Towards a More Perfect Union
Communists to my left, fascists to my right, I shall take the middle road.
That is the sentence. That is the whole sentence. I will spend the rest of the piece trying to be worthy of it, but I will not improve upon it, and I want to put it at the top, alone, so that it can do its work before the apparatus of explanation arrives to dilute it.
It is not a centrist’s sentence. The centrist’s sentence is the truth lies somewhere in the middle. That sentence is a lie. The truth does not lie in the middle. The truth lies where the truth lies, which is sometimes on the right and sometimes on the left and sometimes nowhere on the inherited spectrum at all. The centrist’s sentence is the sentence of a man who has decided that he will not have to choose, that the cost of judgment can be split, that the people on his right and the people on his left can each be granted half a point and the conversation can move on.
The sentence I am borrowing is a different sentence. It is the sentence of a person who has looked at the people on his left and the people on his right and concluded that both flanks are serving the same operation by different costumes, and that the road forward is not between them but past them, on a separate axis they cannot see because they have spent their analytical capacity insisting that the only axis is the one with them on it.
The middle road, in this sentence, is not the middle of their road. It is a different road. It is the road the Preamble named.
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The American Founders did not write we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal because they had achieved a perfect union. They had not. The Constitution they wrote contained the three-fifths compromise, permitted the international slave trade for twenty years, gave us the Electoral College and the Senate’s small-state bias and a hundred other features any honest critic can list. They knew it was imperfect. They wrote, in the Preamble’s first sentence, that the purpose of the document was to form a more perfect Union. Not a perfect one. A more perfect one. The verb was comparative. The verb conceded that the union they were founding was already imperfect and required a labor across generations to be made less so.
That labor is the relay I described two pieces back. It is the inheritance the dead handed us and that we are required, by the fact of having received it, to hand forward in better condition than we received it. The labor is the substance of citizenship. It is what put something back meant in the piece I wrote on Saturday. It is what Tom Steyer is asking for when he asks Californians to elect him in 2026.
The labor has had enemies in every generation. In the generation of the founders, the enemies were the Tories who wanted to remain a colony and the slavers who wanted to remain slavers. In the generation of Lincoln, the enemies were the Confederates and the Copperheads. In the generation of the Reconstruction, the enemies were the Klan and the Redeemers. In the generation of the Progressives, the enemies were the trusts and the Pinkertons. In the generation of the New Deal, the enemies were the America Firsters and the German-American Bund. In the generation of the Civil Rights Movement, the enemies were the segregationists and the Bull Connors. In our generation the enemies are postliberals on one flank and campists on the other, and the donors who fund both flanks from the same petro-AI rentier coalition that has been buying our democracy on the installment plan since the day the Soviet Union collapsed.
The labor has had enemies. The labor has also had stewards. In every generation the stewards have been the people who refused both flanks and kept walking the middle road, which is to say, kept walking the road of the Preamble. Frederick Douglass kept walking. Lincoln kept walking. The grand-children of the abolitionists who founded the NAACP kept walking. Eleanor Roosevelt kept walking. John Lewis kept walking across the bridge at Selma while the segregationists came at him from one flank and the Black nationalist critique of nonviolence came at him from the other, and he kept walking because the road he was walking was older than either flank, and the destination he was walking toward was older too. The destination was a more perfect union. He believed, as Lincoln had believed, that the words on the parchment meant what they said and could be made, by labor, to mean it more truly with each generation.
This is the relay. This is what we have been handed. This is what the operators on both flanks have been trying, in our generation, to convince us is no longer worth carrying.
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The postliberals say the union cannot be perfected because the Constitution is exhausted. They say the experiment has failed. They quote Patrick Deneen and they read Curtis Yarvin and they say what J. D. Vance said to James Pogue: that the regime is decadent, that the answer is a national CEO, or what’s called a dictator, that the architecture must be replaced. They mean what they say. They have the donor list to back it up. They have, by now, the executive branch. They are not pretending. The piece I wrote yesterday on the war on terror named the operators behind them. The piece I wrote two days ago on the cover stories named the apparatus.
