There is a saying that gets repeated often enough to have worn smooth: comfort is the enemy of growth. Like most sayings worn smooth, it is both true and dangerously incomplete.

Some discomfort has no lesson in it. A broken leg is not trying to teach you anything. A torn ligament is not a growth opportunity in disguise. That kind of pain is simply damage, and the correct response to it is to treat it, not to sit with it and wait for wisdom to arrive. Anyone who has done physical work for a living knows this instinctively. You do not build character by ignoring a torn rotator cuff. You build a permanent injury.

But there is a second kind of discomfort, and it behaves nothing like the first. It is the tightness in the chest before you say the thing that needs saying to a coworker, a spouse, a fellow parishioner, a fellow citizen. It is the hesitation before raising a grievance you know will not be welcomed. This discomfort is not damage. It is a signal, in the way a warning light on a dashboard is a signal. It is telling you that something is misaligned and wants attention. Treating it the way you would treat a torn ligament, as something to avoid, protect, and wait out, does not lead to healing. It leads to the thing underneath it getting worse in the dark.

Most people can tell these two kinds of pain apart when the stakes are personal. Almost no one is taught to tell them apart when the stakes are social. So the discomfort of an honest conversation about race, wages or who a political movement is actually asking you to become gets treated like a broken leg. It becomes something to avoid, something to protect against, something to let heal on its own by simply not touching it. The conversation does not happen. What needed saying does not get said. Everyone involved calls the resulting silence peace.

It is not peace. It is the absence of the argument that peace would have required.

There is a third kind of discomfort worth naming because it hides inside the other two and makes both harder to see clearly. This is the discomfort of having your own status questioned, the unease that shows up not because a conversation threatens your safety or your relationships, but because it threatens your sense of where you stand relative to other people. This discomfort dresses itself up as prudence. It says things like, “We shouldn’t divide people,” “Now isn’t the time,” or “That’s not really about race; it’s about something else.” It sounds like peacekeeping. It functions as ego protection. And it is, by a wide margin, the discomfort most responsible for the conversations that never happen because it is the hardest one to admit to feeling.

This is the discomfort this essay is actually interested in. Not the broken leg, which needs treatment, not silence. Not the honest, hard conversation, which needs to be had, not avoided. But the third kind: the flinch that happens when a person is asked, even gently, to consider what they have been getting out of an arrangement they have never had to examine and whether they would be willing to give some of it up.

Chesterton, writing decades before any of this, drew a related distinction. “There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth.” A scandal and a truth are not the same disclosure. A scandal exposes a person. A truth exposes a condition.

Following that same train of thought, a further distinction is worth drawing: Peace bought by silence is not peace at all, but a postponement. It has the shape of peace, the quiet of peace, even the relief of peace. What it does not have is the settlement peace requires. A debt that is not called due has not been forgiven. It has only not yet been collected.

This is the same counterfeit that shows up when freedom curdles into license. License wears freedom’s clothes convincingly enough that it takes a moment to notice what is missing: the responsibility that made the freedom real in the first place. Postponement works the same trick on peace. It borrows peace’s calm, its lack of visible conflict, everything peace looks like from the outside, while quietly discarding the one thing that made the calm trustworthy, namely, that something true had actually been settled. License is freedom that has stopped paying for itself. Postponement is peace that has stopped paying for itself. Both hold together only as long as nobody asks what happened to the bill.

Indiana would get its scandal in 1925, in vivid and humiliating detail. It would not get the truth for a long time after, if it has gotten it yet.

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The wage itself

W.E.B. Du Bois gave this debt a name. Writing in “Black Reconstruction in America,” he described what white workers in the post-Reconstruction South were actually paid in place of the material solidarity that shared class interest should have produced. He called it the psychological wage: public deference, unrestricted use of public spaces, favorable treatment in the courts, a policing system that worked for them rather than against them and, above all, standing. Not wealth. Standing. The felt certainty of not being at the bottom, regardless of how close to it one actually stood economically.

W.E.B. Du Bois in 1918

This wage cost employers almost nothing to grant. It did not require raising anyone’s pay. It did not require improving anyone’s working conditions. It required only that the existing hierarchy be left in place and periodically reaffirmed, so that a mill worker earning near nothing could still walk away from his shift with something a Black worker doing the same job could not have: the assurance that there was a floor beneath him that could not move, no matter how far his wages fell.

Du Bois’s insight was not that white workers were simply deceived. It was that the wage was real. It bought something. That is what made it effective, and it is also what made it a trap. A worker who has been sold a fiction can be argued out of it. A worker who has been paid an actual, if narrow, dividend has to be asked to give something up, and asking a person to give up something real is a harder conversation than correcting a misunderstanding. This is the conversation Du Bois identified as the one that kept not happening. It would have required white and Black workers to recognize a shared material interest large enough to be worth more than the psychological wage each side had been offered to keep them apart.

It is worth being exact about what kind of discomfort this created, using the distinction from the previous section. The conversation Du Bois was calling for was not a broken leg. It was not damage to be avoided. It was diagnostic, a signal that something in the arrangement of labor and race in America was misaligned and needed correcting. But the people who stood to lose the wage received it as though it were a broken leg, as though naming the arrangement were itself the injury rather than the arrangement being the injury and the naming being the treatment.

That confusion is the third kind of discomfort at work, the one dressed as peacekeeping while actually functioning as status protection. Nobody organizing against cross-racial labor solidarity in the 1870s and 1880s framed that resistance as a defense of status. They framed it as a defense of decency, order or the way things had always been done. Status protection rarely announces itself honestly. It borrows the language of whatever virtue is most available at the time: peace, tradition or unity. It wears that language until the wearing becomes indistinguishable from belief.

The psychological wage did not stay in the 19th century, and it did not stay confined to labor economics. It is portable. It attaches itself to whatever institution is willing to keep paying it out, and in the 1920s, in a state that had elected a governor with Klan backing and seated a legislature the Klan effectively controlled, one of those institutions had a name, an address, and a robe.

The cost of having said it

It would be dishonest to write about avoided conversations without acknowledging why avoidance has always seemed like the wiser bet. Fear of this particular discomfort is not simply cowardice or comfort-seeking. It has evidence behind it, and the evidence is a body count.

Malcolm X was building toward exactly this kind of conversation, one that connected race to economics and refused to let either be discussed in isolation, when he was assassinated in 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968 while organizing the Poor People’s Campaign, a coalition explicitly built across racial lines around the shared fact of poverty, not the more comfortable and more segregated fact of civil rights alone.

Fred Hampton, still in his 20s, was building the Rainbow Coalition in Chicago, a genuine alliance of the Black Panthers; the Young Patriots, a group of poor white Appalachian migrants; and the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican organization. The coalition was built around the recognition that poor people across racial lines shared a landlord, a lender and a set of interests worth organizing together. Hampton was killed by police in his bed in 1969, in a raid coordinated with the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, specifically because that coalition was working.

This is worth sitting with rather than rushing past. The people who came closest to having the actual conversation, the one that named the psychological wage and asked people to trade status for solidarity across racial lines, did not face social awkwardness for it. They faced the full weight of the state. That history does not excuse the silence that followed it. But it explains it. A society watches what happens to the people who try and draws conclusions. Given what they had seen, the conclusion most people drew was not wrong. It was simply the wrong conclusion to keep drawing forever.

