Five Things You Can Do to Make America a Better Place Tomorrow (No Matter Who Wins)

In our wise minds, we all know that U.S. politics as presented by legacy media operations is mostly make-believe. A performance put on by the folks in charge to keep us entertained. When a parent plays hide-and-seek with their kid, they loudly stomp around, telegraphing every move, pretending not to see that tiny foot poking out from behind the couch cushions. The child too knows the game, but they giggle anyway. American national politics is little different.

For infants and toddlers, a game of hide-and-seek can help build memory, social skills, and emotional control. In contrast, the imagination-play of American politics is a manipulative dead end with real-world stakes that we actively ignore. The reality is that we’ve all been lobotomized by our political “news” system, trained to believe U.S. governance is a freight train conducted only in Washington, D.C., and reported on by cake-faced “experts” in expensive studios in New York. 

Our own lives are real enough, though. So here are five things American voters can do to build a better future in the next four years, regardless of the outcome of your doom-scrolling:

Number 1: Acknowledge and cultivate the simple truth that the president of the United States is not an elected monarch.

The next POTUS, whether male or female, Black or orange, won’t fix all our problems, nor will they plunge us into some dictatorial hellscape. Trump is not the second coming of Hitler. “Comrade Kamala” isn’t a secret Maoist, waiting in the wings to consolidate all power in her “Afro-Indian” clutches. Even if the most imaginative fantasies of the “resistance” proved true, the U.S. president is highly limited in terms of the power they’re able to secure for themselves compared to other chief executives in other liberal democracies. This is the Janus-faced beauty of America’s “checks and balances” system, which was born from the distinct paranoia of the American Founders and the Anti-Federalists’ fierce contempt for centralized power.

During the McCarthy era, historian Richard Hofstadter began describing what he called the “paranoid style” of American politics: hyperbolic language, conspiracy narratives, us-versus-them thinking, and constant appeals to emotion over reason. Most academics and the mainstream media like to think this only applies to the American right, but that’s not what Hofstadter argued. His thesis pointed to an American tendency that cuts across both the right and left—a habit of seeing phantom enemies and hidden plots, full of mustachioed villains, waiting in the shadows, ready to establish absolute tyranny.

This paranoia has roots in the American Revolution itself, where the threat of British tyranny got wildly exaggerated to rally troops for a colonial revolt that, if we’re being honest, wasn’t exactly necessary. Unlike most revolutions, ours wasn’t a class struggle—it was a fight against a symbol of foreign oppression, King George III. And the mentality sticks. Another George III could be just around the corner. Keep your eyes peeled. Stay vigilant.

Much of our political paranoia goes back to the Revolution’s rabble-rousing polemicists, mostly notably Thomas Paine. His massively influential 46-page pamphlet Common Sense painted the British crown as a revolting tyranny—mostly because he wanted to see the status quo burn. After helping ignite our revolution, Paine tried the same routine in France, where he ironically ended up on the Jacobins’ execution list during the Reign of Terror, spared only by James Monroe’s diplomatic efforts. Paine was a great social critic but ultimately a career revolutionary, and not so different from today’s protest-hopping grad student radicals. Common Sense rallied the troops needed to overthrow the British, but it also helped bake a deep paranoia of centralized power into our national DNA.

As Americans, we’re desperate for a benevolent despot to fix our problems. At the same time, we crave absolute independence, both in mind and spirit. This leaves us permanently at war with ourselves—forever paranoid that someone, somewhere, is coming to take away our “freedoms.” Little do we know, we already gave up our freedom by buying into the media narratives of the U.S. president as savior or villain—someone capable of either creating all our problems or delivering us from them.

A major component of “Trump derangement syndrome” is the fact that most Americans—including national media figures—don’t actually understand how our federal system works. Despite all the pearl-clutching, we don’t live in anything resembling the fragile Weimar Republic of interwar Germany—a democratic structure hastily designed under the threat of military occupation. By contrast, the U.S. system of government is one of the most stable in modern history—nearly 240 years strong. For better or worse, the American Founders, particularly the Anti-Federalists, were determined to prevent the rise of a tyrannical national government or an American despot. While they didn’t get all the checks on power they wanted in the 1787 negotiations, they managed to build in enough protections—notably, the Bill of Rights—to push back against the Federalists’ efforts to erode all the local democracy enshrined in the original Articles of Confederation.

