Introduction

A Plan to Renew the Promise of American Life

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Introduction

This is not your father’s plan to save America, although it might be your grandfather’s. I call it, immodestly, ‘a plan to renew the promise of American life.’ It’s really just a compilation of the results of a thought experiment. And I hasten to add, it’s not a platform in the conventional sense. It gathers in one place my collected thoughts on how I think we could, without violence, make America America again — I mean America in her best and noblest sense.

The challenge I set for myself was to figure out how we might reverse America’s obvious and alarming decline. And I decided there is only one way to do that: restore the principles of the American founding to the center of our national life.

This thought, of course, is unoriginal. It’s as old as the republic. But in our time, it probably seems strange, even silly. But that’s only because it’s unfamiliar. We assume we’ve outgrown the principles that made America great, when really we’ve just forgotten them.

Some of the recommendations here are trivial, some are sweeping. A few are just practical — mere advice or rules of thumb. To make things more intelligible, I gathered it all up into fourteen broad categories or buckets, which, for want of a better term, I dubbed ‘planks.’

The thought experiment began around 2010, when I realized that just about every reform movement I had supported had failed or seemed hopeless. And I wondered why. And I decided the answer was that none were serious. We were addressing the symptoms instead of the disease. And we weren’t trying to look at the whole picture, but rather focusing on specific issues in isolation.

It was not enough, I realized, to ‘elect the right people’ — although that, of course, is always necessary. (Isn’t it odd, by the way, how ‘our people,’ once in office, always seem to stop being our people?)

In addition to the right people, we need the right goals, and the right principles to guide them. And of course, we need to address the real problem.

I decided the real problem boils down to excessive concentrations of power — governmental power, economic power, institutional power.

By ‘America’s decline,’ I mean the obvious problems that fill the headlines. The signs of economic deterioration, the inflation, the squeezing of the middle class. The fading of free enterprise. The rule of bureaucrats and monopolists. The massive and ever-growing national debt. The rise of income inequality. The administrative state, the endless expansion of government-by-fiat. The failure of our institutions, their corruption, and the maddening results of our health care, education, and welfare ‘systems.’ The tribalism. The racism masquerading as ‘justice.’ The public vulgarity and indecency. The weakening of marriage and family life. The culture wars.

I’m thinking of the alarming degradation of our global power, reputation, and respect. The fact that we don’t always live up to our own principles, either at home or abroad. The endless stream of illegal immigrants across our southern border.

I’m thinking of the loss of individual liberty and privacy. The feeling that we’re under constant surveillance and being censored. The suspicion that the news is doctored and that our election results are not always honest.

I’m thinking of the growing enmity and distrust among own people, and the demonization of our fellow citizens as ‘enemies of democracy.’

What the heck happened?

It all comes down, I suppose, to a quarrel over that term, ‘democracy’ — a quarrel over how we should live together. It seems as if we’re no longer content, these days, to just live together in peace and freedom, with decency, respect, common sense, and moderation.

I don’t pretend to be smart enough to understand why all these things are happening. Some of it is undoubtedly due to things we can’t easily control, like rapid technological change, and the tendency to forget the lessons of the past, and the recurrent popularity of ideas that are, as Mencken put it, ‘clear, simple, and wrong.’ In some ways, I suppose one could chalk it all up to the human condition, all par for the course, nothing new here, no different from any other age. Maybe there never was a golden age? Maybe we aren’t really worse off, it only seems that way?

But that can’t be right. Human nature has not changed. The laws of political and economic behavior have not changed. And let’s not kid ourselves, the signs of decline are more than an illusion. There’s good reason for nostalgia.

People are people. There is bedrock. There are permanent standards against which to judge and compare and guide our choices. Which means our current ailments are not inevitable. We can counteract them. We can choose to do something different, and better.

People of good will will offer a hundred different explanations for our current malaise and our current national quarrels, and doubtless many of the explanations have some validity. Secular humanism. Moral relativism. Gnostic religion. Godless ideology. Greed. Prejudice. Hate. Ignorance. Inequality. And so on. Doubtless, there’s a kernel of truth in all of them.