The question this essay is asking is not why people have been afraid to have this conversation. The fear is reasonable. The question is what it costs, generation after generation, to keep deciding that the fear should win.

Defining terms honestly

Before returning to Indiana in the present tense, two terms this essay has been circling need to be defined rather than merely deployed because both are used loosely enough in current debate to generate more heat than light.

“Christian nationalism” is used in two different ways. Used narrowly, it names a specific claim: that America is, or should be, formally and legally a Christian nation, with public life, law and often citizenship itself ordered around a particular Christian identity, typically white and Protestant, to the exclusion of other faiths and other Americans. This is the sense in which the term describes an actual movement with actual figures, publications and policy goals, not a mood or a vibe.

Used broadly, the term gets applied to any fusion of Christian conviction and political engagement, including ordinary religious conservatism that most Christians across most of American history would recognize as unremarkable. Critics on the right have a legitimate complaint when the broad usage gets deployed this loosely because it treats devout political engagement itself as suspect. This essay uses the term narrowly: not people who bring their faith into public life, which the church has always asked of its members, but a specific claim of ethnic and religious entitlement to the nation itself, dressed in Christian language and, in its worst versions, willing to use the same tools the Klan used a century ago: intimidation, exclusion and the promise of restored status to anyone willing to accept the hierarchy on offer.

“White privilege” suffers from a similar problem: It is often heard as an accusation even though it was built as a description. The claim is not that individual white people did not work hard or did not earn what they have. Most did. The claim is structural: The systems surrounding that hard work, including courts, lending, policing, hiring and housing, were built in ways that granted white citizens a floor other citizens were denied by law and custom, often within living memory. That floor is not a personal moral failing. It is an inherited advantage, no more chosen by any individual than the color of their eyes.

Both terms point at the same thing from two directions. White privilege names the structural residue of the psychological wage, the parts that outlasted the explicit hierarchy that paid it out and were quietly built into the systems themselves. Christian nationalism, narrowly defined, names a live movement trying to reissue that wage in religious language, openly and on purpose. Naming the structure is not an attack on the people standing inside it. It is an invitation to see the floor for what it is so that the choice to keep it, share it or dismantle it can actually be made, rather than defaulting to whatever the system already decided a century ago. The movement depends on that invitation never being accepted. It needs the floor to feel earned rather than granted because a floor recognized as an inherited advantage can be questioned, while a floor felt as simple superiority cannot.

The anthropology problem

Here the critique has to be made from inside the tradition it is aimed at, because that is where it actually lands with force. This is not a case of Catholic social teaching being invoked against an external enemy. It is Catholic social teaching recognizing a counterfeit of itself.

The entire architecture of Catholic anthropology rests on one claim, stated plainly in Genesis and never revoked: Every human being is made in the image of God. Not every white human being. Not every native-born human being. Not every human being of the correct confession. Every human being, full stop, prior to and independent of any status a society is willing to grant them. “Rerum Novarum” grounds the dignity of the worker in this, not in the worker’s productivity, citizenship or race. “Laborem Exercens” does the same. The entire distributist tradition, Chesterton and Belloc included, treats the human person as bearing a dignity too fundamental to be parceled out unevenly by rank or birth.

A movement that offers status in exchange for racial or religious identity is not applying this anthropology. It is inverting it. It is taking the language of a faith whose founding anthropological claim is universal human dignity and using that language to sell a good that only works if dignity is scarce and unevenly distributed, because a status wage has no value unless someone else is excluded from it. You cannot be paid in standing if everyone stands at the same height. The wage requires a hierarchy to exist at all, and Christian nationalism, in the narrow sense defined above, is in the business of manufacturing that hierarchy and calling it Christian.

This is not a both-sides argument, and it should not be softened into one. It is a claim that a specific movement, if it is doing what it appears to be doing, has an anthropology in direct conflict with the theological tradition it claims to represent. Naming that conflict is not an attack from outside. It is a family argument, the kind the Church has always been willing to have with itself, and the kind this movement has been mostly spared, because too many people found the conversation more uncomfortable than the alternative.

The tradition being invoked against itself here also supplies its own corrective, which is worth naming rather than leaving implicit. Subsidiarity holds that dignity and decision-making belong first at the smallest workable scale: the person, the family, the parish, the union hall. Those are precisely the scales at which a person can be known rather than sorted. A hierarchy of racial or religious standing does the opposite. It decides a person’s worth at the largest possible scale, by category, before anyone has met them. A church faithful to its own anthropology does not need to import a theory of human dignity from outside. It already has one, and the work in front of it is simply refusing to let that theory be quietly swapped out for a cheaper one wearing its vestments.

When power feels the threat

There is a reliable pattern worth naming plainly. When a movement threatens to organize people across the lines that a psychological wage depends on, the response from entrenched power rarely stays in the realm of argument for long.

The internalization happens first, and it happens on the receiving end of the conversation, not the giving end. Tell a person their wage was granted rather than earned, and the instinct is not to examine the claim. It is to defend the self because the claim is heard as an attack on effort and character rather than a description of structure. This is the same third discomfort named earlier, dressed now in the language of fairness: “I worked for what I have, so how dare you say I did not earn it?” Nobody is saying that. The claim was never about effort. It was about the floor beneath the effort, the one that was not equally available to everyone doing the same work. But defensiveness does not wait to hear the distinction. It reacts to the sentence before the sentence finishes.

The second pattern shows up when a movement gets past that defensiveness and starts building the coalition the wage was designed to prevent. The recent history of the Democratic Socialists of America is instructive here, not because the organization is beyond critique. It is not. Rather, the response it has drawn from entrenched interests illustrates the point cleanly. When a movement starts connecting economic precarity across racial and ethnic lines, the pushback rarely stays confined to policy disagreement. It escalates toward delegitimization, toward painting the coalition itself as dangerous or un-American, toward the kind of organized resistance that treats the coalition as the threat rather than the conditions the coalition is responding to.

This pattern is not confined to the last century. In January 2026, Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed within 18 days of each other and less than 2 miles apart in Minneapolis, both while bearing witness to the same aggressive federal immigration operation.

Pretti was filming agents in the street and had stepped between an officer and a woman who had just been thrown to the ground, putting himself bodily between enforcement and the person it was targeting, when he was pepper-sprayed, tackled and shot by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. Good was stopped in her car near the same operation when agents surrounded her; she was shot as she pulled away. Neither had set out to build a movement the way Malcolm X, King or Hampton did. But both died standing, in different ways, against a style of enforcement that the state has learned to justify in the same terms Christian nationalism uses to justify hierarchy elsewhere: a rhetoric of restored order, lawful belonging and who does and does not have a right to stand on American ground.

Federal officials characterized Good’s death as justified self-defense against a “weaponized” vehicle, while the communities responding to both killings organized across racial and immigration-status lines in vigils, strikes and marches that spread from Minneapolis outward. Power’s instinct, confronted with people organizing across those lines in real time, was not to answer the organizing. It was to reframe the people killed as the threat.

