Reject the Poison: Towards an Honest Mass Politics

"Project 2025 was, above all, a statement of values and a theory of governance," Jamelle Bouie writes, before lamenting the lack of such vision in Democratic responses, the various "Project 2029"s floating around think-tank world. It is the aim of this essay to meet Bouie's challenge: to articulate a theory of what the American project is and how we might reconstruct it.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The contention of this essay is that these words of the Declaration of Independence are the founding principles of the American project. The American project is an experiment in democratic self-governance, aimed at maintaining rights that are inalienable, universal, and equal.

The preamble to the Constitution elaborates on this idea, emphasizing that the government is not merely some minimal "night watchman" state—an idea that failed decisively with the Articles of Confederation—but one that secures the general welfare as well.

Both of these, however, leave unresolved a fundamental question: who counts as we, the People? That question—the crack at the heart of the republic—was answered by the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the 14th Amendment, which fundamentally changed the nature of the republic. We the people is not just white men with property. We the people is everyone born here, with only minimal exceptions, and everyone naturalized. This is not a white man's republic. This is an experiment in how we human beings, free and equal, might govern ourselves.

Thus we come to the central question: how do we enable we, this people to govern ourselves? and do so in ways that are consistent with freedom and law?

For something seems to have gone wrong in our experiment in self-governance. Things have broken down at almost every possible level. Congress is eternally gridlocked. The President considers himself a tribune unconstrained by law; meanwhile the Supreme Court has elected itself Guardian Council. The government barely seems to work, except when it works with terrifying, destructive power. Elections swing from pointless to existential. People don't vote, lines on maps do.

As with the blind men and the elephant, many people have approached this question and seen only their small fraction of it, rather than seeing these all as expressions of a fundamental whole: civil service reform, congressional reform, court reform, voting rights reform, etc. But attempts to address these questions one-by-one produce deranged results, in a way not unlike how an athlete by compensating for one injury may produce a new injury in a different area. All of these are questions about how to design institutions that enable we the people to transform our freedom into joint action.

A proposal

We must approach all of these problems with the wisdom of the Founders at the forefront of our minds:

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

This is the fundamental difficulty which must shape any theory of governance. We want to simultaneously enable government to act, to express the will of the people—to promote the general welfare, secure domestic tranquility and the blessings of liberty, as we ourselves see fit—while also ensuring that the tremendous powers of the state are exercised in a manner consistent with those inalienable freedoms. It is helpful to think of this process as a kind of mechanism for the transmission of energy from the people to politicians to the civil service and into policy. This becomes a feedback mechanism as we the people experience the results of our choices, and make new ones. 

Yet this transmission mechanism has broken down at almost every level, leading to spiraling dysfunctions in the structure of our self-governance. But how to rebuild? On the view proposed here, it is in legislatures—not lone tribunate executives, not sagely black-robed courts, not technocratic bureaucracies—that the center of gravity of self-governance should be lodged. Legislatures, when functioning properly, represent the people in all our diversity. 

Let us work through this proposal in detail, explaining how the mechanisms of self-governance have broken down, and what we can do about it, in each of six areas: parties, elections, legislatures, agencies, executives, and courts.

1: Parties

We the people govern ourselves. But we Americans are a fractious people, radically diverse, many of us with better things to do than think about politics all day, and there's a whole hell of a lot of us. The political energy of the people is channeled through political parties. (This is perhaps the biggest thing the Founders missed).

Parties both channel the people's existing sentiments, organize that energy into action, and also perform essential intellectual functions of thinking through complex policy issues and forming compromises between different factions. Parties both reflect and shape people's preferences.

There are three fundamental problems with the party system in America today. The first is that, under our current single-seat winner-takes-all elections, it is possible for parties to receive a large share of the votes overall, but a fraction of the seats. This is made most obvious in the crisis of gerrymandering. When it is possible to take a state from 5-4 Democratic to 7-2 Republican not by changing anyone's voting habits, but simply by redrawing the lines on the map, then it is simple: we the people are not governing ourselves.

