Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs

In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts and plain arguments. I ask the reader to set aside, for an hour, what team he belongs to, and to examine the condition of the country the way he would examine the condition of a house he was thinking of buying.

First, on how much we actually disagree

Everything I am about to say rests on a claim that many readers will reject before they read it, so let me put it first and defend it.

We disagree with each other considerably less than we have been told.

Researchers call it the perception gap. The method is simple: ask partisans to estimate what share of the other side holds extreme positions, then go and ask the other side what it actually thinks, and compare. Democrats and Republicans each guessed that roughly fifty-five percent of their opponents hold extreme views. The measured figure was about thirty. Both sides were wrong by nearly double, in the same direction, about people they live among.⁹

Two findings from that research deserve to be better known. Heavy news consumption, all of it, not merely social media, is associated with a wider gap, not a narrower one. And education makes it worse rather than better: among the groups studied, college-educated liberals held a notably distorted picture of Republicans.

That inverts the usual story. We are told polarization is a problem of ignorance and the cure is more information; the evidence suggests the information environment is a substantial part of the disease. These are findings about misperception, not proof that Americans support any particular program, and I will not pretend otherwise.

It does not mean disagreement is fake. Americans hold real, deep, non-negotiable differences about abortion, about firearms, about the place of religion in public life, about what we owe people who are not citizens. Those are not misunderstandings. No clever institutional design will dissolve them, and anyone who tells you a better voting method will make abortion stop being contentious is not to be trusted.

The narrower claim, which I believe holds, is this: on a wide band of questions that determine whether the country functions, the public is far closer to agreement than the political system reflects. Whether Congress should trade stocks. Whether budgets should pass on time. Whether the border should be controlled. Whether a person who has lived here twenty years, worked, paid taxes, and broken no law should be deported. Whether ordinary people should own something.

These are not fifty-one to forty-nine questions. They are seventy-thirty and eighty-twenty questions. And they produce nothing.

If I am wrong about this, if Americans really are as divided as the political class, then most of what follows is useless, and institutional reform will only give us prettier gridlock. I want that stated plainly rather than buried, because it is the load-bearing beam of the whole structure.

Second, on the border, and twenty years of theater

Here is a deal that has been available since roughly 2006.

Control the border for real, with enough officers, judges, and adjudicators that a case is decided in weeks rather than years. Make the lawful path work. Remove people convicted of serious violent crimes, with real convictions and real due process. And for the people who have been here a decade or two, working, raising children, breaking no law: a way to register, be checked, pay what is owed, wait their turn, and become Americans.

Ask Americans about each half of that separately and you will find majorities for both: in Gallup’s mid-2024 survey, roughly three-quarters favored hiring more Border Patrol agents, and roughly three-quarters favored a path to citizenship for people living here illegally who meet requirements over time.¹⁰ Most people understand intuitively that neither half works without the other.

Now consider what happened to it.

In 2024 three senators, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma among them, negotiated the most serious border bill in a generation. It raised the standard for asylum claims and gave the president authority to close the border when crossings surged. By any historical measure it was an enormous concession from the Democratic side.

It died. And here is the detail I want you to hold onto: its author voted against his own bill.¹⁰ Party leaders had come out against it in an election year, saying openly that passing it would hand the other side a win, and he voted with his party. The people who made those decisions are responsible for them. And the outcome is hard to describe as anything but a system that has stopped trying. The deal was not too hard to find. It was written down, in legislative text, with two parties’ fingerprints on it. And still no one would claim it.

Twenty years. Millions of people living in a state of permanent provisional existence. Communities frightened. Employers dependent on workers who cannot complain. A border that functions badly. And an available deal, sitting on the table, that nobody will pick up.

Third, on money, and a number almost nobody knows

Let me now tell you something about the federal budget that changed how I think about all of this.

The usual argument runs one of two ways: the right says we spend too much, the left says we tax the wealthy too little. Both have made their case for forty years with remarkably little effect. Here are this year’s figures, from the Congressional Budget Office.¹¹

Federal debt held by the public reaches about one hundred and one percent of everything the country produces in a year. CBO projects one hundred and twenty percent within a decade. Interest on that debt now costs roughly a trillion dollars a year, heading toward two point one trillion by 2036.

The deficit this year is about five point eight percent of the economy.

Now take out the interest. What remains, every soldier, every road, every research grant, every benefit check, the entire operating cost of the United States government minus debt service, is a deficit of about two point six percent. And CBO projects it stays below that for the next ten years.

Interest is now larger than everything else in the deficit combined.

Read that again, because it reframes the whole argument. We are not primarily overspending on programs. We are paying, with compound interest, for thirty years of decisions nobody was willing to make. That is an interpretation, and it does not mean program choices are irrelevant. But it changes where the story starts.