There is a harder truth sitting underneath these two deaths, one this essay should not smooth over. Malcolm X, King, and Hampton chose the conversation, knowing roughly what it might cost them. Good and Pretti did not choose a confrontation with the state so much as happen to be standing in a place where one was already underway, and it found them anyway. That is its own kind of evidence, and it cuts against the comfort of thinking caution can reliably purchase safety. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the danger was never conditional on what you were brave enough to say.

This is Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition again, in a different decade, facing a version of the same instinct, updated in method but not in motive. Power does not fear people being poor, or afraid, or grieving. Power fears people being poor, afraid, or grieving together, across the lines it has spent generations maintaining.

Given that history, it would be dishonest to close this essay by asking people simply to be braver, as though courage were the only ingredient missing. What is being asked for is not recklessness. It is the willingness to have the conversation anyway, publicly, honestly and without flinching from the discomfort that conversation produces, understanding fully what the discomfort has cost people who went before. In hockey terms, dropping the gloves does not mean starting a fight nobody can survive. It means being willing to stand in the moment when backing down would be easier and staying standing. That is a different thing than martyrdom, and this essay owes its reader that distinction plainly: This is a call to public honesty and organized solidarity, not to anything that invites the fate of the people just named.

Indiana, Never Left

A debt not called due has not been forgiven, this essay argued early on. It has only not yet been collected. Indiana is where that claim stops being an abstraction and becomes a matter of public record.

Members of the Ku Klux Klan in Muncie, Indiana, in 1922

In 1925, Indiana had a chance to have an honest conversation about itself, and a courtroom in Noblesville had it instead.

D.C. Stephenson, grand dragon of the Indiana Klan and, in his own estimation, “the law in Indiana,” was convicted of the kidnapping, rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer. Within a year, the organization that had elected a governor, seated a majority of the state legislature and enrolled something close to a third of the state’s native-born white men was crippled and discredited. Historians mark this as the end of Klan power in Indiana. It is usually told as a story with a moral: The truth came out, the villain was punished, decency reasserted itself.

It is worth being precise about what actually happened because the precision changes the lesson. Indiana did not confront the Klan. Indiana was handed a scandal, and the scandal did the work that confrontation should have done. Nobody in Indianapolis, Kokomo or Muncie had to sit across from a neighbor and ask why joining a robed fraternity that terrorized Catholics, Jews and Black families had seemed, to a third of the state, like an act of civic respectability. Nobody had to answer for what that membership had purchased them socially and psychologically, in the coin of belonging. The question simply stopped being asked because the man selling the answer was suddenly on trial for murder.

A society that talks itself out of an evil has done something durable. A society that has the evil taken away from it by circumstance has learned nothing except that the circumstance can change back. Revival attempts in the 1960s and 1970s never regained the scale of the 1920s Klan, and it is tempting to read that as proof the lesson stuck. But absence of scale is not absence of appeal. The vehicle had lost its credibility. The thing the vehicle had been selling never had to be renegotiated in the open. It went quiet. It did not go away.

It has not gone away now either. It has simply changed its name and its wardrobe.

Indiana’s current lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith, is a self-described Christian nationalist and first in the constitutional line of succession to the governor’s office, a line that requires no legislative vote and takes effect automatically. Beckwith is also a sitting pastor at Life Church in Noblesville, and while on the Hamilton East Public Library board he helped relocate nearly 2,000 books out of general circulation for content he judged unsuitable. In a televised panel appearance, he told viewers the country needed to give people “permission to hate again,” then turned the remark toward Muslims specifically, saying they would need to assimilate to what he called America’s Christian foundation. He has also claimed, inaccurately, that the doctrine of separation of church and state was invented by a Supreme Court justice motivated by anti-Catholic bigotry, a claim fact-checkers have traced back to a badly garbled reading of the justice’s actual record. None of this is fringe commentary from the margins of Indiana politics. It is the current holder of the state’s second-highest office, speaking in his official capacity, a heartbeat from the governorship, using almost exactly the grammar the Klan used a century earlier: a Christian foundation that only some citizens are understood to stand on, and permission, freshly granted from above, to treat everyone else accordingly.

That distinction between adherents and sympathizers matters, and it maps almost exactly onto the Klan’s own membership a century earlier. Most of the roughly one in three native-born white Hoosier men who paid $10 to join the Klan in the 1920s were not, individually, monsters. They were neighbors, churchgoers, businessmen, a great many of them ordinary in every visible way. What they were buying was not cruelty for its own sake. It was standing, certainty, a floor. The wage. The same wage is on offer again, in language a great deal more respectable than a burning cross, and it is being bought by the same kind of people, for the same kind of reasons, a century apart.

This is what it means to say Indiana never left. Not that the robes never came off. They did. But the transaction the robes were financing, status purchased through a hierarchy dressed as heritage or faith, was interrupted rather than dismantled in 1926, and interruption is not the same as ending. A debt not called due has not been forgiven. Indiana’s bill came due once, by accident, in a Noblesville courtroom. It has been quietly accruing interest ever since, waiting for someone willing to ask what it would actually cost to pay it off in the open.

What the Conversation Actually Requires

Comfort is not the enemy of growth. False comfort is. It is the kind purchased by silence, by scandal without truth and by a wage nobody wants to admit they are being paid. Real comfort, the kind that follows an honest reckoning, is not the enemy of anything. It is the goal.

The distinction this essay has tried to draw runs through every layer of the argument: between the broken leg and the diagnostic ache, between a scandal and a truth, between peace and its postponement, between freedom and the license that wears its clothes. In every pairing, the second thing is what remains once the first thing has been asked to give up what made it costly, and therefore real.

Indiana does not need another Stephenson trial. It needs the conversation the trial let it avoid. That conversation will cost something, socially if not physically, to the people willing to start it, and this essay has tried to be honest about what that cost has been for others before assuming it will be small now. But the alternative has already been tried. It was tried in 1926, and it produced 40 more years of quiet. The quiet did not hold.

The choice in front of Indiana, and in front of every state watching its own version of this pattern take shape, is not between comfort and conflict. It is between a debt paid honestly, on terms the debtor helps set, and the same debt collected later by circumstance, on terms nobody gets to choose.

Takeaways

• Twitter/X has played a significant role in my professional and political journey.
  

• Account security and access issues on Twitter/X can have a significant impact on an individual’s online presence and engagement.
  

Chapters

• 00:00 The Role of Twitter in My Journey
  

• 03:16 Account History and Political Campaigns
  

• 10:00 Challenges with Account Security and Access
  

• 17:13 Rebuilding Online Presence and Engagement

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Illinois Solidarity Party

There are moments in life when you realize that the work you’ve been doing has prepared you for something bigger.

For me, this is one of those moments.

Today, I’m officially announcing that I am running as a write-in candidate for governor of Illinois.

This decision didn’t happen overnight. It came after years of feeling politically homeless, conversations with family and friends, and countless discussions with people across our state who feel increasingly disconnected from a political system that seems more interested in serving parties than serving people.

It also follows another significant decision. Recently, I stepped down from the Solidarity Party’s national leadership team so I could devote my full attention to building our movement here in Illinois. I remain deeply grateful for the opportunity to have served nationally, but I believe the greatest impact I can make right now is here at home.

