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.

Building the Order We Thought We Had

 

A Blueprint for Renewing the Western Alliance

The Western alliance is often described today as a civilization in decline. According to one narrative, globalization has failed, the liberal international order is collapsing, NATO is weakening, and the democratic world is steadily losing ground to authoritarian powers. According to another, nothing fundamental has changed and today's political turmoil is simply a temporary disruption.

Both perspectives misunderstand the moment.

The Western alliance is neither collapsing nor standing still.

It is confronting the consequences of one of the most important strategic misjudgments of the post-Cold War era: confusing an aspiration with an achievement.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, much of the democratic world came to believe that history had fundamentally changed. Liberal democracy had triumphed. Open markets had prevailed. Great-power competition appeared to be ending. Economic integration would gradually transform authoritarian states into liberal ones, while globalization would produce an increasingly peaceful and interconnected world.

This vision was never unreasonable.

What the Late Roman Republic Can Teach Americans About Constitutional Erosion

History rarely repeats itself exactly. The United States is not ancient Rome. America possesses institutions, constitutional safeguards, and a political culture fundamentally different from those of the Roman Republic. Yet history often reveals recurring political patterns. One of the most enduring of those patterns is the gradual erosion of constitutional norms when rival political factions become convinced that defeating one another is more important than preserving the institutions that govern them both.

The tragedy of the Roman Republic was not that one ambitious man suddenly destroyed it. It was that generations of political leaders slowly weakened the customs, precedents, and unwritten rules that had sustained republican government for centuries. By the time Lucius Cornelius Sulla marched his army into Rome in 88 BC, many of the constitutional guardrails that had protected the Republic had already been compromised.

The lesson for modern America is not that a dictator is inevitable. Rather, it is that republics become vulnerable when political factions increasingly justify bending institutional rules because they fear losing power to the opposing side.

America's Universities Should Become the Nation's Legislative Research and Development Laboratories

 Every year, America's universities produce thousands of dissertations, policy papers, economic studies, legal analyses, engineering innovations, and medical discoveries. Faculty members spend their careers developing expertise in economics, law, psychology, business, public health, engineering, environmental science, education, and countless other disciplines that directly influence public policy. Graduate students dedicate years to mastering these same subjects while conducting original research designed to solve complex problems.

Yet remarkably little of this intellectual capital is systematically transformed into legislation.

The disconnect is striking. Universities generate knowledge. Legislatures create law. Between them lies a substantial institutional gap.

The United States should close that gap by encouraging universities to establish interdisciplinary Legislative Development Centers that combine the expertise of faculty and graduate students across multiple schools to produce evidence-based, professionally drafted legislation ready for introduction in state and federal legislatures.

Such centers would not replace elected officials, dictate public policy, or diminish democratic accountability. Rather, they would provide legislatures with something they often lack: thoroughly researched, empirically supported legislative proposals developed by interdisciplinary teams of subject-matter experts.