Liberty and Justice

“Make America Great Again” began as a 2016 campaign slogan, was emblazoned on thousands of red hats, and was soon abbreviated to MAGA, signifying an entire political faction, a way of looking at the world, a way of life for some.

MAGA prompted not just a reaction but The Resistance, as the opposing faction styles itself, a name and a slogan taken not from peacetime political opposition but from wartime struggle against foreign occupation.

We are now in the semiquincentennial year of 2026. What has become of America over the last decade? Who and where are we, ten years and two presidents later?

America is unsettled, physically and mentally unwell, angry, frightened, in perpetual conflict with itself, barely holding together economically and coming apart in spirit.

Political affiliation is no longer something one brings into the polling place and exercises, in private, every two years; it is identity itself.

Disposable campaign signs designed for lawns and windows gave way to flags designed to fly for as long as their fabric holds out, the perfect symbol of a permanent campaign.

Our roiling culture once produced new and challenging ideas about the meaning of America. As both land and idea, a new world leader in access and expression, America produced bold and fractious and fertile debates about what the American idea is and who belongs to the land. Today, the loudest voices on both sides seek to exclude as many people as possible from their vision of our country.

And yet, even as they grasp at power, the loudest, most extreme, most aggressive figures in both factions display a masochistic attachment to their own feelings of powerlessness, which they advertise as enthusiastically as they shout their own mental health diagnoses, another distinct and unhealthy contemporary marker of identity; but, unlike their other infirmities, their supposed powerlessness can be easily blamed on their enemies.

What can be done? Neither of our two leading political factions has an answer. Both have shrunk to historic lows in the affiliation and affections of the public. Both are compelled to bow to the demands of their most extreme elements rather than answer to the needs of the great American center.

Further destabilizing our politics, the faction that controls the White House enjoys an enormous advantage over the other one, even as presidential elections are increasingly decided by the narrowest of electoral margins.

For decades, long preceding the current administration, authority undreamt of by our founders has been concentrated in the executive branch. Following the 9/11 attacks, the Congress handed the office of the President of the United States emergency powers testing the bounds of the Constitution, and the people have been largely dependent on the mood and will of one person as guarantor of their rights.

The current decade began with a year of pandemic and civil unrest, aggravated by and in turn aggravating the usual tensions and conflicts of a presidential election campaign.

Most sane people remember 2020 as a dreadful year. And yet both factions are dominated by people who seem to want to relive it, for very different but equally destructive ways. The rest of us want to move forward.

This is not a situation to inspire sound sleep, and America does not sleep well.

A demoralized legislative branch has allowed itself to wither and decay into a leaderless mob of social media performers who have abdicated their responsibility to the people who elected them. Congress as an institution is widely detested, yet most of its members are reelected without serious opposition.

On both sides, and in the disaffected center, people speak of the threat of civil war. Some are terrified at the prospect, some seem gleeful, some seem unable to make up their minds, some just want the storm to come at last to clear the sky.

We should consider that the war has already started; but it’s not happening in the streets, for the simple reason that we no longer live our lives in public places. We live online.

And still, conflict between political factions doesn’t satisfy the bloodlust of the parties involved; it gives way to more ancient conflicts: young versus old, men versus women, native versus foreign, gentile versus Jew.

An entire economy appears dedicated to reviving the worst, most primitive, most irrational, most discredited ideas and movements of the right and left. Ancient enemies and conspiracies are exhumed, unkillable precisely because of their unreality.

Compromise becomes harder when the only change of mind people can accept is conversion, moving from one extreme to another.

This endless war is exhausting all of us, impairing our judgment, corroding our character.

Radicals of each faction view not just the political leadership but the entire membership – all the voters – of the other faction as an enemy to be destroyed; meanwhile, completely walled off from the opposing faction they loathe and consider too unclean to risk contact with, they turn their anger on their own moderates. It’s no surprise that both factions grow smaller every day, while the ranks of the independent grow.

We speak of our Constitution with reverence, but we don’t honor it, possibly because we don’t realize we are part of it. We constitute the United States. Present tense.

Our schools have failed to teach us that the written document is only one part of the greater American constitution. In the words of founder Francis Lightfoot Lee, “constitutions employ every pen.”

It’s time to pick up ours.

II.

“...with liberty and justice for all.”

- Pledge of Allegiance (Francis Bellamy)

Those are probably the least controversial words of the Pledge of Allegiance. No one could object to “liberty and justice for all”. But too many Americans, as they settle into their political alignments, seize on one and neglect the other.

The word liberty has long been a favorite of the American right, and it has found its way into the names of many conservative organizations, while the term “social justice” has become entirely identified with the American left.

One side grabbed liberty, the other grabbed justice. But neither of these can stand alone; only together do they constitute an ideal for a free and democratic nation to strive for. And no incomplete, divided, depleted ideal can compete with the pleasure of smashing one’s enemies as the animating force of a political faction.

Political parties are a clever device to motivate citizens to side with government and against their fellow citizens. When “our” faction is in power, we become principally concerned with dispensing justice; when “their” party is in power, we care only about liberty, defined largely as disobedience to the state.

