The Freedom Illusion — Part V
What we build instead
Fifty years ago, one man wrote a memo that changed America.
Lewis Powell—a corporate lawyer who would soon sit on the Supreme Court—told the Chamber of Commerce that American business faced an existential threat. Not from foreign enemies. Not from economic competition. From ideas. From the growing sense that maybe corporations shouldn’t dictate how society works. From the possibility that Americans might start demanding that the economy serve people rather than the reverse.
His solution wasn’t better products or higher wages. It was ideological warfare.
Powell’s memo did something that had never been done: it united forces that had always fought each other. Wall Street and Main Street. Oil giants and small manufacturers. Old money dynasties and hungry new entrepreneurs. Competitors who battled in the marketplace joined hands to reshape how Americans understood society itself. They stopped fighting over market share and started fighting for the market’s soul.
They built think tanks. Captured universities. Created media empires. Funded judicial pipelines. They didn’t just fight policies—they replaced the operating system. And they won.
You can trace a throughline from that memo to everything happening today documented in this series. Citizens United. The fall of Roe. Every culture war of the last fifty years. Climate denial funded by the very companies whose scientists knew the truth. Mass incarceration. The Democratic surrender. The fascist turn. All of it traces back to one strategic insight: win the ideology, and the policies follow.
They understood something we keep forgetting: movements fighting in silos lose. A unified ideology wins.
For fifty years, there has been no counter-memo. No unified response. Just fragmented movements, each fighting its own battle, each losing ground while the extraction machine kept running. Environmentalists over here. Labor over there. Civil rights in another silo. Criminal justice reformers in another. All of them fighting symptoms while the ideology producing those symptoms went unchallenged.
That ends now.
This is the counter-memo.
Why Policies Alone Are Not The Solution
Here’s something most people don’t understand about policy: without an underlying ideology, good policies face a gauntlet designed to destroy them. The obstacles escalate at every stage.
Stage 1: Policies may never be conceived in the first place. When neoliberalism is the only ideology in the room, every policy discussion happens within its frame. Minimum wage debates become “how much can businesses afford?” rather than “what does dignity require?” Healthcare debates become “how do we make markets work better?” rather than “how do we ensure everyone gets care?” Tax policy becomes “how do we incentivize investment?” rather than “how do we fund the society we want?” The ideology isn’t announced. It’s assumed. And because it’s assumed, policies that violate its premises don’t get proposed—they don’t even get conceived. The extraction system doesn’t need to defeat good policies at the ballot box if those policies never make it onto the agenda in the first place.
Stage 2: If conceived, policies struggle to gain momentum. Suppose someone does conceive a policy that challenges the dominant ideology. Without an underlying framework that people subscribe to—one that makes the policy more than just a thing some interest group wants—it will be framed as radical, unrealistic, or special-interest pleading. The policy floats alone, disconnected from any larger vision. It has no natural constituency beyond those it directly benefits. It can be dismissed as impractical because there’s no shared understanding of why it’s necessary. Contrast this with how neoliberalism operates: when Reagan cut taxes on the wealthy, he wasn’t just passing a policy. He was expressing an ideology—that wealth concentration is good, that markets know best, that government is the problem. Every subsequent policy had to fit that frame or fight upstream against it.
Stage 3: If passed, policies get circumvented. Part III documented the Democratic surrender—how both parties embraced neoliberalism and abandoned working people. But notice what happens when Democrats do try to help: infrastructure bills, climate investments, student debt relief attempts. Some pass, some don’t. But even the victories get absorbed. Tax credits get captured by corporations. Relief programs get means-tested into ineffectiveness. Loopholes get carved by lobbyists before the ink dries. Why? Because the entire economy is operating according to an ideology that disagrees with the policy. Every actor—businesses, investors, lawyers—is optimizing for extraction. A policy that cuts against this gets ignored, goes unenforced, or gets worked around. Without an underlying ideology demanding specific outcomes, every policy becomes a negotiation—and in negotiations, the side with more money and lawyers wins. Always.
Stage 4: If enforced, captured courts kill it. Suppose a policy survives all of this—conceived, built momentum, passed, and actually enforced. The final barrier: a judiciary captured by the adversarial ideology. Part III traced how the Federalist Society spent fifty years building a judicial pipeline. The result is a Supreme Court that guts the Voting Rights Act, strikes down Roe v. Wade, kills student debt relief, dismantles environmental regulation, and constrains agency authority—not because the Constitution demands it, but because the ideology does. The courts become the final backstop ensuring that even successful policies die.
This is the gauntlet. Policies that challenge the dominant ideology must survive all four stages. Most don’t survive the first.
The Invisible Hand
Few two-word phrases have had more impact than Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”
Most people hear it and think markets—supply and demand, prices finding equilibrium, the comforting story that if everyone chases profit, society gets what it needs.
But Smith wasn’t naming a sacred property of markets. He was naming a pattern: when individuals pursue their own ends inside a shared environment of incentives and assumptions, their actions aggregate into outcomes no one explicitly planned. The “hand” is whatever makes the environment cohere—whatever turns private optimization into public direction.
That’s ideology.
Ideology is the invisible hand because it does something deeper than set a policy agenda. It sets the definition of rationality. It tells people what success looks like, what’s realistic, what’s respectable, what’s “just how the world works.” Then, as people optimize for security, status, stability, and advantage inside that frame, they don’t just live under the ideology—they express it, over and over, at scale. Not because they’re evil. Because they’re adapting.
Markets are not the invisible hand. Markets are one of the places you can see the invisible hand moving—like surface ripples that reveal a current underneath. Wages, prices, credit, ownership, “efficiency,” “growth”—these are the observable dynamics of a deeper logic deciding what gets rewarded and what gets punished.
But some may want to ask: if ideology shapes outcomes inevitably, what about movements, revolutions, shocks? Doesn’t history show that drift can break—that the direction can change?
Sure. Given enough time, the outcomes of any drift can become untenable for the many—through crisis, contradiction, depletion, backlash, or simply exhaustion. The particular trigger matters less than the fact that, eventually, the strain produces a rupture big enough to force a reckoning.
And that doesn’t refute the argument. It proves it.
Revolutions, movements, crashes, wars—none of them automatically change the direction of a society. They only do so if they change the current. So ask two questions:
Did the movement/revolution/shock substantially reform or replace the dominant ideology?
Is the new dominant ideology pointing somewhere meaningfully different?
If the answer to both is yes, expect the society to shift—gradually but relentlessly—in proportion to that change in direction, as millions of people re-optimize inside the new frame.
If the answer to either is no, expect the society to remain mostly unchanged on net—even if you changed who holds office, which party wins, which industries dominate, or what the markets “look like.” You didn’t change the hand. You changed the gloves.
And that’s the point of the gauntlet: the gauntlet isn’t just a set of obstacles. It’s the invisible hand defending itself.
Changing the Current
This is why “just win more elections” isn’t a strategy—it’s a hope. Democrats have won elections. They’ve held the presidency, the House, the Senate—sometimes all three at once. They’ve passed policies. And yet here we are. The body count in Part IV is what fifty years of “just win” produces when the gauntlet is waiting on the other side.
An ideology is a policy-generating engine. It doesn’t just evaluate proposals as good or bad. It derives policies from first principles. When you truly commit to an ideology, the policy space collapses. Instead of infinite options to debate endlessly, you get a narrow band of configurations that actually fit the principles.
Without an ideology, you’re wandering a map with no destination. Every path looks equally valid. With an ideology, you know where you’re going—and the correct path becomes obvious.
Liberalism, as Part III established, isn’t an ideology. Even at its strongest—Rawls, Perfectionism—liberalism offers no meaningful defense against ideological capture. And if your framework has no built-in anti-capture mechanisms—such that its core values can be redefined away through capture of its own processes—then it does not meaningfully have values. It has aspirations. This means liberalism—in all its current forms—is ultimately reducible to Liberal Proceduralism.
Liberal Proceduralism is a good thing—a commitment to processes like free speech, due process, democratic elections, and separation of powers. These are essential tools for how decisions get made within a context of self-governance. But these tools are deliberately value-neutral on what gets decided. They don’t tell you what taxation should look like, or how welfare should work, or what to do if a power-seeking ideology is trying to redefine “justice” or “good society” according to its preferred views. This neutrality and lack of anti-capture mechanisms make institutional capture a positive-expected-value game*—where the winner defines what values and rights mean, and how rules apply.
