Over the past few years, I’ve become convinced that our nation is crying out for precisely this kind of therapeutic container. We’re not just politically polarized; we’re ensnared in a pathology of contempt—a reflexive disdain that reduces fellow citizens to caricatures, twists disagreements into irrevocable moral judgments, and makes withdrawal feel like the safest path. The symptoms mirror what I see in fractured families: eroded shared identity, anxious sidestepping of tough talks, and rituals—like our national holidays—stripped of their connective power. Thanksgiving, that most universal American gathering, too often becomes a missed opportunity, a table laden with food but starved of genuine communion.

This contempt isn’t a fleeting mood; it’s a corrosive force deliberately amplified over decades, turning polarization into a self-perpetuating storm. But as a clinician, I know pathologies can be treated—not with denial or confrontation alone, but with structured practices that rebuild empathy and interdependence. This year, I’m launching Building Arks, Weaving Bridges: A Journey from Contempt to Connection. It’s not a cure-all, but a practical “treatment plan”—civic infrastructure disguised as dinner, blending shared stories, simple symbols, and intentional acts to hold us through the hard work of citizenship.

Contempt, in psychological terms, is more than anger or dislike; it’s the “unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another,” a judgment that dissolves empathy and shared humanity. In therapy, it’s the silent killer of relationships, often signaled by sarcasm, eye-rolling, or outright dismissal—the point where one partner stops seeing the other as a flawed human and starts viewing them as irredeemable. Scaled to our civic life, contempt dehumanizes opponents, framing them not as fellow travelers with differing views, but as existential threats. Recent surveys reveal this starkly: Over 60% of Republicans and Democrats now see the other side as a danger to America’s core values, a sentiment that has doubled since the 1990s. This isn’t organic evolution; it’s the fruit of coordinated strategies that have weaponized emotion for political gain.

The blueprint traces back to the 1980s, when Newt Gingrich, as a rising Republican force, retooled politics into moral warfare. His memos to GOP colleagues prescribed inflammatory language—branding Democrats as “corrupt,” “pathetic,” and “traitors”—to exploit cultural fears and grievances. This “wedges and magnets” approach, honed with marketing pros, shifted discourse from policy nuance to binary crusades. The 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine unleashed partisan media, with Rush Limbaugh’s radio empire normalizing contempt as daily fare, blending outrage with entertainment to rally bases. By 1995, as House Speaker, Gingrich gutted bipartisan structures, slashing committee staff and centralizing power in party hands, embedding dysfunction into Congress.

The left mirrored this escalation. Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC tirades in the 2000s echoed right-wing venom, decrying conservatives as “cowards” and “fascists,” while David Brock’s Media Matters systematized takedowns of right-leaning outlets as “hate machines.” The 2010s brought social media’s algorithmic boost, where platforms like Facebook and X rewarded contemptuous content for engagement, forging echo chambers that reinforce “unshared realities.” Donald Trump’s rise amplified it all—his nicknames and rally chants dripped with personal scorn—while responses from the left painted his supporters as “deplorables.” Steve Bannon’s directive to “flood the zone with shit” drowned facts in disinformation, deepening mutual distrust.

By the 2020s, AI and deepfakes have turbocharged this, enabling misinformation at scale and eroding any remnant of shared truth. A 2025 UCLA analysis ties this to surging “affective polarization,” where emotions, not ideas, dominate, triggering amygdala-driven threat responses that entrench black-and-white thinking. Right-wing populism, fueled by backers like Peter Thiel, mocks “globalist elites” as cultural saboteurs, while left-wing activism scorns conservatives as “authoritarians” thwarting justice. The toll is profound: Gridlocked governance, rising violence threats, and a happiness deficit, as contempt breeds chronic resentment. Even post-2024 elections, a University of Pennsylvania study shows this hostility lingers, untethered from outcomes. Globally, America’s case is acute, linking to democratic erosion.

From my clinical vantage, this mirrors untreated relational trauma: Untended wounds fester, leading to isolation. But just as therapy interrupts cycles through intentional practices, so can we counter contempt. Gratitude emerges as a potent antidote, rooted in positive psychology and relational science. It reframes scarcity into abundance, deactivating fear circuits and fostering neural pathways for connection. Arthur Brooks describes it as affirming interdependence—”I need you”—against contempt’s isolating sneer. Journaling specific kindnesses from “the other side” can lower hostility, humanizing adversaries.

This insight inspired The Civic Ritual for Thanksgiving. Drawing from traditions like the Passover Seder, it’s a structured gathering: Set intentions for respectful dialogue, pose four probing questions (e.g., “What are we truly hungry for as a nation?”), toast to unalienable rights while naming exclusions, acknowledge modern “plagues” like mistrust, and commit to small actions. It’s civic therapy—gratitude not as blind optimism, but as disciplined appreciation for shared goods: free speech, neighborly courage, national parks. Critics warn gratitude can mask inequities if misused, but when authentic, it demands moral clarity without dehumanization. A 2025 Medium piece on “gratitude politics” advocates its use in communities to rebuild trust.

In my practice, I’ve seen gratitude rituals mend what arguments shatter. Applied nationally, they can depolarize by inviting presence over perfection. As Thanksgiving 2026 nears, envision tables where contempt yields to curiosity, where we hold heartbreak alongside hope. This isn’t escapism—it’s reclamation. In a republic of “e pluribus unum,” gratitude reminds us our stories intertwine. By embracing it, we can heal the pathology of contempt, one intentional act at a time.

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Kevin Roberts opens A Promise to America — the foreword to Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise — by naming real fears: family breakdown, addiction, a rising China, a political class many Americans no longer trust. Those fears deserve a serious answer, and this article tries to give one: where the document’s evidence holds up, where it doesn’t, why its language works on people even when its evidence is thin, and what an honest alternative to that language actually looks like.

This is not a rebuttal written to win an argument. It’s an attempt to understand a document carefully enough to respond to it fairly — which, as it happens, is also the whole argument of the book this article accompanies.

What the Document Actually Says

Stripped to its structure, Roberts’s foreword makes four promises: restore the traditional family, dismantle the federal administrative state, defend national sovereignty against China and “globalist” elites, and secure individual liberty against a managerial class he says no longer believes in self-government. It is explicit that it speaks for a movement, not the country — the product of “more than 400 scholars and policy experts,” the ninth edition of a Heritage Foundation project dating to 1979. That much is stated plainly and should be taken at face value.

What’s harder to take at face value is the register the document reaches for almost immediately, and stays in throughout: elites who “disdain the Constitution,” a “totalitarian cult” called the “Great Awokening,” bureaucrats engaged in “industrial-scale child abuse,” librarians who should be “classed as registered sex offenders.” This is not the language of a policy platform disagreeing with another policy platform. It’s the language of a document that has already decided its opponents are not owed the ordinary courtesy of being wrong in good faith.

Contempt Has a Specific Meaning, and a Specific Function

It’s worth being precise about the word, because “contempt” gets used loosely in political commentary and it means something exact in the research that studies it. The psychologist John Gottman, whose decades of marriage research remain the field’s most cited work on relationship breakdown, defines contempt as communication that conveys disgust and superiority toward another person — sarcasm, mockery, name-calling, the conviction that the other party is beneath you. In his research, contempt is the single strongest predictor of divorce, stronger than conflict frequency, stronger than anger. The reason is mechanical, not moral: contempt is the one communication style that attacks a person’s sense of self rather than their argument, which makes repair — the ordinary, unglamorous work of staying in relationship with someone you disagree with — measurably harder to do.