Why I’m Running

Illinois deserves better than politics as usual.

For far too long, we’ve been told that we have to choose between values that should never be in conflict. We’re told we must choose between protecting human life or pursuing social justice, between supporting workers or encouraging economic growth, between strengthening families or expanding opportunity.

I reject that false choice.

We can build an Illinois where every human life is valued, every worker is respected, every family has the opportunity to thrive, and every community is given the chance to flourish.

That’s the vision behind this campaign.

A Different Kind of Politics

Our political culture has become increasingly defined by division. Every election seems to ask us to fear our neighbors more than to understand them.

There’s a better way.

The politics of solidarity begins with a simple conviction: every person possesses inherent dignity, and our public institutions should reflect that truth.

This campaign is rooted in bringing people together across political, geographic, and cultural divides. It’s for people who feel politically homeless. It’s for those who are tired of voting against their conscience because they don’t believe they have another option.

It’s for Illinoisans who still believe government can serve the common good.

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Breaking the Cycle

For decades, our state has been trapped in an exhausting political cycle.

One party has consolidated enormous power while often advancing policies that many families believe ignore fundamental moral questions.

The other frequently speaks to legitimate frustrations but too often leaves behind working families, struggling rural communities, and neighborhoods that have been overlooked for generations.

Meanwhile, Springfield’s culture of insider politics, fiscal dysfunction, and political maneuvering continues, regardless of who holds office.

The people of Illinois deserve more than that.

They deserve leaders who are willing to listen before they lecture, serve before they seek power, and govern with integrity instead of ideology.

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Our Priorities

This campaign is built around four guiding principles:

• Real Support for Working Families through policies that make it easier to raise children, own a home, and earn a dignified living.

• A Consistent Ethic of Life that recognizes the inherent dignity of every human being at every stage of life.

• Revitalizing Local Communities by empowering neighborhoods, small businesses, family farms, and local institutions instead of concentrating power farther away.

• Government Integrity and Responsible Stewardship that restores public trust through transparency, accountability, and responsible management of taxpayer resources.

These aren’t simply campaign talking points. They’re principles that have guided my work for years, and they’ll continue to guide this campaign.

This Is a Grassroots Movement

No political movement succeeds because of one candidate. It succeeds because ordinary people decide that the future of their communities is worth investing in.

That’s the kind of campaign we’re building.

Over the coming months, we’ll be traveling across Illinois, hosting events, meeting with voters, organizing local gatherings, and listening far more than we speak.

If you’d like to volunteer, host a meetup, or become involved in the campaign, I’d love to hear from you. Whether you’re in Chicago, the suburbs, central Illinois, or one of our many rural communities, there’s a place for you in this movement.

We’re also preparing additional announcements in the weeks ahead, including exciting news about other candidates and opportunities to expand our work throughout the state.

Building More Than a Campaign

One of my greatest hopes is that this campaign becomes part of something larger.

Through Unorthodoxing, we’re building a community of thoughtful conversations, independent writers, and principled voices committed to exploring politics through the lens of the common good rather than partisan talking points.

I’m especially excited to welcome contributors from across the country who are helping broaden that conversation with fresh perspectives and thoughtful analysis.

If you’re a writer, researcher, podcaster, or creator who shares that vision, I’d love to connect.

The future of healthy political discourse won’t be built by algorithms or cable news. It will be built by people willing to engage honestly, thoughtfully, and respectfully with one another.

Join Us

This campaign is ultimately about hope. Hope that Illinois can once again become a place where families flourish. Hope that our politics can be rooted in dignity instead of division. Hope that we can build a government worthy of the people it serves.

If this vision resonates with you, I invite you to join us. Volunteer. Share our message. Tell your friends.

Most importantly, stay engaged. Together, we can build an Illinois that truly reflects the values of life, justice, solidarity, and the common good.

Thank you for being part of this journey. We’re just getting started.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

This quote from Jimi Hendrix was recently brought back to public attention by two people who climbed to the top of the Empire State Building and unfurled a flag emblazoned with those words. There are other posts and articles on the internet discussing what they might mean in today's world.

But this post is for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. On that hot, probably humid, definitely uncomfortable day in Philadelphia, delegates representing the thirteen American colonies put love of self-determination over fear of execution for treason. Their motives were not altogether pure, and their plans for future governance were not altogether virtuous. Our country was born in the blood of the Revolutionary War, and has continued to fight in military conflicts for the majority of its existence. We have also been fighting amongst ourselves for all of our existence over who can be an American, how to live in America, what values America champions, and which future America should strive towards.

How can a country that has experienced precious little peace, solidarity, and brotherly love possibly know how to practice those things? Love of power has been the driving force behind narrowing who could be considered truly American, restricting how people could live in America, perverting or abandoning the values America claimed to champion, and choking out the future so many Americans dreamed of achieving. This corrupted both governing officials who craved ever more political power, and private sector citizens who desired and hoarded the power of wealth and superiority.

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And yet our country was not only born into bloody conflict. It was, as Abraham Lincoln said, "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Americans have never completely forgotten this core identity and guiding principle. Over time, we expanded our concept of "liberty", the category of "men", and the definition of "equal". Through fighting -- yes. In the field, the street, the courtroom, the town hall, the dinner table, and the comment section. We fought each other tooth and nail over chattel slavery, westward expansion, Native American relations, Jim Crow laws, children's education, workers' rights, women's suffrage, environmental conservation, taxation, regulation, and hundreds of other issues. But the point of every fight was, and should be, to reach a conclusion that brings about more peace for more people. Every fight ought to be about making things better not just for ourselves, but for our fellow man and for our shared posterity. Every fight should be because we love something good, and we want it to be made real. Let the power of love overcome the love of power, so that our families, communities, our country, and our world can know peace.

On this 250th celebration of Independence Day, please enjoy listening to the guitar legend himself perform a god-tier rendition of our national anthem.

https://youtu.be/sjzZh6-h9fM

Happy Fourth of July from all of us at Unorthodoxing!

🎇🧡🎇

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On July 4, 1776, 56 men signed a document that made a promise none of them could keep alone. Their country has been trying to keep it ever since.

The Declaration of Independence didn’t describe America as it was. It described what America claimed it was striving to become: a nation where all people are created equal, where certain rights belong to every person simply because they exist, and where government has no legitimate authority except the power the people grant it. Two hundred fifty years later, that promise remains unfinished. This is an honest look at what has been paid toward it, what remains owed, and the role the Constitution has played as the imperfect tool a people has used to make good on words it wrote before it fully believed them.

A Promise Written Ahead of Its Time

Thomas Jefferson and the men who worked with him were not writing a legal code. They were writing an explanation, addressed to “a candid world,” for why 13 colonies were breaking away from their king. They could have confined their argument to specific grievances: taxation without representation, quartering soldiers and dissolving colonial assemblies. Instead, they began with a claim about every human being and the purpose of all government.

Rights are not granted by kings. They belong to people simply because they are people. Government exists to protect those rights, and it possesses legitimate authority only through the consent of the governed. When a government works against those ends, Jefferson wrote, the people have the right to alter or abolish it.