*Positive-expected-value game: When the payoff of winning exceeds the cost of trying, rational actors will try. Institutional capture has huge rewards and—under Liberal Proceduralism—almost no resistance. Capture isn’t just possible; it’s incentivized.
Roe v. Wade is the proof. Fifty years of "settled law." Then the Federalist Society captured the courts, Dobbs used Liberal Proceduralism to revoke the right, and liberals had no defense. Tools don't care who wields them.
Some liberals argue that Roe should have been resolved legislatively. But that's just another trap. Liberal Proceduralism offers nothing to prevent a sufficiently captured legislature from repealing the Respect for Marriage Act—or a captured Court from overturning Obergefell and ending marriage equality. It offers nothing to prevent sufficient capture from annulling the Thirteenth Amendment and making slavery legal again. The only reason this will likely never happen isn't liberalism—it's a clear expectation that the resulting movement, revolution, or shock would succeed in reforming or replacing the dominant ideology, as we discussed earlier.
What’s needed is an ideology of human flourishing—a framework that generates policies the way neoliberalism generates extraction. Not a wish list of nice things. A derivation engine that constrains the possible toward outcomes that serve human thriving.
And here’s the crucial piece: a counter-ideology doesn’t just help you survive the gauntlet. It puts the extractors against the wall.
If you offer an ideology based on values that everyone already agrees on—fairness, truth, responsibility, merit, simplicity—with policies clearly derived from those values, a narrative that frames success as collective struggle rather than individual wins, and accountability mechanisms that ensure the ideology actually delivers on its promises, you force a question the extraction system cannot answer: What values are their policies supporting? Are their policies actually delivering them? And what story are they telling—other than “trust us”?
Neoliberalism survives by never having to justify itself in those terms. It hides behind “freedom” and “markets” and “growth” while delivering wage stagnation, wealth concentration, and captured institutions. But once a competing ideology makes the connection between values and outcomes explicit, the mask slips. Suddenly the extractors have to explain why their “freedom” means medical bankruptcy, why their “markets” mean monopoly pricing, why their “growth” flows only upward.
They can’t. Not honestly.
This is how you do to neoliberalism what liberalism did to monarchy: make it untenable. Make it something that has to be defended rather than assumed. Make its advocates explain themselves in terms they cannot win. And eventually—make it extinct.
From Diagnosis to Prescription
That’s the gauntlet. And that’s why this series was never building toward a policy platform.
In Parts I through IV, we dissected the extraction machine. We traced the architecture: wage suppression, debt traps, engineered life crises, blocked inheritance—the closed loop that keeps 165 million Americans trapped in permanent economic captivity while their labor flows upward. We examined the four-hundred-year technology: slavery, Jim Crow, convict leasing, the Southern Strategy, the carceral state—the machinery that weaponizes race and religion and class to maintain itself. We documented the bipartisan surrender: how both parties abandoned workers and embraced neoliberalism, leaving no legitimate political path to change. And we counted the consequences: deaths of despair, mass incarceration, epidemic loneliness, collapsed trust, the authoritarian turn.
If that felt relentless—if four parts of mounting evidence felt like staring into an abyss—that was intentional.
Not gratuitous. Structural.
Because comfortable exits had to be closed:
“We just need the right policies”—no, you’ve just seen the gauntlet they face.
“We just need better Democrats”—no, Liberal Proceduralism is just a set of tools, not an ideology; it cannot win this conflict.
“These are separate crises requiring separate movements”—no, they’re outputs of one machine, and fighting them separately is exactly how they persist.
The darkness was diagnostic. It had to be complete enough that only one conclusion remained: the operating system itself needs replacing.
The Army warned us in 1945: “The only way to prevent fascism from getting a hold in America is by making our democracy work.”
We didn’t listen. And now fascism has a hold.
But this is not the end of the story. It’s the end of the diagnosis. You can’t defeat an ideology by opposing individual policies. You defeat it by replacing it with a better one.
What follows is the architecture of that replacement—an ideology of human flourishing built to defeat an ideology of extraction. The values it stands on. The institutions it builds. The mechanisms that make it self-sustaining. And the strategy for actually winning.
The Foundation: A New Operating System
What follows didn’t emerge from invention. It emerged from discovery—years of searching for the values that bubble up across philosophies, traditions, and religions wherever humans have tried to articulate what a good society looks like. Fairness. Truth. Responsibility. Merit. Simplicity. These recur because they work. They’re what humans across cultures and centuries have recognized as the foundation of societies that don’t eat themselves.
The work has been in definition and operationalization. Pinning down what each value actually means. Translating them from abstractions into institutional design. Building a theory of power that prevents capture, resists technocracy, blocks authoritarian drift—while remaining strong enough to protect pluralism and dissent.
And it’s not finished. It never will be. What follows is designed to adapt—to maintain feedback loops with the people it serves, to self-correct based on evidence, to evolve as circumstances change. A living framework, not a static blueprint.
But Isn’t Ideology Dangerous?
The objection is understandable. History is littered with ideologies that became persecution engines—movements that started with noble goals and ended in gulags, genocide, and theocratic tyranny. Why should anyone trust a new one?
Four responses:
First, you’re already living under an ideology. Neoliberalism didn’t announce itself. It presented its assumptions as neutral common sense—”markets know best,” “government is the problem,” “there is no alternative.” For fifty years, it shaped every debate, constrained every policy, captured every institution. The question was never “ideology or no ideology.” It was always “which ideology”—named or unnamed, chosen or inherited.
Second, that ideology is already killing people. Part IV just showed you the body count: 70,000 deaths of despair every year. Dropping life expectancy—we’re the only wealthy nation where it’s falling. An epidemic of loneliness affecting half the population. Trust in institutions collapsed from 73% to 17%. A fraying social fabric producing the authoritarian turn the Army warned us about in 1945. These aren’t neutral outcomes. They’re the casualties of neoliberalism—the ideology we’re living under right now. Why does it get a free pass? Why do we treat a growing mountain of corpses as inevitable—rather than as the contemptible output of an ideology that must be replaced?
Third, the absence of a life-affirming ideology is itself the danger. Consider what’s coming: climate change requiring coordinated global action, pandemics that exploit our interconnected world, artificial intelligence that could obsolete human labor within a generation. Each of these is an extinction-level threat if approached through the lens of quarterly profits and shareholder returns. Each requires exactly what neoliberalism cannot provide—collective action, long-term thinking, and human flourishing as the goal rather than economic growth. The absence of ideology isn’t safety. It’s civilizational suicide.
Fourth, what follows is designed specifically to resist capture. Not naively—not by hoping good intentions persist. The framework below includes a full theory of power with built-in safeguards: threat recognition that distinguishes ideologies from cultures and beliefs, proportional defense focused on actions rather than thoughts, and anti-capture mechanisms that monitor whether the system itself is drifting from its principles. These aren’t wishes. They’re structural safeguards, detailed and debatable, built to prevent the cure from becoming the disease.
The objection deserves seriousness. It’s been earned by history. But the answer isn’t abandoning the field to unnamed ideologies that got us here. It’s building one that names the danger explicitly—and designs against it.
With that framing, let’s look at what we’re building.
The extraction system persists because it has something most opposition movements lack: coherence. Its values (profit maximization, shareholder primacy, individual responsibility for systemic failures) align with its institutions (captured courts, corporate media, hollowed-out regulators) and its mechanisms (regressive taxation, debt financing, labor suppression). Everything reinforces everything else.
Any replacement must be equally coherent. Piecemeal reforms get absorbed or reversed. What’s needed is a framework where values, institutions, and mechanisms work together—where the system as a system produces human flourishing the way the current system produces extraction.
That framework is the Unified Societal Operating System (USOS).1
This is an overview. The footnotes throughout this section link to detailed explorations of each component—the principles, the institutions, the mechanisms, the theory of power2 —for those who want to go deeper.
USOS isn’t a policy platform. And it isn’t a replacement for the Constitution. It’s a philosophical architecture that sits beneath both—providing the ethical foundation from which governance should be designed and the Constitution interpreted. Every generation interprets the Constitution through some underlying ideology, whether they name it or not. For the past fifty years, that ideology has been neoliberalism, operationalized through justices groomed by the Federalist Society. USOS offers a competing interpretive foundation—one built on human flourishing rather than extraction.