Applied to public rhetoric, the distinction matters because anger and contempt do different work. Anger says: you did something wrong, and I’m still talking to you about it. It’s a form of engagement — political scientists who study “affective polarization,” most notably Stanford’s Shanto Iyengar, treat ordinary partisan anger as a normal, even healthy feature of a competitive democracy. Contempt says something categorically different: you are not worth arguing with. It doesn’t ask for a response. It forecloses one. When Roberts writes that university presidents have “more in common with a socialist, European head of state than... the parents at a high school football game,” he isn’t making an argument a reader could push back on. He’s declaring an entire class of Americans outside the category of people whose views merit engagement.

Why Contempt Works — Even When It’s Costly

Here is the uncomfortable part, and it’s worth stating plainly rather than assuming contemptuous rhetoric is simply a rhetorical mistake: the research suggests it works, at least on specific measures.

A 2013 study by political scientist Christopher Weber found that anger reliably increases political participation — donating, volunteering, showing up. Steven Webster’s book American Rage extends the finding across a decade of American elections: angry partisans are more active partisans. And a 2025 study analyzing tens of thousands of political Facebook ads found that appeals aimed specifically at donors — not general voters, donors — used language linked to anger, disgust, or fear in 74 percent of ads, a significantly higher rate than ads aimed at persuading undecided voters. Fundraising appeals, in other words, lean harder into threat and contempt than persuasion appeals do, because the research shows it’s a better tool for the specific job of getting an already-sympathetic reader to act right now than a calm, evidence-based case is.

None of this proves Roberts or his co-authors wrote A Promise to America cynically, calculating for donations rather than expressing genuine conviction — that would be a claim about motive this article has no way to verify, and doesn’t need to make. What the research does support is a more modest and more useful point: language this document uses is not incidental to its persuasive power. It is a large part of it. A document written in more measured terms would very likely mobilize fewer readers to act, donate, and vote — which is exactly why so much political communication, across the spectrum, reaches for it.

Checking the Specific Claims

A few of the document’s factual assertions are worth checking directly, because a fair response engages with evidence, not just tone.

“Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children.” This is close to accurate. CDC data for 2023 puts the overall figure at 40.0 percent, and the rate among Black mothers at roughly 68.8 percent — near enough to “more than 70 percent” to count as a fair citation, depending on the year sourced. What’s contested is not the number but the causal story built on top of it. Family sociologists broadly agree that family structure correlates with a range of outcomes; they disagree sharply, and have for decades, about how much of that correlation reflects family structure driving poverty versus poverty and economic insecurity driving family structure — a debate the document doesn’t acknowledge exists.

“Ninety-four percent of Venezuelans live in poverty.” This is a real, if dated, figure — it appears to draw on Venezuela’s independent ENCOVI household survey, which reported poverty near that level around 2021. More recent estimates from the World Bank and other trackers put the rate somewhat lower, in the 73 to 83 percent range as of 2023–2024 — still catastrophic, still a legitimate indictment of the country’s economic collapse, but a number that has moved since the figure was likely sourced.

“Elites” as a category. This is where the document’s evidence thins out most. “Elites” is used to describe, at various points, university presidents, hedge fund managers, federal bureaucrats, Democratic officials, tech executives, and international organizations — a category broad enough to include tens of millions of people with genuinely different jobs, incomes, and politics. Survey research on elite attitudes (including work published by scholars across the ideological spectrum) does find real differences between highly educated professionals and the general public on some cultural questions. It does not support the document’s implicit claim that this group shares a unified, coordinated agenda “to subvert the family” or install “dictatorial powers.” Coordinated intent is a much stronger claim than divergent attitudes, and the document offers evidence only for the latter while asserting the former.

“The Left” not believing all people are created equal. This is not a factual claim that can be checked against data — it’s a rhetorical assertion about the beliefs of tens of millions of people, most of whom have never been surveyed on the specific proposition being attributed to them. Polling on self-described liberals and progressives consistently shows strong, majority support for formal legal equality; disagreements with conservatives tend to concentrate on how equality should be pursued in practice — through equal treatment versus equal outcome-oriented policy — not on whether equality is a legitimate goal at all. Treating a genuine policy disagreement as a rejection of the underlying value is exactly the move that turns an argument into contempt.

The Cost Nobody Is Pricing In

If contempt genuinely helps mobilize a base and raise money, why does it matter that it’s contempt, and not just tough rhetoric? Because the research on the other side of the ledger is just as real. Gottman’s own finding — that contempt predicts divorce more reliably than conflict does — has an uncomfortable civic parallel this book’s own chapters take seriously: a country whose political factions have stopped extending each other the basic hearing owed to a fellow citizen isn’t having a heated argument. It’s heading toward what amounts to a civic divorce — and unlike a marriage, a country doesn’t get the option of simply separating from the people who live in it. Affective polarization research going back over a decade shows Americans increasingly rate the opposing party not just as wrong, but as a threat to the nation’s well-being — a shift that tracks closely with the rise of exactly the kind of language this document uses, on both sides of the aisle, not uniquely on one.

That’s the real stakes of writing this way. It doesn’t just win or lose an argument. It changes what the reader believes is possible with their fellow citizens afterward.

An Invitation, Not a Rebuttal

None of this is offered as the final word on Kevin Roberts, or on the millions of Americans who read Mandate for Leadership and found something true in it. Real fears sit underneath that document — about family stability, about China, about a federal government many Americans no longer feel answers to them — and those fears deserve a serious answer, not a dismissal delivered in the same contemptuous register this article has just spent several pages naming as the problem.

So here is the actual invitation, meant sincerely: if you read A Promise to America and felt it spoke for you, we would like to understand why, not to change your mind in a single conversation, but to actually hear the story behind the belief. That is the entire premise of Project 2026’s Building Arks, Weaving Bridges initiative — a practice, not a slogan, built around exactly one rule: show up to listen, not to debate, and ask the person across the table to help you understand what brought them to what they believe.

Contempt cannot be argued away. But it can be treated — one honest conversation, one shared table, at a time. That offer stands, genuinely, to anyone who reads this far, on either side of the argument this article has just made.

Sources for the research cited in this article — Gottman’s contempt research, Iyengar’s work on affective polarization, Weber’s and Webster’s studies on anger and political participation, the 2025 Facebook ad study, and the CDC, World Bank, and ENCOVI data cited above — are available on request and will be included in the online version of this piece at moonshot.press.

He was not being theatrical. He was being literal.

Suleyman told the table that artificial intelligence would, within a decade, explode disinformation, displace tens of millions of jobs, and produce a public fury that would make the social media backlash look like a warm-up act. He argued that Google — and the broader industry — would have to share its wealth with the people whose livelihoods the technology was going to consume. He used the words universal basic income. Elon Musk, then a guest, nodded along.

Eric Schmidt thought the worry was overblown. Larry Page, in his characteristic whisper, said AI would create more jobs than it took. The conversation moved on. Eight months later, DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat one of the world’s best Go players in front of 200 million viewers — years ahead of when most experts thought such a thing was possible. The timeline was already wrong. The men best positioned to know it had already decided not to prepare.

