A closing word

I want to say what this is not, because it will be misread otherwise.

This is not a party document. It contains proposals that will infuriate the left and proposals that will infuriate the right, and if you have read it and found nothing that annoyed you, I have failed. It is not a manifesto, and I am not asking for anyone’s allegiance. I am not a politician, and I am not in a position to enact a syllable of it. It is an argument, offered to be tested. If you find an error, I would rather hear it than not.

Paine’s critics said America was too weak, too scattered, too dependent to stand alone. He answered that the country had never been better positioned than at that moment, and that waiting would only make it harder. I will make the reverse of that argument, and I think it is the stronger one.

We are not too weak. We are the wealthiest society that has ever existed, with the best universities, the deepest capital markets, the most productive firms, and a population still, whatever we tell each other, remarkably willing to help a neighbor. Nothing material stands in the way.

What stands in the way is a habit. A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, which gives it a superficial appearance of being right. We have grown accustomed to a government that cannot finish anything, the way a person adjusts to a bad back, organizing life around the limitation until it seems like a feature of the world. We have come to believe that a country of three hundred and forty million people simply cannot agree, when what is actually true is that we have built a machine that profits from our not agreeing and have mistaken its output for our own opinion.

The machine that produces this result was not designed by anyone. It emerged, from a series of reasonable decisions, over a long period, and nobody chose it. Which means nobody is defending it on the merits, because it has no merits, because it was never argued for in the first place.

That is a hopeful thing, properly understood. An arrangement nobody chose can be unchosen. It requires no revolution, no violence, no new philosophy, and no one to change their deepest beliefs. It requires only that enough people say, out loud and at the same time, that the thing does not work and that we are no longer going to pretend it does.

Every generation of Americans has been handed a country and asked to hand on something at least as good. That is not sentiment. It is the actual deal, the one thing continuously agreed upon here for two hundred and fifty years, through a civil war and two world wars and a depression. We are, at present, failing to keep it. Not spectacularly; quietly, by deferral, handing our children a larger bill and a weaker instrument every year, and telling ourselves that the other half of the country is at fault.

The generation that read Paine had every material reason to lose. They had no navy, no treasury, no manufacturing, and no experience of governing themselves. What they had was a decision.

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Paine wrote that, and it was an extravagant claim, and it turned out to be true. What I am asking is far smaller. I am asking that a country capable of extraordinary things become capable, once more, of ordinary ones: of passing a budget, of keeping its own house honest, of closing a deal that nearly everyone already wants.

That should not require courage. That it does is the measure of how far we have drifted.

Written in the two hundred and fiftieth year of American independence.