The Unfinished Revolution: From Subjects to Citizens
The more I write, the more I research American history, and the more I try to figure out how we got to where we are today, the more I can’t help but notice one thing: we aren’t as far from where we started as we like to believe.
We like to think this country has evolved into something greater as the decades between founding and modern times pass, but evolution is not linear or exponential in its process. It is a perilous journey of mutations, failures, extinctions, and rare successes. And like any organism struggling to survive, for a nation trying to find its footing, thriving often means covering up its scars and pushing ever forward.
But the truth of those scars is useful. In order to grow, one must recognize how they were injured and be mindful of similar dangers going forward. All too often though, in the case of civilizations and governments, we build myths around those scars, especially those that were self-inflicted.
The United States has long considered itself a beacon of freedom, but instead of being a lighthouse and warning others of the dangers it faced, it behaves more like a spotlight. It only illuminates what it’s pointed at, and rarely is it ever pointed at itself. When we envision the American founding, we see the imagery of a civic religion being birthed: the scratch of a quill on parchment, and the promise of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
It is an exceptional story. One that makes young students feel like heirs to a flawless legacy. But the spotlight of our education is aimed at the moments that make us feel good, while leaving most of the tragedies obscured in the dark. We enshrine the moments of triumph and joy, while pretending the rest are best filed in library stacks, locked away from wandering eyes of passersby.
But every epic is written in conflict. And conflict is rarely exclusive to being against a foreign adversary. Rather, conflict centers around the protagonist’s own contradictions. If we want to solve the crises of the present, we have to move past the myths that make us comfortable and look at the math.
In 1789, the United States Constitution took effect. We are taught this was the birth of our Republic, of democracy. But if you were standing in a town square that year, the reality looked different. Historians estimate that only about 6% of the population was eligible to vote.
Think about that number. Six percent.
This wasn't an oversight. It was intentional design.
The right to participate wasn't even granted to all men. It was granted to a specific class of men: white property owners. The 'landed gentry.' The reasoning was what the many Founders called the 'stake in society' theory. The logic was simple, if cynical. Those who owned land had enough to lose to be trusted with power. Or more simply, those with a stake in the game would want the game to be played fairly.
If you were a tenant, a laborer, a woman, or enslaved, you were seen to be at best a spectator. And in the minds of the founders, a spectator didn’t get a political will of their own. They were merely an extension of someone else’s interests. A tenant was indebted to their landlord; a wife was subsumed by their husband; a laborer dependent on their trade; an enslaved person owned by their master. They were the 'property' that gave the 'stake-holder' his ante at the table of power.
James Madison, the primary architect of the Constitution, was transparent about this. In Federalist No. 10, he didn’t argue for a system that would empower the people. He argued for a system that would buffer them.
He wrote about the danger of 'factions' and the 'superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.' He feared what he called the 'mob.' And rightfully so. Mob rule, the more we see it, is a terrible thing. His solution to this was not a ‘pure democracy', a term he used with disdain, but a Republic.
Madison’s goal was to 'refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the filter of a chosen body of citizens.'
He wanted a firewall. He wanted a system where the 'responsible' class could check the 'passions' of the many. When we talk about the Electoral College, or the Senate, or lifetime judicial appointments, we aren't looking at 'broken' parts of a democracy. We are looking at the safety network. These were mechanisms specifically engineered to ensure that even if the people spoke, the property-owning elite would have the final say as to what would happen.
So, the question we have to ask ourselves isn't 'When did we lose our democracy?'
The question is: 'When did we ever actually have it?'
When we look back at history, the clearest lack of equality and democratic ideals we see is slavery. We often hear slavery described as a 'stain' on our national fabric. A contradiction to our founding ideals. But a stain is an accident. A stain is something without intention that tarnishes a garment.
Spilled wine turns cotton red. But if we are being honest about our history, slavery wasn’t spilled wine. It was the seamstress of the American fabric. The blood of slaves was threaded through our early institutions, to support the cotton that made the economy.
