The Three Repairs

Only the first of these three is about how government works. The other two are ordinary policy, and it's fair to ask what they're doing in a pamphlet about broken machinery. Two reasons.

People vote their fears, and these are the two biggest ones. A border nobody controls and an old age nobody can afford are exactly what make a person willing to back someone who promises never to give an inch. New rules take a decade to settle in. If those two fears are still running hot that whole time, the new rules get torn up long before they take hold.

And these two are the proof. I keep saying there are deals where both sides win at once. That's easy to say. So take the two hardest cases in American politics — the angriest one and the most expensive one — where a deal has been sitting in plain sight for twenty years and nobody has closed it. Close them, and nobody can tell me the rest can't be done.

The full mechanism for each repair — elections and ethics, the immigration bargain, and honest budgets with an ownership stake for every American — has its own chapter: see The Repairs.