The second problem is that, in our highly polarized country, there are many elections in which there is simply no competition: in deep red or deep blue districts, one party always wins. Who takes the seat is determined not in the general election, but in the primary. The primary system, first used in the early 20th century to break the power of corrupt party bosses, nominally enables the people to control the parties. But in practice very few people vote in primaries. The result is that people feel disconnected from their parties, and quality of governance suffers as politicians are no longer accountable to the general mass of people, but only to their most committed partisans.

The third problem is that, in our two party system—again, an inevitable result of our peculiar election design—many people do not and in many ways cannot feel represented by their party. Their political tendency can at best find expression in some sub-faction of a party. As a result, again, voters feel alienated from the political process. This has led to the rise of the nonprofit-industrial complex—"the groups" that purport to represent these factions to the party and to government—not very effectively, as it turns out.

The goal is self-governance. People express themselves through parties. Conclusion: 

• Parties should receive representation in government in proportion to their vote share in the population. 

This addresses all three of our problems. Instead of requiring abstract and tendentious attempts to define "gerrymandering," it cuts the potential for gerrymandering off at the root. Redrawing districts simply can't net you partisan advantage. Second, it enables genuine political competition: for instance, in highly liberal areas, the Democratic Party might face competition from the Democratic Socialist Party. Lastly, by increasing the number of parties, it enables voters to find representation in parties more closely aligned with their specific policy preferences and values.

There are a number of related ways to achieve proportional representation; while I personally favor party list proportional systems, any system of proportional representation would achieve similar outcomes. Mixed-member proportional systems have the advantage of both maintaining individual representation at the district level, and voting simplicity. In your district, you simply vote for your preferred candidate. After seating all those elected in this way, proportional representation for parties is generated by seating the appropriate number of candidates from separate party lists; I prefer a "closed" list system, where parties designate their candidates via internal processes, because it further strengthens parties as institutions.

2: Elections

Elections have the odd feature of being one of the most hotly contested structures in American democracy—with accusations of voter fraud and vote suppression flung against them—despite largely working quite well. Voter fraud almost never happens. Vote suppression is real, but it turns out that political parties and civic society have counter-mobilized against it relatively effectively, finding ways to meet the various hurdles placed in the way of voting.

Nevertheless, elections in America can be improved. The goal:

• It should be convenient and simple for all citizens to vote.
• These votes should be counted securely, rapidly, and transparently. 

We should make election day a national holiday, and ensure as much as possible that elections (outside of special elections to fill vacancies) take place on that same day every year.

A related problem, one which occupies a great deal of national attention, is the role of money in politics. When a billionaire can shell out his equivalent of pocket change to buy himself a shadow cabinet seat, when election spending seems dominated by dark money flowing from unknown coffers, many Americans reasonably feel that dollars vote more than we the people. It is my belief that the problem of wealth inequality is best addressed directly, through changes to the tax and economic structure. Nevertheless, there are reasonable proposals on offer to reduce the role of money in politics—which I leave to others better qualified to articulate.

3: Legislatures

I propose that the center of gravity of self-governance be lodged in legislatures. They are closest to the people and most representative, giving a substantial voice even to those not currently in the majority, especially in multiparty systems, where coalition management is a central problem.

But there is reason to doubt: our legislatures today, especially Congress, appear wildly dysfunctional, gridlocked and unwilling to govern. This is because we have crippled our legislatures, in two basic ways: first, we have larded them with internal procedures that make legislation difficult; second, we have starved them of funding, leaving them without the intellectual heft to directly grapple with confounding policy issues.

The problem of internal gridlock is well-known. The filibuster makes it extraordinarily difficult to pass any legislation at all. Rather than inducing compromise, this induces intransigence: since my own defection from my party is unlikely to tip the balance, why take the political risk? Thankfully, there is a simple answer to this problem: 

• Legislation should be made by simple majorities. 

See Kevin J. Elliot's contribution to The Reconstruction Papers, "Reconstructing the Senate," for a more detailed discussion.

