I believe most patriotic Americans are, like me, sick and tired of watching dangerous extremists on both sides of the political spectrum tear our country apart. The vast majority of us believe in America and want to work together to build a better future for everyone. But the voice of this broad American majority will not be heard, and its hopes will not be realized, unless we organize.
What follows is my proposal for how we might begin. I hope you will read it, consider it, challenge it, and, if you feel inspired, share it. For centuries, Americans have stepped forward in difficult moments to make our country better and carry forward the unfinished work of building a more perfect union. Now it’s our turn.
AMERICAN RENEWAL
A Manifesto for the American Majority
There are moments in the life of a nation when the greatest danger is not that its people have lost faith in their country, but that they have lost faith in one another. We are living through such a moment now.
Americans are told every day that we have divided into two irreconcilable camps; that our neighbors are our enemies; that compromise is surrender; and that the only way to save the country is to defeat the other half of it. Politicians build careers by making us afraid of one another, media companies profit by keeping us angry, social media algorithms learn what frightens and enrages us and feed it back without end. The result is a dangerous illusion that the loudest and angriest Americans somehow represent America itself.
They do not.
Most Americans do not want our Capitol attacked or our elections overturned. We do not want white supremacists marching through our streets. We do not want terrorists celebrated, antisemitism excused, police and prisons abolished, borders erased, minorities demonized, or fellow citizens treated as enemies because they vote differently from us. Most Americans are not revolutionaries of the left or authoritarians of the right. We are practical, decent, imperfect people trying to raise families, build meaningful lives, keep our communities safe, and leave our children a country stronger than the one we inherited.
But we should not underestimate the danger we face. Societies cannot survive indefinitely when their citizens lose the capacity to solve problems together. Great nations rarely collapse because everyone suddenly decides to destroy them. They decline when institutions stop functioning, common problems go unsolved, corruption becomes normalized, citizens retreat into hostile factions, and the bonds holding a society together become weaker than the forces pulling it apart. No matter our past accomplishments, America is not immune to these dangers simply because we are America.
We have seen an assault on our Capitol intended to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power. We have seen political leaders undermine confidence in legitimate elections and treat constitutional constraints as inconveniences. We have seen white supremacists march openly through an American city chanting racist and antisemitic slogans. We have also seen extremists on the left romanticize revolutionary violence, celebrate or excuse terrorist organizations that have murdered Americans, call to “globalize the intifada,” advocate abolishing police and prisons, and describe the American experiment itself as something to be dismantled rather than improved.
These forces are not identical, nor are they equally powerful at every moment. But both feed a politics of dehumanization. Both tell us that some of our fellow citizens are not merely wrong but illegitimate. And both gain strength by convincing us that we must tolerate extremism on our own side because the people on the other side are even worse.
That is how a republic loses its center of gravity.
The great political fact of our time is not that America has become a nation of extremists. It is that the extremists are organized and empowered and the majority is not.
The organized extremes vote in primaries, raise money, recruit candidates, dominate political media, punish dissent, and demand obedience. The rest of us too often complain, tune out, abandon the political parties, or simply hope that somehow the country will right itself. But no republic can indefinitely survive when those who seek to divide it are better organized than those who wish to preserve it.
Most Americans want many of the same fundamental things. We want our children to be safe, loved, healthy, and well educated. We want our borders controlled and our immigration system to be orderly, humane, and worthy of our values. We want to walk safely through our communities. We want healthcare we can afford and understand, good jobs, affordable homes, clean air and water, and a fair opportunity to build meaningful lives. We want a government that works, an economy that creates opportunity, and a country strong and confident enough to confront its failures without losing sight of its extraordinary achievements.
Most Americans understand that our country is imperfect without believing it is evil. We know that patriotism does not require blindness to our failures any more than acknowledging those failures requires contempt for America. We can recognize the terrible crimes committed against Native Americans, the barbarism of slavery, the persistence of racism and discrimination, and the many times our country has fallen short of its professed ideals while still celebrating the generations of Americans who struggled to expand freedom, opportunity, knowledge, and human dignity.
We also know from our daily lives that people who disagree with us politically are not necessarily stupid, wicked, or enemies of the republic. We work together, raise families together, worship together, serve our communities and country together, cheer for the same teams, and help one another after hurricanes, fires, floods, and tragedies. Our lived experience of one another is often far more generous than the political caricatures we are sold.
The broad American majority still exists. What it lacks is not numbers but power.