The entire architecture of the early United States was woven around this reality, and the biblically and morally argued necessity and righteousness, of enslaved labor. And nowhere is this clearer than in the logic of the Three-Fifths Compromise.
We are often taught about this in school as a little more than a fractional deal to appease the south, not as a debate over the 'humanity' of enslaved people. But let’s not sanitize the truth. The Three-Fifths Compromise wasn't a philosophical debate; it was a power grab.
The Southern states wanted enslaved people counted as 'persons' for the sake of representation, but as 'property' for the sake of rights. This allowed the South to inflate its population numbers, which in turn gave them more seats in the House of Representatives and more votes in the Electoral College.
This created a political engine that powered a Southern-dominated federal government for decades. Of the first five American Presidents, four were Virginia slaveholders. They held this power without a single Black person ever casting a ballot. The system converted the presence of the oppressed into the political clout for the oppressor. That isn't a 'failure' of democracy. It is a masterclass in Authoritarian Engineering.
And let’s be clear: the legal system didn't just tolerate this; it fortified it.
If you want to see the peak of this authoritarian Republic, you look at the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857. Chief Justice Roger Taney didn’t just rule that a man named Dred Scott was still enslaved. He went much further.
He declared that Black people could never be citizens of the United States. He wrote that they were 'beings of an inferior order' and had 'no rights which the white man was bound to respect.'
This wasn't a 'drift' toward authoritarianism. This was a formal declaration that the United States was a racial gated community. It codified the idea that 'The People' was an exclusive club, and the gate was kept locked by the law.
When we talk about the 'founding fathers' and their vision of liberty, we have to acknowledge that their version of liberty was a luxury to be owned by few. It was a zero-sum game. For the elite to be free, others had to be owned. For the 'responsible class' to govern, the majority had to be silenced as being too irresponsible to rule themselves.
This is the truth we have to sit with: the American system didn't start as a democracy that allowed slavery. It started as an authoritarian slave-state that used the language of democracy to organize its elite.
If the 6% statistic was the 'Who' of early American power, the structure of our federal government was the 'How.'
To understand why our system looks the way it does, you have to understand that the Framers weren’t just building a government; they were building a series of dams to hold back the flood of human nature. We call these checks and balances, but they are at best speed bumps. They were never meant to stop the elites. They are in place to stop the people.
The founders were terrified of what they called 'the gust of passion' that might sweep through a democracy. They didn’t want a government that responded to the people; they wanted a government that could survive the people.
To see how they hoped to accomplish this, let’s look at the United States Congress.
Today, we go to the polls and elect our Senators. But for the first 124 years of this country, you had no say in who represented your state in the Senate. They were appointed by state legislatures. The Senate was intended to be the American 'House of Lords.'
While the House of Representatives was meant to be the 'grand depository of the democratic principle,' the Senate was the filter. It was the screen for the passions of people. It was an elite body of men, chosen by other elites, tasked with making sure the 'common' House didn't pass laws that threatened the interests of the wealthy or the stability of the landed class.
It is important to understand the 'Refining Filter' wasn't just about wealth; it was about a specific Enlightenment ideal of Civic Virtue. Madison and his contemporaries operated under a massive, and massively naive, assumption: that the 'Responsible Class' would naturally be composed of men who were educated, disinterested, and well-meaning. They imagined a leadership of Stoic philosophers who would prioritize the long-term health of the Republic over the short-term 'passions' of the day.
They did not account for a world where the 'Responsible Class' would be just as capricious, ignorant, or captured by narrow interests as the 'mob' they so feared. They built a firewall against the blaze of humans’ often base desires, but they forgot to build a safeguard against the corruption of the firemen themselves. They gave the elite the final say, assuming that 'the best' would always be the ones speaking. They never imagined the filter would one day be used to strain out the truth and let the poison through."
Then, there is the Electoral College.
We often debate the Electoral College as a quirk of geography or a 'small state vs. large state' compromise. But its origin is much more calculated. Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist No. 68 that the election of the President should not be left to the 'tumult and disorder' of the general population.