And crucially: USOS is itself a form of liberalism—the first configuration that doesn't collapse into Liberal Proceduralism, because its values are anchored in observed cultural convergence rather than abstract philosophy, and its anti-capture is structural. It's not a rejection of the liberal tradition—it's liberalism upgraded into an actual power-competitive ideology.
It operates on three levels:
Level 1: Foundational Principles3 — The ethical bedrock. Five values that anchor everything else:
Fairness — Every individual deserves equitable treatment, dignity, and access to opportunities. Not equality of outcome, but genuine equality of opportunity—which requires addressing the systemic barriers the extraction system deliberately creates.
Truth — Decisions grounded in evidence and logic, not ideology or propaganda. A society that cannot agree on basic facts cannot govern itself. Truth isn’t just a value; it’s infrastructure.
Responsibility — Accountability proportional to power and benefit. Those who extract more from society owe more back to it. Those who cause harm bear the cost of repair. This is the principle the extraction system most aggressively violates.
Merit — Recognition and reward for genuine contribution—economic, social, cultural, intellectual. Not inherited privilege disguised as achievement. Not wealth extracted and rebranded as “earned.” Actual merit, transparently measured.
Simplicity — Systems clear enough that they cannot be gamed by those with lawyers and lobbyists. Complexity is a tool of extraction; simplicity is a defense against it.
These principles aren’t arbitrary. They’re derived from what makes societies actually function—what produces trust, cooperation, and shared prosperity rather than division, hoarding, and collapse.
Level 2: Operational Drivers4 — The translation layer. Five domains that turn principles into practical action:
Psychology — Understanding how humans actually behave, not how economic models pretend they behave. Designing systems that channel self-interest toward collective benefit rather than pretending self-interest doesn’t exist.
Economics — Resource distribution that balances innovation incentives with genuine security. Not socialism. Not unfettered capitalism. A system where markets serve human needs rather than the reverse.
Technology — Aligning technological advancement with human flourishing. AI that augments rather than replaces. Platforms that connect rather than addict. Innovation measured by what it enables, not just what it profits.
Culture — Celebrating diversity while fostering shared values. The extraction system weaponizes cultural difference; a flourishing system makes difference a source of strength rather than division.
Sustainability — Optimizing for long-term viability, not quarterly returns. Systems that strengthen over time rather than extract until collapse.
Level 3: Institutional Pillars5 — The implementation layer. Five structures that make the principles and drivers real:
Education — Developing informed, critical thinkers capable of participating in self-governance. Not job training for extraction. Not indoctrination into consumer identity. Actual education.
Media Integrity — Ensuring public discourse remains grounded in accuracy. The extraction system runs on misinformation; a flourishing system requires shared access to truth.
Democracy — Governance that actually represents the governed. Not donor-captured theater. Not gerrymandered districts and suppressed votes. Actual democracy, defended against the forces that seek to hollow it out.
Justice — Accountability systems focused on repair and prevention rather than punishment and profit. Detention that rehabilitates. Courts that can’t be bought. Laws that apply equally regardless of wealth.
Oversight — Continuous monitoring of institutional alignment with foundational principles. The extraction system captures regulators; a flourishing system builds oversight that resists capture.
These three levels—principles, drivers, pillars—form an integrated system. Each level depends on the others. Principles without implementation are aspirational documents that change nothing. Implementation without principles becomes technocracy serving whoever captures it. The integration is what makes USOS different from both wish lists and policy papers.
The Derivation Engine in Action
Abstract principles are fine, but do they actually generate policy?
When you anchor society’s organization to the three levels—principles, drivers, pillars—certain requirements naturally emerge. Not policies yet, but conditions that any arrangement must satisfy to remain aligned with the principles.
Take Fairness and Merit applied to Economics. What do they require?
If every individual deserves dignity (Fairness) and genuine contribution should be rewarded (Merit), then someone working a full-time job must be able to earn a dignified life—without needing a single government handout. Not luxury—dignity. That means earning enough to cover basic necessities: housing, food, healthcare, education. Plus something reasonable left over for leisure and building modest wealth.
This isn’t utopian dreaming. This configuration existed. In the decades after World War II, for a significant portion of workers—particularly white men (for all the reasons we covered in Part II)—a single income could support a family, buy a home, and build savings. Even without anyone articulating an ideology that demanded it remain permanently true, that arrangement created the American middle class. Its erosion destroyed it.
The point: once you’ve established what the principles require in a given domain, the policy question clarifies. Not “what should we do about this problem?” but “what policy delivers the condition that the principles demand?”
Watch it work on a specific problem.
The problem: Wage stagnation. Millions of Americans work full-time jobs and still can’t afford housing, healthcare, or basic security. The current system’s response: means-tested welfare programs that require workers to prove their poverty, navigate bureaucratic mazes, and accept the stigma of “taking handouts” despite contributing forty hours a week to the economy.
The neoliberal frame: “We can’t raise the minimum wage too high—small businesses would fail.” This frames the choice as workers versus small business owners, pitting two groups who should be allies against each other, while large corporations extract from both.
The USOS derivation: We’ve already established the condition: full-time work must provide a dignified life without government assistance.
Now ask: what configuration delivers this?
Answer: Flip the welfare recipient.
Instead of workers applying for assistance—proving their poverty, suffering the indignity of means-testing when they’re already contributing full-time labor—have businesses apply for wage subsidies. A business demonstrates: we provide goods or services people want, we employ workers doing meaningful labor, we charge competitive prices, and our revenue genuinely can’t cover living wages. If true, the government subsidizes the gap. The worker gets a full paycheck, never interacts with the welfare bureaucracy, keeps their dignity intact.
But when a corporation doing stock buybacks and paying executive bonuses tries to apply? “No. Pay your employees. You can afford it.”
Notice what just happened. No tortured debate about whether minimum wage kills small business. No accepting the neoliberal frame that pits workers against employers. Just a direct question—what configuration delivers dignity for work?—answered by reasoning from principles everyone already holds. The ideology cuts through manufactured divisions and speaks directly to shared values.
The resulting policy has practical benefits too: It reduces bureaucracy (fewer individual applicants, less means-testing). It eliminates stigma (workers aren’t “on welfare”—they’re fully compensated for their labor). It prevents abuse (corporations can’t externalize labor costs onto taxpayers while enriching shareholders). It aligns incentives (businesses that genuinely can’t pay get help; businesses that choose not to pay get refused). And it sunsets automatically: as wages rise and the local spending base rebuilds, the subsidy ratchets down and disappears.
Has anyone proposed this? Not that I’ve seen—not even progressives arguing for worker dignity. Why? Because without an ideological anchor, nobody thinks to ask “what configuration actually delivers what Fairness and Merit demand?” They’re too busy negotiating within the neoliberal frame, accepting its premises, fighting over scraps.
Now consider a different combination: Fairness + Responsibility in Economics. Who should fund the societal infrastructure that makes wealth possible?
Wealth doesn’t emerge from nothing. It can only be meaningfully produced and preserved because of conditions that society provides—all of which have costs. Education systems that produce a capable workforce. Infrastructure that moves goods and people. Law enforcement and courts that protect property and enforce contracts. Emergency services. Public research that seeds private innovation. A stable currency. A market filled with people who have spending power.
Individual innovation and risk-taking matter. But they operate on these inputs. They use these conditions to generate private wealth. The question isn’t whether society deserves credit—it’s who should fund the inputs that make wealth creation possible.
Fairness says: proportionally. Responsibility says: those who benefit most from the system contribute most to maintaining it.
The derivation: your obligation to fund the societal infrastructure should be proportional to how much wealth you’ve extracted from the system it enables. Not proportional to your income—a measure of activity. Proportional to your accumulated wealth—the scoreboard of who actually won.
Notice the framing. This isn’t “billionaires shouldn’t exist.” It isn’t “eat the rich.” It’s: congratulations on building all that wealth using the infrastructure society provides—now pay your dues proportional to your benefit. No class warfare. No punishment. Just proportional responsibility. That framing is much harder to argue against. It is also the foundation for the Meritocracy Tax we’ll discuss below.