That must change.
America has reached a point at which wishing for better politics is no longer enough. The broad American majority must organize—not to create another tribe, split the country into a third political camp, or search timidly for the midpoint between every position of the left and right, but to change the balance of power in American life.
We must make political courage less costly than cowardice, problem-solving more rewarding than outrage, and national citizenship more powerful than political tribalism. We must defend constitutional democracy and our way of life against those who attack it from the right and from the left. We must support leaders willing to stand against extremists within their own ranks. And we must prove, by solving the practical problems Americans confront in their daily lives, that our democracy can still work.
This is the purpose of American Renewal.
How the Majority Lost Control
Over many years, we have constructed a political marketplace that increasingly rewards the people who divide us and punishes those who bring us together. Anger generates attention. Attention generates money. Money generates influence. Influence generates more anger. Now the flywheel has gotten out of control.
Our primary systems allow relatively small numbers of highly motivated ideological voters to exercise vastly disproportionate influence over who governs everyone else. Gerrymandering has created districts in which politicians have more reason to fear extremists in their own parties than ordinary voters in a general election. Our campaign-finance system allows concentrated wealth and organized factions to wield influence far beyond that available to most citizens. Too many politicians spend more time raising money and performing for partisan audiences than studying problems and governing.
The rise of political independents as an increasing percentage of the American electorate reflects the understandable disgust many Americans feel toward both parties. Some have therefore called for the creation of a new third party. But under our current electoral system, third parties have repeatedly struggled to gain durable power and can unintentionally help elect the candidates their supporters most oppose.
There is an even deeper danger in simply abandoning the existing parties. America’s two major parties possess enormous infrastructure: ballot access, donor networks, candidate pipelines, local organizations, media relationships, and institutional legitimacy. If the broad majority walks away while organized extremists remain, we do not weaken the extremists but hand them the keys.
The answer is therefore not to retreat from American politics but to reclaim it.
None of this requires pretending that Democrats and Republicans are the same, that the extremes on both sides are equivalent, or that the correct answer to every political question lies halfway between left and right. Sometimes conservatives are right. Sometimes progressives are right. Sometimes both are wrong. Vigorous disagreement is essential to a free society.
The dividing line we need is not between left and right. It is between those committed to the American democratic experiment and those willing to destroy its foundations to achieve their selfish goals.
A person can be deeply conservative or deeply progressive while embracing constitutional democracy, equal citizenship, peaceful political competition, the rule of law, free elections, evidence, and the fundamental legitimacy and humanity of fellow Americans with whom they disagree. Those principles are not moderate principles. They are American principles.
That is the foundation of American Renewal.
One Standard for Everyone
If we are serious about saving our country from extremism, we must apply the same fundamental standards to our friends that we apply to our opponents.
When white supremacists march through Charlottesville chanting racist and antisemitic slogans, conservatives and liberals alike should stand against them. When political leaders undermine legitimate elections, excuse political violence, demonize minorities, or suggest that constitutional restraints apply only when convenient, Republicans should oppose them as vigorously as Democrats.
The same principle must apply on the left. When organizations embrace revolutionary extremism, excuse or romanticize terrorism and political violence, tolerate antisemitism, seek to abolish essential institutions of public safety, or portray America itself as irredeemably evil, Democrats and progressives should be equally willing to say: these ideas do not represent us.
We should not need to choose between Charlottesville and radical leftist encampments. We should not tolerate racism because it comes from political allies or antisemitism because it is dressed in the language of liberation. We should not excuse authoritarianism on the right because we fear radicalism on the left, or excuse radicalism on the left because we fear authoritarianism on the right.
A free people must be capable of rejecting both.
The tragedy of our present politics is that too many Americans feel forced to choose not the future they want but the danger they fear least. Each side points to the worst people on the other and says, often with some justification, “You cannot possibly allow them to win.” Millions then find themselves defending behavior they would otherwise condemn because they have been persuaded that admitting fault on their own side amounts to helping the enemy.
We need a different moral standard in which we listen to each other with compassion and empathy and judge our own side at least as rigorously as we judge the other.
These simple principles could begin transforming American political life.
America Has Come Apart Before
We should have no illusions about the seriousness of this moment, but neither should we succumb to despair. America has come apart before.
Our history is not a story of uninterrupted national harmony. We endured the bitter sectional conflict that culminated in civil war. We confronted the corruption, inequality, and concentrated economic power of the Gilded Age. We lived through the desperation of the Great Depression and the upheavals of the 1960s, when assassinations, riots, racial conflict, political violence, and profound social change led many Americans to wonder whether the country could survive intact.