Instead, he wanted a small group of 'men most enlightened and respectable' to make the choice. It was a fail-safe for the wealthy to ensure that not just any common man held the office. If the people fell for a 'demagogue' or a 'populist,' the Electoral College was supposed to step in and overrule them. It was a system built on the premise that the public could not be trusted with the most important of decisions.
Finally, we have the Judiciary.
Think about the sheer power of a Supreme Court Justice. They are appointed for life. They are unelected. They are, by definition, the least democratic branch of our government. And that is why when they took the power of 'Judicial Review’, they became almost unstoppable by all other governmental forces.
The Judiciary was designed to tether the Republic to its legal foundations, but through the evolution of Judicial Review, it began to dictate policy, transforming from the neutral barrier it was intended to be into a secretive arbiter of justice. Now, it often echoes the very monarchical authority the Founders sought to supplant
If a law managed to pass the House, and somehow cleared the aristocratic Senate, and was signed by a President, the Court stood at the end of the line. It had the authority to strike down the will of the majority in the name of 'The Constitution', a document that was written to protect a status quo. And overruling the Supreme Court through amendment was made nigh impossible to do.
When we see the Senate gridlocked today or a Supreme Court ruling that seems out of step with the majority of the country, we shouldn't be surprised. We shouldn't say the system is 'failing.'
We are simply watching the system do exactly what it was engineered to do: limit direct popular control to ensure that power remains in the hands of the 'responsible' class, no matter who shows up at the ballot box."
We are conditioned to view American history as a steady climb toward some imaginary pinnacle of perfection. We envision a straight line of progress from 1776 to today. But if you map the 19th century, it doesn’t look like a ramp. It looks like the rugged terrain it was: sharp rises of freedom followed by long plains of state-sanctioned exclusion.
The first major shift happened in the 1850s. This was the era of 'Jacksonian Democracy.' We’re told this was a triumph of the common man, as property requirements to vote were stripped away. By 1850, most white men could vote regardless of how much land they owned.
But look closer at the trade-off. This 'democratization' for one group was paid for by the removal of others. It was Andrew Jackson, the champion of the 'common man', who signed the Indian Removal Act, leading to the Trail of Tears. As participation opened to the white working class, it slammed shut for Indigenous nations and free Black Americans, who saw their existing rights stripped away. There was no true expansion of 'human rights'; it was an expansion of 'club membership’.
Then came the Civil War, and with it, the 'glitch' of Reconstruction.
Between 1865 and 1877, the impossible happened. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments didn’t just end slavery; they attempted to rewrite the source code of our nation. For a brief moment, the United States became a fledgling multi-racial democracy. Black men didn't just vote; they held office. They became Senators, Representatives, and state legislators. They built schools and rewrote state constitutions.
For the first time, the 'Responsible Class' lost control.
But the system has a memory. In the 1870s, the 'Redemption' era began, a chillingly named movement to 'restore' the original hierarchy. The elite began to realize that a multi-racial democracy that included former slaves might pass laws that favored laborers over landowners. This could not be allowed to happen. The law needed to be used as a weapon to re-establish authoritarian control.
When the federal government pulled troops out of the South in 1877, it abdicated enforcement of the 14th and 15th amendments. The default settings of the Republic were restored through a campaign of state-sponsored terror and legal engineering. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan provided the violence, while state governments provided the paperwork. They didn’t 'ban' Black people from voting, because that would violate the 15th Amendment, and potentially invoke federal wrath. Instead, they built a labyrinth of rules and exclusion to stop Black people from voting: poll taxes, literacy tests, and 'grandfather clauses.'
They created a system where you had the 'right' to vote, but you didn't have the 'ability' to exercise it.
By the end of the century, the Supreme Court put its stamp of approval on this restoration with Plessy v. Ferguson, legalizing 'Separate but Equal.' This wasn't a detour from our history. It was a return to the foundations of it.
A country in which Rights have never been a permanent gift. They have been a temporary concession, constantly under threat of being recalled by those who want to claim dominion over the house, because they once would have been the only ones with the right to it.