The problem of intellectual capacity is equally important. Policy is complicated. America is a country of 340 million people, entangled economically, militarily, and politically with a planet of 8 billion. Doing policy well is an exercise in grappling with the mind-boggling complexity of the modern world. This requires time, energy, and staff. 

• Legislators should be well-paid.
• The legislature itself should have a substantial budget for staff.

This includes both individual member staffs and permanent staffs of the legislature itself, such as the Congressional Budget Office. The alternative is legislation passed by legislatures but written by lobbyists, who are more than happy to supply the technical "expertise" that legislators, consumed by the next campaign season, too often lack.

This pair of proposals is often unpopular. As noted earlier, many Americans perceive the role of money in politics to be malignant, and often express their anger by attacking legislative salaries. But this is a mistake. Marjorie Taylor Greene entered Congress with a net worth of approximately $700k and left it with $21M. She didn't get that from her $174k/year salary. Therefore, the increase in salary proposed here should be combined with an attack on corruption and the perception of corruption:

• Legislators and politicians generally should be required to place all assets above a certain minimum into a blind trust.

The possibility of corruption, self-dealing, and insider trading left to politicians today should be stamped out. A high but honest salary should replace tainted lucre.

4: Agencies

In the modern world, governance is in practice executed by large staffs of professional public employees—that is to say, the civil service in various executive agencies. Agencies are the creation of legislatures, and exist to enact their policies. They are self-governance in action.

The problem is that as self-governance has broken down everywhere else in the American system, we have attempted to bring it back at the level of implementation, spinning up endless public comments, public feedbacks, public meetings, lawsuits and private rights of action. The net effect of these is not democracy, which is best found in general elections. The net effect is to empower the wealthy, the well-connected, and the narrow partisans of particular interests, and most of all to empower them not to make anything happen but merely to obstruct, prevent, and block. "The status quo, forever" is not self-governance. It is a prison of our own making.

Conversely, after the wild and lawless destruction of federal agencies under Trump II, after MAGA's relentless attacks on the concept of expertise, there is a strong tendency to reform the agencies by making them more immune to political control, more dominated by the internal professional standards of their personnel. This is a mistake. This is not self-governance. This is giving up on the possibility of self-governance, and retreating into the phantasmic hope that mere technocracy will save us. As has been demonstrated again and again, agencies cut free from any thread of political control begin to prioritize their own interests over those of the public, generating some combination of corruption, incompetence, and misalignment.

Any reform of agencies must therefore combine a respect for expertise with the supremacy of civilian control.

• Independent agencies should be given clear mandates and authorities.

In general, rather than micromanaging the process, the legislature should aim at setting goals for the agencies to executive, then hold them accountable for the execution of these goals.

At the same time, mandates and directives can only take you so far. As Koba teaches, cadres decide everything. How agency staff are shaped—that is to say, what criteria govern firing and promotion—is fundamental. Personnel is policy. The difficulty is in marrying the necessary professional expertise, which only emerges bottom-up, with direction from the political authorities. Therefore:

• Internal professional standards should generally govern promotions and discipline.
• Political appointees of a given agency should be able to fire 5% of the staff per year without cause.

This reflects the necessary balance. On the one hand, professional expertise on an institutional level primarily emerges from "professionalization"—from the ability of professionals to develop a communal identity and set of standards, and to enforce these standards on themselves. The community of scientists is a prime example. On the other hand, the overall alignment of these standards with the goals set by we the people is maintained by control over personnel. Setting top-line policy is nice, but without direct control over personnel, ephemeral. This accountability is limited—even a four-year administration could not turn over more than 20% of the staff this way—but powerful. 

Perhaps most fundamentally, this accountability to political appointees should replace our current system of accountability to courts and processes. The goal is results, not compliance. While obviously crimes committed in office should be subject to prosecution and torts to lawsuit, accountability for the basic administration of policy should be directed towards the political appointees and thus the democratic process.

