Introduction: Beyond Resistance, Beyond Reform

Today we begin publishing the chapters of The Reconstruction Papers on our site as individual articles. The entire book is already available in print and as a PDF.

The most celebrated aspects of America’s form of government are its continuities. First and foremost, of course, is our 238-year-old Constitution—never revised, only expanded with amendments added at the end. The authors and first implementers of that document have been revered by every subsequent generation. For all the complaints about leftist critiques of the Founders, the typical 21st-century American idolizes them just as much as their 20th-century forebears did, and their 19th-century forebears. Justifying contemporary political stances in terms of the Founders, in the language of the Declaration, or through the lens of constitutional interpretation pervades the entire history of our republic.

Less often acknowledged is our capacity for transformational change, beginning with the Founding generation. They engaged in countless institutional experiments: the Continental Congress, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution and its first twelve amendments, the many state constitutions written and ratified in that era, to say nothing of the practices established in the new institutions. After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Congress pursued bold changes to our system that reverberate to this day. They failed to achieve the complete transformation of the South that they sought, to our national detriment, but few officeholders have matched them in sheer ambition. The Progressives were highly critical of the Founders and the institutional status quo of their day but self-consciously saw themselves in the tradition of the Founding, as bold institutional entrepreneurs. Their vision culminated in the New Deal in the 20th century.

America has lasted as long as it has, and has become the wealthiest and most powerful country in history, precisely because we do not rest on our laurels. The conservatism of many of our institutions is matched by a constant stream of reformers with an appetite for drastic change.

The accomplishments of past eras in America should not be understated. Our predecessors built the most dynamic economy in the world, top-tier institutions of research and higher learning, and a global military the likes of which had never been seen before. And they did it in a continent-spanning, polyglot, multiracial, multiethnic nation, with an enormous number of people visiting or immigrating each year. America is vast beyond reckoning. No other country can claim all these things together—certainly not China or Russia, or even the fast-growing Asian liberal democracies. Never mind stagnating Europe,¹ which purchased relatively homogenous nation-states at the price of tens of millions dead or expelled.

But by 2016, most of these accomplishments were moving by inertia alone. Like New Yorkers who rely on an increasingly decrepit 121-year-old subway system to keep their city moving, Americans lived on the fruits of decaying institutions that had been produced at an earlier, more dynamic moment in our history. And now Donald Trump, the greatest enemy of the American project ever to serve as president, is actively destroying these weakened bodies.

There is no going back. Nor should we seek to. People no longer believe the system is working for them. There is gaping inequality. The essentials of the American Dream, from education to healthcare to housing, feel ever more precarious. Higher education before Trump had become shamefully expensive, and the student-loan system simply exacerbated this while saddling students with more and more nondefaultable debt. The public funding of science and medicine had become rigid, leaving many opportunities unexplored and unsupported. Our immigration system grew impossibly complex and sluggish. And where once Americans could produce dozens of ships for every one sunk in war, now our productive capacity for war or peace has atrophied to an alarming extent.

New approaches are needed. Transformative change feels unachievable almost until the moment it happens. Jim Crow seemed permanent until it was crushed and Black Southerners were durably enfranchised. America spent the better part of a half century trying to create an administrative state as large and professionalized as our European peers’. It progressed in fits and starts, and then with the New Deal it sprang up all at once. In writing the Constitution, the Framers were proposing a form of government that had never been tried before. It was born with many warts and retains more than a few. But in the end, they did make it, and it has endured.

We need to give ourselves permission to aim high. We need to have the space to consider what we would significantly change if we really could. You never know when the opportunity will come, and you must be ready to seize it.

The Progressives experienced decades of vibrant intellectual output and bitter political conflict with little to show for it. Then, in the blink of an eye, they managed to ratify four amendments within ten years and build a modern administrative state within the twenty years that followed.

The Court is no match for the combined social power of Congress and the presidency if they truly work in concert to put it in check, whether through a one-time expansion, structural reform, or both.

Our opportunity may come sooner than many are willing to believe. It is no exaggeration to say that we now face the greatest threat to the American experiment since the Civil War. We must seize power over the next three years, and we must use that power to enact large-scale change. It is no longer a question of possibility. It is a question of necessity. American liberals have spent much of the 21st century fighting the cultural battle.² Now it is time to shift our focus toward the proper ways to put those ideas into practice once we have power again.

We have produced The Reconstruction Papers precisely to articulate these ambitious visions. The essays in this collection present plans for reordering our economic, political, social, and foreign-policy systems. Each addresses some specific area where our institutions sorely need updating.

Many of these proposals will seem implausibly ambitious for a political system that regularly struggles to even appropriate funds for its own budgets. Our system is choked by veto points. Perhaps most notable among them is a reactionary Supreme Court capable of picking apart any reform or striking it down outright. But a sufficiently motivated trifecta can steamroll those problems.

“Sufficiently motivated” is a more difficult hurdle than we might hope. We have asked our essayists to think big and have not, in every case, asked them to explain the political path to implementation. But in every case we will need that sufficiently motivated trifecta to see reforms through. Overall we will need political elites to reach new, generational settlements in a very broad set of areas. The Reconstruction Papers is not aimed at doing that political work—how could it be?—but at providing political actors with a comprehensive vision and briefcase of plans for American liberal democracy in the 21st century.

Liberalism amounts to more than a random assortment of value-neutral technocratic “fixes.” While written by disparate authors, these essays form a coherent whole: a program for rebuilding our broken society. Domestic economic woes are inseparable from the world trade system. The world trade system is inseparable from American foreign policy. Our foreign policy is inseparable from our democratic institutions. Liberalism has answers, and these answers spring from enduring principles: genuine democracy, equal freedom, shared prosperity. In the 21st century, as in the 20th, we face a choice: liberalism or barbarism.