Still, for a brief window in the mid-20th century, the systemic shock of the Great Depression and two world wars, moved the United States closer to what some might be able to define as a social democracy more than at any other point in its history. We saw the New Deal, the Great Society, the rise of labor unions, and a massive expansion of the middle class. However, even in this progress, there was oppression. Black people were excluded from the GI Bill and FHA Loans. Labor Unions saw their power erode. There was social momentum for white people, and structural inertia for everyone else. That is why we must look at these victories against a rogue program not as the erasure of malicious actors, but as a hard-fought anomaly that the operating system immediately began to resist.
Take the 19th Amendment in 1920.
We are taught to view 1920 as a magnanimous 'granting' of the vote. It wasn’t. It was the conclusion of a radical insurgency that the state met with iron bars and forced feedings. But even when the 19th Amendment passed, the 'Responsible Class' didn't surrender; they retreated into the private sector.
They kept the keys to the banks, the courthouses, the law schools, and the credit bureaus. They ensured that while a woman could cast a ballot, she couldn't sign a mortgage without a man’s permission. The 'founding' logic remained. A woman could cast a ballot, but for all else, she was seen as an extension of her husband’s will. And for Black women in the South, the 19th Amendment was a hollow promise that the gears of Jim Crow were engineered to ignore. The spotlight of liberty had moved, but the shadows of the old authoritarianism were as deep as ever.
It would take another forty-five years for the 'spectators' to finally march on the machine itself.
First came 1964. The Civil Rights Act. This wasn't just a law; it was a direct assault on the old order. It declared that the 'private' world of the elite was no longer a sanctuary. Their hotels, their restaurants, their places of business could no longer exclude others based on visible factors. It was a formal acknowledgment that 'liberty' is a lie if you can't sit at a lunch counter or apply for a job without being filtered out by the color of your skin or the nature of your gender. It struck at the very heart of the 'Stakeholder' theory by asserting that the public interest outweighed the 'private' prejudices of the landed class.
Then, the final hammer fell in 1965. The Voting Rights Act.
This was the 'Second Founding.' For the first time in 189 years, the law of the land finally aligned with the rhetoric of the land. The state-sponsored terror of the 'Redemption' era was, at least in theory, outlawed. The 'glitch' of Reconstruction was being patched. Those who had been spectators were now being recognized as rightful stakeholders with a seat at the game table.
When the elite realized they could no longer legally stop people from voting, they didn't give up. They changed their strategy. They realized that if you can’t control who votes, you have to control what the vote influences.
As the electorate became more diverse, inclusive, and demanding of equality, the 'responsible class' began a decades-long project to move the levers of the machine out of the reach of the voters.
They began to argue that the 'real' decisions that needed to be made: the ones involving the economy, the distribution of wealth, and the regulation of industry, were too complex for the average voter. They moved power from public halls to private boardrooms. They moved sovereignty from the ballot box to the market.
We were told we were becoming more 'free' because more of us could vote. But in reality, while we had been given access to the halls of power, we were being rushed into a side room as soon as we entered. And that space we were forced into was being emptied of what little power it held in real-time. We gained the right to participate just as the participation was being rendered ceremonial.
Studies like the one done by Gilens and Page show that when the bottom 90% of Americans want a policy change, whether it’s regarding healthcare, infrastructure, or the minimum wage, the probability of that law passing stays at a flat 30%. It doesn't matter if 10% of us want it or 90% of us want it; our collective will has a statistically near-zero impact on the outcome.
But when the 'Responsible Class'—the top 10% of earners and the corporate interests they represent want a law passed, the probability of it becoming reality mirrors their support almost perfectly.
The 'filters' Madison built haven't disappeared; they’ve been digitized. The Senate filibuster, the dark-money lobbyists, and the 'revolving door' between regulatory agencies and the boardrooms they oversee are the modern-day property requirements. We are living in a 'Second Founding' that has been captured by the First. We have been given the right to choose the engineers, but the software they run was programmed long before we ever turned on the computer.