The campists say the union cannot be perfected because the union is the problem. They say American constitutionalism is a fig leaf for American empire and that the only honest politics is the politics of supporting whichever rival empire is currently against us. They mean what they say. They have the funding pipeline I documented this morning to back it up. They have the YouTube channels and the Substacks and the conference invitations and the tote bags reading Communications as Solidarity. They are not pretending either. The Singham network is real. The Tenet Media indictment is real. The Russophile Congress representative credential is real.
Both flanks have given up on the Preamble. Both flanks have given up on the verb to form. Both flanks have decided that the more-perfect-union project is over, either because the founders’ design is now a prison or because the founders’ design was always a fraud.
The middle road is the road of the people who have not given up on the verb.
It is the road of the people who can hold, simultaneously, that American empire has done immense damage and must be opposed in every place it does damage, and that the American constitutional order is one of the few inheritances on the planet under which an immigrant child can grow up to be a senator, a Black sharecropper’s granddaughter can grow up to be a vice president, a Catholic Pope can write an encyclical on the dignity of the person and have it read on the floor of the legislature of a republic founded by Protestants who did not trust Catholics. It is the road of the people who can hold that the Founders were imperfect men whose imperfections were written into the document, and that the document also contained the keys for its own correction — the amendment process, the Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments, the suffrage extensions, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the long unfolding of we the people from a phrase that originally meant white male property-holders to a phrase that now means, in law if not yet in fact, all of us.
The middle road is the road of the people who refuse to confuse the imperfection of the inheritance with the impossibility of the labor. The road of the people who refuse to let the operators on either flank persuade them that the verb to form has been retired.
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I want to put down a temperament here, because the road requires a temperament before it requires a program.
Lincoln gave us the temperament in the Second Inaugural. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right. That sentence is the moral architecture of the middle road. Malice toward none — not because the operators do not deserve malice but because the labor of the union is incompatible with malice as a continuing disposition. Charity for all — not because all positions deserve equal charity but because charity is the discipline that keeps the laborer from becoming what he opposes. Firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right — and here is where Lincoln resolves the question that the postliberals and the campists are both trying to dodge. The right is not relative. The right is not what the camp decides. The right is what the laborer can see by the light he has been given, and the firmness is the requirement that he act on what he sees, even when the camp on his left and the camp on his right are screaming at him to choose theirs instead.
This is not centrism. Centrism would say: split the difference between Lincoln and his Confederate counterpart. Lincoln did not split the difference. Lincoln went to war. The middle road in 1864 went straight through Atlanta and Savannah and Petersburg and Appomattox. It was not the middle road because it was halfway between the two flanks. It was the middle road because it was the road of the union, and the union was the thing the flanks had set themselves against.
The middle road in 1944 went through the Bulge and Iwo Jima. It was not the middle road because it was halfway between the fascists in Berlin and the Stalinists in Moscow. It was the middle road because it was the road of the constitutional democracies, fighting one totalitarianism in alliance with another and going home, after the first one was beaten, to spend the next forty-five years restraining the one they had partnered with. That partnership cost what it cost. The accounting will never be balanced. It was, however, the middle road, because the road that mattered was the road of the constitutional inheritance.
The middle road in 2026 goes through the same kind of difficult country. It refuses Curtis Yarvin and it refuses Jackson Hinkle. It refuses Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures and it refuses Neville Roy Singham’s two hundred and seventy-five million dollars of Chinese state propaganda. It refuses J. D. Vance’s regime-change postliberalism and it refuses Code Pink’s apologetics for Xinjiang. It refuses Tucker Carlson’s pilgrimage to Moscow and it refuses The Grayzone’s defense of Bashar al-Assad. It refuses both flanks because both flanks are funded, in significant part, by the same petro-AI rentier coalition, and the coalition does not care which flank wins. The coalition cares only that the middle road be discredited, that the verb to form be retired, that the Preamble be allowed to gather dust while the documents that will replace it are drafted in Palo Alto and Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and Moscow and Beijing.
The middle road refuses. The middle road says: the verb stands. The work continues. The relay goes forward.