The result was a compromise state with local and national control in equal parts. It’s a system where national legislation is notoriously difficult to pass—especially now that there are 50 states. So don’t expect much to change at the federal level. The dysfunction is guaranteed to continue. However, take solace knowing there’s likely no system of government in the world more resistant to a dictatorial takeover than the one created at Independence Hall in 1787.

Number 2: Remind yourself that local, state, and municipal elections continue to matter most.

Thanks to the Anti-Federalists of the Constitution era, state and municipal matters are where your vote really counts. The further back a candidate or issue is on the ballot, the more likely it will have a tangible impact on you and your family’s daily lives.

Ask any political science professor who’s taught American government 101 (this writer included), and they’ll tell you nearly all students enter college believing the U.S. president can unilaterally pass legislation. Almost none understands the unique features of the American system: its extensive network of local governance. Mayors, city councils, school boards, elected judges, and even elected sheriffs and constables—all these layers of local government form the backbone of American democracy.

This is the positive side of Alexis de Tocqueville’s famously dualistic assessment of American culture. While he believed America was more individualistic, he also noted that it was more politically conformist and materialistic than other nations. Yes, we have freedom of the press and assembly, but Tocqueville observed that he had never seen a country “where there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” Nevertheless, Tocqueville saw this lack of intellectual independence as balanced by America’s extensive network of local democracy and voluntary civic associations. However, as reality has gone digital since the birth of the iPhone, social media and device addiction have killed off those critical voluntary associations and civic groups.

Here’s where that leaves us. On one hand, if we want to keep the country together in its current 50-state form, our national governing structure is likely too weak to combat the rise of corporate tyranny and the flood of big-dollar donations aligned with vested interests. However, it’s also true that no other liberal democracy has a system of local governance more robust than ours. This local control is where the real resistance to corporate tyranny can be affected. All the social democratic policies that Bernie Sanders and his Denmark-adoring supporters dream of—single-payer health care, free college, robust welfare programs—can be achieved at the state level. There’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution that prevents it.

Emily Zackin’s Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places illustrates how many state constitutions already safeguard positive rights beyond federal requirements. New York and Pennsylvania have major labor protections written into their constitutions; Montana’s constitution guarantees environmental rights; New Jersey mandates something akin to equal access to quality education. These examples prove that states can drive significant reform and ensure positive rights at the local level. Reject the horse-race mentality. Local races are what matter.

Number 3: Embrace nonpartisan—and nonideological—organizing against corporate-managerial tyranny.

The management class and their armies of lobbyists on Capitol Hill have an insatiable drive to impoverish not only their own low-level employees but all low-level employees in their sectors. The solution is to support NGOs like American Compass and the Economic Policy Institute—organizations that tackle issues of pay, benefits, and affordability from a no-nonsense, nonideological perspective. American Compass, in particular, seems committed to midwifing a new, practical, working-class movement, one that wrests collective bargaining efforts away from both photo-negative white supremacists and the hetero-hating bigots masquerading as sexual “liberation” warriors. The turn toward identity politics has always been a narcissistic, neoliberal, and bourgeois concern. It’s time to shed it.

Other than your spouse and, maybe, your children, no one cares about your identity. “Expect less of the world and more of yourself,” to paraphrase the late, great Christopher Lasch. Who needs the validation of society? Posers, that’s who.

The post-1960s alliance of wage workers with radical social egalitarian activism—and all the campus-protest-hopping, moral tourism that comes with it—was a political marriage forged in academic conferences and SDS meeting halls. It makes no practical sense. It’s also one of the great unspoken reasons for labor’s collapse, and the parallel freefall in general middle-class affordability, over the last two generations. Ever met a wage worker without a college degree who thinks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her liberal arts school crowd represent them? Neither have I.

Bernie-Trump voters, allow me to introduce you to Reagan-Democrats. Working-class and lower-middle-class folks who reject bourgeois identitarian narcissism. Boy, if ever there was a time for a new political movement, it’s now.