But I think the answer is a lot simpler, at least for my purposes. It’s the excessive growth of government. And in particular the relentless growth of socialist wealth redistribution: taking property from A and giving it to B without A’s consent.

That is the root problem. That’s where the errors begin.

That is ultimately what’s turning us against each other. It’s what’s distorting institution after institution, law after law, norm after norm. It’s what foils markets and fuels monopoly and reduces people to dependency and sheepishness. It’s what screws up even those things nobody ever imagined could be screwed up.

You might say this explanation is too simple, that it confuses symptoms for causes. And to an extent, you’re right. But only to an extent.

Socialist wealth redistribution is a bane. It is destructive, debilitating. Even if it is not the cause, it really has to be on our list, and I will contend, it should be at the top of the list as a practical matter.

What is socialism? It takes many forms, and goes by many names and under many guises. But it boils down to one idea. I define it as ‘disregard for natural rights, including and especially property rights.’ It is an erroneous idea, and a fundamental one. It reflects a basic failure or refusal to recognize that we have natural rights, rights that all men have a duty to respect. That’s what makes it a cause and not just a symptom. And it’s what makes it dangerous.

If my property is mine, it is not yours. You may not take it without my consent. Nothing gives you the right to take it, except my consent. This is not just a claim, it’s an axiom, as undeniable as “1 = 1.”

But socialism does reject it. And having erred at the start, it always goes wrong. Unmoored from nature and reason, it sails from error to error, guided only, it seems, by an insatiable quest for power. Wherever it is tried, the experiment always produces the same result. It empowers the people in power. Even after it becomes exhausted and discredited, it lives on, zombie-like — thriving on, and concentrating, power in ever-fewer hands.

In disrespecting natural rights, and especially property rights, socialism ultimately just empowers oligarchs and tyrants.

But perhaps the term ‘socialism’ is too narrow for our purposes? Fine. Let’s set it aside. Let’s use ‘big government’ instead. The fact is, we have let government become too big and too powerful, indeed, it a power unto itself. And increasingly, it has become a hostile power, hostile to the popular will and to the common good. This, I think, is undeniable.

Therefore, the biggest threat to democracy is big government.

A friend of mine once joked, ‘Our ancestors would be shooting by now.’ Probably! But are things really that bad? I hope not. Surely we can reverse our errors and resolve our differences and, I pray, do it peacefully. Surely we get back to a more humane and livable way of living together, without doing each other harm. Surely we can be friends and fellow citizens.

Even if you don’t share my sense of alarm, even if you don’t think big government is a problem, or the problem, it’s impossible to ignore the trends.

If we keep going down this same road, our quarrels will only get louder. And at some point, quarrels turn violent or the quarrelers part company and go their separate ways. If we keep heading in the same direction, we’ll keep approaching the same destination — the end of the American experiment.

To make America America again, we must change direction. We must take a sharp turn. But how sharp a turn? In which direction?

The solution I landed on was neither capitalism nor conservatism nor liberalism, all of which have their indisputable merits, but rather to restore the American Idea, which encompasses all of them and more. It is ultimately the most humane and dignified solution, because, unlike most modern ‘isms,’ it is realistic about human nature.

The American Idea simply takes the axioms of human equality and natural rights to their logical conclusion. It concludes that government must respect those rights and therefore must be based on the consent of the governed — popular sovereignty.

Popular sovereignty means the people must rule the rulers and not the other way around. The rulers must be the servants. They may rule legitimately only with the consent of the whole people, as expressed in the will of the majority. Consistent, of course, with the rights of all.

In its ideal form, popular sovereignty means the people rule wisely and well, with equal justice for all and special privileges for none — with governments ‘of laws and not of men.’

In this ideal sense, popular sovereignty gives freedom and happiness room to flourish. It of course includes what we today think of as capitalism and conservatism and liberalism (of the classical variety), but it goes beyond all that.

