Why Nothing Changes—Even When Everyone Agrees Something Is Broken
The Just Citizens Experiment: Rebuilding Self-Government (Part 1)
Author’s Note:
This series marks the beginning of a live experiment. Not a commentary on politics or a newsletter of information, but an attempt to build something new: a citizen-led system for practicing self-government in a modern age. Over the next several essays, I’ll share the problem as I’ve come to understand it, the structure we are building through Just Citizens, and an open invitation for those willing to help test and shape it. This is early. It will be imperfect. But if self-government is going to work again, it will have to be built—from the citizen up.
There is a quiet agreement in this country.
It doesn’t show up in headlines. It isn’t voted on. No party claims it. But you can hear it—in living rooms, at work, after long days when people finally say what they really think.
Something is broken.
Not just one policy. Not just one party. Not just one election cycle.
The whole thing feels stuck. And yet, nothing changes. Not in any lasting way. Not in a way that restores confidence. Not in a way that makes people feel like they are part of something that actually works.
We argue. We vote. We post. We sign petitions. We switch sides or disengage entirely.
But the system absorbs it all—and keeps moving, mostly unchanged.
So what’s going on? Why does it feel like millions of people can see the problem, but no one can move the solution?
Let me pause and tell you how I came to this.
For about half of my adult life, I was aware that something wasn’t right. Like many people, I traced it back to the period around the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama. That was when the cracks became visible—economically, politically, culturally.
But awareness is not understanding.
And like most people, I was busy. Work, family, life. I didn’t have a clear diagnosis. Just a growing sense that something fundamental wasn’t working the way it was supposed to.
Then something changed for me in 2022.
I was on a vacation and I remember watching the fall of Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom. I watched members of Parliament scream at each other over scandalous allegations. It wasn’t just the political drama. It was the speed of it. A sitting prime minister collapsing under pressure from his own system—his own party, his own structure of accountability.
I was shocked by how quickly it happened.
And in that moment, something shifted. It felt like a kind of awakening—a realization that a modern political system, even a flawed one, could still correct itself. It could respond. It could attempt a reset when necessary.
And ours… couldn’t.
That contrast stayed with me.
Not as a passing thought, but as a question I couldn’t shake.
Why do some systems still move—and ours feels frozen? What would it take to reboot the political system in the United States so that it worked with high approval and effective governance?
So I started digging. I spent months absorbing political thought. By Thanksgiving 2022, I realized that I needed to write down the ideas that were being assembled in my mind.
Over the next 90 days, I wrote what became The Common Sense Papers. Seventy-six essays with over 100,000 words.
Not casually. Obsessively.
Over eight months, I worked through roughly 50 books and close to 1,000 articles—history, political theory, economics, institutional design. I wasn’t using AI. I was trying to think it through myself, from the ground up.
And what I found was not a single failure.
It was structural.
In Common Sense Paper No. 4, I outlined what I came to believe were several core roadblocks in the system—failures in how we structure representation, incentives, accountability, and participation itself. The structure was impacting conduct (political behavior) and performance (governance outcomes) in a negative doom loop.
In simple terms, I began to see the system being strained across multiple fault lines:
Representation that no longer reflects the diversity and independence of the public
Incentives that reward conflict, attention, and fundraising over problem-solving
Weak mechanisms for accountability between elections
Overreliance on hollowed-out parties as gatekeepers of ideas and candidates
A policymaking process disconnected from structured public input
Information systems that amplify noise but not consensus
And a citizen culture that is increasingly passive, reactive, and fragmented
Different people describe these problems in different ways. But they tend to converge on the same reality: Our system no longer translates public thought into coordinated public action. It processes noise. It manages conflict. It absorbs pressure. But it does not reliably produce shared decisions that move the country forward.
After writing, I started traveling.
I met with people working on democracy reform—across political lines, across ideologies. People building new voting systems, new civic platforms, new policy frameworks. And I pitched the same basic idea everywhere I went. Not that any one reform would fix things. But that we were missing something more fundamental.
And then something unexpected happened.
At the American Democracy Summit in Los Angeles, I was pulled into an unscheduled gathering—an informal room filled with experts from across the country focused on citizens’ assemblies. Researchers, practitioners, reformers—people who had been working on pieces of this problem for years.
That meeting didn’t end when the conference ended. It became a group that has continued meeting every other month for the past two and a half years.
That was the first time I saw it clearly: There were people all over the country working on parts of the solution. But no shared structure connecting it together.
Another moment came on the sidelines of a conference.
I spoke with one of the top “30 under 30” political influencers in the United States. I gave him the same pitch—the structural and behavioral issues that were trapping the system.
He paused and said:
That’s probably the best explanation I’ve ever heard for why the political system is so stuck.