Lastly:

• Salaries should be competitive with the private market, and the hiring process should be streamlined

Today, employment in the civil service frequently radically undercompensates its employees. In return they get extreme job security. This equation has led to an extraordinarily clunky hiring and promotion process, since the bureaucracy does not want to make a lifetime commitment to anyone without obsessive vetting. By moving to a system in which salaries are higher but employees are accountable to results, not just process, we can reform this system.

5: Executives

Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, the American presidency accumulated enormous powers. Arthur Schlesinger warned of the "imperial presidency" in 1973; Juan Linz wrote "The Perils of Presidentialism" in 1990. And yet the march of power continued. As Congress descended into gridlock, the lure of investing all one's hopes for change and reform into a single charismatic national figure increased. MAGA intellectual Russel Vought articulated the idea of "an energetic president with the power to bend the executive branch to the will of the American people" as a way of breaking out of our institutional sclerosis.

By contrast, in many parliamentary systems, the executive—the prime minister—is typically simply the chief of the party with the most seats in the legislature. They are not separately elected, and they do not possess a personal mandate beyond that of their party. The problem is that pure parliamentary systems have, in recent years, encouraged members of parliament to become mere appendages of the party, there to warm seats and vote for prime ministers and do little else.

Instead, I propose that 

• The executive should be seen as the democratically elected overseer of the agencies as they implement legislative mandates.

More or less, they should have the power to propose political appointees to executive agencies to Congress, and they should be able to require members of executive agencies to deliver reports on their actions—the core powers enumerated in the Constitution. The direction of national policy should be set in Congress, not the White House.

• Discretionary powers should be lodged in the agencies, not the person of the executive.
• The president should not have the power to remove political appointees or agency staff at will, but only with the consent of the legislature.
• Congress should claw back as many of the emergency powers it has ceded to the president as possible.

This is a conception of the presidency far more limited than the current status quo, in which the president is something like a totally unaccountable owner-CEO of Corporation America and all its 3 million employees. Yet it is also perhaps more power than it sounds like. A separately-elected president has a real power that derives from having a popular mandate. The ability to oversee the operations of the federal agencies gives them power to drive public and political opinion. And the ability to pick the political appointees to independent agencies gives them profound ability to steer those agencies.

But it is not the imperial presidency that Trump imagines—the deranged outcome of the corrupt SCOTUS rulings on executive immunity and the fabulation known as the unitary executive theory—in which the president embodies the will of the True Volk, unconstrained by law or Congress or the Constitution.

Meanwhile, holding the executive separate from the legislature encourages the latter to develop more of its own institutional heft. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

It is often objected at this juncture that the complexities of running a modern administrative state requires the discretion and energy of a single executive making unilateral decisions. But the truth is that executives have often enough used such unaccountable emergency powers to make stupid decisions—see, for instance, much of the legacy of American Cold War shenanigans—or, of course, our current situation. By contrast, when the nation was attacked on December 7, 1941, FDR went to Congress and acquired a declaration of war the next day. Legislatures can move rapidly and decisively when there is a genuine national emergency.

6: Courts

An independent judiciary has an important role in settling legal disputes; no modern country operates without one. At the same time, our current court has arrogated to itself wildly undemocratic power. They hold themselves up as the sole authority on and interpreters of the Constitution. This is not self-governance. This is the tyranny of nine politicians in black robes who imagine themselves something they are not.

This has been achieved in part by the self-abolition of Congress as a governing body. But it also reflects the lifetime appointments of Supreme Court justices, which enable them to make policy as they like, more or less unaccountable to the democratic process once they have been installed.

Ideally, a reformed court would involve term limits, staggered to match elections, such that each administration has the same number of appointments to make—not unlike the system that prevails with the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Unfortunately, this would require a Constitutional amendment, which is functionally impossible today.

Breaking the power of the Court must instead involve breaking the personal power of Supreme Court justices. Justin Briley has proposed the following solution, which I endorse.

• For any given final appeal to the Supreme Court, the justices should be drawn by lottery from the entire federal judiciary

Per Article III of the Constitution, while the existence of a supreme court is mandatory, its nature is almost entirely at the discretion of Congress. This kind of sortition is entirely within Congress' powers to simply enact.