This is the power of ideology. Not a predetermined list of policies, but a derivation engine that generates solutions—often solutions nobody else conceives—because the principles constrain possibility toward human flourishing the way neoliberalism constrains it toward extraction.
And here’s where it puts the extractors against the wall: How would a defender of the current system argue against these to an average voter? What case could they possibly make that someone working forty hours a week should have to suffer the indignity of proving their poverty to a government bureaucracy? Why shouldn’t people cover the costs of running society in proportion to what they’ve taken from it? Our alternatives align naturally with values voters already hold—fairness, dignity, rewarding real work, proportional responsibility. Once those alternatives exist, clearly derived from principles everyone shares, including the wealthy, the current system simply stops making sense. That’s the goal.
Proactive Alignment Maintenance
Most political frameworks lack something critical: a mechanism for staying aligned with their own principles over time.
Most systems can change—the Constitution has amendments, after all. But they’re designed to resist change. Amendments happen only after decades of an issue going unresolved, after enough damage to social cohesion builds sufficient pressure to overcome massive structural inertia. Change is reactive, arriving long after the harm is done.
USOS inverts this. The system doesn’t just permit adaptation; it mandates continuous evaluation. The Oversight pillar isn’t about watchdogs waiting for crisis—it’s about constant review of what’s working and what isn’t, responsive to public input and empirical evidence. When technology changes, when social conditions shift, when mechanisms get captured, the system is designed to detect drift before it calcifies into decades of damage.
This is the difference between a system that can be amended after enough people suffer, and a system that actively monitors its own alignment with foundational principles and adjusts proactively. Not reactive self-correction, but continuous principled evolution.
The three levels—principles, drivers, pillars—with proactive alignment maintenance, give USOS the structure to guide a society. But structure alone isn’t enough. Every ideology must also reckon with conflict. How does it recognize threats? How does it defend itself? How does it avoid becoming the thing it opposes?
Answering these questions requires a theory of power—the system’s immune system and reproductive system combined.
The theory of power has three components: threat recognition, proportional defense, and anti-capture self-application.
Threat Recognition: The Compatibility Test
Let’s be direct about what USOS faces.
The reality: This is an ideological conflict. USOS cannot coexist with ideologies built on extraction and supremacy—systems designed to concentrate power, exploit the many for the few, or establish one group’s dominance over others. These aren’t differences of opinion to be debated in good faith. They’re incompatible visions of what society is for.
The constraint: But USOS must not become what it fights. History is littered with movements that opposed tyranny and became tyrants themselves. To prevent this, USOS is structurally designed to concern itself only with ideologies—not with cultures, religions, beliefs, or modes of production. The distinction isn’t semantic. It’s the guardrail against becoming a persecution engine.
The necessity: And yet, USOS recognizes it must prevail. Coexistence with extraction ideologies isn’t possible—one system or the other will shape society. If we are to transition from extractionism to human flourishing, the ideologies that sustain extraction must be defeated. Not the people who hold them. Not the cultures they operate within. The ideologies themselves.
This creates a tension: fight to win, but don’t become the monster. The resolution lies in precision—knowing exactly what we’re fighting and what we’re not.
What is an ideology? A comprehensive system for organizing society. It has five components as we discussed in part III:
Anchor — core values from which all else derives, and the means of implementation
Intentionality — commitment to building toward the anchor over time
Systemic approach — coordinated action across domains
Theory of power — how power works and must be wielded
Commitment to outcomes — the anchor materialized throughout society, with processes to measure and iterate toward it
All five must be present.
What isn’t an ideology? A culture is an inherited way of life—customs, practices, shared history. Cultures evolve; they aren’t designed. They don’t necessarily claim that all societies should be organized their way. A belief is an individual conviction. Beliefs can be components of ideologies or cultures, but they aren’t automatically either.
Why USOS Protects Cultures—Structurally
Why does this matter? Because many historical atrocities came from treating these categories as interchangeable—persecuting people for their religion when the actual threat was a specific political configuration, or suppressing cultures when the problem was an ideology operating within them.
But the distinction between ideologies and cultures isn’t just a guardrail against persecution. It’s rooted in something deeper: USOS derives its legitimacy from cultural pluralism.
Remember how this framework was described: “It emerged from discovery—years of searching for the values that bubble up across philosophies, traditions, and religions wherever humans have tried to articulate what a good society looks like.”
Fairness. Truth. Responsibility. Merit. Simplicity. These weren’t invented in a laboratory. They were found—recurring across cultures, continents, and centuries because they work. They’re what humans everywhere have recognized, through vastly different paths, as the foundation of societies that don’t self-destruct.
This is where USOS earns the “Unified” in its name—not through imposed uniformity, but through discovered unity: the same values, arrived at independently, across the full breadth of human experience.
This means the five principles aren’t validated by philosophical argument alone. They’re validated by their appearance across human cultures. Every tradition that arrives at these values through its own path—whether spiritual, intuitive, or practical—is evidence that USOS has identified something real rather than imposed something arbitrary.
USOS therefore has a structural stake in cultural pluralism. Not as tolerance. Not as “celebrating diversity” for its own sake. But because different cultures are manifestations of the foundational principles—the drive of the human mind (or soul, for those who believe in it) to arrive at these values through paths that USOS traces empirically.
This creates a precise distinction: USOS defends and empowers cultures in their non-ideological forms—the forms where they shine as examples of the five principles. It resists the ideological configurations that betray those values in their quest for power.
Christianity as a faith tradition, with its teachings on compassion, justice, and human dignity, exemplifies Fairness and Responsibility. Christianity configured as Christian Nationalism—demanding political supremacy—betrays those same values. The tradition deserves celebration. The power-seeking configuration deserves opposition.
Islam, with its emphasis on charity, community, and submission to justice, manifests Truth and Responsibility. Jihadist Salafism, configured to impose its vision through violence and domination, betrays those values entirely. The tradition deserves protection. The ideology does not.
Indigenous spiritual traditions, with their emphasis on reciprocity with the natural world and responsibility to future generations, embody Sustainability and Responsibility. Any configuration that weaponizes indigenous identity for political domination would betray those same principles.
Socialist philosophy, with their emphasis on worker dignity, collective bargaining, and mutual aid, manifest Fairness, Responsibility, and Merit—the principle that workers should retain the fruits of their labor is Merit at its core. Democratic socialism—worker ownership, robust safety nets, economic democracy—is compatible with USOS. Authoritarian configurations that flatten individual expression or enforce outcome uniformity are not. The incompatibility lies in the enforcement mechanism and the demand for conformity, not in collective organization itself.
The pattern holds across traditions. The distinction isn’t arbitrary—it’s derived directly from the relationship between cultures and the foundational principles they help validate.
This is what separates USOS from universalist ideologies that historically flattened cultural difference or became instruments of cultural imperialism. Those ideologies saw cultures as obstacles to be overcome or assimilated. USOS sees cultures as evidence—as independent arrivals at the same destination through different paths, proving that the destination is real.
The Cultural driver, in other words, isn’t about tolerance. It’s about recognition: that USOS exists because human cultures across time and space have been reaching for these values all along. To destroy those cultures would be to destroy the very evidence on which USOS’s legitimacy rests.
And we’ve already tested the alternative: liberal neutrality. It didn’t produce peace across cultures; it produced an open arena where power-seeking ideologies grew within cultures, weaponized them, and turned pluralism into a battlefield—each trying to seize the state and use it to dominate the rest.
This precision prevents the “slippery slope to persecution” objection. USOS doesn’t suppress beliefs. It doesn’t eradicate cultures. It resists ideologies—comprehensive systems that, if implemented, would undermine the foundational principles that make pluralism possible.
And yes, this means USOS is intolerant of intolerance. The paradox of tolerance isn’t a flaw; it’s the only stable configuration. A society that tolerates movements seeking to destroy tolerance will eventually be destroyed by them. USOS names this explicitly rather than pretending neutrality.
Proportional Defense: How USOS Prevails
Having identified what constitutes a threat, how does USOS actually prevail against ideologies of extraction and supremacy—without becoming a persecution engine itself?
The answer isn’t revolutionary violence or authoritarian crackdown. It’s structural design. USOS is built to make extraction ideologies fail on their own terms, through mechanisms that operate continuously within normal institutional life.