That reaction stayed with me too. Because it wasn’t disagreement we were running into. It was recognition.
The easy answer is to blame the politicians. Or the parties. Or the media. Or the donors. And there is truth in all of that. Incentives are misaligned. Power protects itself. Systems drift. But those explanations, while satisfying, miss something deeper.
Because even if you replaced every elected official tomorrow—every member of Congress, every governor, every president—you would still face the same underlying problem: There is no functional structure for citizens to govern together. Not really.
We have a system for choosing leaders. We do not have a system for citizens to think, decide, and act together at scale. And that distinction matters more than we realize. What we have is a system to let citizens pick leaders who fight for power to manage a system that serves other leaders.
Voting is not governing. It is a signal. A moment. A selection between options that were already shaped long before most people ever saw them.
Petitions are not governing. They are expressions—often ignored, sometimes absorbed, rarely decisive.
Social media is not governing. It amplifies voices, but it does not organize them into coherent decisions.
Even activism, at its best, tends to push from the outside. It can influence. It can disrupt. But it does not replace the need for a structure that can actually process ideas, build consensus, and translate that into action.
So we are left in a strange position. Millions of people who care. Millions of people who have opinions, ideas, instincts about what should change. But no shared mechanism to turn that into something durable. Something that can move.
A republic does not fail all at once. It drifts. It becomes less responsive, less grounded, less connected to the people it is meant to serve. Not because people stop caring—but because they lack a way to act together that is structured, disciplined, and continuous.
And over time, that absence gets filled. By parties. By coordinated or captured institutions. By professional classes of influence. All of which become, in effect, substitutes for the citizen.
This is the part we don’t often say out loud. The problem is not just that the system is broken. It’s that the citizen is underdeveloped within it. We have built a culture of spectatorship.
Pay attention. Have opinions. Show up occasionally. Then return to private life. But self-government was never meant to work that way. It requires something more demanding—and more powerful. Citizens who are capable of thinking clearly, acting consistently, and working together over time. And it requires structures that allow those citizens to do more than react.
Structures that allow them to deliberate, decide, and build.
Right now, we don’t have that. So even when people agree something is wrong, the energy dissipates. It has nowhere to go. No place to organize. No mechanism to convert concern into coordinated action. And so the cycle continues.
Election.
Disappointment.
Debate.
Fatigue.
Repeat.
But what if the problem isn’t just what we’re fighting about? What if the problem is that we’ve never built the missing layer between the individual citizen and the formal institutions of government? A layer where citizens can:
Learn.
Connect.
Deliberate.
Decide.
And act together in a structured way.
Not once every two or four years—but continuously.
That is the idea we want to explore. Not as a theory. Not as a commentary.
But as something we are trying to build.
A system where citizens are not just observers of government—but participants in shaping it, in a real and organized way that is not based on party vs. party combat. It won’t be perfect. It certainly won’t be immediate. And it will likely challenge some of the assumptions we’ve all grown used to.
But the alternative is to continue as we are—aware of the problem, frustrated by it, and unable to move beyond it.
If self-government is going to work in the modern world, it will not happen by accident.
It will have to be built.
From the citizen up.
Next: We’re Trying Something New—A Citizen-Led Experiment to Fix America
In the coming essays of this series—The Just Citizens Experiment: Rebuilding Self-Government—we will examine several key topics. We will explore the core idea, the experiment, the invitation, the vision, and why you should care.
We do not have a system for citizens to think, decide, and act together at scale. So we’re building one. It’s a moonshot, but we have to give this a try.
Do you know someone who needs more happiness? Please share and invite others to subscribe.
Yeah, so let’s start a movement that welcomes all people and parties, but is led by independent thinkers offering objective analysis and proposals.
What is our mission? To revitalize American self-government by organizing our many voices into a potent reform effort centered on the Pursuit of Happiness and the American Dream.
Do you believe the United States should be just, peaceful, good, and free? Do you want to organize (or support others who do) to achieve reforms so big that neither major political party can do them alone? Do you want to champion human flourishing with liberty and dignity for all? Join us…
This is a wonderfully noble concept / mission. I'd love to see some progress, however I'm at a point of being very skeptical.
The USA Empire has been collapsing for the past sixty years. This isn't just one bad leader or a bad party. In part, this is human nature. We human societies (governments) go in cycles. We are still on the way down, but so many people are ignorant of why. As we collapse, more and more people are too busy surviving to bother doing anything to fix the problems.
My focus is that a key problem is fiat money. Until we have a hard currency again, and the constraints it puts on preventing unlimited government growth, we will continue to see this decline.
A great article! We can revive self-government. We must. We the People are the only ones who can solve our problems. I'm excited that JustCitizens is building a framework that can actually work. Looking forward to more!