Aside from a few outliers like Sen. Josh Hawley and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, the Republican Party remains as anti-labor and “pro-business”—i.e., beholden to the moneyed classes—as ever. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders and the small Sanderista wing of the Democrats are still the only federal politicians willing to risk anything for policies like the PRO Act or a livable federal minimum wage. If we want to prevent the total annihilation of the American middle class, these issues need to be front and center in our politics—areas of mass mobilization and, ultimately, consensus.

To make that happen, culture war distractions must be surgically separated from economic issues like paychecks and affordability. Transgender bathroom demands don’t belong in the same conversation as any Gomperist pursuit of material needs. By embracing liberationist “equity” rhetoric and corporate-driven DEI demographic engineering—which almost always undermines the interests of working people—labor unions start to look indistinguishable from corporate management: detached, performative, and hoarding virtue instead of fighting for employees’ economic value. In doing so, they kill all remaining trust working people might have in unions—along with any chance of real paycheck issues getting the attention they deserve.

By Wednesday morning, the transformation of American politics into a middle-school student body election will be complete. Every class and economic issue in America has been sublimated into an unwinnable culture war, benefiting only the two-party gerontocracy, their legacy media allies, and the donor class pulling the strings from behind the scenes. From here, it’s only up, right?

Number 4: Shed the liberal vs. conservative labels—and all left-right divisions.

The core deception of American politics is the notion that traditional left-right divisions apply to our culture. They don’t. The radical left vs. reactionary right binary originated in the French Revolution, describing the divide between bloodthirsty Enragés radicals and royalist Réactionnaires. That split made sense in late 18th-century France. But our own revolution ended six years before theirs, in a completely different social, political, and religious context. In truth, the American Revolution wasn’t much of a revolution at all—the wealthy coastal merchant class that ruled British North America before the war was still in charge afterward, just minus the crown’s oversight. This is why many historians call it the “American War of Independence” or, better yet, the “American Colonial Revolt.”

What the American Revolution did accomplish, however, was the total annihilation of the country’s Tory classical conservative tradition—the royalist, pro-aristocratic forces tied to the British crown. Revolutionary era mobs burned down the houses of Tory and British loyalists, chasing conservatives north to Canada or, better yet, back to Britain. Ever since, Americans have thought of themselves as “born-equal,” as Tocqueville famously argued. To consider oneself inherently superior by birth is, in American terms, to “put on airs.” This cultural attitude has many positives, but there’s a dark side too. The downside of our liberal society is that American politics remains trapped within a Lockean—and Smithian—liberal-individualist framework that worships the market above social good. A space where dime-novel frauds like Ayn Rand successfully sell a Saturday-morning cartoon version of Nietzsche’s Übermensch to slack-jawed yokels who believe, like her, that “society isn’t real” and that they can “overcome anything” if they just “put their minds to it.”

In American politics, there is really only one divide that matters. Yet, like with our “news” media, which obsesses over the presidential horserace and ignores the local issues impacting our lives, we remain trapped in a narrow lens when it comes to the country’s true fault lines. Democrat vs. Republican. Liberal vs. conservative. Red vs. blue. These are nothing more than fiery shadows on the wall in Plato’s proverbial cave—manipulative caricatures created by our wardens to narrate our existence. Embracing these frames gets us nowhere.

The real divide is populists vs. progressives. Lasch outlined America’s true sociopolitical split in his magnum opus The True and Only Heaven, though editors at W. W. Norton convinced him not to use it in the title. In Lasch’s worldview, there are left populists, like Bernie Sanders, and right populists, like JD Vance. For Lasch, “populism” is a political persuasion that champions local democracy, social responsibility, and the interests of ordinary working people over the moral fashions of elites. Neither Sanders nor Vance fits this ideal perfectly—both are inconsistent on relevant issues to the point of hypocrisy. But that’s the point. No one aligns perfectly with any ideology unless they’re inventing it themselves. Compromise on culture war issues and forming a coherent coalition against corporate tyranny and the moneyed elites is our only hope.
Lasch saw populism as a latent American philosophy rooted in moral values, self-sufficiency, and a rejection of unchecked “progress”—a word that should appear in scare quotes more often than not. Progressives, on the other hand, embrace a top-down, managerial approach to governance and social leadership. They see social and technological progress as interconnected, inevitable, and paramount.