But beyond this structural reform, we should rethink the fundamental role of the Court.

• Congress should be the first among equals when it comes to interpreting the Constitution.

The Constitution is not in heaven. The Constitution is the vehicle of our self-governance. Our primary representatives, legislators, are thus best-placed to interpret the Constitution: to decide what is necessary and proper, to decide what it means to guarantee a republican form of government, to decide what the appropriate shape of the Supreme Court is. The Court and the President may push back—again, ambition counteracts ambition—but Congress' interpretation has the strongest backing in the sovereign and inalienable power of we the people to govern ourselves.

Objections and replies

In this section I wish to address a series of objections to the vision I have sketched above. First, I wish to address a direct objection, one that arises any time anyone proposes reforming our system of government to better enable us to govern ourselves: this proposal destroys checks and balances, enabling the tyranny of the majority.

Second, I wish to address a series of alternatives, all of which have some currency in contemporary politics. Each offers a fundamentally different vision of self-governance, which manifest in strikingly different institutional arrangements. These are proposals to lodge the center of power in, variously, executives, courts, and agencies. Each of these, I will argue, is both dangerously unworkable and reflects an abandonment of the basic project of self-governance.

Objection: The Tyranny of the Majority

A simple and straightforward objection to the system of self-governance I have described here is that it abandons the American tradition of separation of powers, of checks and balances, in favor of "legislative tyranny."  The majority elects a party to the legislature, that party tramples over the court and the executive, and thus tramples on the rights and interests of the minority.

This is less of an argument and more of a thought-terminating cliché. In the system I have described, countervailing sources of power remain at multiple levels. A separately elected executive, without whom one cannot appoint heads of the executive agencies nor remove agency personnel, and who has an independent democratic mandate, remains an enormous source of countervailing power. While this system undermines the ego-driven mania of the current Court, the courts nevertheless retain lifetime appointments and supreme judicial authority, albeit collectively rather than in merely five known persons. The other levels of government, at the state and local level, retain their own ability to fight back against the legislature. And of course, most fundamentally, the political parties, the organizations of civic society, we the people retain our capacity to organize against government policies we oppose.

Ambition counteracts ambition. Indeed, this principle is expressed more clearly in this system. The executive is prone to being captured by a single man representing a single party—as we have seen. The Court has abandoned the pretense of democratic constraint in favor of its own despotism. By contrast, in a multiparty legislature, parties with strong but narrow preferences can bargain quite effectively with larger coalitions—as we have seen, often enough, in such systems.

But there is a deeper anxiety here, and a deeper answer. In the age of Trump II there is the urge—as there was in the 60s, in the age of Vietnam and urban renewal—to put chains on the government in general. To fear power full stop. And here is the unnerving truth we must confront: you cannot safety-wrap a government. We the people, collectively, possess an enormous and genuinely terrifying power, whether we like it or not. We split the atom and made a new sun, once; we may yet do so again. There is no institutional arrangement that could guarantee freedom if we the people consistently turned against it. Freedom lives in the hearts of free people, or not at all. As Abraham Lincoln put it at the Young Men's Lyceum in 1838:

If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

It is as true today as it was then.

Alternative: Constitutional Guardian Council

There is another vision of self-governance on offer: the Supreme Court, composed of nine justices serving lifetime appointments, are the fundamental guardians and interpreters of the Constitution. This is an idea with a powerful grounding in the American tradition of constitutional veneration. The fundamental truth of America was not set out in the Declaration of Independence, but rather in the Constitution of 1789 and its various amendments, which set out the basic rights of American citizens and structure of American governance. We are free to govern ourselves, but only within these strictures, which are enforced on their original terms by those nine-black robed masters at 1 First St. NE in Washington DC.

This vision has been profoundly useful to both liberal and conservative groups. It has enabled them to advance their policy agenda by means of the courts, rather than the rough-and-tumble of mass politics—one might here count everything from Roe v. Wade to Bush v. Gore to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization to the endless NEPA lawsuits used to block everything from wind farms to apartment buildings. Each side can point to their preferred victories and use it to claim legitimacy for this approach in general.