This is the profound irony of the late 20th century. Just as the American state was becoming more democratic, the 'real' power was being moved out of the state’s reach entirely.
This was the era of Market Fundamentalism, fueled by the partisan thinkers of the Chicago School. They didn’t use the language of exclusion or terms like 'mob rule'. Those were too 18th-century. Instead, they used the language of 'Freedom.' They argued that the government was inefficient, that the 'nanny state' was a threat, and that the 'free market' was the true democracy.
But look at the result of that logic.
When you deregulate an industry, you aren’t 'freeing' the people or the economy. You are insulating the latter from the voters. If the people vote for clean air, but the power to regulate pollution is stripped from the government and handed to 'market forces,' the vote becomes a suggestion, not a command.
This was a deliberate strategy to decouple the economy from the electorate. It succeeded by convincing a large portion of the public that the tools of their own protection were actually the enemies of their liberty.
By weakening antitrust laws and allowing massive corporate mergers, we permitted the rise of what you might call 'Private Governments.'
Think about your life today. If a corporation controls your healthcare access, your digital communication, your credit score, and your data, they exercise more authoritarian control over your daily existence than your local mayor or even your governor ever could. But here is the difference: You can vote out the mayor. You cannot vote out a CEO. You cannot ballot-box a monopoly.
To protect this new arrangement, the ‘Responsible’ people built another buffer. We moved the most consequential decisions on interest rates, trade agreements, and environmental standards away from public debate and into 'independent' agencies and global financial structures. We were told these things were 'too technical' for the average citizen to debate and decide on. It was the Madisonian filter updated for the 21st century.
The 'passions of the mob' were no longer a threat to the ‘property owners’; now, the 'passions of the electorate' were a threat to 'market stability.'
The result is a system where the public is allowed to argue over culture, symbols, and identity, while the levers of wealth and survival are locked away in a vault marked 'Private Property.' We have outsourced true governance to entities that don’t have to stand for election.
We have moved from the era of 'Poll Taxes' to the era of 'Systemic Friction.' In the old days, if you wanted to maintain an authoritarian grip, you used a billy club or a literacy test. Today, the tools are mathematical. They are algorithmic.
The first of these tools is Gerrymandering as Anti-virus Software. In this new operating system, the 'virus' is the people, and the software is designed to ensure that no matter how loud they scream, the machine never changes its output
James Madison drafted the 'filters' to refine the public view. Modern political parties have perfected them. We now use high-speed computing and consumer data to draw dividing lines with precision. We have reached a point where, in the vast majority of our elections, the voters do not choose their politicians. The politicians choose their voters.
By 'packing' and 'cracking' communities, we have rendered the act of voting a formality for millions of Americans. It is a system of Pre-Determined Outcomes. It is the 1789 'Responsible Class' filter, but instead of being enforced by a man in a wig, it’s enforced by a server in a basement.
Then, we have the Currency of Influence.
We often talk about Citizens United as a legal error, but it is in reality a philosophical homecoming. By declaring that 'Money is Speech' and 'Corporations are People,' the Supreme Court didn't create a reality. It returned us to the 'Property-Owner' logic of 1789.
In this updated version of the 'Stake in Society' theory, your 'voice' in democracy is directly proportional to your net worth. If it costs 100 million dollars to run for a major office, and that money comes from a handful of ultra-wealthy donors, then the 'public servant' is a 'private employee.' This is the machine working as intended to ensure that those with the most have the loudest voice in the room.
But the most subtle form of modern control isn't how we vote or who we fund. It’s how we think.
It is the Management of Information. Throughout the mid-20th century, we had a 'Fairness Doctrine' that required broadcasters to present contrasting viewpoints. We had a public square that, while imperfect, was rooted in a shared set of facts. But starting in the 1980s, we dismantled those guardrails. We allowed a massive concentration of media ownership, where 50 companies in 1980 have now become 6 corporations, soon to be less.