The preferred number of parties or factions in a democracy ought to be the minimum number, which is two. We are not trying to create a third party but to influence the others.

We believe in liberty and justice.

We believe in the rule of law. To believe in the law means to respect it as well as to obey it, and that respect entails not ritually denouncing courts or judges as “corrupt” when their rulings run contrary to the interests of our political faction.

Both leading political factions today cater to those who treat law and procedure with contempt when state institutions fail to produce the result they demand.

Politics and criminal justice mingle too freely in today’s political imagination. Officeholders and candidates answer to, or are indistinguishable from, a growing cadre of conspiratorial thinkers, “influencers” of every kind who are not so much interested in winning political contests as they are consumed by the vengeful fantasy of exposing and prosecuting a largely imaginary cabal of wealthy and powerful criminals.

Too many partisans have come to believe that democracy is best served by jailing their political opponents. This is a dangerous and destructive fantasy, unredeemed by the reality of politicians breaking the law. Though the two worlds sometimes collide, political problems are not solved in criminal courts. “Lawfare” is real and practiced by both factions.

Too many movements claim to pursue justice but turn dispiriting and corrosive because their advocates are driven by a burning, barely disguised lust for revenge.

We must break the cycle of retribution.

We believe in an independent judiciary and in a Department of Justice that does not exist to do the will of the President.

We believe in bringing the power of the presidency back into balance with the powers of the congress and the courts.

When a president abuses his power to achieve his aims, and his successor in turn abuses his power to undo those executive actions, the orders may cancel each other out but the damage to the system is cumulative. It also corrupts us as individuals and turns the machinery of progress against itself.

We believe that restraint of presidential power extends to the decent limits presidents should impose on themselves. Insulting and obscene language has always been a weapon in the hands of the powerless, but it carries a very different charge when it comes out of the mouths (and social media accounts) of the powerful; it is precisely because politicians carry a big stick that they ought to speak softly. Insults, abuse, threats, and mockery are undignified in the public statements of public officials, and the taboo against them deserves to be revived.

We believe in the free market, in the right of citizens to dispose of their property as they choose and to engage in commerce with other citizens. When Thomas Jefferson rewrote John Locke’s “life, liberty, and property” as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, it was expansion, not substitution.

We also believe that society must tax its citizens to pay for its upkeep and regulate the free market to keep its operations consistent with law and justice.

We believe that democratic government is created to bring order (liberty and justice) to society; to set the rules rather than to choose winners. A spoils system corrupts both the government that administers it and the citizens who profit from it. Democratic government improves society less through distribution of resources than by creating the conditions whereby citizens may improve their own lives, and by protecting what its citizens have created through their own initiative.

How much we tax, how we spend, and what and how we regulate, is the proper business of democratic government, which involves the three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial.

We believe that using the power to tax and spend as a tool to reward or punish one’s political opponents, or to improve the human condition beyond what civil society has achieved, corrodes our society and its institutions.

We believe that all branches of government enjoy too many privileges, operate too much in secrecy, and are corrupted through collusion with those they are charged with regulating; legislators and executive policymakers should not hold stock in companies at the same time as they set the policies that help determine the value of that stock, nor should the government itself be taking a stake in publicly traded companies.

We believe in immigration. “Liberty and justice for all” is still an inspiration to all who “yearn to breathe free”, in the words of Emma Lazarus, and we should welcome them.

Because America is both land and idea, we have not just a right but an obligation to exclude immigrants who are hostile to our values. Not everyone can or should arrive on our shores.

Most of us are the descendants of immigrants. We support a system of fair and lawful immigration where no one cuts the line, and where one’s immigration status is not subject to the whims of the executive branch.

Immigrants come to America for freedom and opportunity, and for the foreign-born and native-born alike, opportunity means the opportunity to get rich. We should welcome this. We have never been ashamed to equate the American dream with wealth. Millionaires and billionaires build things, employ people, and pay taxes. We want more of that. CEO isn’t a job an immigrant is going to steal from you at lower wages. There’s always room in America to create a new one.

Globalization has its benefits and drawbacks, but it is not something a nation can simply opt out of. The information technology that drives the 21st century economy is largely an American invention, but America’s own economy would be much smaller without the participation of foreign nations and firms that have benefited from American technology.

The American idea of liberty and justice has long been an inspiration not just to those who long to come to America but to those who would shape their societies on the American model. If we believe in our own values, we ought to support those who share them, for our own benefit as well as theirs.

“America First” should not mean America neutral. We side with South Korea against North Korea, with Taiwan against China, with Israel against Iran, with Ukraine against Russia, because our values and our interests are not separable, and hostile nations who oppose the former tend, not coincidentally, to oppose the latter.

America must always be willing to support free people under attack and unfree people who resist tyranny. But it is not America’s, or any nation’s, role to settle every conflict, and only in the most extraordinary circumstances should we send our own service members to fight in foreign lands.

We believe that the category of “protected groups” is vital to both American civil rights law and to international law, such as the convention on genocide. We also believe that the concept of a protected group can run into conflict with the ideal of “equal protection”, and we must be careful to maintain a balance.