These periods were profoundly different, and easy historical analogies can mislead. But recovery and revival were never inevitable in this midst of these crises.
America renewed itself because Americans acted.
We organized against slavery and segregation. We challenged monopolies and political corruption. We built new institutions for new circumstances. We fought for voting rights, civil rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and human rights. We expanded the meaning of citizenship. We argued bitterly about what America should become while continuing, however imperfectly, to believe that the country was worth fighting for.
We have today inherited the results of these struggles, not a guarantee that their achievements will endure.
A republic is not a machine that keeps running after its citizens stop maintaining it. Democracy is not a possession handed permanently from one generation to the next. It is a living relationship among citizens, institutions, laws, customs, and shared commitments. Every generation inherits an unfinished country.
Our generation now faces that responsibility.
A Common-Sense Agenda for a Great Nation
Renewing America cannot mean simply improving our political manners while leaving our greatest problems unsolved. People lose faith in democratic institutions when those institutions repeatedly fail to deliver. If we want Americans to believe again in the possibility of common purpose, we must demonstrate that common purpose can achieve meaningful results.
We should begin with a simple governing principle: organize ourselves around the problems we need to together solve rather than the political tribes to which we belong.
Restore a Functional Democracy
We must repair the machinery of our political system so candidates have stronger incentives to build broad coalitions rather than appeal primarily to ideological factions. States should experiment with open and nonpartisan primaries, ranked-choice voting where it works, independent redistricting, and other reforms that give ordinary voters greater power.
We should explore reforms to the Electoral College, including systems that allocate electoral votes more proportionally within states, so that presidential candidates have incentives to compete for voters across the entire country rather than concentrating overwhelmingly on a handful of battleground states.
Political spending must become radically more transparent, and the corrosive power of money over our democracy must be confronted directly. Dark money designed to conceal the true sources of political influence should be prohibited, and every American should have the right to know who is financing the candidates, organizations, advertisements, and campaigns seeking to shape their vote. But transparency alone is not enough. We have created a system in which elected officials can spend extraordinary portions of their time courting wealthy donors and organized interests, while ordinary citizens struggle to make their voices heard. That inevitably distorts political priorities. A democracy cannot function as intended when access to political power is effectively auctioned to those best able to pay for it.
We must therefore build a campaign-finance system that dramatically amplifies the power of ordinary citizens, including through mechanisms that encourage and multiply small-dollar contributions, while establishing constitutionally sound limits on the ability of concentrated wealth to overwhelm the political process. Corporations, unions, billionaires, and powerful advocacy organizations have legitimate rights to participate in public debate, but no democracy should accept a system in which a tiny number of individuals or institutions can spend hundreds of millions of dollars shaping elections while concealing their influence behind networks of organizations. Political equality does not require economic equality, but representative government cannot survive if extreme economic inequality is allowed to become extreme political inequality.
We must attack the broader economy of influence with the same determination. Members of Congress and senior government officials should not trade individual stocks while exercising public responsibilities that can affect those investments. Lobbying and revolving-door relationships must be fully transparent, with meaningful restrictions preventing public service from becoming merely an audition for lucrative private employment. Congress must also rebuild its own intellectual and technical capacity so elected representatives are not dependent on lobbyists and outside interests to understand the legislation they are supposed to write. Public officials should spend their time studying problems, debating solutions, meeting constituents, and governing rather than endlessly dialing for dollars, cultivating wealthy donors, and performing for partisan television audiences.
The goal should not be to drive money or organized interests entirely out of politics, which is neither realistic nor consistent with a free society. It should be to restore a basic democratic principle that political power must ultimately flow from citizens. When elected officials have more reason to listen to a handful of enormous donors than to thousands of ordinary constituents, something fundamental has gone wrong. American Renewal should fight to build a system in which ideas compete on their merits, citizens know who is trying to influence them, small donors can collectively rival concentrated fortunes, and no American can purchase a greater claim to our democracy simply by possessing a larger bank account.
The objective should be to make politicians more accountable to citizens than to factions, donors, algorithms, and ideological machines.
Create Orderly and Humane Immigration
A government that cannot control its borders will eventually lose the confidence of its citizens. A nation that has benefited immeasurably from immigration should not need to choose between compassion and order.
