Roadmap to American Reconstruction

There appears to be a coup happening in Washington. Elon Musk and his DOGE cronies are acquiring electronic backdoors into critical systems, firing vast swathes of the federal workforce, destroying government departments—all in violation of the Constitution. By exercising the power of a senior government official without being confirmed by the Senate, he is in violation of the Appointments Clause. By declaring authority to spend or not spend money, regardless of law, he is ignoring that the power of the purse is given solely to Congress. He seems to be on the verge of declaring that he will ignore court orders. This is all of course simply icing on the cake of the fact that Donald Trump occupying the Oval Office at all is a plain violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibition on insurrectionists from holding government office.

The Constitutional order in America is strained to the breaking point. It may soon snap—it may already have snapped.

When President Yoon attempted his bizarre coup in South Korea, opposition lawmakers and ordinary people took to the streets of Seoul en masse, stopped the coup in its tracks, and ousted Yoon from power. For many on the liberal side of the political divide, the fact that this is not happening in America is a source of alternating confusion and terror.

Why haven't we all just thrown the bums out?

To be blunt with you: it's because we lost control of several key centers of power in 2024. We are the weaker party. But history demonstrates that weaker parties can still win—if they pursue the right kinds of long-term strategy. 

And we need long-term strategy desperately. Elon Musk's fiscal coup is already in progress. But even more fundamental: is the peaceful transfer of power still possible in America? Or will Donald Trump attempt to use the powers he is now arrogating to himself to rig the 2028 election and stay in office in defiance of the Constitution? This question answers itself; this question was answered on January 6, 2021: yes, he will. And this time he will have far more forces at his disposal than the disorganized mob of J6. He is preparing for this now. We must do the same.

This essay is a roadmap to long-term victory: to re-attaining a position where we can stop this coup and re-found Constitutional government in America. A roadmap to American Reconstruction. But first: what did we lose, and why does that mean we can't just throw the bums out?

The strategic center of gravity

The power to shape society rests on multiple different strategic centers of gravity. Today, there are three centers we need to recapture: mass opinion, elite consensus, and formal power.

Vox populi, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. There's a reason Elon says it all the time: in our democratic age, the will of the people is taken to be the foundation of all political legitimacy. As the political scientist Xavier Marquez shows, even authoritarian countries make elaborate claims to democracy in their constitutions and their political rituals. One-party states like Singapore nevertheless display an intense interest in election results. Put another way: there's a reason they bother rigging the elections.

Vox populi is often construed in crass material terms: the majority of people means the majority of power, and contradicting them means setting yourself up for failure. This has an intuitive logic, but I do not think history bears it out. The majority of people might be the majority of power in some abstract sense, but that power is rarely well-organized, and unorganized power is no power at all.

Rather, vox populi is the foundation of legitimacy, and legitimacy matters. People accept being ruled by those who represent the people. Notably, the will of the people cannot be reduced to elections. It remains a grand concept operationalized in many ways: elections, most importantly, but also opinion polls, and in a crisis mass demonstrations.

Elite consensus. Like it or not, elites matter: it's right there in the name. It is often assumed by crass materialists that elites are driven by elite interest, and that therefore they can never be allies to progressive causes. But—for better and for worse—modern-day elites are highly ideological, often more so than the average citizen. Elite interest is real, but so is elite consensus.

The difference in macroeconomic response to the Great Recession and COVID-19 was stark. Obama and his team were paranoid about overly-generous stimulus, indeed to the point of ensuring that the sticker price did not exceed one trillion dollars (this had no underlying economic logic). The result was a decade of slow growth and underemployment. As a result, we responded to COVID-19 with enormous stimulus packages which generated rapid recovery and rapid growth.

At the same time, this elite macroeconomic consensus was not shared by the media, which spent four years bombarding Americans with stories of how recession was just around the corner. And, it seems, Americans largely accepted what they saw on the television and the newstands. They might be doing well—but "the economy" must surely be in the shitter. Elites have the power to shape both policy and popular narratives.

Formal power. Right now USAID operations all over the world are shutting down. If Harris had won in November they would not be. Formal power matters. Elections have consequences. If we want to create serious structural change in this country, we need to recapture formal federal power. The importance of formal power should be obvious and I will not dwell on it.

Coercive power? You will notice one thing that is not on this list: "coercive power."  By this I mean the capacity to deploy organized coercion or (in extremis) violence. You might think this is a serious oversight; alternatively you might think it is already implied in "mass support."  Neither of these is correct. First, while the mass of people might weigh a great deal, it does not translate into organized power—as has been seen repeatedly in the failure of horizontalist mass movements. Second, while organized coercive power has been useful in certain cases—for instance, Lenin was able to leverage control over the Red Guards and naval brigades to topple the Provisional Government and, ultimately, win the Russian Civil War; in more recent times, the Syrian Civil War was a prolonged exercise in the use of violence to remove a dictator—our circumstances do not much resemble those of Lenin or al-Sharaa. America is not at the present moment a weak state already on the verge of collapse. In its current form, its capacity to suppress, respond to, or simply outlast organized coercive power radically outstrips any feasible outsider movement—as the George Floyd protests amply demonstrated. So let us set this aside for now.