It is worth pausing to consider how bold that claim was—and how incomplete.

The men who signed the Declaration lived in a society built in large measure on slavery. Jefferson himself enslaved more than 600 people during his lifetime. The document’s declaration of equality stood beside a social order that denied it to many of the people living under it, including enslaved people, women, indentured servants and Native nations whose land was already being treated as the country’s next frontier.

The Declaration was not a mirror reflecting America in 1776. It was a check written against an account that did not yet contain the funds to honor it.

That gap between promise and practice is not a flaw unique to the founding generation. It is the defining feature of American history. Any honest account of the past 250 years must hold two truths at the same time: The principle is real and worth defending, and the nation’s failure to live by it has brought devastating consequences to millions of people across generations.

Neither truth cancels out the other.

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The Constitution as the Machine Behind the Promise

If the Declaration is the promise, the Constitution is the machine built to help keep it. Like any machine designed by imperfect people, it can break down, be repaired and, at times, even be run in reverse.

The Constitution, ratified in 1788, did not include the Declaration’s language of equality. Instead, it incorporated compromises that the Declaration’s own logic condemned: the Three-Fifths Clause, the Fugitive Slave Clause and a 20-year delay before Congress could prohibit the international slave trade. James Madison and the other framers knew they were creating a functioning government, complete with separated powers, checks and balances and a process for amendment. What they did not resolve was the question their own founding document had already raised: Who counted as fully equal under the law?

The Constitution’s greatest strength and its greatest tragedy lie in the same place: Article V.

The framers included a method for changing the Constitution because they understood that no generation could produce a perfect system for all time. The amendment process became the primary means through which the Declaration’s principles were slowly—and often reluctantly—written into American law.

The clearest example came after the American Civil War.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship and guaranteed equal protection under the law, extending constitutional protection to people the original document had left outside its practical reach. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibited denying the right to vote because of race, at least in law.

Together, these amendments marked the moment the Constitution attempted to catch up with the Declaration. Achieving them required a war that claimed more American lives than every other U.S. war combined.

Yet writing principles into the Constitution and enforcing them proved to be very different tasks.

The century separating Reconstruction from the modern civil rights movement demonstrates how wide that gap could become. Plessy v. Ferguson allowed the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection to coexist with legally sanctioned segregation for nearly 60 years. It took another generation of activism, additional legislation and a Supreme Court willing to reverse itself in Brown v. Board of Education to begin closing that divide.

The Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote in 1920. Even then, many Black women throughout the South remained effectively disenfranchised until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law relied on Congress exercising its enforcement authority under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to give constitutional guarantees practical force.

A pattern emerges from this history.

The Declaration states the principle. The Constitution is eventually amended—or interpreted—to reflect it. Then comes the longest struggle of all: making those constitutional promises function in everyday life rather than exist only on paper.

Equality written into law and equality experienced in daily life are not the same thing. Confusing one for the other is how a nation convinces itself that a struggle has ended long before it actually has.

Where the Promise Has Been Kept

It would be its own kind of dishonesty to tell this story only as one of failure. Real progress has been made, won through extraordinary sacrifice by real people, and it deserves to be recognized without qualification.

The abolition of slavery, achieved at enormous cost, closed the starkest gap between the Declaration’s words and American practice. The expansion of voting rights — first to white men without property in the early 19th century, then, unevenly, to Black Americans, to women and, finally, through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to Black Americans in practice as well as in law — brought the operation of American government closer to the Declaration’s claim that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, not merely the consent of some of them.

The labor movement likewise expanded the meaning of the pursuit of happiness beyond a formal legal right into something more attainable for working people who possessed neither the property nor the social standing of the nation’s founders. Those gains came at a cost that becomes easy to overlook once they are woven into everyday life.

Workers at the Homestead Strike in 1892 and the Pullman Strike in 1894 faced private security forces and federal troops for organizing against wage cuts and company control over their lives.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women, after they were trapped behind doors that had been locked to prevent unauthorized breaks. Their deaths became a turning point in the argument that workplace safety was not merely a matter of private contract but of basic human dignity.

It took decades more of strikes and organizing before those ideas found lasting legal expression.

During the Flint Sit-Down Strike, workers simply refused to leave General Motors factories until the company recognized their union. The persistence of labor organizers helped produce the National Labor Relations Act, which protected workers’ right to organize, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established a federal minimum wage, limited child labor and created the 40-hour workweek.

Social Security Act reflected the same underlying principle. It treated security in old age as something society should help guarantee rather than leave entirely to private charity or family fortune.

None of these protections appears explicitly in either the Declaration or the Constitution. Instead, they grow from the same underlying conviction expressed in the Declaration: that every person possesses an inherent dignity the law exists to protect rather than merely tolerate. Those principles were applied to an industrial economy the founders could scarcely have imagined.

The story did not end with the New Deal.

Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta organized farmworkers who had largely been excluded from many New Deal labor protections. Through the Delano grape strike and a nationwide boycott during the 1960s, they secured long-overdue recognition for some of the country’s least protected workers.

Their achievements also served as a reminder that even the labor movement’s own victories did not reach everyone equally. Progress, once again, arrived unevenly, requiring each generation to extend protections that previous generations had left incomplete.

Section 4 — Where the Promise Has Been Kept (Continued)

The civil rights movement of the 20th century accomplished what Reconstruction could not: It forced the Fourteenth Amendment to function as more than words on paper.

None of those gains came from government goodwill alone. They were won, case by case and campaign by campaign, by ordinary people willing to endure arrest, violence and even death to make the country live up to what it had written in 1776 and reaffirmed in 1868.

Brown v. Board of Education declared state-sponsored school segregation unconstitutional in 1954. Three years later, the decision still required enforcement by the 101st Airborne Division after President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and deployed federal troops to escort nine Black students into Little Rock Central High School through a hostile crowd encouraged by a governor determined to keep them out.

Rosa Parks’ arrest in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 was not a spontaneous moment of defiance. It was the carefully chosen test case of a local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter that had spent years preparing for such an opportunity. The yearlong bus boycott that followed, sustained by thousands of Black residents who walked or organized carpools rather than ride segregated buses, demonstrated the power of disciplined collective sacrifice to overturn an unjust local law.

The movement continued to grow.

Four students sitting at a lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960 ignited sit-ins across the South. The Freedom Rides of 1961 exposed the violence used to preserve segregation as riders endured beatings and firebombings while testing federal desegregation orders. In Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, children marching peacefully into police dogs and fire hoses transformed the nation’s own brutality into evidence against its claims of equality.

Among those who paid the price was John Lewis, who was beaten unconscious on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the 1965 Selma voting rights march.

Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper, lost her job and was later beaten in jail after attempting to register to vote. Her testimony before the 1964 Democratic National Convention forced the nation to confront the cost of denying citizens the franchise.

Behind many of these public moments stood organizers whose names received less attention.

Bayard Rustin organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom largely behind the scenes because many movement leaders feared his sexuality would become a political distraction. His experience illustrated that even a movement dedicated to expanding citizenship struggled to extend equal dignity within its own ranks.