We can secure our borders, enforce our laws, adjudicate asylum claims rapidly, remove dangerous criminals who have no legal right to remain, expand orderly legal immigration, and find realistic solutions for long-established undocumented residents who have built productive lives here.
At the same time, America should actively recruit talented, brilliant, hardworking, and entrepreneurial people from around the world who want to build their lives and futures here. One of our country’s greatest historical advantages has been our capacity to attract people of extraordinary ambition and ability and then make their dreams part of the American story. We should strengthen that advantage, not squander it.
The failure to create a sensible immigration system is not evidence that the problem is insoluble. It is evidence that our politics has too often found the conflict more useful than the solution.
Make Every Community Safe and Just
Every American, rich or poor, deserves to live in a safe community. Supporting police officers who perform difficult and dangerous work is entirely compatible with demanding that policing be professional, accountable, effective, and consistent with equal justice.
Violent offenders must face meaningful consequences. Criminals should not be able to terrorize communities because political leaders are afraid of enforcing the law. But people suffering from mental illness and addiction should not simply be abandoned to streets, subways, prisons, and emergency rooms because our institutions cannot agree on how to help them.
We should protect the constitutional right of law-abiding Americans to own firearms while adopting reasonable measures to keep extraordinarily dangerous weapons out of the hands of criminals and people who pose clear threats to others. A serious country should be capable of respecting constitutional rights without pretending that every possible restriction on every possible weapon is tyranny.
Public order also matters in ways our politics sometimes treats as trivial. Streets, parks, transit systems, and public spaces should be clean, safe, and welcoming. The physical condition of our communities sends a message about whether we respect one another and the places we share.
Make Every Child’s Potential a National Priority
Every American child should leave school able to read, write, calculate, reason, understand science, know the essential history of our country, and comprehend the basic institutions of the democracy they will inherit.
We should honor and reward excellent teachers while refusing to protect systems that consistently fail children. We should establish high and uniform expectations while investing aggressively to ensure that every child, regardless of background, has the opportunity to meet them. Standardized assessments for all students should help us identify success and failure honestly, not punish children or substitute testing for education.
Meritocracy should not mean giving the greatest opportunities to children who started life with the greatest advantages, even as we strive toward one standard of excellence applicable to all Americans. It should mean doing everything possible to help every young person develop his or her talents and then ensuring that excellence, effort, and achievement are recognized wherever they are found.
We must instill a love of learning, not merely train students to pass examinations. We should teach history honestly, including America’s greatest achievements and gravest crimes. We should teach civics so young Americans understand the Constitution and institutions they will inherit. We should never educate children to hate their country, nor should we ask them to worship a sanitized mythology. Patriotism worthy of a free people requires the maturity to love a country honestly.
Our universities should remain the finest in the world: engines of discovery, intellectual freedom, merit, opportunity, and vigorous debate. We should support them generously while insisting that they remain open to genuine diversity of thought and committed to the pursuit of truth.
Make Americans Healthier
America spends more on healthcare than any comparable society while too often receiving worse outcomes, fragmented care, and incomprehensible bills. The relevant question should not be whether a proposed solution is ideologically pure but whether it makes Americans healthier while delivering care more efficiently and affordably.
We should guarantee meaningful access to essential care, demand price transparency, strengthen competition where markets can work, intervene decisively where they cannot, invest in children’s health, and use technology aggressively to eliminate administrative waste.
Most importantly, we must transform a system designed primarily to treat illness into one increasingly capable of preventing it. We should create stronger incentives for healthy food, exercise, early screening, vaccination, and other proven forms of prevention.
Safe and effective vaccines have saved countless lives and should be strongly supported. Individual autonomy matters, but personal choice cannot be absolute when a person’s decisions impose substantial and demonstrable risks on others. The governing principle should be proportionality, evidence, and respect for both individual liberty and public responsibility.
Become the World’s Greatest Engine of Discovery
America’s future depends on our willingness to invest in knowledge whose ultimate applications we cannot yet foresee. Basic science is not a luxury. It is one of the foundations of national power and human progress.
We should dramatically strengthen support for fundamental research and ensure that America’s universities, national laboratories, research institutions, and innovative companies remain the world’s leading centers of discovery.
America should lead the world in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, synthetic biology, advanced manufacturing, quantum technologies, medicine, space, energy, and whatever comes next. We should create a regulatory environment that protects people from serious harms without suffocating innovation before it can flourish.