Yet the inevitable result has been that old conservative accusation: legislating from the bench, an activity the justices are manifestly unqualified to perform. Their corrupt and lawless rulings make a hash of responsible governance. Can anyone honestly say that in actual practice that our Guardian Council has done a good job of securing our fundamental rights and freedoms? Of maintaining the letter and spirit of the Constitution? Or is an unaccountable Court even more prone to simply making shit up to enforce its favored policy outcomes on an unconsenting country?

Stated baldly, this idea conflicts with the fundamental principle of self-governance articulated in this essay, in the Declaration of Independence, and in the Preamble to that Constitution these priests purport to revere. It amounts, in the final analysis, to nothing more than a Guardian Council like that which governs the Islamic Republic of Iran. It contradicts the fundamental principle that we the people must govern ourselves. It pretends to secure our most fundamental rights, yet the most fundamental right of all, the one on which all else rests, is the sovereign and inalienable right to govern ourselves. The vision of a Constitutional Guardian Council retreats from the very concept of self-governance and instead treats the Constitution as if were a magic contract forced on us by elves.

Fundamental rights are maintained not because they are written on sacred paper. Paper is just paper. If the project of freedom under law—of self-governance of a free people—is to survive, it cannot survive on the will of nine alone, but only that of the people, ourselves.

Alternative: Technocratic Antipolitics

A second alternative on offer has little to no grounding in the American political tradition, but for reasons which will become obvious, has a deep attraction to a certain kind of elite wonk. It admits that courts have no business governing, but is equally repulsed by the raging tides of populism sweeping across the western world. Instead it retreats into a vision of technocratic deliverism. The basic idea is best articulated by Matthew Yglesias, who writes:

"I know this is deeply unfashionable but IMO politics largely consists of two things: 
— Pandering to the fickle views of the voters to try to win elections 
— Handling a series of tedious technical issues that most people don't care about or understand well 
Having strongly held views not helpful."

On this vision, the center of gravity of governance is lodged in the executive agencies, staffed by professionals, who deliver on good governance in practice. The business of politics is, at best, a kind of antipolitics: placating and distracting the masses sufficiently well to keep them away from any of the actual levers of power.

It is worth reflecting that this strategy appears to have worked almost never. Look to Britain, where Keir Starmer almost explicitly governed on this agenda, attempting to deliver sober, competence governance on economic issues, while tacking hard right on "social" issues like immigration and trans rights in order to win over the "median voter." The result was alienating his core voters and winning over no one. "Technocrats" have an uncanny capacity to capture themselves with stupid ideas.

Technocratic antipolitics is a program that has been executed successfully just once, in Singapore, an island city-state of 6 million people that sits on top of one of the world's most lucrative trade routes and, furthermore, was ruled for decades by perhaps the greatest authoritarian technocrat of all time, Lee Kwan Yew; these fortuitous advantages make this model almost impossible to replicate anywhere else. And besides, it's fucking authoritarian. Singapore is a lovely place to visit, but it's still Disneyland with the death penalty. The antipolitical model doesn't work with just a bit of red meat and focus-grouped TV ads; it requires the active exclusion of the people from political activity full stop.

Even more deeply, without the democratic feedback mechanism, it remains surprisingly difficult to maintain technocratic competence. Why dedicate yourself to the efficient delivery of public service when you could instead dedicate yourself to graft, corruption, and laziness? After all, you're not accountable to anyone but yourself. The text that articulates the antipolitical technocrat's point of view most clearly, Joseph Heath's The Machinery of Government, approaches the question of how these technocratic agencies maintain their alignment with the public interest, and responds "I just take that for granted." This is nice in thought-experiment land, but less useful in the world of real institutional design.

Most damning of all, as we have seen in the age of Trump II, the much-vaunted deep state has about as much force as a fart in a windstorm when it confronts a force that genuinely harnesses mass political energy. So we must turn to the last, and unfortunately most compelling, alternative on offer.