Strategic overview

Given these strategic centers of gravity, our position is mixed.

1. We do not control any of the formal levers of federal power. Congress, the Presidency, and the Court all have Republican majorities. While Democrats can obstruct or slow Republican policy through procedural obstruction, we do not have the power to stop it.
2. Equally importantly, the emblem of the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris, did not win a majority of the popular vote, let alone a commanding one. Donald Trump did not require electoral shenanigans or the electoral college to win: he won fair and square, 77 million to 75 million. (For context, in 2020, Biden beat Trump 81 million to 74 million.)
3. We retain formal levers of power in a wide array of blue states and cities. The federal structure of the American Constitution allows states substantial independence from federal policy. Indeed, previous Constitutional crises—from the fugitive slave controversy to the Civil Rights Movement—were built on this tension.
4. We retain a large foundation of economic and financial power. Cities are the economic engine of modern America, and they are invariably blue. The top 25 cities by themselves account for half of American GDP. ActBlue, a clearinghouse for small-dollar donations, raised more than $3.7 billion in the 2023-2024 election cycle. There is a river of cash out there that can be directed to the progressive cause.
5. We retain a large foundation of cultural and ideational power. Educational polarization has meant that highly educated people are also highly progressive. This represents a base of civic and cultural power that can be tapped.
6. Elite opinion is deeply divided. Many major editorial boards seem willing to give Trump "the benefit of the doubt," and "reactionary centrism" is increasingly against certain aspects of the progressive movement. C-suite executives and billionaires seem increasingly bent on opposing progressive politics.

Understanding what power we do have—and what powers we clearly do not—is essential to understanding how we can beat the MAGA coup.

The act is the message

Given this strategic situation, what is to be done?

On one view, protests are a threat. You hold a peaceful protest, and this displays the power and capability of your movement: "if you don't do what we want, we riot."  This is intuitive, but false. In the modern age—we have all seen this happen—it is possible to put millions of people into the streets without having the slightest ability to organize those people in a reliable way. The "threat" is empty, and besides, even if carried out, a stable regime can weather riots—as was graphically demonstrated during the George Floyd protests. The state outlasts you.

Instead, we should think of acts of protest as moves intended to advance a narrative. The strategic center of gravity is not some piece of physical infrastructure: it is the hearts and minds of the American people. What a mass protest communicates is not a threat but a plot beat: this is the voice of the people. In the right circumstances, that idea can move the world.

Equally obviously, we are not in a position to carry out mass protests—you will notice a distinct lack of them happening. But acts of protest do not require millions to be effective. The most famous acts of the Civil Rights Movement—the Freedom Rides, the sit-ins, the Freedom Summer—never involved more than a few thousand people. But they changed the national narrative in a fundamental way. A few young Black men and women, sitting calmly and asking for coffee while a white mob spat and kicked and screamed and generally acted like deranged thugs: these images changed the world.

We have this idea today that first you hold a protest that grabs people's attention, and then afterwards you explain what it was about. You throw soup at a painting or block a highway or whatever. This gets attention but it also just gets people mad at you. It is narratively vacuous. In an effective act of protest, the act itself is the message. The story being told in microcosm is the story you want to advance. The sit-ins—and all the acts of the Civil Rights Movement—were based on this principle.

A more recent—and more horrid—example is the various confrontations red-state governors organized around immigration in the years 2022-2024. Busing immigrants to blue cities, putting barbed wire in the Rio Grande, and various other forms of posturing were—like it or not—effective at rocketing immigration to the center of the national narrative. While these confrontations did nothing in material terms to affect overall immigration policy, they were narratively effective. They told a story in which tough Republicans were doing what it took to stop the flood, despite the hypocrisy and fecklessness of liberals. And again—like it or not—the story sold well to the American people.

We must begin to think in similar tactical ways. Actually changing federal immigration policy is going to be very difficult from our current position of powerlessness. Leveraging blue state power to generate confrontations that advance our narrative, on the other hand, is entirely doable—as our red-state predecessors demonstrated.

Okay. So the goal is to change the hearts and minds of both ordinary Americans and elite Americans, and eventually reclaim formal levers of power. Doing this requires confrontations with MAGA that advance our narrative. But what should our narrative be?

Wrap yourself in the flag

I've said we need to push our narrative through properly staged confrontations with MAGA. But what is our narrative?

