training people, rebuilding suppliers or preventing harm over decades.
America’s civic assets are equally important. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps data show that 75.7 million Americans formally volunteered through an organisation between September 2022 and September 2023. The Department of Veterans Affairs projected a veteran population of about 17.9 million in the 2024 financial year. Veterans are not a uniform political bloc or an inexhaustible reserve of free labour. They are citizens with varied skills, needs and experiences. Many nevertheless retain a desire for service, teamwork and useful responsibility that civilian institutions often fail to recognise.
The country is also full of state and local officials, teachers, nurses, librarians, engineers, tradespeople, researchers, small-business owners, union organisers, faith leaders and neighbours who solve problems without becoming national celebrities. Disasters repeatedly reveal a capacity for mutual aid that everyday institutions leave dormant. As Rutger Bregman’s Humankind and Nicholas Christakis’s Blueprint suggest, local cooperation often saves the day: humans possess strong capacities for friendship, teaching, social learning and mutual help. Institutions decide whether those capacities are practised or crowded out.
The can-do spirit is therefore not a slogan to paste over decline. It is a resource to organise. Americans do not need to be told they are uniquely heroic. They need institutions worthy of their effort, honest about constraints, capable of using knowledge and willing to share credit.
Start at the end: an American good life
Dan Bingham’s Start at the End argues that action should be reverse-engineered from a clearly imagined outcome. American politics commonly starts somewhere else: an existing agency, a tax preference, a donor constituency, a slogan, a court doctrine or a technology searching for a public problem. The country then confuses the volume of activity with movement towards a destination.
What would the end look like? Not perfection, equality of outcome or permanent national harmony. It would be a country in which most people can plan a good life and possess meaningful ways to influence the conditions of that life.
A young adult could imagine housing, useful work and relationships with time to deepen. A parent could combine paid work and care without continuous crisis. Illness would be frightening, because illness is frightening, not because it also threatens bankruptcy. A worker could question an unsafe decision or an abusive algorithm without risking everything. A small business could reach customers without paying tribute to a dominant gatekeeper. A community could shape development and share in the value it helps create.
Citizens would expect elections to be honestly administered and losing parties to accept lawful defeat. They would encounter government through services that work, not forms designed around agencies they do not understand. They would have places to meet without purchasing admission, opportunities to serve without joining a culture war, and enough security to disagree without treating compromise as surrender.
This destination includes growth, but asks what growth is for. It includes abundance, but asks who controls the assets and bears the costs. It includes freedom, but distinguishes theoretical choice from practical agency. It includes national strength, but understands strength as the capacity to correct mistakes rather than the inability to admit them.
Working backwards from that destination produces eight connected missions.
An American road to somewhere
1. Rebuild constitutional guardrails and a capable state
Constitutional repair is the first mission because every other mission depends on lawful, trustworthy administration. It should not become a campaign to restore the exact bureaucracy that existed before Trump. That bureaucracy produced real frustration: slow hiring, brittle procurement, inaccessible benefits, defensive rules, obsolete technology and responsibility dispersed so widely that no one could fix an obvious problem.
The choice is not between an unaccountable administrative state and a personalised presidency. America needs a professional state that can act and be challenged. Pahlka’s central insight is that policy is often designed far from implementation. Legislators specify procedures in an attempt to prevent abuse; agencies add controls after every scandal; contractors build systems around contractual compliance; frontline staff and citizens inherit the maze. Each rule may have a reason, but the accumulated system loses its purpose.
Departments should organise major programs around measurable human outcomes and multidisciplinary delivery teams, not only legal authorities and annual appropriations. Frontline workers and users should test services before national release. Benefits for which government already possesses eligibility information should be easier to receive automatically. Procurement should allow modular development, open standards and competition rather than decades-long dependence on one contractor. Technical, operational and design expertise must be valued alongside legal and policy expertise.
At the same time, delivery reform needs counterweights. Clear decision rights should leave an auditable trail. Independent evaluators and inspectors general should be able to inspect outcomes, contracts, political interference and burdens shifted onto citizens. Public servants must have protected channels for lawful dissent. Congress should fund administration in relation to the promises it makes; starving an agency and then condemning its queues is political theatre.