Proactive mechanisms are baked into the system’s everyday operation. Economic structures like the Meritocracy Tax make extreme wealth concentration self-defeating. Educational institutions build critical thinking and media literacy—not indoctrination against specific ideologies, but immunization through understanding. Technological infrastructure prioritizes accuracy over engagement-maximizing outrage. These aren’t emergency responses to threats; they’re background conditions that make a flourishing society naturally resistant to capture.
Reactive mechanisms activate when specific threats manifest, following a principle of proportionality. Most conflicts stay at the rhetorical level—counter-speech, exposure, social pressure. When necessary, escalation proceeds through economic pressure, legal accountability for concrete violations (not beliefs), and carefully constrained governance safeguards. At every level, the response is proportional to the threat, subject to due process, and focused on actions rather than thoughts.
The full framework—including the specific mechanisms, due process requirements, and limits—is detailed in the USOS Theory of Power.⁵ What matters here is the core insight: you can design a society that structurally resists extraction without requiring constant vigilante action or authoritarian enforcement. The architecture does the work.
Anti-Capture Self-Application: Who Watches the Watchmen?
The hardest question for any system: who decides whether the principles are being upheld? What prevents USOS from being captured by bad actors who redefine “misalignment” to target legitimate opposition?
The answer is the Independent Public Knowledge Infrastructure—the system’s immune system against its own capture.
This infrastructure operates independently of executive authority. It’s publicly funded but not executive-controlled—structured like an independent judiciary, protected from political retaliation. Its function: continuously evaluate whether institutions are aligned with foundational principles, and whether the theory of power itself is being applied correctly.
Several mechanisms prevent capture:
Distributed assessment: No single body determines alignment. Multiple independent institutions evaluate from different perspectives, and they compete for accuracy. When assessments diverge, the divergence itself becomes evidence requiring investigation.
Public transparency: All methodologies, criteria, and determinations are public. Secret assessment enables capture; transparency inhibits it.
Red team structure: For any contested proposition, random teams are formed from those willing to rigorously defend a thesis. Teams compete to prove and disprove claims. Prestige accrues to accuracy, not to predetermined conclusions. This creates institutional incentive for genuine inquiry rather than confirmation of power.
Feedback mechanisms: When the system itself appears to be drifting from principles—when enforcement targets legitimate opposition, when “threat” gets defined to serve incumbent power—the Knowledge Infrastructure has authority to call it out and demand correction.
Can this system be captured? In principle, yes. No institution is permanently incorruptible. But capture requires coordinated failure across multiple independent bodies, all with structural incentives toward accuracy and transparency. The design doesn’t guarantee incorruptibility—nothing can. It maximizes the difficulty of capture and the visibility of attempts.
This is the critical point: USOS doesn’t pretend to solve the problem of quis custodiet ipsos custodes through institutional design alone. It acknowledges that ultimately, the system requires informed citizens who care about its integrity. The Knowledge Infrastructure makes informed citizenship possible by ensuring access to accurate information. But if the citizenry itself abandons the principles—if “the people” fail—no institutional structure can save them.
That’s not a flaw. That’s honesty about the nature of self-governance. Democracy requires a demos that wants it.
The Economics: Making It Self-Sustaining
Earlier, we reframed Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”—not as a mystical property of markets, but as ideology itself. The shared assumptions and incentives that cause millions of individual decisions to aggregate into systemic direction. Change the ideology, change the current. Change the current, change where society drifts.
Economics is where ideology becomes tangible. Every tax structure, every welfare program, every regulation and deregulation—these aren’t neutral technical decisions. They’re expressions of underlying values. They’re choices.
Consider the post-war era. Top marginal tax rates exceeded 90%. Corporate taxes funded a substantial share of government. Strong unions ensured that productivity gains flowed to workers. These weren’t accidents or economic inevitabilities—they were policy choices. Responses to crisis, guided by Keynesian economics and a belief that maximizing employment and guaranteeing basic needs would stabilize society. And for a time, it worked. A single income could support a family, buy a home, and build savings.
But here’s what Part III established: those policies had no ideological anchor. Keynesian economics is economics—one domain among many, not a comprehensive framework for organizing society. When Powell’s network arrived with a full ideology—one that united values, institutions, and mechanisms into a coherent system—the New Deal consensus had no defense. The choices changed. Top marginal rates fell from 91% to 37%. Corporate taxes cratered. Union power collapsed. And the middle class—built by the previous set of choices—began its long erosion.
That’s the point: there is no neutral. Every economic configuration expresses values, whether articulated or not. The question isn’t whether to have an ideology—it’s whether yours is coherent enough to sustain the policies you want. Neoliberalism chose extraction and built a system to perpetuate it. USOS chooses flourishing—and must do the same.
Two examples illustrate what USOS-derived economic policy might look like: the Meritocracy Tax and the Grifter Tax. These aren’t the only possibilities, but they demonstrate how reasoning from foundational principles produces configurations that current political discourse doesn’t even conceive.
The Meritocracy Tax⁷ addresses a fundamental misalignment in how we fund government. Current taxation punishes economic activity—every paycheck, every purchase, every transaction triggers a tax event. Meanwhile, accumulated wealth—the actual scoreboard of who benefited from the system—sits largely untouched. The Meritocracy Tax inverts this: your obligation to fund societal infrastructure becomes proportional to how much wealth you’ve privatized from the collective economy. Three mechanisms make it work: proportional responsibility (pay in proportion to what you’ve accumulated), a universal exemption tied to the GINI coefficient (which automatically shifts burden upward as inequality increases), and a market-pegged cap (ensuring productive investment still grows wealth while passive extraction doesn’t outpace the economy). The result is a self-correcting system where concentration becomes self-defeating rather than self-reinforcing. For the complete proposal—including how it addresses objections about wealth taxes, valuation, and capital flight—see the full article.
The Grifter Tax⁸ targets a different problem: the business model of misinformation. The extraction system depends on lies—about who’s taking your money, about which policies help you, about who your enemies are. And lies are profitable: false news spreads six times faster than truth, outrage drives engagement, grifters cash checks while democracy burns. The Grifter Tax doesn’t regulate belief—that would be censorship. It regulates commerce in claims presented as grounded in legitimate processes when they aren’t. Did you follow good-faith scientific methodology before selling something as scientifically valid? Did you apply journalistic standards before broadcasting it as news? If you profited from claims dressed in the costume of rigor without doing the work, that’s fraud—and the profits are forfeit. The mechanism removes the financial incentive; without profit, the grift collapses. For the full framework—including domain-specific applications and due process safeguards—see the complete series.
Both examples share a design philosophy: incentivize alignment with foundational principles, make violations economically self-defeating, maintain simplicity and transparency, and ensure due process at every stage. They’re illustrations of what becomes possible when you stop negotiating within neoliberalism’s frame and start deriving policy from values everyone already holds.
The Vision: What It Might Look Like
Economic policy generates resources. But resources need direction. What might governance look like when institutions are designed to implement USOS values?
The United People of America Compact6 is one theoretical example—an exercise in imagining how USOS principles could be translated into functioning institutions, and how we might get there given the current state of federal capture.
The thought experiment starts from a hard truth: the federal government may be too captured to reform from within. But states retain significant authority. Blue states have been subsidizing red states for decades while receiving policy obstruction in return. What if, hypothetically, they stopped waiting for federal permission and started building functional alternatives?
The Compact imagines:
AmeriCare — Universal healthcare based on residency, not employment. Funded through progressive contributions with no caps on high earners. Healthcare as a right, not a profit center—an implementation of Fairness in the domain of health.
AmeriHousing — Publicly-funded housing that cannot be used for speculation. Owner-occupied only. When housing is a human need but also an “investment vehicle,” the investment function wins and humans lose. AmeriHousing would separate shelter from speculation—Simplicity applied to housing policy.
Department of American Success — Consolidated support replacing the fragmented, means-tested maze that currently exists. Food security, education, employment, retirement—integrated rather than siloed. Responsibility made structural.
AmeriSafe — Disaster response and climate resilience, including relocation services for those fleeing states that have abandoned them. Sustainability as institutional mandate.
People might ask: Why is some form of “America” in the name of everything? Isn’t that nationalistic? Isn’t that bad?
