Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created June 26, 2026
It’s a gloriously beautiful day in the future. The dark days of endless hate and hopelessness have finally ended. The United States has voted in a competent, pragmatic President who is inspired by the spirit of America and its dream for the world. The American dream of the preciousness of each human life and the dignity of every individual.
There is a lot of rebuilding and repair to do. Augean stables abound.
Rather than being overwhelmed by the scope of the task, Americans who begin this resurrection will feel grateful to be the lucky generations whose timing has granted them this historic honor. “We are the new Washingtons, Franklins, Jeffersons, Hamiltons, Lincolns,” they dare to realize with awe. “Completing their work.”
Starting over. A feeling of enormous creative license, freedom to paint on a grand scale canvas. And yet an imperative to start from and hew to originalism, the original Constitution, its exact words and meanings.
Even though that Constitution did not protect us from falling away from The American Dream into an American Nightmare.
That is where the creativity comes in. How do we Amend the Constitution so that it can never happen again?
Finally, a social media conversation worth having. A collaboration, a wikimedia, crowdsourcing at the highest level. With guard rails and guidelines contributed by experts in Constitutional Law.
Something better to do with the amazing media we have created.
A sense of common purpose.
Starting over is a lovely feeling.
What sorts of things will be up for discussion? What are some of the different ways things can turn out?
In one scenario, there may be a ban on the two-party system.
The idea of political parties is never mentioned in the Declaration of Independence nor in the Constitution.
In fact, many of the Founding Fathers were deeply suspicious of them. They referred to political parties as “factions” and viewed them as a threat to national unity.
For instance, George Washington famously used his 1796 Farewell Address to warn Americans against the dangers of political parties, arguing that they would lead to “alternate domination” and distract the government from its duties. Similarly, James Madison wrote extensively in Federalist No. 10 about how to control the negative effects of factions.
The landmark political science book Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler argues against the common political science theory that political party affiliation is a rational, calculated choice based on policy. Instead, it’s a deep-seated social identity, much like religious or ethnic alignments. People adopt a partisan identity early in adulthood. This identity acts as a perceptual lens that filters all future political information. Major events like recessions or scandals rarely shatter a voter’s core party identity.
A social identity does not have the same psychological status as motivational drives; it is more like a mask that is worn, not the inner urgings which cause all of our behavior. We stick to our early self-classification as Democrats or Republicans because otherwise we feel a loss of identity and as if we no longer live within the safety and support of a large group. All of this goes on below the level of our conscious minds. This is why we can be rabble-roused and manipulated to hate each other. If our conscious minds were in control, we would not let that happen.
When the reconstruction comes, there may no longer be political parties. The first new President may be an Independent. This was never thought possible, but today we see great erosion in the images of both parties. Americans want a real change and this might not be possible with the current two parties.
How do we stop money from controlling politics?
This is really a media question.
If there were a foolproof mechanism for identifying candidates willing to serve and who have proven by their actions to be the kinds of people that could possibly serve us well, the media exposure of those candidates could be provided for free, mandated by law. True, this would reduce advertising revenues by about 3%, but perhaps that would be worth the cost.
One way or another, in the reconstruction, we have to stop the buying of elections by the amount of money raised for advertising.
Neither gerrymandering nor filibuster appears in the Constitution. The Electoral College causes gerrymandering, so it is time to switch to popular vote. The two-party system causes filibuster, so in the Second Life of America, we can sweep those out together.
The FCC may have been a bit prissy in regulating American media before there was digital, but on balance, we were better off then than now in terms of what we allow in media.
With AI, it is well within technical capabilities to automatically fact-check everything and to filter out lies and false statements made innocently – or to allow them with the fact check alongside – something for all of us to decide together. Then we get the best of Free Speech without the current Orwellian, Skinnerian conditioning of our whole population’s acceptance of blatant lying as the new way of being we are all supposed to adopt because somehow it is manly?
We who are suffering through the new Dark Ages are entitled to let our hearts and minds have respite by living in the future when we emerge again in the Light.
Starting Over.
Love to all,