The objective is democratic capability under law: elected leaders set legitimate direction; professional institutions advise candidly and implement competently; courts review legality; Congress investigates and funds; citizens can see who decided what and challenge failure. Authority, knowledge and accountability should meet in the same system.
2. Put a secure floor beneath ordinary life
The second mission is to restore the capacity to plan. Security is often described in American debate as the opposite of freedom or enterprise. In practice, a secure floor makes risk-taking possible. People start businesses, change careers, leave dangerous employers, care for relatives and participate in public life when one setback will not destroy the household.
Healthcare belongs at the centre. The immediate institutional form will remain politically contested: strengthened public programs, regulated private insurance, public options or a more universal national system. The test should be less ideological and more demanding. Is everyone covered? Can people obtain primary, mental, dental and preventive care? Are prices intelligible? Does illness create unpayable debt? Can clinicians spend more time treating than navigating billing systems? Does the system produce health rather than transactions?
Housing requires a similarly mixed strategy. America needs substantially more homes in high-opportunity regions, especially near jobs and transport. Permitting and zoning that exclude apartments, smaller homes and social housing should be reformed. As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson ask: why can’t a wealthy society build what it publicly claims to want? However, supply cannot be an incantation that ignores ownership, speculation, infrastructure, displacement or the needs of places with weak demand.
Federal finance and land should support sustained social, cooperative and affordable housing, not only private construction whose affordability expires. Tenant stability, fair enforcement and targeted assistance are required now, because a family cannot live in a unit that may be approved five years from now. Communities asked to accept density should receive visible public benefits: schools, parks, transport, clinics and a share of land value. Building faster and governing development fairly are complementary.
Childcare, paid family leave, disability support, reliable transport, affordable energy and portable income protection during job transitions complete the floor. Programs should be simple enough to use, broad enough not to stigmatise and structured so work pays. National standards and funding must reduce interstate inequality, while states and communities adapt delivery.
This is not a permanently rescued population. It is infrastructure for agency. The goal is to reduce the number of hours citizens spend proving their need, negotiating opaque bills and recovering from predictable crises. Every hour returned is time that can be invested in work, care, education, service, politics or rest.
3. Restore power to people who live by work
A secure floor protects people from ruin; organised power allows them to shape the economy. Daron Acemoglu’s working-class liberalism begins from a democratic truth: political equality becomes thin when most adults spend their working lives inside institutions they cannot influence. Elizabeth Anderson calls many workplaces “private governments” because managers exercise extensive authority while employees possess limited voice or exit.
The objective is not to recreate the industrial relations of 1955. America’s workforce includes care workers, professionals, contractors, franchise employees, warehouse pickers, drivers, creators, technicians and people managed by platforms or algorithms. Institutions of voice must fit that diversity.
Federal labour law should make organising and bargaining practically possible, with meaningful remedies for retaliation and procedures that cannot be defeated by delay. Sectoral standards can establish minimum wages, training and conditions where firm-by-firm bargaining is unrealistic. Benefits should follow workers across employers and employment categories. Works councils or elected worker committees can provide voice over scheduling, safety, surveillance and the introduction of artificial intelligence, without replacing independent unions.
Public procurement and subsidies should reward firms that train, retain and share gains with workers. When taxpayers finance a factory, research breakthrough or energy transition, agreements should specify employment standards, local supplier development, profit-sharing or a public return. Mariana Mazzucato is right that the state often shapes markets rather than merely repairing them after failure. It should acknowledge that role and negotiate competently.
Small businesses require power too. Many confront dominant platforms, payment systems, insurers, distributors and landlords rather than a romantic free market. Competition policy should address exclusionary conduct, self-preferencing, predatory acquisition and gatekeeper control. Antitrust is not a cure for every social problem, but dispersed economic power creates more room for entrepreneurship, worker exit and political independence.
Grit has a proper place here. Angela Duckworth’s account of passion and perseverance helps explain how difficult achievements are sustained. Yet grit without a fair track becomes an instruction to endure exploitation. The task is to build firms, unions, colleges and public institutions that deserve perseverance by connecting effort to mastery, progression, voice and purpose.