We live in a world of 'Manufactured Consent.' When your information ecosystem is owned by a handful of tech giants who profit from outrage and division, the 'Public Square' becomes a private commodity. They don’t have to tell you what to think; they just have to control the environment in which you think. They can amplify a fear or bury a truth with the tweak of a line of code.
When you combine rigged districts, unlimited corporate money, and an information landscape designed for distraction, you don't need to ban people from voting. You have created a system where they can roll the dice on whatever candidate they want, as many times as they want, but the house always wins. Like any good gambling machine, it was rigged from the start.
We must change our perception to understand this better.
When we imagine authoritarianism, we usually picture a uniformed dictator on a balcony. But in the 21st century, power doesn’t need a uniform; it needs an interface.
We have entered an era of App-Driven Feudalism.
In the Middle Ages, the King didn’t own your soul, but the Lord owned the land you stood on, the mill where you ground your grain, and the road you used to get to market. Today, figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are the new Lords of the Manor. They don’t hold elected office, yet they wield the power of Censorship and Amplification, powers that were once the guarded province of the State.
They own the digital land where our political discourse lives. They own the mills where our data is processed. They own the roads that carry our thoughts to one another. We are no longer citizens in a Republic. We have become serfs in the manors of technocrats.
If a government official shuts down a protest, we call it a violation of the First Amendment. If a billionaire tweaks an algorithm to bury a movement or amplify a conspiracy, we call it 'terms of service.' But the result is exactly the same: the shaping of reality by an unaccountable will.
This brings us to the Accountability Gap. In a democracy, even a flawed one, there is a 'kill switch' for power. It’s called an election. If you hate what your Senator is doing, you can vote them out. But how do you vote out a CEO? How do you petition a board of directors that answers only to a bottom line?
This is the New Authoritarianism. It is a power that is felt in every aspect of our lives, from the news we see to the jobs we are offered, but it is a power that cannot be tamed by a ballot. It is a system where the most consequential decisions about the future of our species are made in Silicon Valley, shielded by trade secrets and non-disclosure agreements.
We are living through a massive bait-and-switch.
We spent two centuries fighting for the keys to the house, only to find that while we can unlock the front door, we have no say in which rooms we can occupy. We have won the right to be little more than squatters.
So, when we talk about the state of our country today, the word we hear most often is 'decline.' We speak as if we are falling from a grand summit where our institutions worked, our discourse was civil, and our democracy was strong. That even if we didn’t have a ‘Golden Age’ for the people, that we had one for democracy.
"But we have to be honest: Who was that 'Golden Age' actually for? Because it wasn't a golden age of democracy; it was a golden age of management."
There is a danger in nostalgia.
When we try to 'return' to a previous era of American stability, we aren’t only inviting back the civility. We are inviting back the exclusions that made that stability possible. The 'functional' government of the 1950s worked because it ignored the voices of millions. The 'ordered' Republic of the 1790s worked because 94% of the population was silenced.
If we try to fix the present by restoring the past, we are trying to get closer to our neighbor by building a fence.
We look at our current political climate, the polarization, the mud-slinging, the gridlock, and we say the system is 'breaking.' But I want to suggest something different. What we are witnessing isn't a breakdown. It is a collision. It is the collision between a 250-year-old architecture and a 21st-century reality.
The 'dysfunction' we see is the sign that the system’s filters are aged and faltering. They were designed to manage a small, homogenous group of property owners. They were never intended to contain 330 million people.
The system isn't 'breaking' solely because of bad actors. It is struggling because it has reached its structural load limit.
I understand the fear that fuels this nostalgia. It is exhausting to live in a time of friction. It is terrifying to feel like the floor is falling out from beneath us. We want to go back to a time when things felt 'solid.' But we have to accept that. You cannot fit a 21st-century democracy into an 18th-century model of government. You cannot squeeze the aspirations of 330 million people into a machine built to protect the property of 240,000.
When we say we want to 'save' our democracy, we are misdiagnosing the disease. You don't save a patient that was never alive. You don't 'restore' a foundation that was never poured.