The legislative achievements that followed were not gifts bestowed from above. They were the culmination of years of organized sacrifice.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, employment and federally funded programs. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 protected access to the ballot after generations of systematic exclusion. The Fair Housing Act, enacted during the week Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, extended the same principle to housing discrimination.

Each law answered sustained demands made by people willing to be arrested, beaten or killed to secure them.

That is what it took for constitutional guarantees adopted in 1868 to begin functioning as intended nearly a century later.

The same pattern continues into the present.

Disability rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and marriage equality under Obergefell v. Hodges continue the country’s ongoing argument over who is included within the Declaration’s promise that “all” are created equal.

None of these victories is beyond challenge. Each remains contested, incomplete and, at least in theory, subject to reversal. They should not be mistaken for the end of the story.

They are, however, genuine achievements. Like those that came before them, they resulted from people taking the Declaration’s principles seriously enough to insist that the Constitution—and the nation governed by it—move closer to fulfilling them.

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Where the Promise Has Failed, and Where It’s Straining Now

The nation’s failures are not confined to the past. Some of its oldest wounds have never fully healed, and new strains have emerged on principles that seemed more settled only a generation ago.

The dispossession of Native nations remains among the country’s deepest and most enduring failures because it was not incidental to American expansion; it was one of its central mechanisms.

Treaty after treaty was negotiated and then broken, not as isolated exceptions but as a recurring pattern of federal policy. The Declaration itself reflects that contradiction. Among its grievances against the British crown is the accusation that the king had encouraged “merciless Indian Savages” to wage war against the colonists, language revealing how little the document’s authors extended their own philosophy of natural rights to the Native peoples whose lands they were already claiming.

This was not a contradiction that emerged later. It was present from the beginning.

Its consequences — measured in land, sovereignty, culture and generations of loss — remain visible today.

The second great failure is the era of Jim Crow, not simply because segregation existed but because it endured for nearly a century after the Constitution had already been amended to prohibit racial inequality under the law.

For decades, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments remained part of the Constitution while many state governments constructed elaborate legal systems designed to circumvent them. Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and state-sanctioned segregation transformed constitutional guarantees into promises honored only selectively.

That history demonstrates an uncomfortable truth.

Amending the Constitution is necessary, but it is never sufficient.

Rights secured on paper remain vulnerable unless successive generations insist upon enforcing them. Otherwise, constitutional amendments risk becoming monuments to ideals rather than living protections under law.

That lesson remains relevant.

Even during this anniversary year, there are visible pressures on constitutional principles that many Americans considered largely settled not long ago.

The Supreme Court’s narrowing of protections under the Voting Rights Act, combined with another wave of mid-decade redistricting by legislatures controlled by both major political parties, has renewed debates over whether electoral systems adequately reflect the Declaration’s principle that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed rather than from electoral maps drawn to predetermine outcomes.

Questions about due process have likewise reemerged.

Reports alleging that federal immigration officers entered homes without judicial warrants, together with judicial findings that some agencies failed to comply with court orders, have renewed debate over constitutional protections against unlawful searches, seizures and deprivations of liberty.

These controversies are not merely historical echoes.

They involve constitutional questions currently being argued in federal courts, state legislatures and public debate. Their eventual resolution will help determine whether the nation’s long effort to bring constitutional practice closer to the Declaration’s principles continues to advance or begins to retreat.

The larger pattern remains consistent across American history.

The Declaration established ideals that far exceeded the country’s willingness or ability to fulfill them immediately. The Constitution provided mechanisms for moving closer to those ideals. But every generation has faced the same choice: whether to strengthen those principles through law and practice or allow them to weaken through neglect.

The promise has never been self-executing.

It has always depended upon citizens willing to insist that the nation’s governing institutions honor their own founding commitments.

A Consent Not Extended: The Wars Abroad

There is a version of American history that tells the story of the past 250 years as a steady expansion of the principle of consent of the governed to more and more people within the nation’s borders. That account is true as far as it goes. But it leaves out a parallel history just as long: the United States has often denied that same principle to people beyond its borders when military power and national interest came into conflict.

The Declaration of Independence did not argue that consent of the governed applied only to Americans. It presented the principle as universal. Yet American foreign policy has frequently treated it as a privilege reserved for Americans rather than a right belonging to all people.

That pattern began at home, long before the United States projected power overseas.

The wars against Native nations, the Long Walk of the Navajo, the Sand Creek Massacre and the violence culminating at the Wounded Knee Massacre were not simply isolated conflicts over land. They were military campaigns intended to eliminate the political independence of nations the United States had, in many cases, already recognized through treaties.

A nation founded on opposition to taxation without representation spent much of the following century using the U.S. Army to ensure that Native nations would exercise no meaningful sovereignty over lands the federal government claimed for itself.

That contradiction was not incidental to westward expansion.

It was central to it.

The same logic eventually extended beyond the continent.

The Mexican-American War transferred roughly half of Mexico’s territory—including land that would become California, Nevada, Utah and much of the modern Southwest—to the United States without the consent of the people who lived there.

Years later, Ulysses S. Grant, who had served as a young Army officer during the war, described it in his memoirs as one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker one.

The residents of those territories became citizens of a country that had spent seven decades proclaiming that governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed. They themselves were never asked whether they consented to the transfer.

Perhaps the clearest illustration came in the Philippines.

The United States entered the Spanish-American War partly in the name of Cuban independence. President William McKinley initially suggested that the Philippines would likewise be liberated rather than annexed.

Filipino revolutionaries who had already been fighting Spain believed the United States would recognize their newly established government.

Instead, the United States annexed the islands and fought the Philippine-American War to suppress the same independence movement it had appeared to support.

McKinley described the policy as “benevolent assimilation.”

For many Filipinos, it meant something very different.

Tens of thousands died during a conflict fought to deny them the same principle of self-government that Americans had invoked against the British Crown more than a century earlier.

The irony is difficult to ignore.

Jefferson’s language about the people’s right to alter or abolish a government that ruled without their consent became the philosophical foundation of American independence. Yet that same principle was denied to another people by an American government exercising authority from thousands of miles away.

The contradiction does not erase the importance of the Declaration’s ideals.

It illustrates how difficult nations—including the United States—have found it to apply those ideals consistently when doing so conflicts with strategic, territorial or political interests.

The question raised by the Declaration was never simply whether Americans deserved self-government.

It was whether all people did.

The nation’s history abroad suggests that answering “yes” has often proved easier in principle than in practice.

The pattern continued through the 20th century even as the locations and circumstances changed.

American interventions throughout Central America and the Caribbean reflected the same tension between the nation’s stated ideals and its strategic interests. The prolonged occupation of Haiti, repeated military interventions in Nicaragua and support for governments that protected American economic interests regardless of their domestic legitimacy all raised the same fundamental question: How universal was the principle of consent of the governed?

In Vietnam, that question became even more difficult.

The United States supported the government of South Vietnam, despite its persistent struggles to establish broad political legitimacy among its own people. The conflict itself grew in part from the collapse of French colonial rule following World War II, a colonial order the United States had initially helped restore despite its own longstanding commitment to national self-determination.

The result was a war in which Americans often described themselves as defending freedom while many Vietnamese experienced the conflict as another struggle over who would govern their country.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq raised similar questions in a different era.