That dinner is the hinge point of the story we are now living through. It is the moment when the people who controlled the technology decided, consciously, not to govern it.

Eleven years later, the pitchforks are no longer a metaphor.

The warning shots

Last month, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house in San Francisco. A few days later, his property was hit by gunfire. No one was injured. No motive has been confirmed. But it was difficult, reading the news, not to think of the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk in late 2024, and the strange, ugly folk celebration that followed.

The writer Jasmine Sun, in a piece in The New York Times Magazine, called these incidents “AI populism’s warning shots.” The phrase is precise. They are not the populism itself. They are the noises that precede it — the rumbles a community makes before the ground gives way.

Altman, to his credit, has long understood that something like this was coming. As far back as 2016, he was telling reporters, in a tone that hovered between candor and confession:

“I prep for survival. I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

You do not stockpile potassium iodide because you are confident the social contract will hold. You stockpile potassium iodide because some part of you has already calculated the probability that it will not — and concluded that the calculation falls on you, personally, to survive that failure rather than to prevent it.

This is the psychological hinge that connects 2015 to 2026. The architects of the most consequential technology of our era have been preparing, for at least a decade, for the human backlash to their own work. They have done so by buying land, building bunkers, hiring security details, and applying for citizenship in countries with better natural defenses. What they have not done — what they conspicuously declined to do at that 2015 dinner, and have continued to decline to do at every fork in the road since — is the political work of ensuring that the backlash never becomes necessary in the first place.

Why people are angry

It would be easy, and wrong, to treat the rising anger at AI as irrational — a kind of techno-Luddism, the latest in a long American tradition of fearing the future.

The anger is rational. It is grounded in specific, documentable conditions. Citizens with no formal training in machine learning have nonetheless looked at the facts available to them and reached three conclusions that are, in fact, correct.

First, the displacement is real and is happening fast. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs globally. OpenAI’s own researchers estimate that roughly 80 percent of the American workforce will see at least 10 percent of their tasks affected by large language models, with nearly one in five workers facing impacts on more than half. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei — a man with every financial incentive to soft-pedal this — has warned publicly that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, and that most lawmakers “are unaware this is about to happen.”

When the people who build a system tell you it will destabilize the economy you live in, the rational response is not skepticism. It is preparation. The citizens are preparing. The government, mostly, is not.

Second, the wealth from this transition is being captured, not shared. A $4.5 million National Science Foundation grant seeded the research that became a $2 trillion company. A $50,000 CIA contract seeded another $400 billion one. DARPA’s network research — paid for by American taxpayers — seeded the entire internet economy. The argument that the public, having funded the underlying science, has some claim on the resulting wealth is not a radical proposition. It is the most ordinary kind of accounting. The fact that the accounting has not been done, and the wealth has flowed almost entirely to a few hundred people in a few square miles of California, is a political choice. It was made in specific rooms by specific people. The 2015 dinner was one of those rooms.

Third, the political system has, so far, declined to intervene. The federal AI framework released in March 2026 explicitly defers to markets and existing agencies. Only 12 percent of civilian federal agencies have completed AI adoption plans. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, as currently constituted, includes twelve technology executives among its thirteen members. There is no labor economist on the council. No workers’ advocate. No community health researcher. The body charged with advising the President on the human consequences of AI is, by composition, structurally incapable of advising on those consequences.

The proposed federal response to mass displacement amounts to roughly $160 million for AI-related teacher development and $90 million for affected workers. Set that against a projection of 300 million jobs disrupted globally, and the numbers do not represent a policy. They represent a gesture.

People can do this math. They are doing it.

What the pitchforks actually are

The image of the pitchfork is older than industrial democracy itself. It is the implement that ordinary people pick up when the formal channels of accountability — the courts, the legislatures, the press, the ballot — fail to address what they can see with their own eyes.

In American history, the pitchfork has rarely been a literal weapon. It has been a threat of last resort that the rest of the democratic system uses to motivate itself. The Gilded Age robber barons did not surrender their monopolies because they had a change of heart. They surrendered them because Theodore Roosevelt and a generation of muckraking journalists made the alternative — the actual mob, the actual fire — look more expensive than concession. The New Deal did not arrive because Franklin Roosevelt was a more generous man than Herbert Hoover. It arrived because the country had spent four years watching breadlines and Hoovervilles and decided that a system that produced them could not be allowed to continue.

The pitchfork, in other words, is not the failure of democracy. It is one of democracy’s instruments. The failure is what happens when the people holding the pitchforks find that no functional institution will receive their grievance — that the courts are captured, the legislature is paralyzed, the press is distracted, and the powerful are bunkered in Big Sur.

That is the danger of the present moment. Not that Americans are angry about AI. They should be angry about AI, or at least about the political economy that is producing it. The danger is that the anger is arriving faster than the institutions that are supposed to channel it are able to respond.

We are watching the warning shots. The Molotov cocktail. The gunfire. The 2,400 lawsuits against social media companies that are previewing what AI liability litigation will look like a few years from now. The $375 million jury verdict against Meta. The Florida Attorney General opening a criminal investigation into OpenAI. The 80 percent of Brown University students who, surveyed last year, said they were afraid of the future.

This is not yet a movement. It is the noise a society makes before deciding what kind of movement to become.

What the AI industry got wrong about people

There is a particular kind of arrogance — common in Silicon Valley, but not unique to it — that consists in believing that the people who are good at building a thing are also, by virtue of having built it, the people best qualified to predict what it will do once it leaves their hands.

The 2015 dinner was a case study in this error. The people in that room were extraordinarily good at building artificial intelligence systems. They were extraordinarily bad at modeling how those systems would interact with the actual society — with the rent payments, the credentialing systems, the regional economies, the marriage markets, the church attendance patterns, the opioid prescription rates, the gun ownership statistics — into which they were about to be released.

The economist Jasmine Sun’s reporting captures this gap with unusual precision: the AI builders, she notes, were “first in line to see the power of these tools,” and because so much of their work had been transformed by them, they tended to “extrapolate to everyone.” But the real world outside Silicon Valley does not run on the cognitive patterns of a senior AI researcher at a frontier lab. It runs on credentials, geography, family obligations, debt, faith, habit, and a thousand other variables that are invisible from a corner office in SoMa.

What the industry missed is not technical. It is sociological. It is what the sociologist Richard Sennett called the narrative function of work — the way a job, even a mediocre job, gives a life its shape, its sequence, its sense of being headed somewhere. It is what the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, writing from inside the Nazi camps, named as one of the three primary sources of human meaning. It is what Sigmund Freud, asked what a psychologically healthy person required, summarized in five words: to love and to work.

When the technology comes for the work, it is not merely coming for the paycheck. It is coming for the narrative. And human beings, when their narrative is taken from them without consent or compensation, do not become docile. They become combustible.

America already knows what this looks like. The deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s — the closure of the steel mills, the auto plants, the textile factories — did not merely produce unemployment statistics. It produced what the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton named the deaths of despair: the surge in mortality from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease that has, for the first time since the Civil War, shortened the life expectancy of working-class Americans. The connection between economic displacement and the destruction of human bodies is not speculative. It is documented in the autopsy reports of three counties in every state.