The goal isn't preservation. The goal is completion. We aren't watching the end of a great story. We are watching the collapse of a limited series, so that a long running one can finally begin.
We have spent too much of our history obsessed with the word 'Freedom.' It’s a beautiful if abstract concept. We put it on coins and we sing about it at ballgames. But 'Freedom' is at best a status. It isn’t necessarily an agency. If we want to solve the modern American crisis, we have to stop talking about 'Freedom' and start talking about 'Influence.'
Because, as we’ve learned since 1965: Participation is not Power.
Imagine you are invited to an exclusive party at a high end club. You fought for years just to get past the velvet rope. You have a seat at the table. You are 'included.' But then you realize: you aren’t allowed to look at the menu. No one is going to pour you wine. You’re not even allowed to use the toilet. And yet, at the end of the night, you are handed the bill for a feast you weren’t allowed to taste. We are asked to pay what little we might earn to sustain a system that refuses to serve us."
That is the state of modern American 'Participation.'
We are told the system can work because we can vote. But when that vote is drowned out by dark money, and filtered through the 'Private Governments' we discussed earlier, the participation becomes perfunctory.
And this leads us to a most dangerous byproduct of our current system: The Vicious Cycle of Apathy. When people feel that their 'presence' doesn't translate into 'influence'. People stop playing the game when they see that no matter who they elect, the cost of housing goes up, the schools underperform. They don’t even bother to watch when the wealthy get wealthier while the poor get poorer and the middle class get nothing. They stop showing up. The antivirus wins. The system is in charge once more.
Some call this a 'failing' of the citizenry. Some call it 'laziness.' But if we look back at 1789, we realize again that this was the original design. The goal was always to ensure that the 'passions' of the many didn't interfere with the 'interests' of the few.
Apathy isn't a glitch in the American machine; it is the safety valve for concentrated power. If the people stop believing they matter, the 'Responsible Class' can govern in peace.
This desperation, the feeling that the system is unfixable, creates an empty space where the 'Great Man' Savior can take the place of hope.
We see it across the political spectrum. We look for a hero, a disruptor who can 'fix’ everything. But we have to be careful.
Authoritarianism loves a savior. Democracy requires a structure.
We see this most clearly in the rise of the Conservative Savior. Figures like Donald Trump are framed as disruptors, yet their actual record: aggressive deregulation, corporate tax shifts, and the expansion of military action is a pro-business homecoming. It isn't a rebellion against the 'Private Governments' we discussed; it is a fortification of them. He is a savior for the modern elitist Gentry, dressed in the rhetoric of the mob.
Conversely, the lack of a 'Savior' on the Democratic side is not an accident of personality; it is a result of a 'Business Deal.' The leadership of the Democratic party has no interest in a true disruption because they are 'Property Owners' too. They share the same fundamental commitment to the global financial structures and market stability as their counterparts. This is why men like Bernie Sanders, who actually challenge the Gentry's bottom line, find themselves labeled as 'Independents.' The machine recognizes them as a hacker, an 'unauthorized user' trying to rewrite the source code of the 1789 design. They want a new structure because they have no desire to be idolized in it. They just want it to work. But in a system built for idols and property, that makes them the greatest threat of all
The struggle of our time isn't about finding the right leader. It’s about building a system where the leader matters less because the people matter more. It’s about moving from a world where we are merely 'present' to a world where we are 'consequential.'
If we finally accept that we are not 'saving' a past, but 'completing' an unfinished project, then we have to ask the most important question of all: What does completion actually look like?
It isn't a vague feeling of unity. It isn't a return to 'civility.'
It is a structural renovation. It requires us to build three specific pillars that our founding fathers, by design, left out of the blueprints.
The First Pillar: Structural Equality
We have to move beyond the 'Right to Vote' and toward the 'Guarantee of Representation.' In the 18th century, the system was built to ensure that some votes counted more than others. In the 21st century, that is an inherited defect we can no longer afford.
