Accountability, Affordability, Democracy.
The trinity of American collapse—and the seeds of its restoration
Thank you to everybody who’s been along for the ride so far. It’s not easy to look deep into the soul of America. Like you all, I’ve been watching the last six months with frustration, anger, despair, and hope. The last few weeks have been equal parts hope and despair for me. And I wanna talk about three elements that I think are the root of both of those things - hope and despair. Accountability. Affordability. Democracy. We have none of the three right now.
I’m going to get into more depth about all of them this week. This is to tee them up.
I believe Americans - those who vote and those who don’t - are looking for exactly these things, but they’re being told they can’t have them. People are yearning for community and togetherness, but they keep getting divided and separated. They keep being shown that everything they thought was solid about this country is cracking, cracked, or totally rotten.
Look, people see that accountability means nothing. From presidents to the wealthy, people can get away with nearly anything - genocide, sex trafficking, you name it. They’re told they live in the richest nation in the history of the world at its most affordable point in history, yet they’re struggling to get by and constantly anxious about their future, their kids’ future. Most of us never get a moment of economic rest.
And they’re constantly told they have to save a democracy that’s obviously broken. We get very few real choices when it comes to who represents us. There’s shenanigans one way or another - they push candidates out, one gets more coverage than another, one gets more money. The media lies about people without consequences. Districts get drawn by whoever’s in power. People have to buy their way into making our rules and laws, so everything gets designed for the rich and powerful.
People know they’re living through this. They’re not stupid. They’ve had to turn off and turn away just to survive. They can’t keep looking at the sunken eyes of Gaza’s children because it reminds them too much of their own powerlessness.
## What I Want to Talk About This Week
I want to dig into each of these because of what we’re all seeing right now. We’re watching forced starvation in Gaza with US backing - people are dying while we fund it. We’ve got both Trump and Bill Clinton called out for being in Epstein’s contact book, but somehow that story just disappears.
I’m seeing people in the party trying to pivot to affordability, which I get, but you can’t solve the affordability problem if you won’t acknowledge how deep and widespread it really is. And now we’ve got Dems planning to gerrymander their own states without saying gerrymandering should be banned entirely.
What I believe is that by taking on these three elements as the unified issues they are, we have a chance to come together to fix our trajectory. I’m doing my best to make the case that this road leads somewhere dystopian—somewhere we do not want to be.
This is my sense of how people are feeling, but I don’t know if it matches what you’re feeling. I want to write about my theory on each of these this week - here, on YouTube, in live streams, on TikTok - and I want your feedback. What are you seeing? What’s weighing on you? How do these assessments land with you? Hit me up in the comments.
I resonated with all of this, but mostly our powerlessness and dystopian heading.
We're working on the problem from the outside, in, which is needed. But if we only keep working from the outside in, we will always be like Sisyphus.
What I'm working on is an inside, out, solution. I'm looking at the core emotion that drives people to be either brave or cowardly, to go down the path of least resistance leaving the rest of us in a chronic Sisyphus position, or to go down the more challenging path of root cause and prevention that removes the steep hill. FEAR is the core emotion we are not dealing with.
Fear can be faced and handled with courage and integrity and be our servant, or fear can rule like the selfish monarch it wants to be. When fear is our leader we become greedy for power over others. When we counter fear with wisdom, we all have power.
We would be wise to work both from the outside, in, and the inside, out, together with integrity.
We need leadership that knows how to get people working together for the benefit of both one and all with integrity.
We must never lose our integrity.
Aside from reading Substack articles from a few authors like yourself and attending a few protests, I've disengaged from politics. It feels like nothing we do really matters. Prices continue to go up and most young people have accepted that they'll never own a house or afford children while watching the wealthy flaunt their lifestyle. People are truly suffering and hunted and I just don't want to watch it happen. Campaign finance reform is the solution for the true root of our problem, but I can't see a world where anyone agrees on it.