The answer lies in the difference between patriotism and nationalism. People need a reason to have pride in themselves as a whole, to identify with a collective struggle, and to feel that it matters. That is not the same as “my people have some immutable characteristic that makes us superior to everyone else and therefore entitled to conquer the world.” Throwing away patriotism for fear of nationalism isn’t wisdom—it’s foolishness. It’s saying: “there’s nothing that actually binds us together or that makes our combined struggle important.” It completely hands the reins to ideologies that thrive on division to fabricate that sense of belonging and togetherness without competition. It is the failure mode of pure liberalism as ideology that we discussed in Part III at the deepest level.
The Compact also imagines membership requiring standards: no voter suppression, no theocratic governance, protection of bodily autonomy. States that violate these standards would face automatic removal—principles enforced by structure, not hope.
This isn’t a legislative proposal. It’s an illustration of what becomes possible when you start from USOS rather than from the current system’s assumptions. The specific programs matter less than the demonstration: that coherent governance flowing from coherent principles is imaginable, even under conditions of federal failure.
Rhetorical Escalation in Practice
Economic mechanisms create structural incentives. But structures don’t build themselves—and they don’t defend themselves either. The extraction system has spent fifty years winning the ideological war while we debated policy. If USOS is going to replace it, we need to win that war too.
The escalation doctrine outlined above is a framework. But frameworks need application. At Level 1—rhetorical escalation—the Anti-MAGA Messaging Guide7 provides the tactical playbook.
Why start here? Because rhetorical escalation is where most conflicts should stay, and where the opposition has been winning for decades. The extraction system didn’t achieve dominance through better arguments. It won through strategic deployment of power: coordinated messaging, emotional manipulation, tribal identity activation, and relentless repetition. The opposition has historically brought facts to a propaganda war—and lost.
The core insight: you cannot treat an ideology as a normal political opponent requiring debate-style engagement. This is psychological warfare, not discourse. And psychological warfare has different rules.
Simplicity beats complexity. If your message doesn’t fit on a sign, it won’t spread. The extraction system uses simple frames: “They’re taking your jobs.” “Government is the problem.” “Make America Great Again.” The response cannot be a policy paper. It must be equally simple, equally memorable, equally repeatable.
Emotion beats facts. Facts are your shield, not your sword. Lead with emotion—anger, betrayal, hope. Facts defend against counterattack; they don’t win hearts.
Repetition is power. The extraction system repeats the same frames endlessly until they become background reality. One message, repeated by everyone, everywhere, simultaneously. Not a hundred clever variations. One hammer, swung relentlessly.
Attack the betrayal, not the believers. MAGA voters aren’t the enemy. They’re victims of the same extraction system, misdirected toward scapegoats. The strategy is to drive a wedge between the architects who exploit them and the followers who’ve been conned.
The Mission
The mission has two goals. Ideally, you do both. But if direct conflict just isn’t something you can handle—and that’s okay, not everyone is built for it—then at minimum, do the first.
Goal 1: Spread Ideas That Work
Use the USOS framework to plant questions and policy ideas that reframe the debate entirely. You don’t have to fight anyone. You just have to make people think.
Questions like:
“Why should someone working forty hours a week need government handouts to survive? Shouldn’t full-time work provide a dignified life?”
“Why shouldn’t your tax contribution reflect how much of the economy you’ve privatized?”
“If corporations are people, why don’t they go to prison when they kill people?”
“Why does ‘fiscal responsibility’ only apply to healthcare and food stamps, never to wars and billionaire tax cuts?”
Policies like the Meritocracy Tax⁷—replacing income tax with a wealth-based system that rewards productive investment and makes extraction self-defeating. Or the Grifter Tax⁸—targeting the business model of misinformation without censorship.
Build your slogans are these questions and ideas. They’re derivations from principles everyone already holds—Fairness, Truth, Responsibility, Merit, Simplicity. They cut through manufactured divisions because they speak to values, not tribes. Spread them. Let them do the work.
Goal 2: Discredit the Machine
Here’s the second objective, stated plainly: discredit the identity components built by the Powell Network and the systems through which they propagate.
A critical distinction before we proceed: We are targeting ideas and institutions—not individuals. The line we never cross is stochastic terrorism: rhetoric designed to inspire violence against people. That’s not just morally wrong; it’s strategically stupid. Attack people, and their supporters unify in defense. Attack ideas, and the coalition fractures. The people holding these ideas are potential converts. The ideas themselves are the enemy.
Not debate the ideas. Not engage with them in good faith. Discredit them—mock, humiliate, and expose them with receipts at every opportunity—until society reflexively finds these manufactured beliefs disgusting, untrustworthy, and contemptible. For good reason.
This isn’t cruelty. It’s accuracy. Parts I through IV documented what these institutions actually are and what they’ve actually done. The mission is to make that reality stick—to ensure that the next time someone encounters these products, they recognize them for what they are.
The Religious Identity Manufacturing Operation. Every manufactured moral panic—from the abortion issue to the Satanic Panic to “grooming” accusations to the war on “wokeness”—should be treated as proof that everything manufactured by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Moral Majority, the Family Research Council, and their successors is the product of a Jesus-hating, anti-Christian cult that serves and worships corporations instead of Christ.
Because that’s precisely what they are.
Each moral panic is a political project designed to manufacture Christian identity with total disregard for scripture—to separate Christians from their hard-earned money and mobilize them to vote against their own interests. These organizations don’t serve Jesus. They serve the extraction system. Their theology is whatever keeps donations flowing and workers voting for their own exploitation. The 700+ pedophile pastors exposed in the Southern Baptist Convention weren’t an aberration—they were the product of an institution that protects predators while screaming about drag queens reading books.
Mock them. Expose them. Make “family values organization” synonymous with “grift operation.”
The Legal Doctrine Manufacturing Operation. Any lawyer who utters “originalism” or “unitary executive theory” with a straight face should be disbarred—and if they’re a judge, impeached as a threat to constitutional self-governance. Their only “grace” should probably be standing to sue the Federalist Society for fraud, because their “education” was the legal equivalent of a Trump University real estate seminar.
These are not “neutral methods.” Originalism and unitary executive theory aren’t serious jurisprudence. They’re manufactured quasi-legal lenses designed not for the fair execution of law, but to provide cover for ripping off the American people while pretending the Constitution demands it.
A serious jurisprudence demonstrates four things: constraint, consistency, epistemic integrity, and ethical coherence with self-governance. These “doctrines” fail all four. And by examining their fruits, you can see the consequences of these failures:
Buckley v. Valeo, Bellotti, and Citizens United (Powell himself wrote Bellotti): Established that money equals speech, corporations are people, and spending is protected expression. The result: unlimited dark money flooding elections, billionaires drowning out citizens, and democracy for sale to the highest bidder.
Shelby County and Brnovich: Gutted the Voting Rights Act, reopening the door for voter suppression in the same states that required federal oversight in the first place.
Loper Bright, Jarkesy, and West Virginia v. EPA: Stripped independence and expertise from executive agencies, making it impossible for government to regulate industries that capture the courts.
Janus: Kneecapped unions’ ability to fund themselves, weakening the only organized counterweight to corporate power.
Trump v. United States: Placed the president above the law by giving him total immunity for core powers. The Court rubberstamped it even after lawyers suggested a president could legally assassinate a political opponent using “core powers.” That’s not jurisprudence. That’s coronation.
Dobbs: Reversed Roe and stripped privacy rights from women—over a manufactured religious position industrialized into identity by the same ideological machine that created these doctrines in the first place.
Trump v. Wilcox and Trump v. Slaughter: Via shadow docket, allowed the president to fire heads of independent agencies at will—shredding the independence that made them independent. But curiously, they carved out an exception for the Federal Reserve, because even these justices know that letting a president fire Fed governors would crash the economy. There’s no principled legal distinction. They just invented one to avoid the consequence of their own doctrine.
Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo: Stayed an injunction that had barred immigration stops based on “speaking Spanish... with an accent” and “apparent race or ethnicity.” Racial profiling, blessed from the bench.
Snyder v. United States: Ruled that payments made to officials after they do your bidding aren’t bribes—they’re legal “gratuities.” Pay a mayor $13,000 after he awards your company a million-dollar contract? That’s just a thank-you note. Corruption, legalized through wordplay.