4. Put technology and finance under democratic purpose
Technology and finance are not separate sectors floating above society. They are systems through which choices about work, knowledge, housing, communication and investment are made. The United States cannot own its mess while leaving the most powerful decision-making infrastructure governed primarily by advertising, fees, asset appreciation and quarterly returns.
Nicholas Carr warned in The Shallows that digital environments shape attention, while The Glass Cage examined how automation can remove the struggle through which skill and judgment develop. Jonathan Haidt’s work on the anxious generation adds a developmental warning. The issue is not that screens are evil or childhood can be returned to an analogue past. It is that firms run population-scale experiments while children, families and schools carry the risk.
A democratic technology settlement should provide strong privacy rights, meaningful consent, data portability and interoperability where network effects create lock-in. Platforms should be accountable for manipulative design and transparent about major recommendation systems. Children deserve age-appropriate protections that do not require universal surveillance. Independent researchers need secure access to study systemic effects. People affected by consequential automated decisions in employment, credit, housing, education, insurance or justice should receive an intelligible explanation and a route to human appeal.
Artificial intelligence also requires a labour settlement. Workers should participate before systems reshape jobs, not merely receive retraining after decisions are irreversible. Productivity gains can support shorter hours, better services, higher pay and less dangerous work; they can also intensify surveillance and concentrate income. Technology does not choose between those outcomes. Institutions do.
Public investment should carry public conditions. If federal research, tax credits, procurement or infrastructure make an innovation commercially possible, the public might receive equity, royalties, price conditions, domestic capability, open standards or reinvestment commitments. The appropriate mechanism will vary. The principle is skin in the game: risk and reward should not be socialised in opposite directions.
Finance needs the same test. Credit is essential, but an economy can have too much financial activity of the wrong kind. Nicholas Shaxson’s finance-curse argument is that an oversized financial sector can extract talent and resources from productive activity, increase inequality and acquire political power. Policy should reduce incentives for short-term extraction, strengthen transparency around ownership and tax avoidance, and make patient capital available for housing, infrastructure, industrial transition and community enterprises.
Jeff Booth’s argument for technology-enabled deflation deserves consideration, but not adoption as a complete theory. Falling costs in computation and some manufactured goods can expand abundance. General deflation can also increase the real burden of debt, discourage spending and damage employment. The useful question is not whether all prices should fall. It is why productivity improvements do not more reliably lower the cost of essential life, and how policy can prevent land, monopoly rents and finance from capturing the gain.
5. Rebuild places, not only national aggregates
National statistics can improve while particular places continue to lose hospitals, newspapers, bank branches, union halls, factories, young adults and confidence. A person does not live in gross domestic product. They live somewhere, among people, institutions and memories. When policy tells a declining town that the national economy is efficient, it translates abandonment into an allegation of ignorance.
Place-based renewal should begin with maps of capability rather than lists of deficits. What skills, suppliers, colleges, natural assets, cultural institutions and relationships already exist? Which missing link prevents them from becoming a functioning system? A transport connection, childcare centre, technical program, reliable broadband link or modest pool of patient capital may matter more than a distant flagship project.
Federal missions in clean energy, advanced manufacturing, health, resilience, food, water and defence can support regional compacts among states, Tribal Nations, cities, unions, community colleges, universities and firms. Funding should last long enough to build teams and supply chains. Competitive grants that force every community to hire consultants, produce glossy applications and then dismiss staff after losing reproduce the begging-bowl problem described in Head North.
National government should set transparent objectives, labour and environmental standards, equalisation rules and learning requirements. Regional institutions should decide how to assemble housing, transport, training, land, finance and suppliers around those objectives. Community-benefit agreements can ensure that development creates durable local value. Tribal Nations must participate as sovereign governments, not stakeholders invited after key decisions.
Universities have a larger role than commercialising patents. They can share laboratories and procurement with local firms, recognise civic problem-solving in promotion, strengthen public-interest technology, support local journalism and create paths between community colleges and advanced research. Anchor hospitals, utilities and large employers can direct more purchasing towards capable local suppliers without indefinitely protecting incompetence.
