Letters to America: This Is Not a Pendulum...

Hello again my lovelies!

Across this series of Letters to America, I have tried to describe the same crisis from different angles.

• First, a Supreme Court that no longer looks merely conservative, but structurally unsafe.

• Then an electoral system in which maps, doctrines and court rulings increasingly turn representation into managed minority rule.

• Then a country in which refuge itself is becoming a luxury item: a patchwork of shield laws, volunteer networks and exit routes trying to compensate for the collapse of equal protection.

There is a sentimental way to end a series like this.

I could write something uplifting about resilience. I could say that American institutions have bent before and recovered before. I could reach for the old language of checks and balances and remind you, my readers, that the Republic is designed to self-correct.

I do not think that would be an honest ending.

Because your institutions are not merely under strain. Too many of them are now part of the mechanism by which strain is normalised, absorbed and redirected away from consequences.

• A Supreme Court with no meaningful external ethics enforcement

• A Senate built to over-represent rural and conservative minorities

• A House distorted by gerrymandering and then, under Mike Johnson, often barely functioning as a legislature at all

• An executive branch now demonstrably willing to use administrative pressure, emergency process and settlement power to shield itself and reward allies

• A mainstream political and media culture still too inclined to describe all this as messy but ordinary democratic conflict.

So the question is no longer whether America needs reform.

I think that we can agree - no matter which side of the Big Ponds1 we are located on - it obviously does.

The real question is what kind of reform would make a difference; what can still be done inside existing institutions; what will require open political hardball; and what ordinary people should stop waiting for permission to support.

The answer, I think, has four parts: truthful naming, institutional restraint, structural reform, and personal thresholds.

Truthful Naming

Before law comes language.

One of the reasons democratic erosion works so well is that it is constantly narrated as normal politics. A court scandal becomes a “controversy.” Executive retaliation2 becomes “governing style.” A billion‑dollar settlement creating a discretionary fund for supposed victims of “lawfare,” while reportedly walling off future scrutiny of the president’s own finances, becomes just another surreal Trump story.

In an ideal version of your Republic3, the largest newsrooms and broadcasters would do that work. They would refuse the laundering function. They would call self‑dealing what it is, describe authoritarian administrative pressure as such, and stop translating the narrowing of accountability into the anaesthetised language of “ongoing legal disputes.”

But sadly that is not the America you actually inhabit.

Not anymore

In the America you actually inhabit, much of that naming work is being done by smaller, less powerful outlets, independent reporters, newsletters, podcasts and digital publications. The big legacy brands - the national papers, the networks, the cable formats that still shape what millions accept as “real news” - are, more often than not, failing.

Faced with lawsuits, threats to broadcast licences, exclusion from briefings, ownership pressure4, and their own addiction to access, they have chosen euphemism over clarity and “balance” over truth.

It is deeply telling that some of the plainest descriptions of what this administration is doing now come from places still dismissed as marginal, while the people in the front row of White House press briefings largely sit there like hostages to etiquette5.

The President lies as a matter of habit - often in a torrent of disconnected verbiage that would be comic if the stakes were not so high - and I’ve yet to see anyone in that room simply say, while the cameras are rolling: “that is not true”.

When no one in the room is willing to do that, a press conference stops being an instrument of accountability and becomes a set for a managed narrative.

So yes: journalists, lawyers, civil servants, clergy, universities, unions, medical bodies and business leaders all have a role before Congress passes a single bill.

But let us be honest about the problem. Many of the institutions with the biggest megaphones are not merely failing to name the disease. They are helping to launder it into something the country can continue pretending is survivable.

That failure is not secondary to the crisis. It is one of the reasons the crisis has deepened.

Institutional restraint? Congress is NOT powerless

But it has been weak, timid and too willing to anticipate defeat.

This is the point where American liberals often become strangely fatalistic.

The Court is captured, they say. The Senate is skewed. The House is distorted. The presidency is lawless. Therefore nothing meaningful can be done.

That conclusion is too convenient.

Congress still has substantial authority over the structure of the federal courts, judicial ethics, appropriations, elections and the administration of federal law.

The problem is not that it lacks tools. The problem is that too many politicians have internalised the idea that if the Court might object, or if Fox News will howl, then reform is already (somehow) illegitimate.

That mentality is one of the quiet enablers of minority rule.

On paper, Congress still holds these powers.

In practice, the House under Speaker Mike Johnson has often behaved as if it refuses to be a legislature at all. It has logged near‑record lows in working days, spent weeks in recess even during a prolonged shutdown, and repeatedly cancelled votes rather than risk visible defeats for the majority.

Even members from Johnson’s own party have complained that he has squandered the chance to use this narrow majority for anything beyond one “big, beautiful bill” and a pile of symbolic resolutions.6

The disappearance of Congress is not just a metaphor. It is a schedule.

Congress can and should impose a binding ethics and recusal regime on SCOTUS justices. Existing proposals would require enforceable standards, proper disclosure, review of recusal questions, and real transparency around gifts, travel and conflicts.