It makes us a people, a nation distinct from other nations, and yet, because it has nothing to do with race or blood, it is open to anyone who is willing to assimilate and become one of us.

The American Idea starts with the idea that our rights do not come from government, they come from nature, or, if you prefer, from God. It says, I was born a sovereign, and so were you, and therefore you may not rule me without my consent and vice versa.

Why are property rights the most important of our natural rights? Because they guard and protect our other rights, like speech, conscience, privacy, travel, and so on. Without property rights, all our other rights are vulnerable.

And implicit in these rights is a right to rebel, what the political thinkers call the right of revolution. As sovereigns by nature, we may say no to those who oppress us. We may overthrow a despotic government that won’t reform itself. ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.’

The American revolution was lawful, no matter what King George said, because his rule over us required our consent. And by violating our rights and withdrawing his protection from us, and indeed by making war on us, he had thrown away his right to that consent. We were absolved of our obligation to obey him.

The flip side of sovereignty is responsibility. Rights entails duties. Popular sovereignty implies self-government, personal as well as local. We must govern ourselves. Each of us must, individually, govern himself.

And the upshot of all this is that government must be limited.

Ah, but who will do the limiting? Well, look in the mirror.

And by the way, if all these self-evident truths are true, then that’s final. There’s no progressing beyond them. No progressing beyond the truth of human equality. No progressing beyond the truth of inalienable rights and consent of the governed. No going beyond the need for limited government. To go beyond these things is not to go forward, but backward — back toward inequality, injustice, and servitude.

(Perceptive readers will know I’m brazenly stealing here from a wonderful Calvin Coolidge speech — a great president.)

Our modern progressives are in fact regressives. They think the best way forward is backward, toward oligarchy and servitude, and, one suspects, with themselves perpetually seated around the oligarchs’ table, coming up with new commands and shiny new ‘reforms’ every day of the week, but without any grounding in permanent, unchanging principles of justice or nature.

The progressives don’t care what we do, as long as it’s mandatory.

To make a long story short, I decided that the most important source of big government, and thus of American decline, is over-centralization. Too much power in too few hands. And so the remedy must be — can you guess? — decentralization.

Historically speaking, the American Idea is new, but its underlying principles are very old. What made it new — and what made America exceptional — was that, for the first time, it combined all these old ideas of popular sovereignty and limited government and decentralization in a new and solid and practical way.

So, anyway, the remedy seems clear enough: we need to reassert our sovereignty, and we need to take control. Popular control. And then we need to break things up. Yes, break. We need to break up the excessive concentrations of power. Break up the monopolies, public and private. Stand up for the little guy against the heartless corporation. Stand with the citizen and the consumer against the faceless bureaucrat. Be pro-market and not just pro-business.

In short, we need to disperse power — economic, political, institutional — into as many hands as possible, without lapsing into anarchy.

In more mundane terms, I realized, we have to restore things like federalism and the separation of powers and the rights of property and contract, without in any way shortchanging equal justice or civil rights.

To some, those old concepts may seem outdated. They’re certainly old-fashioned. But it’s a mistake to underestimate or disparage them. What could be more exciting than self-rule? What could be more thrilling than personal and popular sovereignty?

I don’t think those old ideas of the Founders have been tried and found wanting. I think they’ve been tried and found successful — and, for some people, that has proved inconvenient and thus unwelcome.

The American Idea is the only idea that can save us. It’s the only way back to national and individual happiness. Show me a different idea, and I’ll show you why it’s inadequate to the task.

At some point, perhaps around 2013, Michael Farris, founder of Patrick Henry College, told me something that struck me. He said government’s purpose is very simple, namely, to protect our rights to life, liberty, and property, and to punish those who violate those rights, and that’s it. And government, he added, does not exist to take care of our needs, it exists to protect our right to take care of our own needs. I almost laughed. He nailed it.

Mulling on that, I asked myself, So what’s the purpose of the Constitution? To ensure that government do the few things Farris summarized, and only those things. Or to put it another way, to preserve the Revolution — the revolution from a monarchy to a republic, or what we today call democracy.

