The promise of the Declaration of Independence isn't history — it's our unfinished work.
Why Moonshot Press exists, and why 2026 is the year to finish what 1776 started
Friends and fellow citizens,
I’m Shimon Waldfogel — a psychiatrist by training, the founder of the Institute for Salutogenesis, and, as of this year, the publisher of something I’ve been building quietly for a long time: Moonshot Press.
I want to tell you why, in plain terms.
I spent most of my career sitting with people at difficult thresholds — loss of health, loss of role, loss of the things that used to define them. What I learned there wasn’t really a clinical lesson. It was a human one. People don’t break under hardship the way we assume they will. They break when the world stops making sense to them, when they no longer believe they have the resources to meet what’s in front of them, and when the thread connecting their effort to something larger goes slack. Understanding, capability, meaning — lose any one of the three, and even strong people come apart. Hold onto all three, and people survive things that shouldn’t be survivable.
I don’t think that’s only true of people. I think it’s true of republics.
We are 250 years into an experiment that was never actually finished. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Those words launched a nation two hundred and fifty years ago. For a great many Americans, they remain a promise, not a description. Polarization fractures communities that used to be able to disagree without disappearing from each other’s lives. Barriers to opportunity stay stubbornly in place across generations. And artificial intelligence is now reshaping work and daily life faster than our institutions know how to answer for.
We could let that gap between promise and reality just keep widening. Or 2026 — the actual 250th anniversary of the Declaration — could be the year we treat it as the reckoning it actually is.
That’s the entire premise of Moonshot Press: the promise of the Declaration of Independence isn’t history. It’s our unfinished work.
A moonshot is a goal audacious enough to look impossible, achieved anyway through sustained collective effort — Kennedy’s Apollo pledge is the model everyone reaches for, and rightly. But I’d argue the American experiment itself was the original moonshot. A declaration of inalienable rights and popular self-government was every bit as audacious in 1776 as a rocket to the moon was in 1962, and it demanded exactly the same thing: not one triumphant moment, but generations of sustained work.
So we organized Moonshot Press around a set of specific, dated moonshots — not abstractions, but real commissions and initiatives with real timelines:
The People’s Commission for Technology and the American Future, building a new social contract for an AI-disrupted economy
The People’s Commission to Make Our Children Healthy, centered on the First 1,000 Days of life — because the vast majority of brain architecture is built before age two, which makes early childhood civic infrastructure, not just a family matter
Towards a Health-Promoting System, asking what it would mean to build healthcare around what creates health, not only what treats disease
The Declaration to Constitution Project, reframing this year’s midterms as a 250-year checkpoint on the health of the political system itself
The Middle East at 2048, a generation-length peace moonshot anchored to a symbolic horizon: the 2048 FIFA World Cup
Thrive in Montco PA, our hyperlocal proof of concept — testing whether any of this actually works, starting in one Pennsylvania county, in person, with real neighbors
I should be honest about something: none of this would be possible at this scale from where I sit without artificial intelligence. The same technology I’m asking the country to govern more wisely is the technology that lets one physician draft policy frameworks, produce publishing material, and convene a national conversation that would have required a building full of staff a generation ago. I don’t think that’s a contradiction — I think it’s the whole point. AI is not a savior or a threat in the abstract. It’s a tool whose consequences depend entirely on the hands holding it. So we use it in the open. AI recommends. Humans decide. Every time AI meaningfully shapes something we publish, we say so — not in fine print, but as a civic argument in its own right: that AI, governed transparently, can strengthen human flourishing instead of eroding it. We’ve written that commitment into a public constitution, and we’re inviting readers to hold us to it.
Here’s what I’m asking of you, plainly: don’t just read this. Join it. Suggest a topic. Pose a question we haven’t asked. Show up to a launch — most will be video, one, Thrive in Montco, will be in person, because some things still need a room and real people in it. If you know someone who’s spent years believing democracy asks more of us than we’ve been giving it, forward this to them.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” Two hundred fifty years on, that’s still the standard. We haven’t met it yet. I don’t think any generation fully does. But I think this is a year worth trying harder than most.
Show up. Deliberate. Demand. Vote. Repeat.
Warm regards, Shimon Waldfogel Founder & Publisher, Moonshot Press
P.S. — If this is the first you’re hearing of Moonshot Press: welcome. Subscribe below, and watch for the first launch on July 30th — details to follow.