If deindustrialization did that to the people who worked with their hands, the cognitive automation of the 2020s threatens to do something analogous to the people who were told, explicitly and repeatedly, that education was their insurance policy. The paralegal. The medical coder. The junior financial analyst. The customer service supervisor. The radiologist’s assistant. The accountant. These are people who followed every rule the meritocratic system gave them — who went into debt for the credentials, who delayed family formation for the career, who relocated for the job — and who are now being told, by the same system, that the rules have changed and that the adjustment is, regrettably, their problem.

The pitchforks are not coming from the people who never trusted the system. They are coming from the people who did.

What an adequate response looks like

Here is where the article could easily go wrong. The temptation, having named the anger and validated its basis, is to channel it into the kind of catastrophic register that confirms the worst suspicions of the bunker-builders — the mob really is coming, batten down the hatches. That register is not useful. It produces paralysis on one side and fortification on the other, and it leaves the actual democratic work undone.

The harder and more honest argument is that the AI transition is not fated to produce a populist conflagration. It is fated to produce one only if the institutions of self-governance fail to respond to it in time. They have not yet failed. The window is narrowing, but it is open.

A response adequate to the scale of the moment would, at minimum, include the following elements — none of them radical, all of them debated in serious policy circles, several of them already on state ballots.

It would include an automation tax or analogous mechanism that redirects a share of AI-driven productivity gains toward public investment in workforce transition. The argument that capital should bear some of the cost of the transition it is profiting from is not a Marxist argument. It is the same argument that produced workers’ compensation, occupational safety law, and unemployment insurance — each of them, in their time, denounced as confiscatory, and each of them now understood as a precondition of a functioning labor market.

It would include a Public Wealth Fund that gives every citizen a direct stake in AI-driven growth, on the model that Alaska has operated for half a century without controversy. If the underlying science was publicly financed, the returns should not be exclusively privately captured. This is not a redistribution argument. It is a property-rights argument.

It would include portable benefits — health insurance, retirement contributions, training credits — that follow the worker rather than the job, because in a labor market where job tenure is collapsing, benefits tied to employers are benefits in name only.

It would include automatic safety-net stabilizers that activate when displacement metrics cross defined thresholds, so that the response to mass layoffs does not depend on Congress passing emergency legislation in a panic six months after the layoffs have already happened.

It would include a serious, scaled commitment to workforce retraining — not the thin, underfunded, scattershot version that currently exists, but something on the order of the GI Bill, with the public seriousness and the public budget that comparison implies. The current funding levels — $160 million here, $90 million there — are an insult to the scale of what they purport to address.

And it would include — this is the part the technology industry is least prepared to hear — a serious public conversation, with workers and economists and ethicists at the table and not merely AI executives, about which applications of AI we actually want and which we do not. The premise that any technically possible deployment is also socially desirable is not a finding. It is a libertarian assumption smuggled into the conversation as a fact. Democracies are entitled to decide otherwise.

None of these proposals will satisfy the most radical critics of AI. None of them, taken together, will fully prevent displacement. But taken together, they constitute the difference between a transition that working Americans navigate with dignity and one they absorb alone. That is not a small difference. That is the entire difference.

What citizens can do

If the federal government will not lead on this — and the current evidence is that it will not — then the work of channeling the legitimate anger of the AI transition into constructive political pressure falls to citizens themselves. This is not a consolation prize. This is, in the American constitutional tradition, exactly how the system was designed to work.

States are already filling some of the federal vacuum. Illinois, Texas, and Colorado each have AI workforce protections coming into force in 2026. Municipal AI accountability boards are emerging in a handful of cities. Worker AI councils, modeled loosely on the workplace safety committees of the early 20th century, are being organized inside several large unions. The People’s Conference on Technology and the American Workforce Future — a kind of populist counterweight to the President’s all-CEO advisory council — is one of several efforts to build the deliberative infrastructure that federal policy lacks.

These efforts are small. They are also, historically, exactly the kind of institutions that precede major democratic course-corrections. The New Deal did not arrive without a labor movement. The Progressive Era did not arrive without muckraking journalism and the settlement house. Civic infrastructure is the thing that translates diffuse anger into specific demand. Without it, the anger curdles. With it, the anger legislates.

The reader of this essay, then, has a more useful set of questions than should I be worried about AI. They are:

What is my county doing to prepare its workforce for displacement, and who on the county commission is responsible for that work?

What is my state legislator’s position on automation taxes, portable benefits, and AI-related retraining funding, and have I asked them directly?

What civic, labor, faith, or community organization in my region is doing the work of organizing displaced workers, and have I offered them time, money, or expertise?

Which of the candidates running in 2026 — at every level of the ballot, not just the marquee races — has thought seriously about this, and which is offering platitudes?

These are not glamorous questions. They are the questions that decide whether the energy of this moment becomes a New Deal or a riot.

The choice in front of us

The men at the 2015 Google board dinner had a chance to choose something other than what they chose. They could have decided, in that room, that the appropriate response to a technology of this magnitude was to share its benefits broadly, to absorb some of its costs collectively, and to invite the public into the decisions about its deployment. They chose, instead, to treat the warning as overblown and the warner as alarmist, and to continue building.

The pitchforkers Suleyman warned them about were not, in his telling, the enemy. They were a forecast. They were what would happen if the people in that room failed to act on what they themselves already knew.

Eleven years on, the forecast has arrived. A Molotov cocktail at Altman’s house. Gunfire a few days later. A criminal investigation in Florida. Thousands of lawsuits. The first nine-figure jury verdict. An 80 percent fear rate among college seniors at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. The polling numbers on AI trust, on every survey, in steady decline.

There is still time to choose something other than what the 2015 dinner chose. The choice is not between AI and no AI — that question was decided, for better or worse, by the same dinner. The choice is between an AI transition that produces broadly shared flourishing and one that produces broadly shared resentment. Between one that strengthens the democratic institutions of the country and one that overwhelms them. Between one that ordinary working Americans look back on as the moment their society renewed its social contract and one they look back on as the moment it was finally broken.

Jefferson, who knew something about technologies of disruption, put the standard plainly: the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government. That is the test. It is the only test. We will pass it or we will not, and the people who decide are not the ones in the bunkers. They are the ones reading this, and the ones in the next county over, and the ones who will mark a ballot in November.

The pitchforks are here. The question is what the citizens holding them, and the institutions receiving them, are going to do next.

Moonshot Press is a project of the Institute for Salutogenesis and a cornerstone of the Democracy, Opportunity and Citizenship Moonshot. We are nonpartisan, constitutionally grounded, and committed to the proposition that an informed citizenry is not a luxury of democratic life — it is its precondition.

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I am a psychiatrist by training, and I can tell you that what is happening to our national attention right now has a clinical name. It is called perseveration—the compulsive, involuntary repetition of a response regardless of whether it remains useful. Patients who perseverate get stuck on a single thought or action and cannot redirect their focus to wh…

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There is a 40-year-old engineer somewhere in America right now who has stopped functioning. His wife brought him in. He was not sleeping, not working, not engaging with his children. He was verbalizing suicidal thoughts. The precipitating event was not a catastrophic personal loss. It was a series of meetings with his managers that made clear what he had been trying not to know: that the expertise he had spent two decades building — the thing around which he organized his identity, his family’s security, his sense of his place in the world — was being replaced. Not downsized. Not restructured. Replaced. By a system that does not sleep, does not ask for benefits, and improves by approximately an order of magnitude every eighteen months.

