What We Are Doing Here

OneThe thesis

This document assumes you have read the About page, which sets out who we are and how we write. This one sets out what the issue papers are built on — the diagnosis behind them, and the limits we accept on what we will propose.

A safety net that taxes escape more heavily than anything else a person can do. A tax code with two trillion dollars of exceptions. A liability rule that quietly decides who in America gets to own a home. An alliance that cannot admit Japan because of a sentence written in 1949.

Nobody decided any of that. Each piece was adopted separately, for its own reasons, by people who were not thinking about what it would combine with. The result is a country full of arrangements that would never pass if written down as a single sentence and put to a vote.

Two things have made the maintenance stop.

1.1   Principle has been subordinated to party

Parties once offered competing answers. Increasingly they function as teams, and a team is something you root for regardless of what it does.

That is not new, but it is pervasive, and it is corrosive in a specific way: a person who has decided in advance which side is right has no reason to examine anything. Principles have to sit above party, or they are not principles — only affiliations.

1.2   And curiosity has gone out of fashion

There was a time, and most of us are old enough to remember it, when senators and members of Congress and presidents asked experts questions because they wanted to understand something. They were trying to administer well. They were not performing, and they were not fishing for a clip.

Some of that instinct survives and a great deal of it does not. A country cannot maintain what it has stopped being curious about.

1.3   Which is also the reason for optimism

We have a reasonable country full of decent people, and a government that reflects them less well than daily life does. The problem is not that the machine was built wrong. It is that nobody has opened the hood in a long time.

Lincoln said it better than anyone has since, in his message to Congress on the first of December, 1862 — one month before the Emancipation Proclamation and the Homestead Act both took effect.

"It is not 'can any of us imagine better?' but 'can we all do better?' The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."1

Disenthrall is the word. Not tear down, not start over — free ourselves from assumptions we stopped noticing we were holding.

That is the work. And 1863 is the standard for how large it is permitted to be: the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Homestead Act, which took effect on the first of January — the same day Lincoln issued the Proclamation.

We should be honest that the land distributed had been taken from people already living on it. A standard you can invoke only selectively is not a standard. But the instrument was sound and the ambition was enormous.

Big and difficult things were done, by people of serious character, in the worst year the country ever had. If they could attempt that, we can attempt this.

TwoThe vision

A country where the largest possible number of people hold equity in the American dream — a stake in something that appreciates, a reason to care how it turns out, and the standing to build rather than only to work.

Not barons and serfs. Not spectators.

ThreeThe mission

Stop kicking cans.

Lincoln again, in the same message to Congress:

"Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."1

That is the standard. Not what people think of the work this morning — what they will make of it in a hundred years. It produces better decisions, because it removes the temptation that produces bad ones.

So: take one structural problem at a time. Establish what is actually known about it. Propose repairs that have evidence behind them. And print the strongest case against our own conclusions alongside them.

We are trying to be useful to a citizen who wants to understand something rather than to be told what to think about it.

FourWhat we believe

SixWhat this looks like in practice

Every issue paper follows the same structure, and the structure is the argument.

It states what is actually known, with sources named and dated. It sets out specific repairs. It devotes a full section to the strongest case against itself, including evidence we would rather not have found. It lists what we concede. It says plainly what the reform will not fix. And it ends with the argument compressed to something a person can carry into a conversation.

Where a figure cannot be traced to a primary source, we remove it rather than soften it. Where published estimates disagree, we give the range rather than the number that suits us. Where an organisation that disagrees with our conclusion has the best data, we cite it and say who they are.

None of that is unusual for scholarship. It is unusual for advocacy, and that is the point.

SevenWhy 1863

In the worst year in the history of the republic — with the outcome of the war genuinely in doubt and the country's survival an open question — an administration issued the Emancipation Proclamation, opened the public lands to anyone who would work them, and delivered two hundred and seventy-two words at Gettysburg that are still the clearest statement of what the country is for.

Not one of those was a small or safe measure. Each was contested, each was attacked, and each was undertaken by people who had every excuse available to do less.

The bar was set in the worst year we ever had. Nothing in front of us now is harder than what was in front of them.

We take the name as a standard rather than as nostalgia. The question that organisation asks itself about every piece of work is the one Lincoln asked Congress: not can any of us imagine better, but can we all do better.