And on a deeper level, the Constitution’s purpose is to enshrine the universal principles on which that revolution is based, the principles so eloquently stated in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. ‘We hold these truths.’

My reading of, and about, the Constitution awakened me to the fact that the document rests on four pillars and — this came as a welcome discovery — only four. They are: republicanism, federalism, separation of powers, and enumeration of powers. Every word in the document can be read as either flowing from, or shoring up, one of those four things.

But there’s a flip side. Like real pillars, they only work together. Knock one out, any one, and the others won’t be able to stand the strain forever. Eventually, they’ll all fail. And there goes your Revolution.

So, at the risk of being repetitive, to reverse American decline and renew the promise of American life, we need a popular revolution to reclaim popular sovereignty, decentralize our institutions, and make room for virtue and happiness to flourish.

That, at least, is my working hypothesis.

Which brings me to the ‘plan.’

It ended up, as I say, consisting of dozens of specific recommendations, which I grouped into ‘planks.’ You can read it all for yourself. But I want to highlight three of them, the most important ones — the super-planks, if you will — which are the ones concerning judicial reform, tax reform, and honest money. If we can secure those, I believe most of the rest will eventually follow, some almost automatically.

Tax reform and honest money will tend to produce balanced budgets, which will force tradeoff choices that lead to reductions in the size and scope of government. And ending judicial usurpation will facilitate our ability to limit government and keep it limited. And the sustained return of limited government will create space for the revival of local self-government and, who knows, maybe even the joys and virtues of small-town life. (Hey, a man can dream!)

In a nutshell, I am betting that, if we revive the constitutional principles of James Madison and the tax and monetary policies of William McKinley, we will make possible the decent and flourishing America of Norman Rockwell and Frank Capra. Does that sound naive? I suppose it must. But why not? Is there a better idea?

Now, if you force me to choose just one plank to top the list, I’d have to go with honest money. Without that, I’m not sure any of the others is sustainable. It’s hard to permanently limit a government that retains an unlimited power to extract resources from the people using a hidden, magical printing press.

So, let’s prioritize that. Let’s prioritize forcing the government to prioritize — by ending its ability to expand the money supply at will.

What will happen? A general retrenchment of government activity. And a corresponding expansion of personal liberty and self-reliance. It’s as close to a mathematical certainty as you can get in these things.

Budgets will come into balance, debt will shrink, the economy will heal and grow and thrive. More importantly, power will flow back to where it belongs. Back from the non-legislative branches to Congress. Back from Washington to the states. And ultimately from the monopolies back the people. And then perhaps, just maybe, we can live as free men and women again.

Are those outcomes inevitable? Maybe not. But they’re more likely.

Of course, if the government finds its resources limited, it will look for other ways to expand its power. It will try to do more by command. The property it can’t take, it will seek to control. Okay. So, we just cut ’em off at the pass. And I think we can — with a pair of simple constitutional amendments.

I started out determined not to amend the Constitution. There’s nothing in the document itself that’s fundamentally flawed. We already have the guide book for national happiness, we just have to follow it. (A wag once suggested that all we need to do, after each sentence in the Constitution, is insert the words, ‘and we mean it.’)

But I reluctantly realized we do have to amend it. Our rulers won’t follow the guide book until forced to do so, and that won’t happen until their incentives change. And changing their incentives requires changing — no, better word, reestablishing — the ground rules.

The following two amendments, I think, would shore up the four pillars, enabling us to escape the current, vicious circle and replace it with a virtuous cycle:

A majority of the state legislatures may repeal any federal law or regulation

and

A majority of the state legislatures, representing a majority of citizens of the United States, is needed to approve an increase in the national debt

That’s it.

Of course, the amendments would need additional words to guide their implementation and prevent misinterpretation. We’d want, for example, to prevent states from repealing a state admission act. But those two sentences are the essence.

