Citizenship in the Nation
We are watching the slow death of American citizenship—not through revolution or decree, but through the quiet surrender of our power to shape the world around us.
This erosion is clearest in the institutions that shaped my understanding of community. The Boy Scouts, where I first experienced the power of collective purpose and shared responsibility, now struggles for relevance. This is an unfortunate pattern that touches every corner of American life, as we surrender local autonomy to credentialed experts we'll never meet.
We've reduced citizenship to voting for candidates we know only through campaign websites and a barrage of automated texts. Where town halls once debated how neighborhoods would grow and function, they now navigate pre-existing regulations. Each crisis spawns new agencies, each problem prompts new rules—touching everything from housing costs to education. The experts get more credentialed, the processes more rigid, and communities more disconnected from decisions that shape their daily lives.
This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: as government grows more complex, we retreat from meaningful participation. As we retreat, bureaucracy fills the void. The fundamental pillars of human life—housing, education, healthcare, infrastructure—remain locked within frameworks designed to minimize risk rather than enable progress. Our brightest minds, faced with these calcified systems, increasingly flee public service entirely. I don't blame them—who wants to spend their energy navigating bureaucracy rather than solving problems?
For all their different tax rates and license plate designs, our states have become remarkably similar—variations on the same theme of bureaucratic accumulation. This sameness cuts deeper than appearances—it strikes at the heart of who we are.
When being from somewhere means nothing distinct, we lose both local identity and national cohesion. Our conflicts grow increasingly bitter precisely because we lack the relief valve of genuine local variation. The irony is sharp: our pursuit of national standards has produced neither excellence nor unity.
I see a different path forward. Imagine a federation of bold experiments, each state pursuing distinct visions of the American Dream, united by Constitutional principles but free to experiment with different paths forward.
California could pioneer a new social contract around regenerative farming by creating an entire economy around soil health and carbon sequestration, shifting from industrial agriculture's misaligned incentives toward models like The Biggest Little Farm.
Texas could further deregulate energy markets, letting communities form microgrids and negotiate directly with producers, all while investing in the poles and wires that don't make sense for privatization.
Massachusetts could transform education through radical choice, supporting everything from Montessori programs to apprenticeships to hybrid learning models that leverage AI.
Cities could break free from the straitjacket of single-use zoning, allowing neighborhoods to grow organically again. Projects like Culdesac shouldn't be considered unprecedented—these projects rediscover patterns of human-scale development that served us for centuries.
Our brightest minds optimize ad click-through rates while education crumbles. They perfect cloud databases as cities decay. They craft digital echo chambers while real communities wither.
The tools for this transformation exist today. The legal frameworks for state-level experimentation remain intact. What's missing isn't ability—it's the courage to look beyond incremental improvements and rediscover why citizenship matters. We face a stark choice: embrace the vivid possibilities of authentic difference or accept the sterile promise of managed conformity
The path forward demands finding the spaces where evolution is already possible. In Texas, technologists are reimagining the energy grid because deregulation created room for innovation. Similar opportunities exist throughout our physical world—in designing resilient power systems, scaling transportation, rethinking how we build housing, and detoxifying our food systems through better incentives.
These changes won't be easy. The most ambitious problems aren't in vertical software—they're in the fundamental systems that define American life. Building AI-first vertical software or cloud infrastructure is lucrative, but rebuilding our physical and social foundations is revolutionary. The pursuit of happiness isn't an empty phrase from our founding documents—it's an infrastructure problem waiting to be solved.
We have everything we need to rebuild American self-governance. The question is whether our generation will be remembered as the one that did—or the one that stood by and watched it die.