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I want to be specific about what walking the middle road looks like, because vague exhortation is the failure mode of the kind of writing I have been doing this week, and the readers deserve better than vague.
It looks like voting. It looks like voting in the primary and the general and the off-year and the special election and the school board and the water district. It looks like understanding that the operators count on you to skip the school board because you have decided that the presidency is the only office that matters, and that they have been quietly capturing the school boards for thirty years while you were watching cable news. It looks like Tom Steyer winning the California gubernatorial primary on March 3, 2026, which is now ninety-one days away, because Californians showed up at the polls in numbers the operators were not expecting. It looks like the citizen labor that the operators have spent forty years and untold billions trying to convince you is futile, performed in the small disciplined acts that constitute it.
It looks like donating. It looks like five dollars to the campaign you believe in and five more to the local journalist trying to keep a newsroom alive in a county where the Gannett paper closed in 2019 and the operators have been filling the information vacuum with Russian-funded and Chinese-funded and Thiel-funded content ever since. It looks like the small subscription you make to the publication that does not capture you for a flank, to the writer who is trying to walk the middle road in plain sight, to the institution that has not yet been bought.
It looks like writing. Not all of us will write in public. Some of us will write letters to the editor. Some of us will write comments under the pieces that move us, the way Cecelia Blair commented on The Longest Relay this morning and lifted the level of the entire conversation by the seriousness with which she had read. Some of us will write to our representatives, knowing that the staff member who reads the constituent mail counts the letters and reports the count up the chain. Some of us will write the long argument we have been holding inside for years and put it in front of the people who know us, because the people who know us are the people most likely to be moved by what we say.
It looks like witness. It looks like refusing to look away. It looks like reading James Pogue’s piece. It looks like reading the New York Times Singham investigation. It looks like reading the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Office of Special Plans. It looks like reading the Judicial Watch documents on the Cheney Energy Task Force. The records are on the internet. The internet still works, for the moment, the way an archive works. The middle road begins, every morning, with the discipline of reading the documents the operators have been counting on you not to read.
It looks like refusing the cover stories. It looks like noticing, when the conspiracy theory arrives at the door, that the conspiracy theory is hiding the conspiracy. It looks like noticing, when the campist takes the side of Russia in Ukraine, that the campist is not opposing American empire but transferring his loyalty to a different empire. It looks like noticing, when the postliberal calls for a national CEO, that the national CEO is the cover for the donor class behind him. It looks like the small daily act of refusing to be taken in.
It looks like mercy. The temperament of the middle road is mercy. The operators on both flanks have made themselves into hard men with hard answers and hard borders. The middle road requires a softer architecture. It requires the willingness to extend charity to the person who has been taken in, to the relative who has gone down the QAnon rabbit hole or the cousin who has gone down the Grayzone rabbit hole, to keep the door open for their return, to remember that the same propaganda machine that has captured them has been working on you and the only difference is that on a particular question on a particular morning the propaganda did not catch. The middle road is not the road of the smug. The middle road is the road of the merciful, who know that they themselves have been wrong about important things and that their being right today is not their own achievement.
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There is a religious dimension to this that I cannot avoid and will not pretend to.
Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, issued on May 15 of this year and formally promulgated on May 25, is the most serious answer I have read to the project Peter Thiel laid out in his Palazzo Orsini Antichrist lectures in Rome in March. Thiel’s lectures argued, more or less openly, that the katechon — the restrainer that holds back the Antichrist in Saint Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians — must in our moment be a strong man who will suspend the normal order to prevent the worse strong man from arriving. The argument is two thousand years old. Augustine refuted it. Constantine partially refuted it by accident. Every emperor who has tried it since has produced exactly the worse strong man the argument promised to prevent.
Leo’s answer in Magnifica Humanitas is the older answer. The katechon is not a strong man. The katechon is the human person, in the dignity given to the person by the imago Dei, refusing the offers that would diminish the person. The disarmament of AI that the encyclical calls for is the disarmament of the offers. The dignity of the worker, of the migrant, of the elder, of the unborn, of the prisoner, of the soldier, of the dissident — the dignity of each of them, defended against the systems that would reduce them to inputs in a production function — is the katechon of our moment.