Progressives yearn for a highly engineered society, both literally and metaphorically, which is why they view DEI practices that privilege some racial groups over others as not only fair but “just” and aligned with the “march of history.” In their minds, these policies are part of undeniable progress, and they, as responsible bureaucrats, are simply ushering it along. On the flip side, Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel also fit squarely into the progressive camp, despite their disdain for DEI and the like. Just as with populists, there are left progressives and right progressives.

If anything, Musk is the ultimate progressive. Whether it’s boring speculative tunnels under Los Angeles or convincing high-speed rail advocates to hold out for “hyperloop” technology that’s never worked—and most likely isn’t safe for humans—Musk is the StarWars generation’s Albert Speer. Instead of Speer’s “World Capital Germania” seeking to bring megalomaniacal architecture to life, Musk’s technophile lunacy involves making humanity an “interplanetary species” and placing microchips inside our skulls. But it’s hard to question his authenticity. Perhaps more than anyone that’s ever lived, Musk believes in technological progress. The inevitability of progress is his only through line. Musk takes massive federal and state handouts to build Tesla, then unironically campaigns to lead a second Trump administration’s “government efficiency” commission, aiming to slash half the federal bureaucracy—all in the name of, you guessed it, “progress.”

Musk, Bezos, and the rest of the Silicon Valley executive elite are the antithesis of populism. Musk and Bezos are like Howard Hughes with better emotional regulation—brilliant men, wholly detached from reality, chasing Gen X’s childhood Star Trek fantasies. As if sending humans to space or Mars colonies—where there’s no food or oxygen—would somehow represent a leap forward.

Number 5: Break free from the two-party cartel.

Ever since the Civil War, our republic has been held hostage by a two-party duopoly that rigs the system against real choice. It’s time we admitted that the Republican and Democratic parties work less like opponents and more like co-conspirators, monopolizing power, gatekeeping dissent, and making it impossible for any true outsider to gain traction. America’s bipartisan stranglehold limits not only our meaningful debate but our entire political imagination of what’s possible. Together, these two parties block reforms that threaten elite interests and force Americans into a recurring cycle of voting for the “lesser evil” rather than genuine representation. Yet we somehow accept this reality as “democratic,” even though more Americans than ever reject both parties and crave a meaningful alternative.

To restore true democracy, we must dismantle this cartel’s grip on our ballots and our minds. The recent independent presidential run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—and his briefly lived We the People Party—should serve as the final proof that no one can trick-shot their way into the presidency or build an effective third-party apparatus that challenges the duopoly. We must face the bleak reality: We don’t live in a “two-party democracy” but, rather, are ruled by a two-party cartel. If someone with Kennedy’s centrist appeal, connections, and billionaire backing can’t break through, no one can.

It’s time U.S. voters of all stripes reject the blinders imposed by these mafioso-like organizations, which function as twin towers of political corruption, maintaining an iron grip over the American empire and its people. Passing a constitutional amendment to implement proportional representation—with a 5% threshold for the House—and reforming Senate apportionment is no longer optional. It’s essential.

If Americans want to reclaim their government from the tyranny of corporate donors, corrupt politicians, and their obedient media allies, then our structure of government needs updating. If the U.S. had proportional representation, like nearly every other liberal democracy outside the Anglosphere, we might already have an exciting new populist party—similar to the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) in Germany. A party that supports greater government intervention and protections for workers and the middle class, while rejecting woke social engineering measures and unchecked immigration.

Several NGOs, like FairVote, Equal Citizens, and even the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Our Common Purpose project, are already advocating for versions of representation reform. They deserve a look. Though, all of them stop short of advocating an actual proportional representation, which is essential for smaller parties to thrive and, thus, for new voter coalitions to form. In a country that will soon be approaching 400 million people, we must stop pretending that massive structural reform is a mere side issue compared to the quadrennial “apocalypse” of each presidential election cycle.