To hear some people on the internet tell it, this election has merely revealed the inherent evil at the heart of the idea of America, that all that stuff about freedom and democracy and inalienable rights was always a lie, that American was only ever empire and cruelty. I don't want to litigate whether this is true. I want to point out that these people have predicted nineteen of the last zero communist revolutions. Such narratives are guaranteed to lose. Most Americans like America. Most Americans believe in America. 

Therefore, our narrative should be Donald Trump is ripping up the Constitution and stealing our country. He is handing over Social Security to a bunch of Silicon Valley oligarchs. He is handing foreign policy over to our enemies in Russia and China. He is re-segregating the military and the federal workforce. We are defending America from Donald Trump. And we will reconstruct the Constitutional order he has broken. We must wrap ourselves in the flag at every opportunity. This is simply what successful social movements in America do. It is what the Civil Rights Movement did. It is what the Tea Party did. Like it or not, this narrative sells.

Note that I emphasize narrative and aesthetics here. This is not a call to restrict your political activity simply to the confines of "conventional" politics—of elections and letter-writing. Rather, when we seek out confrontations with MAGA, we should adopt the aesthetics of Americana. We should cast ourselves as the defenders of America, of the American people, of the American constitutional order. Thankfully, when confronted with a MAGA movement that wants to burn all these things down, this should not be a hard task.

This is why even if Donald Trump attempts to stay in office via unconstitutional means, and must be removed via extraconstitutional ones, the 2028 election is the most opportune crisis for doing so: "this is when such things happen," in the American narrative. Even as political creativity begets political creativity, we all still operate within the gauzy red-white-and-blue story at the back of every American's mind.

This point also militates in favor of nonviolence. Violence, especially "disorderly" violence, plays directly into the state's hands. There is this fantasy that the mass of protesters is going to force the state to capitulate under threat of violence. But as the George Floyd protests demonstrated, the state can outlast you.

More deeply, violence is exactly the terrain that the state wants to engage on—as Omar Wasow's quantitative research shows. The state will always be tactically better prepared for violence. And the state's preferred narrative is of violent protesters looting and destroying; the riot cops breaking heads are of course simply defending families and properties. Like it or not that narrative tends to work well for states: we should avoid playing into their hands. "But they'll call us violent no matter what we do—so we might as well be violent."  This is a nice comeback but it doesn't actually answer the question does violence advance your cause? Or, put another way: why are you doing what your enemy wants you to do?

Admittedly, there have been cases where oppressive states have been overthrown by violence, such as recently in Syria, or with the assistance of violence, as in Euromaidan in Ukraine in 2013—or Tsarist Russia in 1917. But America is not a paper-thin corrupt state needing only a push to implode. So these comparisons are not presently relevant.

Nonviolence is emotionally demanding. If a man spits on you you want to slap back. It takes a particular kind of commitment to stand there and take it instead. But nonviolence works. What American history—and the comparative political science of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan—demonstrates is that nonviolent movements are more likely to achieve their goals. This is because nonviolent movements are more effective at moving the narrative in the necessary direction. They are more effective at winning hearts and minds. They are more effective at regaining the three strategic centers of gravity I discussed earlier.

Go viral

What the Movement understood—and MAGA understood as well—is that good ideas don't sell themselves. TERFs and Republicans did not ask an opinion poll whether people were scared of trans: they picked a fight and drove the narrative, and now we are in the midst of a society-wide moral panic.

In our post-material age, everything about our world is filtered through our information environment. We have witnessed the bizarre spectacle of Americans "concerned about inflation" voting for the man whose policies are guaranteed to spike inflation. This is a result not of the objective conditions, but information environments and media narratives.

This is simply the water we breathe. It is not enough to be good or to be right. We need to recognize that we also have to sell that story to the masses and to elites. It is of no use to complain "the media is covering us unfairly!" Of course they are. In politics as in war, the other side gets a say, and they will work their hardest to spin your confrontations in ways that are favorable to them. That is the nature of the game. Or, in other words: this is the game we have to play.

We must attack the media environment along multiple lines of advance. First, we must "get around" hostile media institutions. Thankfully, there has never been a time when this was easier to do. In an age of smartphones and social media, small actors can create dramatic confrontations and viral messaging. We must fight in the piranha tank of social media until we are the biggest piranha. This means individual creativity, rapid iteration, and the hunt for clicks and attention. As Jamelle Bouie put it—on TikTok, no less—"the name of the game is attention."  You don't need to develop policy or organize disciplined movements—social media is terrible for both. But you can drive a narrative towards the mass of people—and that's enough, for this axis of advance. We must reach people where they are: on their goddamn phones.