I am not a Catholic. I am writing this on a Sunday morning in May after a week in which I have published nine pieces that have, in their different ways, attempted to defend the same proposition Leo defended in his encyclical. The proposition is older than the Church. It is in the Hebrew prophets. It is in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos. It is in the prophet’s refusal to flatter the king. It is in the prophet’s insistence that the widow and the orphan and the stranger are the measure of the kingdom. It is in the writing of Simone Weil, who was my first prophet and remains my closest, and who taught me that affliction is the door through which the truth enters a society and is recognized.
The middle road, in this dimension, is the road of the people who can hold simultaneously that they may be religious or not religious, that their tradition may be Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or none, and that the ethical claim — the person is the measure, the person under power is the question, the person’s dignity is the katechon — is binding upon them regardless of where they have come to it from. The middle road is ecumenical. It accepts that the road has been walked by people who arrived at it through every door, and that the test of the walker is not the door he came in through but the road he keeps walking after he is inside.
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I want to come back, before I close, to the sentence at the top.
Communists to my left, fascists to my right, I shall take the middle road. It is, I now realize, a sentence that has been waiting for a generation. It is a sentence in the lineage of Lincoln’s malice toward none. It is a sentence in the lineage of Orwell’s if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. It is a sentence in the lineage of Bebel’s socialism of fools. It is a sentence in the lineage of Hitchens’s regiment of useful idiots and of Applebaum’s New Puritans. It is a sentence in the lineage of every writer who has stood on the road that runs past the flanks and tried to keep walking while both flanks were screaming at him to come in.
The flanks will keep screaming. The screaming is the operation. The screaming is what the rentier coalition has purchased on both ends. The middle road is the road the screaming is designed to drown out.
We are not going to be drowned out. We are going to keep walking. Some days the walking will look like writing nine pieces in seventy-two hours. Some days the walking will look like reading a single document the operators were counting on us not to read. Some days the walking will look like voting. Some days the walking will look like staying in the marriage, paying the taxes, raising the kids, going to the school board meeting, picking up the trash on the block, calling the elderly neighbor whose husband died in March. The walking is the union. The union is the people, walking in the same direction, across the generations, toward a destination none of us will reach in our own lifetimes and all of us are responsible for carrying the relay one more leg toward.
A more perfect union. Not a perfect one. More perfect. The comparative verb. The labor of the centuries.
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I am going to close with the words that closed Lincoln’s First Inaugural, because the moment we are in is the moment he was in, and because the words have not lost their force in the hundred and sixty-five years since he spoke them.
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
The chords are still there. The graves are still there. The hearthstones are still there. The better angels have not been retired by the operators, however hard they have worked to retire them. The chorus will swell again. It will swell because we, the witnesses, the laborers, the walkers on the middle road, will keep walking and writing and voting and donating and witnessing and refusing the cover stories until the chorus is louder than the screaming on the flanks.
We will keep walking. The road is older than the operators. The road is older than the screaming. The road is the road of the Preamble, of the Reconstruction Amendments, of the Voting Rights Act, of Magnifica Humanitas, of Leo and of Lincoln and of Bebel and of Orwell and of Hitchens at his best and of Weil at hers and of every quiet citizen in every quiet town who has, in every generation, picked up the relay and carried it the next leg.
Pick it up.
Carry it.
Hand it on.
Toward a more perfect union.
Your writing has always given me comfort and encouragement. Your pieces this week are compelling. The "likes and comments" you get are historically less in number than I wish they were. However, the famous line from "Field of Dreams" gives me hope. If you build it they will come! Keep building it Michael! They will come!
Haven't seen any mention of Code Pink since the first Trump years. I see it's been taken over as a Chinese front organization. Meanwhile, China has been taken over by state capitalism -- not Marxist or Communist, aside from the Party name, which is now as distant from the reality as is the name of the "Republican" Party. China is not Communist; it's fascist, just like Russia, just like the Trumpists aspire to. The bulk of the American left favors something like the Scandinavian examples, not state capitalism. There's no horde of Communists here.