We should also learn aggressively from other countries. American exceptionalism should never mean assuming we have nothing to learn. When another society educates children better, builds infrastructure faster, delivers healthcare more efficiently, or solves a problem more effectively, we should study what works and adapt the best ideas to our own circumstances.
Confidence is not the refusal to learn. It is the ability to learn without feeling diminished.
Build Again
America must once again become a country capable of building great things.
We need more housing, abundant and reliable energy, modern infrastructure, faster and more rational permitting, advanced manufacturing, and resilient supply chains. Environmental protection and economic growth should not be treated as permanent enemies. Sustainability can be an enormous source of innovation, competitiveness, resilience, and national wealth.
We should pursue a comprehensive energy strategy rather than turning energy policy into another tribal identity. Solar, wind, advanced nuclear, geothermal, next-generation storage, fusion, and other technologies should all contribute where they can. Our goal should be abundant, affordable, increasingly clean energy and American leadership in the technologies that will power the future.
We should protect our forests, waters, landscapes, biodiversity, and natural resources while ensuring access to the materials required for a modern economy. We should invest aggressively in synthetic biology, advanced recycling, material science, and other technologies that may allow us increasingly to grow, manufacture, recover, or substitute materials rather than endlessly digging them from the ground or cutting them from the earth.
A confident society does not spend all its energy fighting over how to divide yesterday’s opportunities. It creates new opportunities for tomorrow.
Make Markets Work for People
Markets are among humanity’s most powerful mechanisms for generating innovation, prosperity, and opportunity. But markets are tools, not gods.
Unregulated markets can produce monopoly, exploitation, environmental destruction, and concentrations of wealth and power that eventually undermine the very competition on which healthy capitalism depends. We should celebrate entrepreneurship and reward innovation while enforcing competition and ensuring that economic power does not become political domination.
America should not tolerate levels of inequality so extreme that birth increasingly determines destiny or accumulated wealth purchases a fundamentally different relationship to citizenship. Our tax system should be simpler, fairer, more progressive, and less vulnerable to manipulation by those wealthy enough to hire armies of specialists.
The goal should not be equality of outcomes. It should be a society in which opportunity is real, work is rewarded, success is celebrated, failure is survivable, and no permanent aristocracy can close the doors behind itself.
Govern Revolutionary Technologies Wisely
Artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies will transform education, work, creativity, warfare, medicine, and perhaps our understanding of what it means to be human. We should neither surrender our future to these technologies nor strangle them out of fear.
We need sensible, adaptive governance focused on real risks and real opportunities. We should teach young people not merely how to use AI, but how to think independently in a world saturated with it: how to develop their own voices, distinguish truth from manipulation, understand when machines are wrong, and use extraordinary tools without surrendering human agency.
The same principle should guide our approach to social media. Freedom of expression must be vigorously protected, but free speech does not require allowing opaque algorithms to manipulate children, addict users, or systematically amplify rage because rage is profitable. We need greater transparency, meaningful researcher access, stronger protections for minors, clear disclosure of political advertising, and far greater control for citizens over how information is presented to them.
The purpose is not government control of speech. It is preventing our democracy from being quietly reorganized around business models that become more profitable by prodding Americans to hate one another.
Celebrate One America
America’s pluralism is one of our greatest strengths. People from every corner of the world, every faith, every race, and every imaginable background have become part of the American story. We should celebrate that extraordinary diversity while resisting the Balkanization of our country into permanently competing identity groups.
Our differences shape our experiences and perspectives. But none of us should be reduced to a demographic category, and no American should be taught that people from another group are inherently guilty, suspect, or incapable of understanding them.
We should restore decorum and civility not as nostalgic affectations, but as essential democratic practices rooted in the understanding that how we treat one another matters, that standards and excellence are worth upholding, and that character remains an essential measure of both leadership and citizenship.
We should celebrate and invest in the arts because a great nation is measured by more than the size of its economy or the strength of its military. Music, literature, theater, dance, architecture, and the visual arts preserve our memories, challenge our assumptions, expand our capacity for empathy, and help us imagine lives and possibilities beyond our own experience. They give expression to what statistics and political arguments cannot, connecting us across generations, backgrounds, and beliefs. The arts are not luxuries to be supported only after the supposedly serious work of society is done, nor are they decorations around civilization. They are among the essential ways a civilization understands itself, expresses its highest aspirations, confronts its deepest contradictions, and imagines what it might yet become.