Second, we must get around media institutions by creating our own alternative information networks. This means independent publications—like Liberal Currents, among others—that are dedicated to liberal principles, not captured by bothsidesism and reactionary centrism. More deeply, we must tap the river of money flowing through progressive politics and use it to fund durable media institutions—such as, for instance, local papers—that can reach low-information voters who are not, like you, reader, politics obsessives. The parallel is billionaire-owned Sinclair Broadcast Group, which mostly reports on the weather and local interest stories, while occasionally airing Fox-approved editorial segments.

Third—and you will not like to hear it—we must "go through" traditional media institutions. Chris Rufo discovered that the refs were laughably easy to play. Say the right words in the right way and they will amplify your narrative—or at least, a narrative that is suitable for your larger purposes. Like it or not, major media institutions like the New York Times retain agenda-setting power, especially in elite circles. Working to those refs is distasteful but it must be done.

The inside strategy

You will notice I have not yet said a word about policy. Centrists are convinced that if Democrats want to win they must make a policy change (abandoning trans rights, most centrally). Leftists are convinced that if Democrats want to win they must make a policy change (endorsing Medicare for All, famously). There is again a familiar model of how protests achieve change: a coherent party organization develops a platform, pursues actions that drive support for that platform, and eventually wins power and enacts it. This idea manifests as the thought that individual acts of protest need to be connected with policy demands

None of this is true. Policies don't win elections. Here is my somewhat surprising thesis: inside and outside strategies are only tangentially connected. The George Floyd protests once again provide a useful case study. "Defund the police" was not a coherent party organization that mobilized millions. Rather, abolitionist thought became emblematic of the protests because it was there. Years before the protests, abolitionist thinkers had won obscure seminar-room battles—which is to say, struggles for elite opinion—and as a result their "package" was standing ready to answer when a mass movement called.

Unfortunately, their package was also a total nonstarter as actual policy—just look at the CHAZ/CHOP debacle for proof of that. It was a winning package in the seminar room, but unable to solve real problems in the real world.

What this means is that American Reconstruction does not need to be organizationally connected with a mass movement. What it needs to be is ready to go when the moment comes. It needs to have secured enough elite buy-in prior to winning power, and it also needs to be comprehensive and workable. When we retake power, we want to have a package of political reforms ready to go that can shore up the creaking structures of our democracy.

We can see how this works, once again, by observing how the other side operates. During the 2024 election, Donald Trump explicitly disavowed Project 2025. DOGE was regarded as a joke. But as we have seen, Elon Musk was able to hit the ground running—not because he had a mass movement or mass support, but because he had a plan and personnel ready to go, combined with enough elite backing to let him run.

We must approach political change in the same way. Winning back power requires winning back the mass of the people. But it does not require selling them on policy details. It requires selling them on a narrative. The policy details will come from an elite consensus that develops among Democratic politicians, staffers, and opinion leaders long before the election results. Whoever wins that fight—whoever has a comprehensive package ready to go when the time comes—will be in a position to enact their policy.

Thus: watch these pages for further development of the principles of American Reconstruction.

Waging a long war

Some people seem to think that the American people are going to pull a Euromaidan and turf Donald Trump out of the White House a few months after a plurality of them put him there. This is not going to happen. We must prepare ourselves for a protracted struggle. We must start by winning back the strategic center of gravity. Thankfully, you do not need an already-existing mass movement to do this. You need moral clarity, strategic thinking, and the will to see them through.

Winning does not require a general strike or a disciplined nationwide resistance. Winning requires changing hearts and minds, which can be achieved with small but dramatically effective acts of protest that go viral and convince Americans that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are burning down our Constitution and stealing our country.

We must push this narrative through confrontations with MAGA in which the act itself is the message. The story and the aesthetics should always display MAGA thugs attacking American liberties—and Democrats standing up for the Constitution.

You, yourself, can find such confrontations in your life or profession. And—this part is important—we must drive those narratives in public discourse. Don't just think of being right: think of selling a story to the mass of Americans. In this fight there is room for tremendous individual and tactical creativity.

But this also means preparing yourself emotionally. This is not going to be a short fight. There are going to be losses. If you expect this to be over in four months you will not have the emotional fortitude to fight it out for four years—or as long as it takes, if longer.

Know that you can make a difference. Your individual contributions—your confrontations with MAGA—even if they do not achieve immediate material results, drive a narrative. And as we recapture the hearts and minds of the American people, we will recapture our country from the thugs and oligarchs who have stolen it. 

When Donald Trump attempts to stay in power in 2028, through whatever legal chicanery or brutal thuggishness he can muster, the American people must be readied to insist that elections be held and the results respected. This may be difficult. But it can be done—it has been done, in many countries before. And then American Reconstruction can begin.

Featured image is Image from page 566 of "An American history" (1919)