We believe in public education; many of America’s finest minds were shaped in the nation’s public schools, which continue to provide a first-rate education for millions, regardless of their economic and social status. But there is no ignoring the failure of our schools to provide even a minimum of academic preparation for millions of others, even as our spending on them is commensurate with spending in other nations, which achieve better results. In many districts, schools have lost sight of their purpose and serve as jobs programs, top heavy with administrators.

We believe that a democratic society that preserves and defends the rights of its citizens must above all defend their right to be secure in their homes and on the streets, in all public and private places. The duty of the state to apprehend and punish criminals must not be compromised by a misguided attempt at social engineering that regards criminals as representatives of oppressed classes and not as individuals with will and agency who have chosen to do wrong.

We believe in prosecuting fraud. America’s increasingly bitter and mistrustful political culture, its hostility to so-called expertise, and the growth of an irrational and vengeful populism on both left and right, reflects our failure to hold to account any major figure in the 2008 financial crisis.

Today, increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) technology holds out the promise of solving longstanding scientific and technical problems but also enables new and difficult to understand forms of financial fraud, targeting the most vulnerable. Ours is already a dangerously low trust society, and now it is situated in a wider world where we cannot even trust the evidence of our eyes and ears.

We believe in science and medicine, and we consider the corruption of these most urgently objective of pursuits by ideology – whether at the hands of temporary political appointees or of through the efforts of a permanent class in academia and professional organizations – is a nothing less than a threat to the lives and safety of citizens.

We believe in scholarship and free inquiry. But American universities, though still among the world’s finest, are now notorious for being inhospitable to dissent from the prevailing ideology.

University professors moonlight lucratively as propagandists for political factions, trading on the respectability of their institutional affiliation and their former scholarship, deluding themselves into thinking their role is to “defend democracy”, even when that means compromising their integrity by knowingly spreading lies. In doing so, they play into the hands of opportunistic politicians who would cheerfully destroy our centers of learning in exchange for a little notoriety.

We believe in a free press. But protection from government pressure or censorship will not protect the press from its own worst impulses, which include the tendency among many of its more prominent figures to believe they have a mission to shape society by leading the public to certain conclusions rather than by reporting the news accurately and trusting their readers and audience to reach their own.

All of these beliefs are predicated on an overriding belief in the importance of balancing powers and interests, in the need to respect the democratic, legal, and constitutional processes in all their sometimes frustrating and slow-moving complexity, and in the understanding that society grows and improves when all its constituent parts are operating in harmony, not when one interested and motivated party wills it.

III.

Who will we be when the era of MAGA and The Resistance is over? Will we be stronger or weaker? What will the landscape look like after this battle for our minds is over?

Who will we be after the war?

First, we must imagine the war ending.

Because this is a war of the information age, with screens as its battlefields, very few have paid any price in blood and ruins. Those of us old enough to remember when a “computer war” was a science fiction scenario might recognize its consequences: the relative absence of death and physical destruction has given few people reason to put down their weapons, even as the war’s psychic costs grow like our appalling national debt.

We say things to strangers online we would never dare say to their faces; for own good, our own happiness, we need to spend more time in rooms with each other, where we can see the consequences of our words on the faces and bodies standing in front of us.

It can be difficult to imagine (or remember) a world in which we don’t spend several hours a day online, but it shouldn’t be difficult to imagine a world in which we treat people online the way we treat them face to face. It’s just a matter of choosing to be our better selves, and in the online world that’s no more costly or difficult than choosing to be our worst selves.

Most of us have a terrible longing for life with other people, only to find ourselves frightened once we find ourselves in a room with them. We’ve lost our social skills through neglect, we seem to have outgrown clubs (if indeed they even exist anymore), and restaurants are too damned expensive.

Social media has been engineered to reward our worst impulses, and for many people rage has become the most reliable source of pleasure. This is deeply unhealthy for us as individuals and as a society. The pandemic worsened this situation to the point where only the promise of a riot roused people to break out of their isolation. The renewal of civic life, which is the heart of democracy itself, depends, quite simply, on a revival of social life, which is in vital ways the very opposite of social media.

Bringing people together under the banner of common beliefs and a desire for communal life that is not just civil but positively a pleasure is central to the mission of Liberty and Justice.

Fraternal orders of all kinds flourished in America for years, and their decline, along with the decline in manufacturing, the decline in large-scale, democratic social life (moviegoing, bowling leagues, the amusement arcade), and the corrosion of civility in politics (at the same time brutally uncivil politics has oozed into all the empty spaces in lives previously occupied by healthy pursuits), is symptomatic, for so many people, of the spiritual, if not material, decline of 21st century America.

Liberty and Justice seeks to revive the spirit of the fraternal order, with no secret handshakes or arcane codes or odd headgear, just the desire to renew human bonds under the banner of belief in what Lincoln called “the last, best hope of earth.”

Even independents feel the need to belong, so long as acquiescence to lies isn’t the price of belonging.

Liberty and Justice cannot promise to bring back manufacturing, or movie theaters, or bowling alleys, or one party’s president sitting down with another party’s Speaker of the House for a beer, but it can throw a party and invite everyone who loves this country.

You don’t have to join. Just show up.