He recovered. The work was long and careful: understanding the world view and the reality he was experiencing and interpreting, providing initial tools to manage the response, and then building the cognitive and relational resources for a genuinely healthy state. Not just the absence of crisis, but the presence of coherence — a renewed ability to make sense of his world, to manage what it asked of him, and to find it worth the effort to engage.

I have thought about him many times in the years since, as I have watched the disruption that broke his world begin to break millions of others. What happened to him in that consulting room was not primarily an economic event. It was a coherence crisis. And coherence crises require different tools than economic problems do.

The Framework We Have Been Missing

The sociologist Aaron Antonovsky spent his career asking a question that medicine had largely neglected. It was not a complicated question. It was simply the wrong question for a system organized around disease. The question was this: not why do people get sick, but why do some people stay well?

Working in the 1970s with survivors of profound trauma, Antonovsky noticed something that the standard medical focus on disease and its causes could not explain. Some people, exposed to conditions that would predictably break most people, did not break. They remained functional, engaged, even healthy. What did they have that others did not?

His answer was the Sense of Coherence — a person’s capacity to experience their world as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. Comprehensible: the world makes sense to me, even when it is hard. Manageable: I have the resources to cope with what I face. Meaningful: it is worth the effort to engage with my life.

He called the framework that flows from this insight salutogenesis — health creation rather than disease prevention. The difference is not a matter of emphasis. It is a fundamentally different question. A pathogenic system asks: what is wrong, and how do we stop it from getting worse? A salutogenic system asks: what creates health, and how do we build more of it?

What Antonovsky understood — and what three decades of subsequent research has confirmed — is that the Sense of Coherence is not a fixed trait. It is built. It develops across a lifetime, shaped by experience, by relationship, by the degree to which the institutions around a person support or undermine their capacity to find the world comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. And its foundations are laid earliest. The first years of life — the First 1,000 Days, from conception through age two — are when the basic architecture of coherence is established. The quality of attachment, the stability of caregiving, the safety and predictability of early environment: these are not merely developmental facts. They are the biological and psychological infrastructure on which a lifetime of resilience is either built or compromised.

This is why any serious response to AI’s challenge to the social contract cannot focus only on the workers who are displaced today. It must also focus on the children being born now — the ones who will enter the labor market that AI is currently reshaping, carrying the Sense of Coherence that their earliest years are already forming. To address AI displacement salutogenically is to address it across the full arc of human development: from the newborn whose first experiences are laying the foundations of lifelong coherence, to the mid-career professional whose carefully constructed world has suddenly become unreadable.

The Social Contract and Its Foundations

The American social contract — the implicit agreement between citizens, employers, and democratic institutions about the terms of economic life — was never written down in one place. But its essential architecture is legible: work hard, develop skills, contribute to your organization and your community, and in return you will have income, security, identity, and a place in the social order. Your expertise will be valued. Your contribution will be recognized. The rules you learned will continue to apply.

This contract was always imperfect. It excluded too many people for too long. It concentrated its rewards inequitably. It broke down in specific communities and for specific populations in ways that produced decades of unaddressed damage. But for a significant portion of the American workforce, it was real enough to organize a life around. People built careers, families, communities, and civic identities on the foundation of its basic promise.

Artificial intelligence is breaking that contract. Not gradually, at the margins, in ways that allow for managed adaptation. It is breaking it at the center, at speed, in the sectors where the knowledge economy concentrated its most educated and credentialed workers. The legal researchers, the financial analysts, the software developers, the healthcare administrators, the professional services workers who built their lives on the premise that cognitive expertise was the secure foundation — these are the workers discovering, in real time, that the rules have changed. That the skills they spent decades developing are being automated. That the contribution they made is being replaced by a system that does not require their participation.

The standard policy response to this disruption has been organized almost entirely around the income dimension. Wage insurance, retraining programs, expanded unemployment benefits, universal basic income — these are the tools in the toolkit, and they address a real problem. When displacement occurs, income replacement matters enormously. It is necessary.

But it is not sufficient. And the salutogenic framework tells us precisely why.

The Triple Coherence Attack

AI displacement does not only remove income. It simultaneously attacks all three dimensions of Antonovsky’s Sense of Coherence — and that is what makes it categorically different from prior economic disruptions, and categorically more dangerous to the foundations of democratic life.

Consider comprehensibility first. The social contract made the world legible. You knew what the rules were, what success required, what you needed to build to secure your place. Thirty years of investment in expertise produced a comprehensible relationship between effort and outcome. AI displacement breaks that relationship without explanation, without warning, and without providing a new framework to replace it. The rules changed and nobody told you. The skills you built on the assumption that cognitive expertise was durable turned out to be the precise target of the disruption. The world has become, in Antonovsky’s precise clinical sense, incoherent. It no longer makes sense in the way it used to make sense.

Consider manageability. The resources that made a working life manageable were not only financial. They were the professional identity built over decades of practice. The workplace community — the colleagues, the relationships, the sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. The daily structure of contribution and recognition that gave life its rhythm. The institutional knowledge and the tacit expertise that made a person feel competent and capable in their domain. AI displacement removes these resources simultaneously. It does not just reduce income. It eliminates the scaffolding of a manageable life.

Consider meaningfulness. Perhaps the deepest wound is to the sense that the investment of a lifetime has been worth it — that the effort to build expertise, to develop judgment, to contribute to an organization and a profession and a community, has produced something of lasting value. AI displacement attacks that sense directly. It says, in the most concrete possible terms, that the cognitive work you did can be replicated and improved upon by a system that requires none of what you spent decades developing.

This is what the clinical literature calls a coherence crisis. When it happens to one person, it produces anxiety, depression, identity disruption, and in severe cases, the kind of suicidal ideation that brings a 40-year-old engineer to a psychiatrist’s consulting room. When it happens to millions of workers simultaneously — as it is happening now, and as it will accelerate — it produces something that has a name in the historical record. It produces the social conditions that precede democratic breakdown.

Why Income Is Not Enough

The policy community is not unaware that something beyond income is at stake. Every serious analyst of AI displacement acknowledges the challenge of meaning and identity in passing. But passing acknowledgment is not the same as building it into the architecture of the response.

The standard policy toolkit addresses the income dimension with increasing sophistication: short-time compensation, wage insurance, portable benefits, sector-based retraining, an automation tax, a Public Wealth Fund, even a 32-hour workweek to distribute productivity gains as time rather than money. These are real tools and they matter. But they share a common assumption: that if the income floor is maintained, the other dimensions of what work provides — identity, community, meaning, civic agency — will take care of themselves.

They will not. Antonovsky’s research was unambiguous on this point. The Sense of Coherence is not a byproduct of income security. It is built from specific experiences, over time, in specific institutional and relational contexts. It requires that a person’s world make sense to them in ways that go beyond financial stability. It requires that they have genuine agency over the conditions of their lives. It requires that their contribution be recognized as meaningful by the communities and institutions around them.

