The Reconstruction Papers

For nearly a century, the conservative movement's white whale was the government the New Deal and the Great Society had built. Republicans chipped away at it but feared the political ramifications of going too far. Now, Donald Trump and men in his inner circle like Russell Vought have come promising to do what their predecessors could not, and kill the beast outright. In its place they intend to leave a fascist, personalist, but otherwise greatly diminished state.

If they are going to shoot their shot, then liberals need to be ready to shoot ours.

The Reconstruction Papers is a guide to what that shot should look like. The aim is not to go back to normal, or repair the damage, but to offer bold plans of action for political liberals who manage to retake power from the fascists, as soon as 2029.

The Liberal Currents staff who organized this collection are not DC or media insiders. We are ordinary liberals who have built an extraordinary community. It is the support of that community which made The Reconstruction Papers possible.

It is now available for order in the United States, and a print-on-demand option is also available globally.

The PDF is free to the public:

Here is the table of contents:

And here is an excerpt from the Introduction, summarizing each essay:

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.

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 have 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.

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.

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.

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.”