Completion means ending the practice of Gerrymandering and other software of exclusion. It means reforming the Congress and the Electoral College so that they reflect the will of American people. We cannot claim to be a democracy while a person’s political influence is determined by their zip code rather than their citizenship. Structural equality means that participation must translate into proportional influence. If the majority of the people are speaking in unison, the system must be engineered to hear them, not to filter them.
The Second Pillar: Economic Accountability
We have to bring the 'Private Governments', the massive institutions of Big Tech and Finance, back into the social contract.
For too long, we have allowed the 'Market' to be a lawless zone where the rules of democracy don't apply.
If an entity has the power of a state, it must have the accountability of a state. If a corporation has the power to decide who gets a loan, who sees the news, and who has access to the digital town square, they are no longer just a business. They are a governing body. Completion means stripping away the 'private' shield that allows these entities to bypass our rights. It means ensuring that no boardroom, no matter how much dark money it contains, can override the public interest. We must reclaim the economy as a tool for the people, rather than a cage for them.
The Third Pillar: The Information Commons
Finally, we must treat the flow of information as a Public Utility, not a private commodity.
In a democracy, information is like oxygen. When that oxygen is owned by three or four billionaires who profit from suffocating us with outrage, democracy dies. We cannot have a functional society where 'the truth' is whatever an algorithm decides will keep you doom scrolling for five more minutes.
We need an Information Commons, a digital public square that belongs to the people, governed by transparency rather than 'trade secrets.' We must prioritize the health of our discourse over the wealth of the platforms.
These three pillars are not 'radical' ideas. They are missing pieces to the American dream of a true democratic society. They are the updates required to make a 250-year-old machine capable of serving a modern world. They are the difference between a system that manages its subjects and a system that empowers its citizens.
Building them would be the among the hardest things ever done. It would be met with the same 'backlash' that ended Reconstruction. But we have to realize that the alternative, trying to hold up a crumbling home, is no longer an option. We are either going to build a democracy that works for everyone, or we are going to watch the Republic we have, as intended, continue to work only for the few.
To move forward, we have to face the 'Fault in the Founding.'
This country, the house of the people it should be, was built with beautiful architecture from a storied history. But it was built on a poor foundation, tilted to favor one side over the other. When you live in a house like that, you have two choices. You can keep painting the walls and pretending the cracks aren’t there. Or you can do the hard thing; dig down and reinforce.
You don’t burn the house down because the basement is flooding. But you also don't keep buying paint while the wood is rotting.
This requires a fundamental shift in how we see ourselves. We have to move from being Subjects to being Citizens.
A 'Subject' is someone who waits for rights to be granted. A Subject asks permission. A Subject looks at the 'Responsible Class' and hopes for a kinder ruler. But a 'Citizen' recognizes that power is not a gift. It is an inherent right that must be organized. A Citizen doesn't ask for a seat at the table; a Citizen understands that they built and own the table. And that they must maintain it for all that will sit at it.
We are currently living through a moment that feels like an 'end time.' We see the division, the anger, and the erosion of our norms, and we fear our story is over.
But I want to offer you a different frame. This isn’t an ending.
We are in the painful process of trying to become the country we’ve claimed to be for 250 years. We are trying to do something that has never been done in human history: to build a truly multi-racial, multi-ethnic, broad-based democracy out of an authoritarian foundation. Of course it is hard. Of course there is resistance.
This is the Unfinished Revolution. The true American Revolt. Not against the Redcoats or the crown, but against the very ideals that are antithetical to the country we want to be.
We aren't here to 'save' a system that was designed to keep most of us out. We are here to finish the work of bringing everyone in. We have spent two centuries arguing about what was written in 1776 and 1787, but those weren't the only dates that mattered. In fact, they matter very little.
The 'Founding' wasn't 1776 or 1787.
The Founding is happening right now. Every time we demand accountability and every time we refuse to be 'managed' and insist on being 'heard,' we are founding this country anew.
We have the tools to make things better. To make things right.
The only question left is: Are we brave enough to use them?
Source: The Unfinished Revolution: From Subjects to Citizens