Place policy can become pork-barrel politics or a museum for industries that no longer have a future. It therefore needs measurable outcomes and exit rules. Are household incomes, business formation, health, housing security, worker progression and civic participation improving? Are subsidies buying capabilities that remain after support ends? Amy Edmondson’s “right kind of wrong” matters: experiments should be bounded, assumptions explicit and failure reported. A failed pilot that teaches is cheaper than a permanent program that conceals failure.
6. Make democracy participatory between elections
Voting is indispensable and insufficient. Citizens who are asked to choose among distant candidates every two or four years, then excluded from framing problems, will not experience democracy as agency. Participation cannot mean endless consultation after decisions have already been made. It must give people consequential, structured work.
Election reform should make representation more credible. Secure and accessible voting, independent administration, auditable results, transparent campaign finance and independent redistricting are foundations. Electoral systems such as ranked-choice voting or multimember districts deserve state-level experimentation where constitutional arrangements permit, with honest evaluation rather than claims that one mechanism will cure polarisation.
Between elections, states and cities should expand participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies and standing civic panels. A well-designed citizens’ assembly brings a broadly representative group together, supplies balanced evidence, allows questioning and requires reasons. It does not replace legislators or experts. It improves the informational and relational conditions under which difficult trade-offs are considered.
Participation must connect to power. Agencies should state which decisions are open, what constraints exist, how recommendations were treated and why departures occurred. Participants should be paid, with childcare, transport, disability access and language support. Otherwise, public engagement selects for citizens with spare time and institutional confidence.
Hahrie Han’s work on organising distinguishes mobilising people for a transaction from developing their capacity for leadership. American democracy has become exceptionally good at extracting donations, clicks and votes from supporters. It needs institutions that teach people to listen, recruit, deliberate, negotiate and remain responsible for outcomes. Unions, congregations, neighbourhood organisations and civic associations can do this when they are more than mailing lists.
Political parties also require reform from within. They are necessary institutions for organising choice, but fundraising, primaries, media incentives and gerrymandered districts reward performance for the most attentive partisans. Parties should invest in local membership, candidate development, policy capacity and year-round service. A party that appears only to request money or predict apocalypse should not be surprised when citizens experience politics as manipulation.
Democracy is partly an emotional practice. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind explains why moral intuitions differ and why people reason within groups. Emotional maturity means holding convictions without assuming one’s feelings are complete evidence, admitting error without collapse, and distinguishing discomfort from danger. Civic institutions should make those skills normal. The aim is not centrism or politeness. Some conflicts involve genuine injustice. The aim is to contest power without losing the capacity to learn or share a country after defeat.
7. Rebuild connection, attention and a culture of service
Governments cannot manufacture friendship. They can make it easier or harder for relationships to form. Libraries, parks, schools after hours, recreation centres, main streets, arts organisations, unions, veterans’ groups, faith communities and local media are social infrastructure. They create repeated encounters in which people become known, useful and accountable to one another.
This infrastructure needs physical places, operating money and time. A beautiful library closed on evenings and weekends cannot anchor community life. A worker with two unpredictable jobs cannot join a club. A neighbourhood divided by a highway or designed only for cars makes casual contact difficult. Housing, transport, labour and planning policy are therefore also loneliness policy.
The Surgeon General’s loneliness advisory calls for investment in social connection comparable to other major public-health priorities. That does not mean medicalising ordinary solitude. It means recognising that connection affects health, resilience and participation, while creating conditions in which people can build it themselves.
America should offer a voluntary, paid civic-service guarantee for young adults and accessible pathways for people at other life stages. Participants might support disaster preparedness, conservation, care, tutoring, public health, housing rehabilitation, digital access or local journalism. Service should provide training, a living allowance, educational credit and routes into careers. It should mix people across class, region and background without demanding ideological conformity.
