Why the delay?

Are you prepared for fundamental change?

Why the delay between my Substack posts?

For a long time, I’ve been working on a post addressing the increasing number of Americans who are intellectually homeless. They cannot identify either with Woke or Trump. In broader terms, the post will be for those who reject both today’s Left and today’s Right.

These people, quite understandably, don’t know how to name their position. They wonder, “Am I a ‘classic liberal’? A constitutionalist? A Libertarian?” The point will be to identify the proper political system, and what makes it so, starting from first principles.

The proper system is not even represented on the Left-Right spectrum—at least not on the version that puts communism at one extreme and fascism at the other.

That scale makes Stalin and Hitler into polar opposites. It implies that the sensible, moral system would be a mixture: semi-communism, semi-fascism. As if there has to be dictatorship, but we can decide which is better, dictatorship of the proletariat or dictatorship of the Aryan race.

I’m not writing Substack posts for those who know my work and agree with me. I have other outlets for speaking to the pre-sold. I am writing for the thoughtful in the general public. And in the case of the post I’m writing, that created a problem.

After I laid the foundations for a rational social-political position, I realized that to put it into practice would require such radical reduction in the size and scope of government that the reader’s reaction might be: “Good in theory, won’t work in practice.”

I realized that what underlies our problems today is not just a couple of mis-formed classifications. This country and the West in general have been on the wrong path for some 150 years. Both our thinking and our laws have to start over, from a fresh slate.

Once I show, assume persuasively, what are the fundamentals of a proper social system, readers have to be willing to consider the radical changes that implementing it will take. For starters, the scope of government should be about one-tenth of what it now is. Sure, that reduction should be phased in over several years, but how many readers, outside the pre-sold ones, are prepared to consider that big a change?

People tend to take the laws passed before they were born as the given, the unchallengeable. But no measure put in place by human beings is unchallengeable. Indeed, we have a responsibility to challenge them. And 9 out of 10, or more than that, won’t survive the challenge.

The system I will be outlining may sound utopian, but it is essentially that of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Yes, we have to remove a few compromises, especially on slavery, and a few mistakes, but naming the philosophic basis of America’s ideals and explaining the need to return to them them is the project.

Coming soon.