The United States removed an authoritarian government without the consent of the Iraqi people and without broad international support. Although the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was widely condemned, the occupation that followed demonstrated a recurring political reality: Governments imposed by outside powers struggle to acquire legitimacy because consent cannot simply be transferred by military force.

A constitution may be written.

Elections may be organized.

Institutions may be constructed.

None of those guarantees creates the public trust that legitimate self-government requires.

None of this means every American war has been fought in bad faith or that the United States has never defended the principle of self-determination abroad.

The Allied victory in World War II remains one of history’s clearest examples of military force used to defeat regimes fundamentally opposed to democracy and national self-government.

Yet even that achievement existed alongside profound contradictions at home.

While American soldiers fought fascism overseas, the federal government incarcerated more than 100,000 Japanese Americans without due process during the war. The nation defended liberty abroad while denying constitutional protections to many of its own citizens.

That contradiction mirrors a recurring pattern throughout American history.

The issue is not whether the United States has sometimes fought for liberty overseas.

Clearly, it has.

The issue is whether the nation has applied its founding principles consistently when those principles conflicted with military, economic or geopolitical objectives.

The historical record suggests that it has not.

Too often, the right of self-government has been treated as universal in theory but conditional in practice.

If the Declaration’s claim that “all” are created equal is to be taken seriously, then the people affected by American military power cannot be excluded from that moral calculation simply because they lived beyond the nation’s borders.

A country that measures itself by universal principles cannot evaluate those principles only within its own boundaries.

The same standard that judges how America treats its own citizens must also inform how it exercises power beyond them.

Only then can the nation’s commitment to consent of the governed become something more than a principle applied selectively when it proves politically convenient.

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What the Constitution Cannot Do

The Constitution can secure rights.

It cannot compel virtue.

It can restrain government from abusing power. It cannot require citizens to love one another, care for their neighbors or exercise mercy. It can establish a framework for justice, but it cannot create the moral character necessary to sustain a just society.

This is where a distributist perspective—and, more broadly, a religious one—offers something a purely civic account cannot.

Writers such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc argued that political liberty alone is insufficient if economic and social power remain concentrated in the hands of distant institutions. A society may distribute legal rights while leaving people dependent on governments or corporations for the necessities of daily life.

The Declaration promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It does not promise that anyone will help another person pursue those ends.

No constitution can legislate generosity.

No statute can require compassion.

No court can order genuine charity.

That is not a criticism of the Constitution so much as an acknowledgment of its limits.

The nation’s founding documents establish a floor beneath which government should not allow people to fall. They cannot build the roof of a shared moral life.

That has always depended on something beyond law.

Whether one calls it charity, mutual aid, civic responsibility or caritas, it consists of people freely choosing to recognize the dignity of others rather than merely respecting their legal rights.

A community of tiny homes helping people returning from incarceration, a coalition of churches operating food pantries or shelters, volunteers accompanying immigrants through legal proceedings, neighbors caring for elderly residents who would otherwise be alone—none of these efforts substitutes for constitutional government.

They complement it.

They accomplish work the Constitution was never designed to perform.

The Constitution protects liberty.

Communities decide what to do with it.

Turning the Tide

Recognizing the nation’s current challenges is only useful if it leads to practical action.

An essay that merely diagnoses problems without considering possible responses risks becoming an exercise in pessimism.

Several of the pressures discussed earlier remain within the reach of ordinary citizens.

Voting rights offer one example.

The Supreme Court’s decisions limiting portions of the Voting Rights Act have shifted much of the work of protecting fair elections back to states and local communities. Independent redistricting commissions, already adopted in several states through ballot initiatives, provide one way to reduce partisan control over electoral maps.

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Local voter registration efforts remain equally important.

Many of the gains achieved during the civil rights movement began not in Washington but through years of patient organizing in neighborhoods, churches and community centers.

The lesson of 1965 is often misunderstood.

Congress did not create the movement.

The movement created the political conditions that made congressional action possible.

The same relationship between local organizing and national reform is likely to remain true in the future.

Due process presents another opportunity for civic engagement.

Legal observers who monitor immigration proceedings, volunteers who organize “know your rights” workshops and citizens who participate in court-watch programs all contribute to making constitutional protections more than abstract guarantees.

Support for public defenders and legal aid organizations has likewise become increasingly important.

Rights that exist only on paper cease to function as rights in practice.

The Fourth and Fifth amendments have never enforced themselves.

They have depended upon judges willing to apply them, attorneys prepared to defend them and citizens determined to insist that government remain accountable to them.

The final challenge is less legislative than cultural.

It concerns the relationship between patriotism and religious faith.

A Christianity that measures its faithfulness primarily by loyalty to a nation rather than by concern for the stranger, the prisoner and the hungry risks confusing the symbols of faith with its substance.

The standard set by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew is not national allegiance.

It is service to those in need.

The measure is whether the hungry are fed, the stranger welcomed and the imprisoned visited.

The earliest Christians understood this distinction well.

Their refusal to offer incense to Caesar reflected the conviction that no earthly government could claim the ultimate loyalty owed to God alone.

The answer is not to remove faith from public life.

Doing so would ignore the moral traditions that inspired abolitionists, civil rights leaders and countless advocates for justice throughout American history.

The challenge instead is to practice the substance of faith rather than its symbolism.

Visiting someone in prison matters more than merely debating criminal justice.

Welcoming an immigrant matters more than treating immigration solely as an abstract political issue.

Feeding a hungry neighbor matters more than arguing over who deserves assistance.

A person spending a Saturday morning mentoring someone recently released from prison or accompanying a family through immigration court performs an act that no flag displayed in a sanctuary can accomplish.

Such actions rarely become headlines.

Yet they have often outlasted political victories because they depend neither on election results nor on which party controls government.

They depend only upon individuals choosing to treat one another with the dignity the Declaration claims belongs to every person.

That possibility has existed in every generation.

It remains available today.

What 250 Years Suggests

Taken as a whole, the American story is neither the triumphal narrative often presented at official commemorations nor the account of unrelieved betrayal offered by its harshest critics.

It is something more complicated.

The Declaration of Independence wrote a check the nation could not immediately cash. The Constitution created—however imperfectly—a mechanism for honoring more of that obligation over time through amendment, legislation, judicial interpretation and the sustained efforts of citizens determined to make the nation’s founding principles more than aspirations.

Some of that debt has been paid.

The abolition of slavery, the expansion of voting rights, the dismantling of legal segregation and the extension of civil and labor protections to people the founders never imagined as full participants in American civic life represent genuine progress. They are not symbolic achievements. They changed the lives of millions of people and brought the country closer to its stated ideals.

Yet a debt that has been only partly repaid remains a debt.

The nation’s 250th anniversary is therefore an appropriate moment to ask not whether America has fulfilled its promise but whether it continues to move toward it.

Recent developments suggest that the answer remains unsettled.

Protections for voting rights that required generations of activism and the sacrifice of countless Americans have been narrowed by judicial decisions and challenged through legislative changes at the state level. Constitutional guarantees of due process, rooted in many of the same grievances Jefferson identified against the British Crown, continue to face new tests as courts examine the limits of executive authority and law enforcement power.