Veterans can make an important contribution as mentors, organisers, emergency planners, teachers and public servants. They should not be romanticised as the only adults capable of discipline, or asked to rescue civilian society without support. The better model is mutual translation: civilian institutions learn from veterans’ experience of teams, logistics and mission; veterans gain useful roles and relationships that do not require reenacting military identity.
Attention must be protected alongside connection. Schools should preserve device-free space for play, reading, conversation and concentration. Workplaces should stop treating constant digital availability as commitment. Families need practical support rather than blame. Platforms should not be permitted to turn developmental vulnerability into an unpriced input.
Harry Moffitt’s modern Stoicism can contribute to a renewed civic philosophy if separated from “Broicism” and fantasies of invulnerability. The useful Stoic lesson is to distinguish what we control, practise judgment, endure discomfort and act according to values. It must be joined to solidarity. Stoicism without structural analysis tells citizens to serenely absorb preventable harm. Solidarity without personal discipline can turn every frustration into someone else’s obligation. A capable society needs both agency and mutual responsibility.
8. Build upstream, antifragile federalism
Dan Heath’s Upstream asks why institutions repeatedly rescue people from a river without walking upstream to discover who is pushing them in. American government often funds crisis response through one budget while prevention would save money in another. A housing intervention may reduce hospital use, school disruption and incarceration, yet the housing agency cannot count those savings. The system waits until suffering acquires the correct administrative label.
An upstream state should create cross-agency prevention budgets around outcomes such as stable childhoods, healthy ageing, housing security and disaster resilience. Local partnerships could combine funds, while independent evaluation tracks costs and benefits across systems and over time. Savings should be partly reinvested where prevention occurred, or every agency learns that helping another budget is financially irrational.
Federalism is an advantage when it permits adaptation and learning. It is a danger when it turns rights, healthcare or basic administrative competence into geographic lotteries. The correct settlement is neither total national uniformity nor fifty isolated experiments. National government should protect constitutional rights, provide minimum standards, equalise resources, regulate interstate markets and coordinate challenges that cross borders. States, Tribal Nations and localities should have room to test delivery models and exceed the floor.
The purpose of this balance is not simply accommodation; it is to turn variation across the federation into disciplined learning. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile asks how systems can gain from variation and stress rather than merely survive it. That requires modularity, redundancy, feedback and failures small enough to teach. A national program should not depend on one vendor, database or fragile supply chain. States should not all repeat the same failed procurement in isolation. A federal learning network could publish comparable data, implementation notes, negative results and reusable digital components.
Skin in the game completes the design. Officials and contractors should remain responsible beyond an announcement or sale. Senior decision-makers should experience services as users and meet affected citizens. Contracts should link reward to durable outcomes without encouraging providers to avoid difficult cases. Firms receiving public support should share downside as well as upside. Communities should possess enforceable rights, not ceremonial consultation.
Accountability should sharpen experimentation, not extinguish it. Safe-to-fail does not mean consequence-free. It means pilots are bounded, ethical, reversible and informative. Amy Edmondson distinguishes intelligent failures in genuinely uncertain territory from preventable failures caused by negligence or ignoring known practice. America needs more of the first and less tolerance for the second.
Better, not perfect: principles for implementation
The plan above is deliberately large because the mess is large. It is not a demand that every reform begin at once. Richard Koch’s 80/20 principle and Owain Service and Rory Gallagher’s Think Small both point towards disciplined selection: identify actions that unlock several outcomes, begin at a scale people can manage, and use visible progress to enlarge confidence.
For example, housing near transport can improve affordability, access to work, household budgets, emissions and social contact. Automatic benefit enrolment can reduce hardship, administrative labour and distrust. Worker voice over technology can improve adoption, job quality and organisational learning. A well-funded library can support literacy, digital access, cooling during heat, local organisations and ordinary companionship.
Small does not mean trivial. A small experiment should test a pathway towards the destination. Nudges can help citizens navigate choices, but Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s ideas should not be used to decorate structures that remain exploitative. A reminder cannot make rent affordable. A better form cannot create a doctor. Behavioural design is useful when it removes friction from a sound institution.