And all the while, as these clearly “neutral” decisions flow from the bench, some of the strongest proponents of these “methods” conveniently forget to disclose the copious financial benefits they’ve been receiving for years from titans of industry—who just so happen to be friends and colleagues of the beneficiaries of many of these decisions.
And who are those beneficiaries? Certainly not the public. It’s always some industry trying to externalize their costs (which often are human lives) while lying to the public, or some other clearly and objectively corrupt moneyed interest. The tobacco industry—which Powell himself worked for before Nixon put him on the Supreme Court—while it lied about lung cancer. The oil industry as it lies about climate change. The gun industry as firearm deaths become the leading cause of childhood mortality (ages 1-17) in the United States. Corporations seeking monopoly control over entire sectors of the economy. And the very religious organizations that manufacture the moral panics designed to distract their followers from noticing they’re being fleeced.
And if you take these doctrines to their logical conclusions:
Originalism → The dead hand of a brutally exclusionary baseline outvotes the living. The “original understanding” didn’t include Black people as citizens, women as voters, or workers as anything but expendable inputs. If you insist that this baseline is the supreme moral authority—and then selectively honor the Reconstruction Amendments only when convenient—what you’re actually doing is laundering hierarchy as “constitutional fidelity.”
Unitary executive theory → Elective monarchy. A president who can consolidate control over enforcement, hobble independent oversight, and then claim immunity for “official” acts is not meaningfully accountable to law. That is monarchy with a ballot.
So no—these aren’t “schools of thought.” They are products: ideological packaging designed to convert extractor interests into the appearance of constitutional necessity. A bar that treats this as normal is a captured bar. A legal academy that treats this as respectable debate is complicit. And judges who knowingly deploy these doctrines as legitimacy costumes—while the outputs consistently undermine democratic constraint, equal citizenship, and evidence-based governance—are not engaging in jurisprudence. They are engaging in institutional sabotage in a robe.
If you judge a tree by its fruit, this is the death-of-democratic-self-governance tree.
Don’t forget: these people have spent their entire professional lives—plus higher education—learning precisely how to play with words to justify the absurd. Don’t fall for their traps.
Don’t debate the costume. Ridicule the costume.
Don’t litigate their sincerity. Point to the outputs.
Don’t argue theory. Expose the con.
And always keep the rule: attack the doctrine and the pipeline, not the individuals. We’re here to attack bad ideas, not people. The product is the enemy.
The “Small Government” Lie. Every time you hear “fiscal responsibility,” “limited government,” or “getting government off your back,” understand what you’re actually hearing: the Southern Strategy in economic drag.
Lee Atwater confessed it openly in 1981. You start with the n-word, then you say “forced busing,” then you say “states’ rights,” then you say “cutting taxes” and “small government.” Abstract it enough and the racial targeting becomes deniable—but the effect stays the same. Since Black wealth was structurally held back for four hundred years (Part II documented exactly how), Black Americans rely disproportionately on the social programs that “small government” guts. “Cut welfare” was always code. It still is.
And notice what “fiscal responsibility” never applies to: endless wars, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, bailouts for banks, tax cuts for extractors. The money’s always there for prisons, bombs, and extractors. It only runs out when poor people need healthcare or food. And if poor white people have to suffer in the process—lose their Medicaid, their food stamps, their disability benefits—that’s a sacrifice the architects are happy to make. Collateral damage in a war they’d never admit they’re fighting.
The tactics betray them too. Voter suppression. “Voter fraud” panic. Both deployed relentlessly in the same states, targeting the same communities, producing the same disenfranchisement. These mirror 1:1 the KKK’s playbook during Jim Crow. It’s not a coincidence. It’s continuity. Anyone claiming this is about “freedom” or “meritocracy” or “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is either lying or hasn’t read the history. The history is clear.
And now there’s “The Great Replacement”—the claim that white Americans are being deliberately replaced by immigrants through some shadowy conspiracy. It’s Atwater’s playbook with a fresh coat of paint. The same racial panic, the same manufactured fear, the same purpose: keep white Americans voting against their economic interests by convincing them the real threat is brown people, not extractors.
The Media Laundering Operation. Everything coming from Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, The Daily Wire, and the entire right-wing media ecosystem is vile and anti-American—existing for the sole purpose of laundering and spreading the products of the Powell Network, exactly as Powell planned.
From the Jesus-hating moral panics, to originalism, to unitary executive theory, to “small government” austerity, to whatever manufactured outrage consolidates conservative identity this week—these outlets exist to lie, manipulate, and divide Americans so they have something to focus on while they get fleeced.
They’re not news organizations. They’re not even propaganda in the traditional sense. They’re product distribution channels for an ideological manufacturing operation. The “culture war” is inventory. The audience is the product being sold to advertisers and delivered to the ballot box.
Treat anyone who cites them as a source the way you’d treat someone citing a press release from a tobacco company about lung cancer. And guess what? That’s exactly who Powell worked for when he wrote his memo. He sat on the board of Philip Morris for seven years, advised the Tobacco Institute, and when Nixon put him on the Supreme Court, Philip Morris’s CEO called it “the greatest single honor ever bestowed upon anyone connected with Philip Morris.” The man who wrote the blueprint for capturing American democracy was a tobacco industry lawyer. The entire conservative legal and media infrastructure descends from a guy whose job was helping cigarette companies kill Americans by lying to them about cancer while making them feel cool.
Pin the Body Count to the Ideology
And here’s the part they never want discussed: the consequences are theirs.
Every death of despair—the 70,000 Americans dying every year from suicide, overdose, and alcohol—those belong to them. Poor white workers in hollowed-out towns, abandoned by an economy that shipped their jobs overseas while Fox News told them to blame immigrants. They voted for the people who gutted their communities, because the Powell Network’s media operation told them their enemies were below them, not above them. The extraction system killed them. The identity manufacturers made sure they’d never see it coming.
Every woman bleeding out in a hospital parking lot while doctors huddle with lawyers debating whether saving her life counts as an “abortion”—that’s theirs. The Federalist Society groomed the judges. The Alliance Defending Freedom wrote the model legislation. The right-wing media celebrated when Roe fell. They built this. They own every preventable death.
Every transgender kid who took their own life because an entire political movement told them they shouldn’t exist—that’s theirs. The “groomer” panic wasn’t organic. It was manufactured—funded, focus-grouped, and distributed through the same channels that brought you “welfare queens” and “superpredators.” Children are dead because think tanks needed a new culture war to keep donations flowing.
The mass incarceration industrial complex that cages more people than any nation on Earth—that’s theirs. Part II traced the direct line from convict leasing to the modern carceral state. The “tough on crime” politics that built it came from the same network. The prison labor that profits from it flows to the same donors.
The affordability crisis. The healthcare crisis. The national debt crisis. The fraying social fabric. The authoritarian turn the Army warned us about in 1945.
All of it. Every piece. The direct result of the identity these grifters built.
They didn’t just lie to Americans. They didn’t just divide us. They killed us—by the tens of thousands, year after year, while cashing checks and manufacturing the next outrage to keep us distracted.
That’s what you’re fighting. Not a difference of opinion. Not a legitimate political philosophy you happen to disagree with. A fifty-year project that has produced a mountain of corpses—and the organizations responsible aren’t shadowy conspiracies. They’re registered nonprofits with public 501(c)(3) filings, donor disclosures, and lobbying records. It’s all on the record. It always has been.
Make them own it. Every time they open their mouths, make them answer for what their machine has done.
The Unified Counter-Story
All of this connects. The religious grifters manufacture identity. The legal grifters manufacture justification. The media grifters distribute the product. And all of it—every piece—traces back to the Powell Memo’s explicit strategy: capture institutions, reshape ideology, extract wealth.
Parts I through IV gave you the receipts. This section gives you the mission: make those receipts common knowledge. Make “Federalist Society judge” land the way “tobacco industry scientist” lands. Make “Fox News says” trigger the same credibility response as “my uncle’s Facebook post says.”
They built this machine over fifty years. We don’t need fifty years to discredit it. We just need enough people telling the truth, loudly, with contempt, backed by evidence—until the spell breaks.
Engaging the Three Tiers
With the mission clear, tactics follow. The Messaging Guide proposes a three-tier model for engaging different audiences:
Cult followers: Affirm their real pain → Reveal how they’ve been betrayed → Dislodge certainty → Offer an offramp
Acolytes (GOP leaders, media figures, think tank operatives): Attack brutally and publicly. No mercy. No benefit of the doubt. These are the manufacturers. They know what they’re doing.