Our objective should be a country proud enough to celebrate its history, mature enough to confront its failures, diverse enough to welcome difference, and united enough to remember that we share a common destiny.
Turning the American Majority Into a Force
None of these ideas will matter if American Renewal becomes another organization that publishes thoughtful reports, holds admirable conferences, and leaves the incentives of political life unchanged.
The test is whether a politician, candidate, donor, media organization, or ordinary voter begins making different choices because American Renewal exists.
The organized extremes understand how power is built and exercised. They show up in primaries, raise money, recruit candidates, dominate political conversations online, enforce ideological conformity, and punish leaders who refuse to fall into line. In this way, relatively small but intensely committed factions can translate their passion and organization into political influence far beyond their actual numbers.
The answer is not to resent their effectiveness or complain about the imbalance. It is for the broad American majority to organize with equal determination, but with a larger and more constructive purpose to reclaim our political system for the millions of Americans who still believe in democracy, pluralism, practical problem-solving, and a shared national future.
American Renewal should not become a third party or another rigid ideological faction. It should become a permanent national movement capable of exercising influence within both major parties and across American society.
Its first task should be building a national constituency of Renewal Voters: millions of Americans who retain whatever political affiliation they choose but commit themselves to a short civic compact. Members would affirm their support for constitutional democracy, peaceful transfers of power, equal citizenship, rejection of political violence and bigotry, respect for evidence, and the legitimacy of political disagreement.
A Republican should not need to become less conservative to join. A Democrat should not need to become less progressive. The requirement is not ideological moderation. It is democratic citizenship.
The initial goal should be to build a large and growing national constituency of organized Renewal Voters, with membership tracked by congressional and state legislative districts so elected officials understand the movement’s strength in their own communities. Members should commit to voting in every primary for which they are eligible, evaluating candidates according to Renewal principles rather than party loyalty alone, and contributing some combination of time, money, expertise, or community service.
This movement must then go to the primaries where political incentives are actually created.
In each election cycle, American Renewal should identify a limited number of high-leverage races in which an extremist candidate faces a credible, democratic, problem-solving alternative. Sometimes that alternative will be a Democrat. Sometimes a Republican. Renewal should be unapologetic about supporting both.
The message to politicians must be that if you stand up to extremists in your own party, you will no longer stand alone.
To make this credible, the movement should create a transparent Renewal Standard evaluating political leaders not on ideological conformity but on democratic behavior: respect for constitutional institutions, rejection of violence and bigotry, honesty, respect for evidence, willingness to work across party lines, commitment to solving problems, and courage in confronting extremists within one’s own coalition.
That final test is the most important. It is easy for Democrats to condemn right-wing extremism and Republicans to condemn left-wing extremism. Political courage begins when we tell our own supporters something they do not want to hear.
Candidates who meet a demanding standard could earn a Renewal endorsement. Politicians who violate fundamental democratic principles could face a clear and evidence-based public finding explaining why. The process must be scrupulously fair. The moment it becomes a disguise for conventional partisanship, it will lose its moral authority.
American Renewal should also create a Renewal Shield for courageous leaders. One reason politicians capitulate to extremists is entirely rational: standing against your own faction can be politically expensive.
To counter this, we must make courage less expensive.
When a Democratic official takes a principled stand against radical socialism, antisemitism, political violence, or ideological extremism on the left, the movement should respond immediately with public support, volunteers, small-dollar donations, and media amplification. When a Republican defends legitimate election results or stands against authoritarianism, racism, or political violence on the right, the same machinery should activate.
Politicians should know before taking a difficult stand that they will not be abandoned afterward.
Alongside this should be a major Problem-Solvers Fund, built primarily on broad participation rather than dependence on a handful of billionaires. Five million Americans contributing an average of $50 annually would represent $250 million in potential political power. Donors could support Democratic, Republican, or cross-partisan candidate pools, while a portion of funding could be directed toward the races where intervention would matter most.
If extremism can raise money, courage must be able to raise money too.
Change the Rules That Reward Division
American Renewal should simultaneously pursue structural political reform state by state.
Rather than waiting for sweeping federal legislation, the movement should identify states where ballot initiatives, legislation, or bipartisan coalitions can advance open or nonpartisan primaries, ranked-choice voting where appropriate, independent redistricting, campaign-finance transparency, stronger ethics laws, and other reforms that increase the influence of ordinary voters.
Different states should experiment with different models. Results should be measured rigorously. Reforms that produce broader participation, better candidates, and more effective governance should be expanded. Those that do not should be reconsidered.
