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.