The Leader: Never attack directly to followers—it triggers defensive loyalty. Target the relationship. Frame him as a scammer who defrauded them.
The attack vectors: policies that betray MAGA’s stated values. Pardons for criminals while “law and order” voters cheer. Billionaire tax cuts while working-class wages stagnate. “Protecting children” rhetoric from a movement sheltering predators. SignalGate incompetence from the “best people” administration.
The offramp: “You weren’t stupid. You were manipulated by professionals. The same people who’ve been manipulating Americans for fifty years. Join us in building something that actually works for people like you.”
Remember: emotion beats facts—but not because emotion is a trick. It beats facts because it’s true. You’re angry because people are dying. You’re grieving because the country you were promised doesn’t exist. That’s not manipulation. That’s reality. So don’t flatten yourself into a dispassionate debate-club voice. Match their fire. Yours is earned.
This isn’t about being nice. It’s about being strategic. The goal is to fracture the coalition between those doing the extracting and those being harvested while thinking they’re on the winning team.
Test it: share one betrayal fact today. Just one. See what happens. See who pushes back, who stays silent, who asks questions. That’s the ripple. That’s how ideas spread.
For those who want to go deeper: Two resources provide comprehensive analysis of the opposition’s structure.
Unmasking MAGA8 — A ten-part series dissecting the MAGA coalition as eight distinct factions: four founding powers (Fascists, Corporatists, Fake Christians, Warhawks) and four absorbed groups (Libertarians, Red Pillers, Conspiracy Theorists, Blue Collars). Each faction has different motivations, functions, and vulnerabilities. Understanding the components reveals where to apply pressure.
The Real Deep State9 — The fifty-year infrastructure built to capture American democracy. Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo. The Heritage Foundation. The Federalist Society. Fox News. The network of think tanks, captured judges, and media moguls that systematically dismantled the New Deal consensus. This is the actual deep state—and it’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s documented history.
These aren’t required reading. But if you want to understand exactly what you’re fighting, they provide the map.
This Is an Ideological Conflict
One final thing you need to understand—and it may be the hardest part for many reading this.
The liberal predisposition toward neutrality, dispassion, and “hearing both sides” that you’ve been taught as a virtue? It’s a trap. And the extractors have learned to exploit it.
You see it everywhere. Senate Democrats desperately seeking bipartisanship while Republicans abuse the gesture and pocket the concessions. Media outlets both-sidesing every issue—climate denial gets equal airtime with climate science, fascism gets framed as “populism,” lies get labeled “disputed claims.” Your own inclination to stay quiet at Thanksgiving rather than push back against the crazy uncle. Your instinct to recoil from social media because you don’t want conflict.
These are all traps. Every one of them advantages the side willing to fight while the other side performs civility.
But here’s the good news about ideological conflict: the math is simple. Get your ideas into as many heads as possible. Remove their ideas from as many heads as possible. That’s it. That’s the entire game.
USOS gives us the means to do both. A cohesive story that brings cultures together across five principles—Fairness, Truth, Responsibility, Merit, Simplicity—designed to generate policies that genuinely improve lives. And the rhetorical framework to challenge the extractors, expose their machine, and make their ideas contemptible to anyone with a conscience.
The neutrality you were taught to prize? It was always a unilateral disarmament in a war the other side has been fighting for fifty years.
Time to fight back.
There’s more, but first…
If this work—five parts tracing the extraction system from slavery to fascism, and pointing toward what replaces it—feels worth having in the world, please consider supporting The American Manifesto. Paid subscriptions make it possible to keep building the tools we need when the old systems have failed us.
The Invitation
What you’ve just read isn’t a finished blueprint. It’s a starting point.
USOS provides the philosophical foundation—the values and structures for a society organized around human flourishing rather than extraction. The Compact shows what implementation might look like. The taxes demonstrate self-sustaining mechanisms. The theory of power provides the immune system—threat recognition, proportional defense, and safeguards against the system’s own capture.
But these are drafts, not gospels. They’re meant to be debated, refined, improved. The extraction system took fifty years to build. The replacement won’t emerge overnight.
What matters is the shift from diagnosis to construction. From “this is what’s wrong” to “this is what we build.”
The Army knew what to do in 1945. They told us: make democracy work. Solve the economic problems. Don’t give fascism fertile ground.
We failed to listen. Fascism found its fertile ground.
But the prescription hasn’t changed. The path is the same. Build systems that deliver for ordinary people. Create genuine opportunity. Make the economy work for everyone, not just the extractors. Restore the sense that collective action can change things.
That’s not idealism. It’s the only thing that’s ever worked.
Your Move
This series has argued that American freedom is an illusion—that what we call a free market is actually a closed loop of extraction, maintained by racial division, enabled by political surrender, and producing a body count that should shame a wealthy nation.
But it has also argued that we can build something different. That the principles, structures, and mechanisms for a flourishing society already exist—scattered across proposals and frameworks that need to be unified and fought for.
Which goal fits you? Are you more comfortable spreading ideas that work, or discrediting the machine? Or both?
What’s your test? Pick one USOS-derived question or one betrayal fact. Use it this week. What happened?
Which manufacturing operation is loudest where you are? Religious? Legal? “Small government”? Media? Where do you see it most?
What’s your trap? The Thanksgiving silence? The social media recoil? The bipartisanship reflex? Name it.
The extraction system wins when we stay isolated, overwhelmed, convinced nothing can change.
It loses when we see the whole picture—and start building together.
“The Unified Societal Operating System (USOS)“
Overview of the complete USOS framework, explaining how the three levels—Foundational Principles, Operational Drivers, and Institutional Pillars—integrate into a coherent system for organizing society around human flourishing.
The complete theory of how USOS recognizes threats, defends itself, and prevents its own capture. Details the compatibility test for distinguishing ideologies from cultures and beliefs, the five-level escalation ladder from rhetoric to physical force, and the Independent Public Knowledge Infrastructure that serves as the system’s immune system against authoritarian drift.
“USOS: Foundational Principles“
Deep dive into the five ethical anchors—Fairness, Truth, Responsibility, Merit, and Simplicity—that form the bedrock of USOS. Explains how each principle functions and how they reinforce rather than contradict each other.
Explains how the five domains—Psychology, Economics, Technology, Culture, and Sustainability—translate foundational principles into practical action across all areas of governance and social organization.
Details the five structures—Education, Media Integrity, Democracy, Justice, and Oversight—that implement USOS principles in practice and maintain alignment over time.
The complete theory of how USOS recognizes threats, defends itself, and prevents its own capture. Details the compatibility test for distinguishing ideologies from cultures and beliefs, the five-level escalation ladder from rhetoric to physical force, and the Independent Public Knowledge Infrastructure that serves as the system’s immune system against authoritarian drift.
Tactical playbook for fighting propaganda warfare. Three-tier audience model (followers, acolytes, leader), attack vectors based on betrayal of stated values, and the strategic offramp for those ready to leave.
“Unmasking MAGA“ (10-Part Series)
Comprehensive dissection of the MAGA coalition as eight distinct factions with different motivations, functions, and vulnerabilities. Maps the anatomy of the extraction system’s political arm.
Documents the fifty-year infrastructure built to capture American democracy: Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, Fox News, and the network of think tanks and captured judges that dismantled the New Deal consensus.
Very, very impressive. But as you well know, this is only a beginning.
I’m a retired gig worker, subsisting on SS and family, but I have a way with words -I made my living as a writer (speeches, training/learning, educational entertainment). I live in a rural area of California and am looking for folks to work with (in my case, work = communication).
Using the labor Union experience as a model, I believe that before action there must be organization. Any ideas on how to engage, and with whom?
Sorry, one more thing: there's a subtlety around simplicity. Though it's an important aspect of helping to ensure democracy and human flourishing (by preventing grifters and extractors from gaming the system, using legalese to find loopholes etc.) there's a sense in which this simplicity is embedded within a type of complexity that's good: of being part of a complex adaptive system. This concept is widely applicable in biology, economics, sociology and technology. For our purposes, we want to ensure that the system remains ADAPTIVE, and in a way that is responsive to the needs of human flourishing.