Why the states? Because they’re the only element in the system that can exert pressure from the outside, like a flying buttress. The three federal branches can’t do it. The people, acting alone, can’t do it. Only the states can.

Why put such a tight leash on debt? Because Uncle Sam will not reform his ways voluntarily. He needs an accountability partner, a co-signer. And the states are the only entity that can be trusted, and have the incentive, to provide that security.

Now, if it turns out I’m wrong, if we add these amendments and they don’t work, then I reluctantly conclude that we may need a third and final amendment — but, to be clear, only as a last resort, and only in a scenario where the federal courts are the roadblock to American renewal. Something along the following lines:

Each state fills one seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, with each justice serving no more than ____ years

(This, too, is from Farris. Personally, I’d fill in the blank with ‘twelve.’)

Now, this amendment will probably never be needed, and I hope it won’t. With the first two amendments, the courts will surely get the memo. Congress and the president will have both the ability and, more importantly, the incentive to resume their proper roles — and drag the Court along with them. But if things don’t pan out that way, well, then, we should reluctantly break the glass and call in the states to install that third, and I pray final, flying buttress.

Realistically, Congress will never propose any amendment that reduces its own power. But the states can. They can propose such an amendment through an Article V convention. And that’s probably how it will happen, most likely in the wake of a national catastrophe. There has not yet been a convention of states for proposing amendments under Article V, but there have been plenty of state conventions, both before and after 1787, that provide us with the model for how to conduct such a meeting. The most recent was the Washington Peace Convention of 1861. The Founders gave us the convention-of-states option for use as a last resort, and it seems the time has come to use it. (I’ve explained elsewhere why I think fears of such a convention ‘running away’ and ‘totally rewriting the Constitution’ are entirely misplaced.)

I also suggest three lesser constitutional amendments, relating to specific policy matters, namely, national lands, social security, and D.C. statehood. I suggest them only because they seem unavoidable if we’re to get right with the Constitution in terms of enumerated powers — to fully align our practice with our principles. If we could resolve those issues with ordinary legislation, I’d much prefer it.

Additionally, I suggest two constitutional changes that I think are not strictly necessary but would be good to have, namely, one to remove Congress’s power to impose income taxes, and one to revise the dates of federal elections and swearings-in, in order to eliminate lame duck sessions and to shorten presidential transitions. But these are not essential.

And finally, I suggest an amendment on the definition of citizenship, to be pursued only if the Supreme Court gets that important issue wrong.

So, for readers who have lost count, I suggest a total of nine amendments, which I would classify as follows: two essential, three seemingly unavoidable, two nice to have, and one only in case of need — plus a final, optional one if all else fails.

So much for not amending the Constitution!

There’s more to the plan, as you’ll see. A lot more. Immigration. Regulation. Ballot integrity. The territories. Governmental reorganization. Sorry. Once you start, it’s hard to stop.

But the heart of it is the three super-planks and the two flying-buttress amendments. Achieve those, and I think our work is done.

I’m sure this must all sound bonkers. But then, we live in a bonkers age.

In the context of American history and the present crises, I think it’s pretty moderate, to be honest. Sure, it is radical, in the sense of going to the root. But then, it seeks a balance between the minimum that’s needed and the most that’s achievable, consistent with our history and traditions and principles.

The plan is comprehensive, unavoidably so, but it’s also incrementalist, like a blueprint that proposes nothing new but rather makes many small but, one hopes, advantageous changes to restore the vision of the original architect.

We do not have to make every bit of it happen. But we do have to do something. And we have to start somewhere. So, let’s start. Let’s push a first domino and see what happens. The more we decentralize, the more quickly the magic of decentralization can do its work. The momentum will grow. Things will get easier. We may even find ourselves galloping.

Have I answered my original question? Decide for yourself. But if these answers are not the right ones — help us find better ones.

Renewing the promise of American life will not be easy. It will be hard. It will take effort and patience and sacrifice. But if we succeed, the blessings for ourselves and our posterity will be, well, awesome.

And given the alternative — the end of the American experiment — why not try?

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