That is not radical. It is the minimum one would expect of a local planning board, let alone the highest court in the country.

Congress can also move on term limits. The current system - life tenure plus actuarial roulette plus partisan confirmation warfare - has plainly failed. Eighteen‑year staggered terms, with regularised appointments, would not depoliticise the Court. Nothing will do that fully. But it would at least stop each vacancy becoming a constitutional hostage crisis with four decades of consequences.

And Congress can regulate process.

If the Court is going to use the shadow docket to make nationally consequential decisions without full argument or clear explanation, Congress can demand reporting, justification and transparency as the price of operating within a democratic system rather than above one.

The Anti‑Weaponization Fund should be treated as a five‑alarm warning, not a weird side story.

Trump’s DOJ wants to use the permanent Judgment Fund to create a 1.776 billion‑dollar compensation mechanism overseen through a process controlled by the attorney general after settling Trump’s tax‑return lawsuit.

That settlement reportedly also forecloses future scrutiny of Trump’s tax affairs and related entities.

If Congress allows this to stand as a precedent, it is effectively announcing that future presidents may use settlement power and standing appropriations not merely to end litigation, but to construct patronage schemes and forms of de facto immunity around themselves.

The time for polite disbelief is well and truly over...

• Congress should explicitly prohibit settlement terms that bar future investigation of sitting or former presidents, their family members or controlled entities.

• It should prohibit the use of the Judgment Fund for broad compensation schemes not specifically authorised by statute.

• It should require prompt disclosure of major settlement terms and beneficiaries.

• And it should make clear that executive-branch lawyers who facilitate self‑protective settlements of this kind are exposing themselves to real oversight, not performative outrage.

Congress still has unusually strong authority over federal elections, and it should act like it knows that.

National standards on registration, access, purge practices, election‑worker protection, ballot curing and congressional redistricting are not fantasies. They are overdue.

Would the current Supreme Court resist some of it? Perhaps.

That, however, should never be an argument against legislating.

It should be an argument for forcing the Court to expose itself clearly if it chooses to strike democracy protections down.

All of this, of course, assumes that pro‑reform coalitions can actually win the power needed to act...

On that front, the outlook is neither hopeless nor guaranteed.

In the House, Republicans currently cling to a very narrow majority, and analysts and markets now treat a Democratic flip in 2026 as more likely than not. The Senate is harder: Republicans hold 53 seats, and Democrats would need to net four pickups in a map that still leans red, though serious analysis now treats a Democratic Senate as a real possibility if the national environment remains strong and candidate quality holds up.

There is a path back to a Congress capable of passing the kinds of laws I have described.

There is also a very clear path to two more years of drift, tactical shutdowns, symbolic bills and procedural abdication.

Which path you end up on is not fate. It is politics.

Structural reform - because ordinary reformism will not be enough

Here is the harder truth, and the one too many respectable people still flinch from.

A system this distorted will not be repaired by pearl-clutching letters and pretty speeches, nor by decorous gestures undertaken in the spirit of bipartisanship.

It will be repaired, if at all, by people willing to use lawful power in ways that feel uncomfortable to elites who still confuse institutional gentility with democratic virtue.

That means at least three things:

1. Any coalition serious about repair must legislate as though it may not get a second chance. That means no sequencing fantasy in which ethics reform waits for the next session, voting reform waits for better polling, and Court reform is discussed delicately after the donors have been reassured.
   If you win power in a bent system and still govern as though the playing field is fair, then you really have not read the room, and are not governing seriously.

2. Unilateral disarmament in this situation is not morality, it’s fecking stupidity. If one side continues to gerrymander, strip rights, weaponise the executive and rely on a captured Court to bless or ignore the damage, the other side cannot answer only with op‑eds about democratic norms.
   There may be moments when retaliatory asymmetry - more aggressive voting maps in blue states, for example - becomes a regrettable but rational stopgap, provided it is accompanied by a clear public commitment to unwind those measures the moment national fair‑play rules are enacted.
   Ugly is not the same thing as unjust.
   Sometimes ugly is simply what self‑defence looks like after one side has spent years pretending your restraint is weakness.

3. The immunity question cannot be dodged forever. Biden’s 2024 call for a constitutional amendment clarifying that presidents are not immune from criminal prosecution for abuses of office looked, at the time, like a noble but distant proposal.
   It now looks like the kind of basic constitutional clarification a democracy should not have needed to be reminded of.
   A country in which the chief executive can claim sweeping protection for “official acts,” then use his own Justice Department to shield his finances and reward his allies, is not operating under a healthy theory of constitutional government.

If some of this sounds harsh, it is because the situation is.

“Respectable gradualism” is part of how America got here.

One of the most revealing developments of recent months is that people seeking accountability are increasingly doing so through second‑order institutions because they no longer trust the primary ones.

Pam Bondi is being pursued through state‑bar and state‑supreme‑court channels because people do not trust the federal system to discipline a politically weaponised attorney general.

Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are being targeted not only through ethics arguments, but through bar and state‑level tax theories tied to undisclosed gifts and luxury travel, in part because federal self‑policing has proven so feeble.

I do not say that dismissively. These efforts are rational, inventive and morally serious7. People are looking for any lever that still has an outside chance of working.

But a healthy constitutional order would not require citizens and advocacy groups to go scavenging through governors’ offices, licensing bodies and tax codes just to make judges and attorneys general obey rules that would end the career of an ordinary public servant.

That is the point.

A society forced into private citizens undertaking procedural treasure hunts to drive accountability is a society that already knows its formal oversight systems are not functioning.

So yes: use the side doors. File the complaints. Pursue the tax angles. Pressure the governors. Push the bar associations.

But do not mistake any of that for a satisfactory arrangement.

Those are improvisations in the ruins, not an accountability architecture.

States can still do important work, and they should.

They can strengthen shield laws for reproductive and gender‑affirming care. They can build stronger ethics regimes, protect voting access, expand privacy rights, create legal defence funds, support local journalism, and build forms of overground refuge for people fleeing hostile jurisdictions.

All of that matters.

Some of it is life‑saving.

But my last article made this clear, and it remains true now: archipelago politics is not the same thing as democratic repair.

A hostile federal government can still weaponise funding, revive statutes like the Comstock Act, and force blue states into defensive legal crouches.

A hostile Supreme Court can still destabilise state innovations through the shadow docket before they are fully established.

So by all means, strengthen the safer states.

Just do not tell yourselves that a nation can be healthy because some islands within it remain habitable8.

Personal thresholds - what people like you should actually do

This is usually where the ritual answer usually appears: vote.

You should vote. Obviously.

But if that is all anyone is prepared to say, then they are still not taking the emergency seriously.

Ordinary people can do at least five things now.

1. Support institutions of friction: local reporters, legal defence funds, abortion funds, trans mutual‑aid networks, ethics watchdogs, civil‑liberties groups, public‑interest litigators, and the smaller outlets still willing to name what they are seeing.

2. Treat structural reform as a threshold issue, not a policy bonus. Do not reward politicians merely for sounding alarmed. Ask whether they support enforceable Court ethics, term limits, election standards, settlement reform, protection for career officials and real limits on presidential immunity.

3. Back people who are willing to use power, not just narrate abuse elegantly.

4. Refuse the narcotic of helplessness. The system is bent. That does not mean every lever is fake. It means you must stop treating institutional discomfort as a reason not to pull them.

5. Know your threshold. Some of you will fight in place. Some will build refuge. Some will leave. It is better to think honestly about those thresholds now than to improvise them later under pressure.

That last point is not defeatism.

It is what adulthood looks like when institutions stop earning automatic trust.

A state that offers its citizens fewer and fewer reasons to believe in its good faith is not entitled to endless patience from them in return.

A final thought from abroad

I grew up, as many of your allies did, with a version of America in which the constitutional architecture was untidy but basically self‑correcting. Courts restrained presidents. Congress eventually asserted itself. Corruption was exposed, punished and contained. Elections, however imperfectly, could still change the direction of the state.

That is not the America you are showing the world now.

The America you are showing the world is one in which gifts to justices become ethics footnotes; where attorney‑general misconduct is chased through bar complaints because the federal system cannot be trusted; where a president can reportedly use settlement power to wall off scrutiny of his own finances; where the House often seems to prefer adjournment to legislating; and where the largest narrators of public reality still often lack either the courage or the institutional freedom to say plainly what is happening.

I do not say this because I think the story of American democracy is completely over. Not yet…

I say it because I think the old story is.

You are no longer at the stage where the main task is simply noticing what is happening. That task has already gone on too long.

You are at the stage where the only serious question is “what you are willing to support - politically, institutionally, personally - in order to stop this hardening into permanence, and for your 250 year old experiment with democracy to fail”.

That support will have to be more structural than sentimental, more conflict‑tolerant than polite liberalism prefers, and more honest than the pieties that helped get y’all into this mess in the first place.

Democracies do not save themselves.

People save them - or fail to.

With loving concern, and yet with no remaining patience for euphemism (or BS).

If you’re reading this from inside the United States and feeling trapped, it’s worth saying plainly: there are other options.

Countries like the UK, Ireland, much of the EU, Canada, Australia and New Zealand still operate under systems where elections are broadly free and fair, where courts are constrained by real ethics rules and term limits, and where reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights - while imperfect - are not being systematically rolled back.

Leaving is a big step. As I’ve discussed previously, it’s not possible or desirable for far too many people. But if you find yourself thinking, “I can’t live under this forever”, know that:

• There are immigration paths (work, study, family reunion) into functioning democracies

• There are communities, and programs such as Sanctuary Europa, already helping people navigate those moves,

• And you are not obligated to stay in a system that no longer treats you as an equal citizen.