The Fifty-State Policy Review: Giving Voters an Independent Check on Political Promises

 American democracy has never suffered from a shortage of political opinions. Increasingly, however, it suffers from something more consequential: a shortage of institutions that citizens across the political spectrum trust to distinguish sound policy analysis from advocacy dressed up as analysis.

Modern political candidates rarely lack statistics supporting their positions. Whatever the proposal—tax cuts, tariffs, immigration restrictions, climate policies, healthcare reforms, minimum-wage increases, industrial subsidies, criminal justice reforms, or entitlement changes—there is usually a think tank, advocacy organization, consultant, or interest group capable of producing research suggesting that the policy will work.

The problem is not necessarily that these organizations fabricate evidence. Many employ talented researchers and produce serious scholarship. The deeper problem is selection.

A candidate can choose the assumptions, models, experts, and institutions most sympathetic to a policy and then present their conclusions to voters as objective evidence. Opponents can do precisely the same thing. One side produces a study showing that a tax proposal will accelerate economic growth. Another produces a study showing that it will dramatically increase deficits. One analysis says a regulation will save consumers money; another says it will destroy jobs. Each side cites experts. Each side has charts. Each side insists that the evidence is clear.

The average voter has little realistic ability to adjudicate between them.

Democracy therefore faces an information problem. Citizens are expected to choose between complicated policy platforms involving economics, law, national security, healthcare, energy, technology, education, and public finance, but few voters have the time or specialized knowledge necessary to independently evaluate the competing claims surrounding them.

Notes on American Polarization and a Hundred-Year Framework for Renewal

 

Part One: The Fire of Division

In recent decades, the United States has grown increasingly polarized, with political, cultural, and social divisions deepening year after year. Polarization is not new in American history, but the contemporary version is unusually intense and entrenched. Understanding how the country arrived here means looking at several forces that built on one another over time, and, just as important, at why those forces have never been allowed to burn out. The end of the Cold War cleared the ground. Karl Rove's 2004 campaign strategy laid the logs. The media's financial incentives supplied the kindling. Social media poured on the accelerant. And beneath all of it sits a structural fact that keeps the fire from ever going out on its own: the two parties that dominate American political life do not just tolerate this fire, they depend on it.

Notes on Polarization in the United States

How Political Strategy, Media Incentives, and Social Media Have Polarized the United States

In recent decades, the United States has become increasingly polarized, with political, cultural, and social divisions deepening year after year. While polarization is not a new phenomenon in American history, the contemporary version is particularly intense and entrenched. The numbers bear this out: in 2000, only about a quarter of partisans on either side held a very unfavorable view of the opposing party. By the mid-2020s, majorities of both Democrats and Republicans did, a shift Pew Research Center has tracked consistently across two decades of surveys. Understanding how we arrived at this moment requires looking at three key forces that have interacted over time to fuel this divide: Karl Rove's political strategy during the 2004 Bush reelection campaign, the traditional media's financial incentives for conflict-driven narratives, and the explosive impact of social media. These three elements function like a fire: Rove's strategy laid the logs, the media's conflict bias provided the kindling, and social media poured on the accelerant. The result is a roaring blaze of partisanship, ideological rigidity, and institutional gridlock.

The Case for an Independent President

For most of American history, the presidency has been viewed through the lens of the two-party system. Every president enters office as the leader of a political party, surrounded by campaign staff, party strategists, donors, activists, and long-time political allies. As a result, many of the incentives that shape a presidency are driven not simply by governing the country but by managing a political coalition.

An independent president would fundamentally change those incentives.

While an independent president would certainly face significant challenges governing without the institutional support of a major political party, there are compelling reasons to believe such a presidency could produce a more competent, collaborative, and problem-oriented government.

UnCommon Sense

 The Corrupt Two-Party System, Polarization, and a Better American Future

Essays on political dysfunction, democratic renewal, and pragmatic reform

What are the American people?

 

Everything.

  

What have the American people been in our current political order?

 

Nothing.

 

What do the American people demand to be?

 

To be Something.

The Federal Stimulus Reserve: A Case for Modernizing Fiscal Policy

 John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money has shaped economic and governmental thought for nearly a century. Its central insight, that government spending can jolt a stalled economy back to life through a multiplier effect, remains sound. But the world in which that insight was applied no longer exists, and two of its load-bearing assumptions have quietly failed. The first is economic: the multiplier itself has weakened. The second is political: the officials Keynes trusted to wield fiscal policy responsibly have not lived up to that trust. Fixing fiscal policy for the twenty-first century means addressing both failures directly, and doing so requires a new institution, a Federal Stimulus Reserve, built with the independence of the Federal Reserve but a mandate for fiscal, not monetary, policy.

Start with the economics. Keynes's multiplier worked because in the 1930s and 1940s, manufacturing and farming accounted for over sixty percent of U.S. employment, and a dollar spent on goods circulated back to American workers almost automatically. Today, those two sectors account for under twenty percent of employment; services dominate, and services spending is exactly what consumers cut first in a downturn. Meanwhile, global supply chains mean that much of what stimulus dollars buy is manufactured abroad, so spending that once supported American factory workers now supports workers in other countries. The result is a fiscal dollar that does measurably less domestic work than it did in Keynes's time, not because the theory is wrong, but because the economy it was built for has changed underneath it.

The Order That Never Was: How the Western Alliance Must Confront the Myths That Are Tearing It Apart

 There is a particular kind of political failure that is especially dangerous because it wears the mask of success. The Western alliance experienced precisely this failure in the decades after the Cold War. Having won the most consequential geopolitical contest in modern history, the democracies of the liberal world made a natural but catastrophic error: they concluded that winning meant the contest was over.

It was not. It never was. And the price of that delusion is now being paid in the ballot boxes of nearly every major Western democracy.

The rise of Donald Trump in the United States, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Reform in the United Kingdom, the National Rally in France, and their counterparts across the Western world are not separate or anomalous phenomena. They are not the products of unique national pathologies or the idiosyncratic grievances of one people or another. They are a single wave, driven by a single underlying failure: the refusal of the post-Cold War political establishment to tell its citizens the truth about the world they actually inhabited, and its persistent unwillingness to do so even now.

To secure the Western alliance's future, and the liberal order it sustains, that refusal must end.