An income floor maintains the material conditions for a manageable life. It does not rebuild the comprehensibility, the relational resources, or the meaningfulness that displacement removes. A displaced worker receiving wage insurance and a retraining voucher has more financial security than one without. But they are still living in a world that has become incoherent — still navigating the loss of professional identity, still experiencing the disintegration of workplace community, still confronting the question of whether the expertise they built has any lasting value.

That is the gap in the current response. It is the gap between a policy that prevents financial catastrophe and a policy that supports human flourishing. Between a safety net and a social contract. Between disease prevention and health creation.

The Window and What We Are Building

This brings us to the stakes — and to why the timing of the response matters as much as its content.

Every major democratic renewal in American history intervened in a coherence crisis before the destructive alternatives consolidated. The Constitutional Convention, the Progressive Era reforms, the New Deal — in each case, what determined the outcome was not only the quality of the democratic response but whether it arrived before the destructive coherence — the movements that offered comprehensibility through scapegoating, manageability through authoritarian control, and meaningfulness through the targeting of enemies — had won the race for the allegiance of displaced and frightened citizens.

The window between a coherence crisis and its resolution is shorter than we want to believe. In the 1930s, Father Coughlin had thirty million radio listeners. Huey Long was preparing a presidential run. The destructive coherence was not hypothetical. It was already in the room, organizing, broadcasting, building. What Roosevelt had was not just a better argument. He had institutions — the presidency, a Democratic Congress, the labor movement, a progressive press — that could channel the coherence drive into democratic form before the destructive alternatives consolidated.

We are in an analogous moment. The AI displacement crisis is producing exactly the social conditions — rapid economic disruption, institutional distrust, geographic concentration of harm, absence of adequate policy response — that historically precede either democratic renewal or democratic breakdown. The question is not whether a coherence crisis is underway. It is here, documented in every survey of worker anxiety, in every Reddit thread about the Fear of Becoming Obsolete, in every comment section where someone writes: “I have been in this field for eighteen years. Who is writing the policy response to this?” The question is whether the institutions capable of channeling that energy democratically can be built fast enough.

The People’s Council on Technology and the American Workforce is Moonshot Press’s answer to that question. Not a think tank or an advocacy organization, but a civic institution in which displaced workers, healthcare practitioners, educators, economists, and elected officials sit in the same room — and in which citizens hold authority over the agenda rather than merely providing input to conversations that others control. The Citizen Briefs provide comprehensibility: here is what is happening, here is why it makes sense that you feel this way, here are the policy tools available to respond. The Accountability Scorecard provides manageability: here are the specific, verifiable commitments your candidates are making, here is the factual record against which their words can be measured. The People’s Conference provides meaningfulness: a deliberative forum where citizens are treated as intelligent adults capable of self-governance, not as an audience for expert presentations.

Montgomery County as a Testing Ground

Abstract policy arguments need concrete homes. The People’s Council on Technology and the American Workforce is grounded in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania — not arbitrarily, but because Montgomery County is one of the most economically and demographically representative suburban counties in the United States. It is the kind of place where the AI displacement challenge lands with full complexity: highly educated professional workers in financial services and healthcare administration who are watching their roles restructure; logistics and warehouse workers in lower-wage communities facing a different but equally real wave of automation; a public school system serving children from widely varying circumstances who will all enter the same transformed labor market; and a civic infrastructure of community organizations, faith communities, and local government that is neither a coastal elite enclave nor a hollowed-out industrial community.

Montgomery County is, in other words, America in miniature — diverse enough to reveal how differently the displacement crisis lands depending on zip code, education, race, and industry; connected enough that a civic institution rooted here can test whether the salutogenic approach actually works when applied at community scale.

The Institute for Salutogenesis’s First 1,000 Days Initiative is already at work in Montco, addressing the early childhood foundations of coherence that the policy conversation almost entirely neglects. Because if the Sense of Coherence is built from birth — if the foundations of lifelong resilience are laid in the earliest years of life — then the most important thing a community can do in response to AI displacement is not only to support the workers who are displaced today. It is to ensure that the children being born now enter the world with the strongest possible foundations for the comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness they will need to navigate the transformed world they will inherit.

That connection — between early childhood development and workforce resilience, between the First 1,000 Days and the AI transition — is one of the most important and least discussed in the entire policy landscape. A child whose first years are characterized by secure attachment, by stable and responsive caregiving, by environments that are predictable and safe, is building the neurological and psychological infrastructure for a strong Sense of Coherence. That child will be better equipped to navigate disruption, to rebuild coherence after displacement, and to maintain the democratic agency that citizenship in a self-governing republic requires. The investment in those first years is not separate from the workforce policy challenge. It is its deepest foundation.

And the testing ground for all of it is here, in Montgomery County — where the work is already underway, where the First 1,000 Days Initiative is building the early childhood foundations of coherence alongside the workforce displacement response, and where six children being born right now are the living argument for why urgency is not alarmism but honesty.

Grace in zip code 19003. Jaylen in 19401. Sofia in 19446. Aiden in 19464. Amara in 19012. Riley in 19001. Six children from six different communities within a few miles of each other, whose Sense of Coherence is being shaped right now in their earliest days — and whose life chances in 2043 will be profoundly determined by whether the policy choices made in the next two to three years channel AI’s gains broadly or concentrate them narrowly, whether the institutions of democratic accountability are rebuilt before the coherence crisis produces irreversible political damage, and whether the salutogenic proposition — that human beings deserve the conditions for genuine flourishing, not merely the management of their decline — becomes the organizing logic of American economic and civic life.

That is the work. At the scale of one person in a consulting room, it is psychiatry. At the scale of a community, it is the First 1,000 Days. At the scale of a democracy, it is civic journalism, deliberative institutions, accountability tools, and the organized will of citizens who refuse to accept that the most consequential technological transformation in human history should be governed by the companies building it rather than by the people who must live with what it creates.

The republic has been here before. It has found its way through — not because the outcome was inevitable, but because enough people built the right institutions at the right moment, before the window closed. We are attempting that again. In Montgomery County, in the five years before America’s 250th birthday, with the tools of salutogenic medicine applied to democratic life.

We believe it is possible. And we are building it in public, with citizens, on democratic terms — because there is no other way worth building it.

These aren’t the warnings of fringe alarmists. These are sober voices from inside the financial establishment—people whose profession requires calibrated assessments of risk. When they say America is one step away from Stage 6 in the historical cycle of societal breakdown, we should pay attention.

But as a psychiatrist who has spent years thinking about how emotions shape behavior, I want to offer something these economic analyses often miss: the central role of passion, and how understanding it might be our most important tool for prevention.

Passion Is the Ignition

Dalio’s framework emphasizes structural forces—debt, inequality, the erosion of bipartisanship. These matter enormously. The wealthiest 1% now hold 31% of America’s net worth, up from 23% in 1989. The bottom 50% watched their share shrink to just 2.5%. When people feel the system is fundamentally unfair, conflict follows. History shows this pattern repeatedly: the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and others.

But the structure alone doesn’t ignite. What ignites is passion.

Friedberg put his finger on something essential: “Everyone I speak to is activated emotionally.” This activation isn’t a side effect—it’s the mechanism. Polarization isn’t merely about political disagreement; it’s about the emotional quality of that disagreement. When political difference becomes existential threat, when the other side stops being fellow citizens with different views and becomes enemies, the guardrails start to fail.