Rebecca Ray’s “good enough” is equally important. Perfectionism can protect the status quo by making every coalition wait for complete agreement. Yet “good enough” must not become an excuse to transfer risk to people with the least power. The test is whether an imperfect reform improves capability, distributes gains fairly, can be corrected and avoids locking in preventable harm.
Constraints may help. David Epstein argues that working inside constraints can sharpen attention and creativity. Fiscal, constitutional and political limits are real. They force sequencing and trade-offs. But austerity is not a neutral constraint when it destroys the administrative capacity required to use money wisely. Mark Blyth’s warning remains relevant: cutting during weakness can deepen weakness, while public failure is then presented as proof that public action cannot work.
The most useful principles are simple to state and difficult to maintain: protect rights; distribute power; build capability; make responsibility visible; prevent harm upstream; experiment safely; measure outcomes people experience; and keep learning. These principles do not eliminate uncertainty. Simone Stolzoff’s work on not knowing suggests why this can be an advantage. Institutions that admit uncertainty can update. Institutions that promise certainty must conceal evidence.
Alexander’s Question: what might be wrong with this argument?
Alexander’s question requires more than a polite paragraph of caveats. What evidence would weaken the argument, and what alternative explanations deserve serious weight?
First, this report may overstate systemic deterioration by assembling the worst trends into one narrative. The United States remains wealthy, innovative and capable of peaceful political competition. Many institutions continue to function. Crime, health, wages, trust and participation do not all move in the same direction, and national averages hide improvement. A compelling story about a mess can become self-sealing: every problem confirms the system, while every success is dismissed as an exception.
The answer is to specify outcomes and accept disconfirmation. If constitutional checks hold, public administration retains professional independence, household security improves, market concentration falls, mobility broadens, trust and participation rise, and reforms survive partisan turnover, the diagnosis should be revised. The report argues about relationships among conditions, not inevitable collapse.
Second, the plan may ask too much of government. Public institutions can be captured, incompetent and coercive. American veto points sometimes prevent bad policy. Local knowledge can outperform national expertise. Markets coordinate information that planners do not possess. A larger public role may create protected insiders, fiscal burdens and new opportunities for corruption.
This counterargument is strong against careless statism, not against public capacity. The existing system already contains planning and coercion; much of it is exercised privately through employers, insurers, platforms, landlords and financial institutions. The relevant comparison is not government versus freedom. It is among different arrangements of power. Public action should be transparent, contestable, experimentally minded and subject to exit or correction. Markets should be used where competition and choice are real.
Third, abundance reformers are right that progressive procedure can prevent construction and make public goals impossible. Environmental review, local vetoes and procurement rules may protect narrow interests while housing, clean energy and infrastructure remain scarce. Yet a politics of building can also dismiss communities, labour and environmental justice as friction. The resolution is neither infinite process nor executive bulldozing. Set clear timelines, consolidate review, provide early participation, compensate burdens, enforce substantive standards and make one accountable institution responsible for a decision.
Fourth, federalism may deepen division. States can innovate, but they have also defended segregation, restricted voting and competed by weakening labour and environmental standards. Local participation can empower organised homeowners more than renters or future residents. This is why experimentation requires national rights, fiscal equalisation, representative participation and transparent evaluation. Devolution without capacity or rights is abandonment.
Fifth, universal economic security may not overcome racial hierarchy. Class-based programs can leave discriminatory institutions intact; race-conscious policies can be attacked as zero-sum or administered in rigid categories. The United States must do both: build broad goods that create common interest and directly repair documented exclusion in wealth, housing, education, health, justice and political voice. McGhee’s argument is not that race should disappear into class. It is that racial division has repeatedly been used to prevent shared investment.
Sixth, the report may understate culture, family and personal responsibility. Institutions do not make every choice for citizens. Addiction, violence, dishonesty and neglect cannot always be explained as structural symptoms. Emotional maturity includes accepting agency, limits and consequences. But responsibility is meaningful only when power and options are real. A society can demand better choices while refusing to design environments that make destructive choices profitable and constructive ones punishing.