These are not abstract constitutional debates.

They concern the practical meaning of rights that have shaped American political life since 1776.

The struggle has not ended.

It has merely taken new forms.

Perhaps the most honest conclusion on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is neither that America has fully succeeded nor that it has irrevocably failed.

Rather, America remains under construction.

Every generation inherits both the unfinished blueprint and the responsibility to continue the work.

Abraham Lincoln understood this during the Gettysburg Address. He did not describe the Declaration as a document commemorating a completed nation. Instead, he treated it as a proposition to which the nation remained dedicated—a proposition that required continual testing to determine whether a government founded on liberty and equality could endure.

That test did not end with the Civil War.

It did not end with Reconstruction.

It did not end with Brown v. Board of Education.

It did not end with the Voting Rights Act.

It continues today in courtrooms interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment, in legislatures debating election laws and in communities deciding how they will treat immigrants, formerly incarcerated people, those experiencing homelessness and others whose dignity is often easiest to overlook.

The signers of 1776 could not have imagined many of the causes their words would eventually be invoked to defend.

They did not foresee the abolition of slavery.

They did not foresee disability rights.

They did not foresee interracial marriage becoming constitutionally protected, much less marriage equality.

Their language proved larger than their own understanding of it.

That may be the Declaration’s greatest strength.

Its principles were never permanently owned by the generation that wrote them.

Each generation has inherited them, interpreted them and sought to extend them further than those who came before.

The work has proceeded through constitutional amendments, legislation, court decisions, social movements and countless acts of individual courage and compassion.

It has also advanced through quieter acts that history rarely records: neighbors helping neighbors, communities caring for those left behind and citizens insisting that the country’s highest ideals apply not only to themselves but to everyone.

The American experiment has always depended upon both kinds of work.

The Constitution provides the framework.

The people determine whether it lives.

The wall remains unfinished.

No generation was ever expected to complete it alone.

The enduring question, at this anniversary and every one that follows, is not whether the work is finished but whether each generation is willing to lay its own stones before passing the task to those who come next.

is a contributing writer at Unorthodoxing.

A New Direction for the Podcast

In this episode, I’m announcing a retooling of our podcast format. Instead of starting with the news of the week, we’ll focus on one or two core issues affecting our culture and political landscape. This change will allow us to dive deeper into the analysis of pressing topics, and I’m eager to share the ground-level work of my activism.

The Decision to Step Down

I recently made the difficult decision to resign from my position on the National Committee of the American Solidarity Party. This decision stems from two main desires: first, I want to focus on building the Illinois Solidarity Party, and second, I want to dedicate my time to expanding this podcast into a more effective media operation. While I still believe in the principles of the Solidarity Party, I need to address some systemic issues at the national level that have prompted my resignation.

My Journey with the Solidarity Party

Reflecting on my journey, I first discovered the Solidarity Party in 2020, which felt like a lifeline for me. As a politically homeless person, I found an organization that closely matched my convictions. My involvement led to forming the Liberation Caucus with Bill Fleming, who served at the time as the chair of the Georgia Solidarity Party and the host of the national party’s official podcast, the Pelican Brief. Through the caucus, we recruited people from the pro-life left and worked to provide a supportive community.

Addressing LGBTQ Issues

A significant challenge within our party has been the approach to LGBTQ issues. The Liberation Caucus has remained neutral on this topic, focusing instead on economic and social justice. However, the increasing stridency of our national platform on LGBTQ issues has hampered our ability to attract members from the left and center. It’s crucial to recognize the diversity of viewpoints within our party and work toward a more inclusive approach.

The Current Landscape

Currently, our party’s platform is heavily influenced by a faction that promotes a rigid stance on LGBTQ issues, which does not resonate with the broader electorate. I believe the party would benefit from a more balanced approach that includes perspectives from both socially conservative, moderate and liberal members.

The Way Forward

As I step away from national leadership, I am focusing on three key fronts: building a robust media operation, collaborating with non-party organizations that share our vision, and developing a strong state party in Illinois. By doing this, I aim to demonstrate what effective local organizing looks like and how it can pave the way for a healthier political movement.

Engaging the Community

I want to foster a community of independent thinkers. Your voice is vital in shaping our path forward. Whether you agree or disagree with my views, I encourage you to share your thoughts and insights. Together, we can build a vibrant community that welcomes diverse perspectives.

As we embark on this new journey, I invite you to stay connected through social media and our website. Join me in expanding our reach and building a platform that reflects our shared values. Let’s turn our vision into action and create a movement that resonates with people across the spectrum.

Key Takeaways

- The podcast is shifting focus to in-depth analysis of critical issues.

- I’ve resigned from the Solidarity National Committee to focus on state-level activism and podcast development.

- The Solidarity Party must embrace diverse viewpoints, especially on sensitive issues like LGBTQ rights.

- We will work on building a powerful media operation and collaborate with like-minded organizations.

Conclusion

As we move forward, let’s engage in meaningful discussions and work together to create positive change. If you found value in this episode, please share it with a friend, subscribe, and join the conversation. Together, we can build a better future.

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Unorthodoxing

Unorthodoxing: where uncommon politics finds common ground.

By Mike Vick

Be sure to check out Patreon and Substack for bonus episodes and more members-only perks. This week, look for Amar’s take on where ASP stands now and his hopes for the future of the party.

Unorthodoxing with Mike Vick

Unorthodoxing is the podcast where uncommon politics finds common ground.

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Unorthodoxing

00:31 Rescue Resurrection Recap

02:53 Venezuela Controversy

07:19 Amar Patel’s Political Journey

16:53 Joining the American Solidarity Party

26:04 Becoming a vice presidential candidate

36:07 Outro and Acknowledgements

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Unorthodoxing, Mike Vick, Terrisa Bukovinac, Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, FACE Act, Trump, Venezuela, Amar Patel, American Solidarity Party, third-party politics

In this members-only exclusive, Terrisa Bukovinac of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising reveals the circumstances behind Justice for the Five, pleas for Americans to demand congressional hearings, and urges pro-life activists not to censor the truth of abortion.

I also share my thoughts on the Trump administration’s crackdown on Somali immigrants, and th…

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In the inaugural episode of Unorthodoxing, host Mike Vick discusses controversial military actions in the Caribbean and the implications of a Supreme Court case regarding abortion and free speech. He also interviews Terrisa Bukovinac, founder of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate.

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Unorthodoxing

01:24 Controversial Potential War Crime in the Caribbean

06:47 Supreme Court Case on Abortion and Free Speech

09:16 Interview with Terrisa Bukovinac

29:03 Follow Unorthodoxing on social media and become a member for exclusive clips and videos

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Unorthodoxing is the talk show where uncommon politics finds common ground! You’ll get weekly news analysis from a unique perspective, and interviews with outside-the-mainstream guests you won’t see on the nightly news.

Hosted by Mike Vick, producer of the Nuclear Option podcast, and executive advisor to Pastor Chris Butler of the Center for Christianity and Public Life. Mike is a member of the American Solidarity Party’s national and Illinois state leadership teams, and co-founder of ASP’s Liberation Caucus.

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