This should be a movement committed to evidence even when the evidence challenges its own assumptions.
The objective is a virtuous cycle: reform the incentives, demonstrate better results, build public support, and scale what works.
Organize Around Problems, Not Tribes
American Renewal must never become so obsessed with political process that it forgets why politics exists in the first place.
I would begin with a series of national American Renewal Missions focused on problems where the country is trapped in ideological stalemate: secure and humane immigration; safe communities and equal justice; every child learning; affordable and preventive healthcare; and American abundance.
Each mission should bring together people who experience the problem from profoundly different perspectives. An immigration mission should include law enforcement, immigrant communities, border states, business, labor, and government. A public-safety mission should bring police together with civil-rights advocates, community leaders, victims, researchers, and people who have successfully reduced violence. An education mission should begin by finding schools where disadvantaged children are achieving extraordinary results and asking how those successes can be replicated.
These missions should operate differently from traditional think tanks, beginning not with ideology or predetermined answers but with evidence about what actually works. They should identify places where difficult problems have been successfully addressed, understand why those approaches succeeded, determine whether they can be adapted and replicated elsewhere, and then build the broad political coalitions needed to put proven solutions into practice.
The governing question should always be the simplest and most useful one in public life:
What works, and how do we do more of it?
Compete for America’s Attention
The movement must also compete in the attention economy rather than merely complain about it.
American Renewal should build a first-rate national media operation devoted to making problem-solving compelling, accessible, and prestigious. This does not mean producing boring content about the virtues of bipartisanship. It means telling extraordinary human stories about people accomplishing difficult things.
An annual American Renewal 100 could recognize the country’s most effective problem-solvers, while a weekly video series could explore seemingly intractable national challenges by visiting communities where people are making measurable progress. A podcast could bring together thoughtful people who genuinely disagree, creating a space where they can work through difficult questions together rather than simply performing outrage for an audience.
The movement should also document those across the political spectrum who deliberately use demonstrably false claims, dehumanization, bigotry, or political violence to generate attention, money, and power.
The objective is not censorship. It is accountability.
For decades, our political culture has perfected the machinery for making people famous when they say something outrageous. We need equally powerful machinery for making people famous when they accomplish something worthwhile.
We must also confront the deeper incentives built into social media itself. Platforms have learned that anger, fear, humiliation, and conflict often generate more engagement than nuance, civility, or understanding, creating systems that can reward the very behavior most damaging to democratic life. The answer is not government censorship or political control over what people can say, but far greater transparency and accountability for how information is amplified. Platforms should provide meaningful access to independent researchers, give users greater control over the algorithms shaping what they see, protect children from manipulative and addictive design, and be required to assess and disclose the broader effects of their recommendation systems.
We should also encourage the development of new platforms and business models that reward constructive engagement rather than outrage. Freedom of speech is fundamental, but no principle of free expression requires us to accept a digital marketplace deliberately engineered so that the angriest voices are systematically handed the largest megaphones.
Rebuild American Citizenship
Political reform alone cannot save a republic whose citizens no longer understand or feel responsible for it.
We should create a free, world-class American Citizenship Course available to every school, university, company, community organization, and individual. It should teach how the Constitution works, how federal and local governments function, how citizens can participate, and how American institutions developed through both extraordinary achievement and profound failure.
We should dramatically expand opportunities for voluntary national and community service. Young Americans should be able to spend a year working in conservation, disaster response, education, eldercare, public health, infrastructure, or the military while earning meaningful educational benefits.
A democracy needs places where Americans who would never encounter one another online learn to work together in the real world, not as demographic categories or political abstractions but as teammates.
American Renewal chapters across the country could embody this principle. Every chapter should select at least one tangible local problem each year and work to solve it: chronic school absenteeism, a neglected park, refugee integration, tutoring, veteran support, voter education, public cleanliness, or police-community cooperation.
People who disagree politically should have the experience of accomplishing something together.
That experience may be more powerful than a thousand lectures about national unity.
The First Five Years
A movement like this must judge itself by outcomes rather than attention.
Within five years, American Renewal should aim to organize five million Renewal Voters, participate meaningfully in hundreds of primary elections, elect or protect dozens of courageous problem-solvers from both parties, enact structural electoral reforms in multiple states, establish a nationally recognized civic-education program, create thousands of local problem-solving projects, and demonstrate measurable progress through its national Renewal Missions.