Seventh, direct criticism of Trump may alienate citizens whose support arose from legitimate anger at elite failure, cultural contempt, insecure work, uncontrolled borders or wars that achieved little. Treating every Trump voter as authoritarian would repeat the humiliation on which authoritarian politics feeds. The distinction must be precise: citizens deserve curiosity and equal standing; unlawful conduct and attacks on constitutional limits deserve opposition. Understanding a vote does not require excusing a president.
Finally, perhaps the political coalition required for this plan does not exist. The country is polarised, wealthy interests possess veto power, and reforms may be reversed. This is the deepest challenge. There is no technical bridge over absent power. Keith Ferrazzi’s Leading Without Authority is useful because leadership often begins before formal permission: people connect existing efforts, demonstrate a workable practice and create pressure. But local action cannot substitute for national law where national power causes the problem.
The best response is sequential coalition-building around felt outcomes, combined with non-negotiable constitutional boundaries. People need not agree on a complete ideology to support reliable benefits, affordable homes, honest procurement, fair competition, safe elections, local service and consequences for corruption. Success can create constituencies for continuation. Failure must be admitted before opponents expose it.
Alexander’s question does not dissolve the argument. It improves it. The plan is defensible only if it remains open to evidence, distributes the power to challenge it and treats correction as strength.
From defence to renewal: a sequence, not a single launch
The United States cannot wait for perfect national alignment. It also cannot pretend that scattered local projects add up to constitutional renewal. The work needs different time horizons.
Now, the priority is defence and preservation. Courts, legislatures, state officials, professional bodies, businesses, universities, unions, journalists and citizens should insist on compliance with lawful orders, protect election administration, preserve public records and data, support threatened public servants and maintain independent expertise. States and cities should continue improving housing, health, labour standards, civic participation and resilience within their authority. Every institution should examine where dependence on one federal decision, vendor or funding stream creates fragility.
In the first two years of a genuine reform opening, Congress and the executive should concentrate on guardrails and high-leverage capability: civil-service repair, inspector-general independence, emergency-power limits, election funding, modern delivery teams, automatic access to existing benefits, competition enforcement and a small number of place-based missions. Visible competence matters. Citizens who have heard decades of promises need early evidence that lawful government can make ordinary life less difficult.
Within five years, the secure floor and power-building institutions should expand: health coverage, housing pipelines, childcare and leave, portable benefits, sectoral standards, worker voice, civic service and regional compacts. Participatory institutions should move from pilots to recurring parts of state and local government. Programs should publish comparable outcomes, including negative results and burdens shifted elsewhere.
Over ten to fifteen years, success would appear less as one historic law than as changed expectations. Citizens would assume that public systems are usable, firms receiving public support owe public obligations, workers have a voice in technological change, election losers concede, and communities can shape development. Regions would possess durable teams rather than temporary grant writers. Prevention would compete fairly with crisis response. Constitutional restraint would become boring again.
This sequence will be interrupted by recessions, disasters, elections, court decisions and geopolitical shocks. Taleb’s antifragility is valuable precisely because the plan cannot depend on calm. Redundancy, distributed capability and honest feedback allow systems to adapt. The aim is not to predict every shock. It is to ensure shocks reveal learning capacity rather than accumulated neglect.
A more capable union
The United States has fallen a long way in important respects, and it could fall much further. Saying so is not anti-American. It takes the constitutional promise seriously enough to judge the country against it. Nor is direct criticism of Trump a complete explanation. A democracy does not become vulnerable to personalised power in a vacuum. Institutions failed to deliver security, dignity, voice and credible accountability for too many people, while concentrated wealth learned to live comfortably with public anger.
Owning the mess means refusing both excuses. Structural failure does not absolve a president who attacks constitutional limits. Presidential danger does not absolve the institutions and interests that created the conditions in which such danger could thrive.
The resources for renewal remain extraordinary. America has money, land, knowledge, technology, universities, civic traditions, public servants, entrepreneurs, workers, volunteers and millions who have served in uniform. What it lacks is not raw capability. It lacks arrangements that connect capability to common purpose and distribute enough power for citizens to experience the common purpose as their own.