In my clinical work, I’ve seen how emotions drive behavior far more powerfully than logic or even self-interest. Fear contracts our thinking. Anger demands action. Contempt dehumanizes. These are ancient neural systems, designed for survival in a world of immediate physical threats. They served us well on the savanna. They serve us poorly when the “threat” is a neighbor with a different political bumper sticker.

The tech platforms that mediate so much of our discourse have become passion amplifiers. They’re optimized for engagement, and nothing engages like outrage. Every day, millions of Americans have their fears stoked, their anger validated, their contempt reinforced—not because any human decided this was good for democracy, but because the algorithm found it was good for clicks.

2026: Renewal or Reckoning

America will mark its 250th birthday in 2026. This timing feels almost providential—a moment when we could either descend further into conflict or choose renewal.

I’ve devoted the last chapter of my professional life to this question. After decades as a psychiatrist, I pivoted to what I call civic entrepreneurship—founding Moonshot Press and directing Project 2026, a democratic renewal initiative timed to this anniversary. Some colleagues think this an odd career move. I see it as a natural extension of the same work: understanding what makes human beings flourish, and creating conditions that support it.

The founders who gathered in Philadelphia 250 years ago understood something we’ve partly forgotten: that self-government requires emotional discipline. They knew history. They knew that democracies tend to destroy themselves through faction, passion, and the corrosion of common purpose. They built institutions designed to slow passion down, to force deliberation, to require coalition.

But institutions alone can’t save us if the people who inhabit them have lost the civic temperament those institutions require.

Neither Denial Nor Despair

It would be easy—and perhaps understandable—to respond to these warnings with either denial or despair. Neither helps.

The denial response says: “Civil war? In America? That’s hyperbolic.” But Dalio isn’t predicting armies clashing on battlefields. He’s describing a society where different factions become willing to inflict maximum pain on each other, where the peaceful transfer of power becomes contested, where political violence becomes normalized. We’ve already seen early signs of this trajectory.

The despair response says: “What can any individual do against such vast forces?” But here’s where my clinical background offers some hope. Individual actions matter precisely because passions spread through social contagion. One person’s calm can reduce another’s anxiety. One act of bridge-building creates permission for others. Movements begin with what John Paul Lederach calls “pockets”—small communities where people model different ways of engaging.

This is why I do this work. Not because I’m certain it will succeed, but because the alternative—waiting passively while the forces of fragmentation gain strength—is unacceptable.

Building Arks in a Time of Storm

Project 2026 operates on a simple premise: democracy requires democrats. Not partisans of the Democratic Party, but citizens who have internalized the habits, skills, and dispositions that self-government requires. We need what I call salutogenic democracy—a framework that emphasizes creating civic health, not just preventing civic disease.

This means treating citizens as thinking adults rather than audiences to be mobilized. It means journalism that equips people for participation rather than merely reports on conflict. It means bridging divides not through empty calls for “civility” but through the hard work of finding shared interests that make cooperation rational.

We’re focusing on early childhood development—what we call the “First 1000 Days”—because democratic capacity begins in the formative period when children develop the neurological foundations for emotional regulation, empathy, and trust. We’re focusing on rural-urban divides because these geographic fault lines track dangerously close to our political ones. We’re starting to work in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and places like it, because real change happens locally before it happens nationally.

None of this guarantees success. Dalio may be right that we’re past the point of return. But his framework also identifies an alternative path: “rise above it and realize that our common good is going to necessitate us dealing with it so that what works for most people is going to work.”

For the Children Born Today

I have no illusions about the difficulty of what we face. The structural forces Dalio describes—the debt, the inequality, the technological disruption—don’t disappear because people decide to be nicer to each other. The passions that threaten us have deep roots in genuine grievances.

But I’ve also seen, in clinical practice and in civic life, how human beings can transform. We are not prisoners of our passions. We have the capacity to recognize when our emotions are being manipulated, to pause before reacting, to seek understanding before condemning. These capacities can be cultivated. They can be taught. They can spread.

The 250th anniversary of America’s founding is not magic. But it is an opportunity—a natural moment for reflection on who we’ve been and who we might become. Whether we seize it or squander it depends on choices that millions of us will make, individually and together, in the months and years ahead.

I’ve chosen to spend whatever professional years I have left on this work. Not because I’m optimistic—the evidence makes optimism difficult—but because I believe the stakes demand engagement regardless of odds. The children born today, on this day when we debate whether civil war awaits them, deserve adults who tried.

They also deserve adults who acted together.

If what you’ve read here resonates—if you believe that preventing civil conflict is work worth doing, and that 2026 represents a genuine opportunity for renewal—I invite you to learn more about Project 2026 and join us. We need physicians, teachers, journalists, parents, business leaders, and citizens of every political persuasion who are willing to build bridges rather than burn them. This isn’t work any of us can do alone. But together, we might just prove Dalio’s grimmer predictions wrong.

Learn about our plans with Project 2026 and how to get involved

We are pleased to offer a preview of Project 2026: Renewing the American Experiment, a forthcoming book from Moonshot Press. This excerpt includes the deeply personal "Personal Foreword: The Question I Couldn't Ask My Mother" by lead writer Shimon Waldfogel, MD, which grounds the project's urgent mission in a story of resilience and democratic health. It is followed by the book's "Introduction: A Republic at a Crossroads," which sets the stage for America's pivotal 250th anniversary in 2026 and the crucial 2026 midterm election as a defining moment for the nation's future. For those interested in a more detailed look into the book's full scope and actionable blueprint, a complete outline is available through the contact page of Moonshot Press.

Personal Foreword: The Question I Couldn't Ask My Mother

I have spent much of my life haunted by a question I could never ask my mother. She was arrested at seventeen for distributing leaflets protesting the working conditions in Zamość, Poland. For five years, she was held without trial in the Bereza Kartuska prison, a place designed to break the human spirit. She escaped only in 1939 during the chaos when Russian forces repelled the Germans. She survived the Holocaust, endured exile in the Soviet Union, and eventually rebuilt her life as an immigrant—first in Israel, then in the United States, where she became a naturalized citizen and worked as a seamstress.¹

As a child, I was often embarrassed by what I saw as her lack of sophistication—her accented English, her silence about the past. It created a wall between us I never learned to climb. She died of cancer in 1970, taking with her the chance to ask my burning question: How did you do it? How did you not only survive systems designed to crush you, but maintain a sense of self, a capacity for hope, a will to keep going? What were the sources of your resilience in a world so full of suffering?.¹

I never got to ask her, but the answer had been closer than I knew. As a young medical student in Israel, I had the privilege of participating in groundbreaking research with medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky. He was studying women who, like my mother, had survived the Holocaust. Driven by the same question that haunted me, he wanted to understand why some people not only survive unimaginable trauma but manage to thrive.¹ This research led Antonovsky to coin the term

salutogenesis—from the Latin salus (health) and Greek genesis (origin).² It represented a revolutionary shift in perspective: from focusing on the origins of disease (pathogenesis) to focusing on the origins of health.³ Instead of asking "What makes people sick?" salutogenesis asks "What keeps people well?".¹