Each deferral was individually rational. Every Congress, of both parties, faced a choice between a hard conversation and a bond issue, and chose the bond issue. None of them did anything outrageous. The outrage is cumulative.

So the fiscal crisis is not a spending story or a taxing story. It is the same story as the border. It is what happens when an institution loses the ability to close a deal and borrows instead, over and over, until the borrowing becomes the largest single thing it does.

That is why I do not believe you can fix the budget without fixing the machine. You would be asking the same institution that could not make the decision the first thirty times to make it the thirty-first.

Fourth, on retirement, and a date certain

There is a specific date attached to this, which is unusual in politics and worth attending to.

Social Security’s retirement trust fund runs short in 2032. That is not a projection about the distant future or a claim by one side about the other. It is the finding of the program’s own trustees. At that point, under current law, the money coming in covers about seventy-eight percent of the retirement benefits promised. The remaining twenty-two percent simply does not exist.¹²

Six years.

Nothing in current law addresses this. Both parties know, and both have concluded, correctly, that the first to propose a specific fix will be attacked for it, and so the responsible move, in the logic of the machine, is to say nothing and let it arrive.

Now, the shape of this program, which both sides misrepresent.

Social Security is not a savings account. There is no vault with your money in it. The payroll taxes taken from working people this month are paid out to retirees this month. It is a promise, backed by the willingness of future workers to keep paying, and nothing else.

It is also not merely a retirement program. It is insurance. It pays if you are disabled at thirty. It pays your children if you die at forty. It pays if you live to a hundred and two and outlast everything you saved. It pays proportionally more to people who earned less. Comparing its “return” to the stock market is like comparing an insurance premium to a bet. You are not meant to come out ahead; you are meant to be protected.

Both of those things are true, and both matter for what I will propose.

Fifth, on who owns America

Here is a question that is not asked often enough.

If you are an ordinary American, a nurse, an electrician, a teacher, a person who drives a truck, what do you own?

Perhaps a house, if you were born early enough or lucky enough. A car, financed. A retirement account, if your employer offers one and you could spare the contribution; nearly half of private-sector workers have no employer plan to join.¹³ And a promise from the government that in some decades it will send you a check whose size depends on a political fight that has not happened yet.

What you do not own, in most cases, is any piece of the thing that has actually created wealth in this country for the past century: the productive capital. The companies. The machines. The land under the warehouses.

For most of American history this mattered less, because the returns to labor and the returns to capital rose together roughly enough. That relationship has been coming apart for forty years, and it may be about to come apart considerably faster.

I am not going to make dramatic predictions about artificial intelligence, because nobody knows and the people who claim to know are selling something. But I will make one narrow observation that seems hard to dispute. If machines take over a growing share of the work, then the returns to owning machines rise and the returns to being able to work fall. In that world, the question of who owns the machines stops being an abstraction and becomes the central political question of the century.

A country in which most people own nothing but their capacity to labor, in an economy where labor’s share is falling, has a structural problem coming. And I doubt you can tax your way out of it, because at some point you are simply redistributing from a small group to everyone else forever, and I know of no place where that arrangement has stayed stable.

It is common sense that people who spend their lives working inside an economy should end up owning a piece of it. Not as a slogan about capitalism, and not as a promise that markets are kind, but as the only durable answer to the question of what happens when work alone stops being enough. The alternative is that everyone owns some.

Sixth, on what all of this has in common

Look at these five things together, the border, the debt, retirement, ownership, and the stock-trading vote, and a pattern emerges that I find more persuasive than any single one of them.

In every case, a solution is available. In every case, that solution requires someone currently holding leverage to give it up. And in every case, the solution does not happen.

The border deal required both parties to surrender an election issue. It died.

The budget requires someone to say no to a constituency. Nobody does; we borrow.

Retirement requires the first mover to absorb an attack. Nobody moves.

The stock-trading ban required members of Congress to give up an advantage they personally enjoy. They passed a version that lets them keep selling.

This is not a coincidence, and it is not a story about bad people. It is what a machine does when it has been built, accidentally, to reward holding leverage over using it.

And once you see it, you see it everywhere, including in places where your own side is the one holding the leverage. That last part is the hard bit. I am not exempt from it and neither are you.

If I had to reduce this entire pamphlet to a single sentence, it would be this one: nobody will close a deal that lets the other side win too. Everything else is a cause of that failure or a consequence of it. The closed primary is a cause: it selects for people who prove themselves by refusing. Legalized self-dealing is a cause: it removes every personal penalty for refusing. The debt is a consequence, thirty years of refusals compounding at interest. The border is a consequence. The stock vote is the whole thing performed in miniature, in a single afternoon, over an idea that eighty-six percent of us share.