Rutger Bregman’s moral ambition is a useful closing challenge. The country should make it prestigious to spend talent on consequential, neglected and solvable problems. Yet moral ambition needs institutions that can use it. Otherwise, committed people burn out, withdraw or learn to perform while achieving little.
The plan in this report is not a master lever. It is a direction: constitutional government strong enough to constrain power; economic security sufficient for agency; worker and community voice capable of challenging extraction; technology and finance directed towards public purposes; places rebuilt as systems; democracy practised between elections; social connection treated as infrastructure; and federalism organised for upstream learning.
Americans do not need perfect agreement before they begin. They need enough agreement on rules, enough security to act, enough humility to learn and enough visible success to continue. A more perfect Union was always an unfinished instruction.
Perfection was never on offer. A more capable union is.
References and further reading
Olney, David James (2026). How the hell did we get here? Why the West is a mess.
Olney, David James (2026). Getting on the road to somewhere: How the West can own its mess.
Acemoglu, Daron (2026). What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity. Profile Audio.
Ackoff, Russell L. (1978). The Art of Problem Solving: Accompanied by Ackoff’s Fables. Wiley.
Anderson, Elizabeth (2017). Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It). Princeton University Press.
Bingham, Dan (2021). Start at the End: How Reverse-Engineering Can Lead to Success. Welbeck Publishing Group.
Blyth, Mark (2014). Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford University Press.
Bregman, Rutger (2020). Humankind: A Hopeful History. Bloomsbury.
Bregman, Rutger (2025). Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. Bloomsbury.
Carr, Nicholas (2011). The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. W. W. Norton.
Carr, Nicholas (2014). The Glass Cage: Automation and Us. W. W. Norton.
Christakis, Nicholas A. (2019). Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. Little, Brown Spark.
Duckworth, Angela (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner.
Dunkelman, Marc J. (2025). Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back. PublicAffairs.
Edmondson, Amy C. (2023). Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. Atria Books.
Epstein, David (2026). Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. Riverhead Books.
Ferrazzi, Keith and Noel Weyrich (2020). Leading Without Authority: Why You Don’t Need to Be in Charge to Inspire Others and Make Change Happen. Currency.
Haidt, Jonathan (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon.
Haidt, Jonathan (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press.
Han, Hahrie (2014). How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century. Oxford University Press.
Heath, Dan (2020). Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. Avid Reader Press.
Klein, Ezra and Derek Thompson (2025). Abundance. Avid Reader Press.
Koch, Richard (2003). The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less. Nicholas Brealey.
Levitsky, Steven and Daniel Ziblatt (2023). Tyranny of the Minority. Crown.
Mazzucato, Mariana (2013). The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Anthem Press.
McGhee, Heather (2021). The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. One World.
Moffitt, Harry (2025). The Fourth Pillar: Modern Stoicism and the Philosophy of High Performance. Macmillan Australia.
Pahlka, Jennifer (2023). Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. Metropolitan Books.
Putnam, Robert D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster.
Ray, Rebecca (2022). Good, Great, Perfect: Ditch Perfectionism for Good Enough and Succeed More. Audible Originals.
Service, Owain and Rory Gallagher (2017). Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals. Michael O’Mara.
Shaxson, Nicholas (2018). The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer. Bodley Head.
Stolzoff, Simone (2026). How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers. Tantor Media.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2018). Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Random House.
Thaler, Richard H. and Cass R. Sunstein (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2026). Union Members—2025.
U.S. Census Bureau (2024). Nearly Half of Renter Households Are Cost-Burdened.
U.S. Census Bureau (2024). Volunteering and Civic Life in America.
Commonwealth Fund (2024). Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System.
National Science Board (2024). Trends in U.S. R&D Performance.
Opportunity Insights (2014). Where Is the Land of Opportunity?
Pew Research Center (2025). Americans’ Trust in One Another.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2023). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (2024). Veteran Population Projection Model 2023.
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White House (2025). Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies.
American Bar Association (2025). Task Force for American Democracy: 2025 Report.
Brennan Center for Justice (2026). Fighting Abuse of Executive Power.
Protect Democracy (2026). The Trump Administration’s Conflict with the Courts, Explained.