My search for answers continued through my work as a psychiatrist, where I learned that the human body is a complex system of interconnected parts. To heal effectively, you must understand how these systems interact to sustain life. This fascination with systems thinking became my lens for viewing the world. My professional journey brought me to Philadelphia to complete my psychiatric residency at Jefferson Hospital. Living and working minutes from Independence Hall was more than coincidence—it was a daily invitation. I found myself drawn to the revolutionary ideas born in that building. The Declaration of Independence was a moonshot of human dignity. The Constitution that followed was its blueprint, an attempt to build structures that could facilitate human flourishing on a national scale. That proximity sparked a lifelong passion for exploring America's democratic experiment and understanding how to fulfill its promise.¹

On a hot Sunday morning in August 2009, my professional lens turned squarely on the American body politic. I attended a town hall meeting about healthcare legislation, expecting civil discussion. Instead, I encountered a wall of rage. Citizens, red-faced and shouting, voiced fears that their government was overreaching, their freedom disappearing, their country being taken from them. This wasn't just about healthcare—it was symptomatic of deeper democratic pathology. As a physician, I recognized the pattern. Our politics, like much of our healthcare system, was trapped in a pathogenic model: obsessed with diagnosing illness, fighting enemies, and managing dysfunction.¹

But what if we asked Antonovsky's question about our democracy? What if, instead of only cataloging democratic diseases, we focused on creating conditions for democratic health? That salutogenic approach animates this book and the movement it represents: Project 2026. It's a call to shift focus from what's breaking down to what we can build up, resting on three interdependent pillars ¹:

• Democracy: Rebuilding the machinery of self-government to be transparent, trustworthy, and genuinely participatory—providing the process through which a just society emerges.

• Opportunity: Creating conditions for every person to thrive from their first breath—providing the foundation for a just society.

• Citizenship: Cultivating a culture of engagement, responsibility, and mutual care—providing the culture needed to sustain a just society.

These aren't abstract ideals but design principles for a republic worth keeping. They demand more than analysis of what's wrong—they require tools for making things right. My mother's tool was a leaflet: paper, a mimeograph machine, and immense courage. It was technology of dissent, designed to amplify a single voice against oppressive systems. Today's tools have evolved, but the purpose remains. The modern leaflet is a dataset. The modern printing press is an AI assistant that can help any citizen analyze complex legislation, draft powerful public comments, and send them directly to decision-makers.¹

As we approach America's 250th anniversary in 2026, we face a concerted, well-funded effort to dismantle democratic institutions and consolidate authoritarian power. The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 offers a detailed blueprint for this constitutional override—a plan to sideline citizens and entrench narrow ideology.⁶ This book is the counter-blueprint, not as academic exercise but as civic defense. Project 2026 is part manifesto, part manual, part moral compass for 21st-century citizenship. It bridges philosophical insight with concrete strategies, demonstrating how America's founding principles can be powerfully reimagined for our era. This isn't another treatise on democratic decline—it's a comprehensive framework for what we, the people, can build together.¹

Central to this vision is the Citizen Toolbox: practical resources from deliberative guides to AI-powered platforms designed to translate your concerns into concrete action. We're field-testing these tools in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania—our "living laboratory"—proving that democratic renewal isn't top-down fantasy but bottom-up reality.¹

The forces that imprisoned my mother haven't vanished. Human capacity for division and oppression persists. But so does our capacity for resilience, courage, and creating health amid hardship. We cannot afford silence or sophisticated detachment. We must engage. This book invites that engagement. It calls you to move from spectator to citizen, to become co-author of America's next chapter. The work is hard. The hour is late. But the republic is ours to keep—and ours to heal.¹

Introduction: A Republic at a Crossroads

This section sets the immediate stakes: the 250th anniversary, the challenge of Project 2025, and the introduction of the salutogenic question ("What creates democratic health?"). It introduces the "America 6.0" framework as our way of understanding this moment of transition.¹

In July 1776, a small band of visionaries declared the birth of a new nation with a bold proposition: that all people are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights, and that legitimate governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. These ideas were radical then—and they remain radical now. The Declaration of Independence marked the beginning of an experiment in self-government that has endured, evolved, and expanded for nearly two and a half centuries. Yet the promise laid out in that parchment remains incomplete. The American project, in all its resilience, is still unfinished.¹

Project 2026 is a public invitation to finish the work. This invitation is not abstract; it is urgent. The nation's 250th anniversary coincides with the pivotal 2026 midterm election—a moment that will serve as a referendum on the future of American democracy. This book is a guide for that moment, not to tell you who to vote for, but to equip you to reclaim the conversation and demand a government worthy of its founding ideals.¹

Our republic faces unprecedented challenge and opportunity. We are strained by a deep crisis of faith in our institutions and disrupted by a technological revolution that is reshaping our economy, our communities, and the very nature of truth and power. This digital transformation is a double-edged sword: it holds the potential to accelerate authoritarian control, deepen inequality, and fragment our society beyond repair. Yet it also offers us the most powerful tools for citizen empowerment and democratic renewal we have ever known.¹ The path forward begins not with politicians or parties, but with people—with the foundational idea that the citizen is sovereign.¹

Democracy is not a finished product but a practice, a process, and a promise. Like any living system, it must be nurtured, renewed, and reimagined in every generation. When we treat democracy as a static inheritance rather than a dynamic relationship, it begins to atrophy. We are living through such a moment now. To understand this moment and find a path forward, it is useful to frame America's history not as inevitable decline or manifest destiny, but as a series of major system upgrades. America is the most ambitious operating system for self-government ever attempted, evolving through distinct versions in response to crisis and calls of conscience. This "America 6.0" framework provides a hopeful counter-narrative to stories of decay, reframing our current crisis not as an endpoint but as a necessary transition between operating systems—positioning you as a potential co-author of the next version.¹

• Version 1.0 (1776): The Declaration of Independence. A philosophical foundation for liberty and self-rule, but with rights reserved for a privileged few.

• Version 2.0 (1787–1791): The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. A functional architecture for governance, establishing federal institutions and core individual protections.

• Version 3.0 (1865–1870): The Reconstruction Amendments. An attempt to re-found the Republic on equal terms by abolishing slavery and defining citizenship—a promise later betrayed.

• Version 4.0 (1920): Women's Suffrage. A long-overdue expansion of political rights that redefined the electorate.

• Version 5.0 (1930s–1960s): The New Deal and Civil Rights Era. The creation of social safety nets and dismantling of legal segregation expanded opportunity and legal equality.

• Version 6.0 (Now): We stand on the threshold of the next great upgrade, defined by a radical recommitment to the American promise: providing the foundations for every newborn to flourish. In an era shaped by artificial intelligence, democratic fragility, and deep inequality, this requires building new systems that create health and opportunity from the very start of life, ensuring our 20th-century institutions can meet 21st-century challenges.

The task of building America 6.0 rests on a central insight: our founding ideals must be matched by modern institutions and engaged citizens. This requires a holistic approach focused on three interdependent pillars that form the guiding logic of this book ¹:

• Democracy provides the processes for just governance.

• Opportunity creates the conditions for all people to flourish.

• Citizenship cultivates the culture of participation and responsibility required to sustain both.

Together, these pillars form a comprehensive blueprint for renewing the American experiment in our digital age. This book charts that blueprint, guiding you from a clear-eyed diagnosis of our present crisis to a compelling vision for a renewed republic, and finally to the practical tools—including Civic AI Co-Pilots—needed to transform that vision into reality before the pivotal 2026 election.

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