Alternative: Caudillismo Hyperpolitics

We live in an age of increased politicization and polarization—even your brand of coffeemaker can become a cultural signifier overnight. Politics suffuses ordinary life. It is like we are living in dry country, and the slightest spark will set the prairie alight. Mass movements appear out of nothing, spread like wildfire, put millions in the streets, and then evaporate months later, with everyone—whether for or against, involved or on the sidelines—wondering what exactly just happened. The organizational and institutional structures that once channeled this mass energy into durable political outcomes have withered away.

Caudillismo hyperpolitics proposes that rather than channeling these mass energies through the formal structures of politics, or through organizations and institutions, they will be channeled via identification with a strongman (and it is almost always a man, with a particular sort of slimy machismo) who both leads and expresses the mob. In this respect it is not unlike the situation of an "influencer," whose only connection with their audience is that audience's parasocial identification with them. They can lead that audience, to a degree, but are also completely captured by it—see, for instance, Trump's embrace of antivax philosophy, despite his initial inclination to take credit for Operation Warp Speed.

In other words, caudillismo hyperpolitics proposes to channel mass energy directly through one person, without any of the intermediating structures of law or even parties, all of which have proven themselves hollow and sclerotic and unequal to the task of getting anything done. What is striking about this—as contrasted with, say, the first age of fascism—is how shallow the would-be caudillo's connection with his followers is. Trump, for all we speak of a personality cult, has no ability to put hundreds of thousands of devoted followers onto the streets of New York City—he can, at best, muster hundreds of thousands of likes for his demented 4am poasting.

Unlike antipolitical technocracy, which conceives of spectacle as a set of jangling keys to distract the masses with while real results are delivered in silence, in caudillismo hyperpolitics the spectacle is the point, both the goal and the mechanism of governance itself. Careful administration of a regime of mass deportations takes second seat to the spectacle of masked thugs grabbing people off the street; the spectacle is both red meat for the base as well as itself an instrument of policy intended to sow fear and terror in the regime's opponents and targets.

This, in all honesty, is the most democratic of the possibilities on offer. It expresses a genuine theory of mass politics and self-governance. But it is nevertheless, as we can now see clearly, a total mess. It has been strikingly unable to mobilize the mass public in a disciplined and reliable way. It has wreaked destruction, but improved nothing. Its war on expertise and administration has hamstrung its ability to achieve even its own goals.

Worse still, these goals are authoritarian and lawless, dedicated to racial hierarchies and antithetical to the American project. Caudillismo hyperpolitics thrives on the base emotions of the human soul, fear and anger, outrage and disgust. It generates attention and parasocial attraction precisely by flattering our worst selves, and it has degraded the civic virtue of all of us. It may be democratic, but it is no path to freedom under law.

Peroration

Some readers will have been screaming that the proposals here violate this or that Supreme Court interpretation of the Constitution. Yes, of course. Enacting these proposals will require a future legislature to embody these proposals, to reform its own sclerotic procedures and assert itself as the fundamental interpreter of the Constitution.

This essay has not been about the practicalities of passing any one of these proposals—which we have covered extensively elsewhere. This is a philosophical blueprint for self-governance, something that Reconstruction Liberals can implement at many levels.

After Trump, there will be a strong temptation among Democrats to simply learn to love the poison, and rule like he has—through executive fiat, through caudillismo hyperpolitics. To not fix the fundamental structural problems affecting our self-governance. There will equally be the temptation to retreat into technocracy, to attempt to wall off government from politics and "trust the experts."

Neither of these will save us. The only path forward for genuine self-governance is a return to honest mass politics. The riot of popular sentiment cannot be vetoed forever. It will explode in populism, or it will be channeled through functional political parties that can both express the popular will and discipline it into genuine legislative programs, enacted through competent, professional governance. In this story the legislative branch is the first among equals, and the others are primarily creations of the legislature, because the legislature is the most representative of the branches, in which the people in all our diversity all have our say.

Featured image is Opening ceremonies of the U.S. 59th Congress, 2nd session, 1906, with Speaker Joseph Cannon presiding, by Franklin Benjamin Johnston