But the ultimate metric is political behavior.
We will know American Renewal is succeeding when a Republican politician considering an extremist position thinks: I could lose Renewal voters.
We will know it is succeeding when a Democrat facing pressure from the ideological left thinks: If I stand my ground, Renewal voters will have my back.
We will know it is succeeding when candidates discover they can raise more money by solving a problem than by manufacturing an enemy.
And we will know it has truly succeeded when Americans begin to feel that their political system belongs to them again.
The first year should be ambitious but disciplined: recruit a genuinely cross-partisan founding council; conduct rigorous national research to understand where the broad American majority actually stands; finalize the Renewal Compact and Renewal Standard; create the appropriate nonprofit and political organizations with strict governance safeguards; build the first 100,000-member community; select ten high-leverage primary races; identify two or three states for structural reform campaigns; launch several initial Problem-Solving Missions; establish the Renewal Shield; and create a media operation capable of competing seriously for national attention.
The founding group will matter enormously. It cannot look like a collection of defeated establishment politicians or Washington insiders trying to restore an imaginary past. It should include respected conservatives and progressives, business and labor leaders, military veterans, educators, scientists, artists, religious and civic leaders, younger Americans, and people who have actually solved difficult problems.
Every prominent participant should meet one essential test: a willingness to challenge extremism on his or her own side.
That should become the moral signature of American Renewal.
The Choice Before Us
Being our best as Americans requires generosity. It requires listening to people with whom we disagree and admitting when they have a point. It requires resisting the intoxicating certainty that our side possesses all virtue and the other all vice. It requires recognizing that in a nation of hundreds of millions of free people, none of us will get everything we want.
But being our best also requires courage.
There are things worth defending and forces worth opposing. We must fight political extremism without becoming extremists ourselves. We must confront bigotry without surrendering to hatred. We must defend our institutions while remaining determined to reform them. We must oppose those who would undermine our democracy while refusing to treat millions of our fellow citizens as enemies.
This is not a call for Americans to begin believing in our country again. Most Americans never stopped.
It is a call for the majority of Americans who still believe in this country to recognize that belief alone is no longer enough.
The American experiment has survived for nearly 250 years because generation after generation accepted responsibility for problems it did not create and institutions it did not design. Each inherited an unfinished country. Each was called, in its own way, to decide whether the inheritance was worth preserving and improving.
That decision is now ours.
We can continue allowing our politics to be defined by those who profit from our anger. We can retreat more deeply into rival camps, each increasingly convinced that destroying the other is the only path to salvation. We can allow algorithms, political entrepreneurs, ideological factions, and concentrated interests to determine the future of a country that belongs to all of us.
Or we can organize.
We can build a new center of democratic gravity powerful enough that politicians once again have more to gain from solving problems than inflaming them. We can change the structures that reward extremism. We can support courageous leaders in both parties and hold accountable those who betray the principles of our republic. We can rebuild the habits of citizenship that allow free people to disagree without coming apart.
This movement will not succeed by asking extremists to become less extreme. It will succeed by changing the balance of power around us all. It will create a political marketplace in which courage has allies, compromise has constituencies, solutions generate attention, and politicians who divide Americans for personal gain discover that division carries a cost.
For too long, the broad American majority has remained a largely passive audience while increasingly organized factions fight for control of our country. Our task is to turn that majority into a broad coalition of citizens determined to reclaim the country we share.
America is bigger than Washington, the Democratic and Republican parties, any president, movement, ideology, or passing political moment. America is an agreement among generations, a shared inheritance entrusted to us by those who came before, and a shared responsibility to those who will come after.
Those who came before us struggled, sacrificed, argued, built, failed, learned, and tried again. They left us a country far better than the one they inherited, though still painfully incomplete. We owe the same obligation to those who will come after us.
The extremists are organized. The industries of division are organized. The people who have learned how to turn our fear of one another into money and power are organized.
The great question of our time is whether the rest of us will be.
We do not seek to defeat half of America, but to bring the great majority of Americans back into the center of our national life. We seek not an end to disagreement, which is essential to any free society, but a country confident and resilient enough to disagree without tearing itself apart. And we seek not a return to an imaginary past, but a renewal of the enduring principles that have allowed generation after generation of Americans to confront new challenges and build a better future.
The republic does not belong to the loudest among us. It does not belong to the angriest. It does not belong to the right or the left.
It belongs to all of us.
And now it needs us.