Let’s get to work.

Reconstructing our political system

The collection begins with “Institutional Reform That Can Be Done With a Simple Majority in Congress,” by University of Illinois political-science professor Nicholas Grossman. This essay is unique among those in this collection in its focus on the short term. Before any more expansive and permanent work can be done, we will need to move beyond our immediate democratic crisis. Grossman lays out the path to do so, once Republicans have been defeated electorally.

We then move to “Reconstructing the Executive Branch,” by Marquette University professor of constitutional and administrative law Patrick J. Sobkowski. If there is anything we have learned from the Trump era, it is that the checks on executive unilateralism have all but evaporated. Sobkowski proposes some much needed reforms to roll back executive dominance.

Complementing Sobkowski’s contribution is “Guardrails for Democracy: How Congress Can Reinforce Privacy Rights and Independent Oversight,” attorney and mediator Judith Starr’s proposal to rebuild the system of watchdog agencies put in place after Watergate. The toothlessness of these agencies in the second Trump term has revealed vulnerabilities of the system that Congress has the tools to fix.

In “Fixing Article V,” Constitutional lawyer Robert Black examines the hard problem of amending the Constitution—in particular, the hard problem of fixing the very process by which the Constitution is amended.

In “Fixing Federalism,” I make a contribution of my own to the collection. I draw inspiration both from peer countries with federalist systems developed after ours and from the basic logic of the Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act.

In “Reconstructing the Senate,” Yale political theorist Kevin J. Elliott looks at how we might bring the Senate more in line with the logic of a system that is overall partisan and majoritarian rather than deliberative and collegial.

Reconstructing our economy

In “The Liberal Economy,” economic analyst Maia Mindel diagnoses the failures of our current economic regime, which are in no small part responsible for the current authoritarian surge. The artificial scarcity of housing, the rising costs of essentials, the gaping inequality of the asset economy: These are all connected. Mindel’s solution? Woke abundance.

In “Rebalancing Trade in a Fragmented International Order,” Steve Randy Waldman talks about the perils of the unbalanced trade regime that America has run for decades, and offers an elegant solution for it. The imbalances of foreign trade are, despite neoliberals’ protestations, inextricable from our current economic and political woes.

In “Sustainable Fiscal Policy for America,” Niskanen Center Senior Fellow Ed Dolan lays out a vision for rules-based fiscal policy, noting that the credibility that such approaches provide has helped finance generous social democratic states such as Sweden’s.

In “Seeing Like a Gardener: A New Framework for the Public Funding of Science,” Analogue Group founder Aishwarya Khanduja and Good Science Project executive director Stuart Buck present a bold rethinking of the enterprise of American science and research. Drawing on the metaphor of a garden, they argue that the government must aim to produce and protect the conditions that allow scientific advancement to flourish, rather than overengineering what is asked for of each specific research project.

Reconstructing our society

A great deal of the pathologies of the Trump administration have been driven by almost cartoonishly patriarchal visions of gender. In “Imagining Life After Patriarchy,” author and analyst Jude Doyle explores the question of gender and outlines a liberal vision of how the state should relate to this deeply personal matter, from education to legal rights to bodily autonomy.

In “How to Normalize Immigration,” CUNY Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights Anna O. Law writes about the desperately needed reforms to our immigration system, a problem at the heart of the entire Trump era. Law discusses not just the specific changes that must be made to the law but also the necessary changes in how Congress approaches its role in maintaining that law.

In “Four Principles for Comprehensive Higher Education Reform,” Michigan State education professor Brendan Cantwell explains the accumulated difficulties that institutions of higher education faced in America before the present crisis, and outlines a framework for reform.

In “To Rebuild Democracy in the Hearts of Americans, We Need a New National Service Initiative,” Pulaski Institution president and CEO and Liberal Currents contributing editor Alan Elrod proposes an ambitious federal national service program to overcome the erosion of civil society and reduce the personal and emotional tolls of political polarization.

In “Housing Resilience and Financial Stability for All,” Climate and Community Institute Senior Fellow Moira Birss dives into the difficult issue of insurance and risk mitigation in climate-vulnerable parts of the country. Her creative proposal mixes government-provided social insurance with administrative institutions that will seek to lower people’s exposure to climate-related risks.

In “Towards a Third Reconstruction,” University of Iowa F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor of Sociology Victor Ray surveys the Trump administration’s destruction of the post-Civil Rights racial integration policies. He argues for the necessity of their revival and lays out a practical plan to do so.

Reconstructing our foreign policy

In “In Search of an FDR Consensus,” the pseudonymous Secretary of Defense Rock, a military and international security expert who cannot write under his own name for professional reasons, has a bold vision for rebuilding the institutional and, more important, democratic basis of American foreign policy.

In “Rebuilding International Law,” Palestinian-American writer Y. L. Al-Sheikh offers a complementary rethinking of foreign policy, but from the perspective of international institutions rather than domestic ones.

Remembering our principles

In “Remember Who You Are, Liberal,” Liberal Currents executive editor Samantha Hancox-Li closes the collection with a discussion of liberalism, the value system motivating this entire project. Liberalism is not a value-neutral “referee” standing outside politics but is rooted in a deep conception of freedom—personal as well as political.

In “The Ark and the Deluge: The Unfurling of Equality in World History,” Liberal Currents contributing editor and student of intellectual history Guillaume A. W. Attia looks at the confident and militant history of liberalism from the French Revolution to Reconstruction.

Finally, in “The Return of Constitutional Politics,” lawyer and Liberal Currents contributing editor Adam Rust walks through the necessary role of constitutional politics, and the more limited role of constitutional law, in American history and today. We cannot afford to sit around hoping that judges will solve our problems for us. We need, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, to transform “thin paper to thick action.”