WELCOME TO FEDERALIST 2.0

“These are the times that try men’s souls.” Thomas Paine wrote these words in the winter of !776 during the dark hours of our Revolutionary War. He continued: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

For many in our country today another dark hour has arrived, the hour of Donald Trump.  Even those who voted for him must wonder what he will do to “drain the swamp” as he fills his cabinet from the swamp.  He ran on no real agenda or plausible solutions to real problems. 

Many who voted for him do not really believe he will bring back rust-belt jobs or double American economic growth rates in our economically troubled world.  He has no experience at any of it, but he aspires to be king. We got rid of our last king more than two hundred years ago.  Has the crisis returned?

We believe it has.  But the crisis now concerns us more than our emperor in search of his clothes. The sum of this last election, long before Donald Trump won the Electoral College Vote, is a crisis of belief in our form of government. 

It is a crisis borne on a sea of disturbing facts—content free elections while billions are spent for advertising, simple-minded political discourse miles away from the complexity of our problems, schools abandoning civic training and the powers to think about human problems, the rich running politics, and a media unable or unwilling to drop below the sensational to give us depth and breadth on critical issues.

We the people have been cast out; we the people replied by electing Donald Trump, an ironic example of all that is wrong but spoken from outside the swamp.

Looking to the Past to Inform a Better Future

Our founders believed deeply that the root power in our form of government was the people, not those we elect. When we lose faith in our system, we lose faith in ourselves.  In our new crisis, the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will wait to see what happens.  But he or she who stands now will act. The question is how?

Paine’s plea actually moved hundreds of men to join Washington and the Continental Army in a famous, almost ad hoc foray against the British with a midnight run across the Delaware River on a cold and merciless December night in 1776. It was against the odds and conventional wisdom. 

It succeeded.  It did not win the war, but it exemplified the power of the people against an overwhelming force opposing them, which force was eventually made to surrender five years later.  We need a new midnight run, as ad hoc, as against the grain, as the one Washington conceived then, a metaphorical crossing of the Delaware for our times. 

Our Reason for Being: To Encourage Effective Civic Engagement

Federalist 2.0 comes into being to facilitate a new midnight run. As a company, a blog site, an information site, and a virtual action site, Federalist 2.0 hopes to move millions to greater levels of effective civic engagement.   We will empower individuals and virtual communities of like-minded citizens to identify, learn about, discuss and debate issues that matter to the future well-being of our country, and then take-up virtual arms against our sea of troubles. 

We confess to hold a liberal point of view.  But we are more interested in the power of debate and wrestling with the system than the imposition of particular ideas.  Indeed, we hold that most of the ideas from left and right today have lost relevance in a rapidly changing world.  This sense has alienated both parties from their constituents, the reason Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump could ride in from the outside like heroes. Like America’s first midnight run, we must be as focused on the new as on action itself.

About our Name

We take our name from The Federalist Papers, written in 1787 and 1788 largely by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to promote ratification of a new US Constitution. 

The Federalist Papers are as close to an American scripture as we have or will ever have.  They tell us about our government and our role within it.  They do not tell us what to do, but they tell us why we are doing it, and how we should go about our work.  They tell us that differences are inevitable, that we should and do organize disparate groups around these differences, that debate and compromise govern our processes, and that without citizen initiatives we lose our form of government.

We attach the number 2.0 to our name to suggest that The Federalist Papers must be adapted to our current circumstances with a strong focus on creating a better future for our country, and that digital technology will play are large role in this process.  

Restoring a Republican Democracy.  

Effective civic engagement requires informed debate, even adversarial at times, within groups, and between groups and our elected representatives and government agencies.

Informed debate requires accessible information, the capacity of citizens to understand it, collections of citizens able to make and express good arguments around innovative solutions, and direct action enabled by suitable tools of engagement.  

The Empowering Role of Technology

The good news is that we now have technology well suited to the task. Federalist 2.0 will provide a digital platform of information and social media venues to host discussions and debate on key issues and facilitate civic action by groups dedicated to any particular position on any particular issue. We will encourage the formation of virtual communities of like-minded individuals that can work together to effect positive change.

Our digital platform will offer three overlapping facilities: 

a) Conversations to expose issues to enquiry and examination, crow source information, and encourage increasing numbers of people to engage and participate in the process.

b) Engagement tools that promote understanding, expression, argument, creation of full positions for wrestling with our elected and regulatory officials, and means to carry out such matches, including links to appropriate social media venues. 

c) Information in abundance, breadth, and depth in accessible and curated forms at levels hitherto unknown to mankind outside high profile specialties such as law and medicine.

Our Starting Point: Promoting Healthcare Reform in America.  

To avoid the pitfall of trying to do too much and in the end accomplishing nothing – we plan to start with just one major issue facing America today: Healthcare Reform. The subject is of acute interest to every American, and a system in turmoil. Our nation’s spending nearly twice as much per capita as any other nation on earth, with health care statistics among the worst for developed nations.   

Health care itself is a massive undertaking.  The central challenges of coverage, costs, quality, and innovations have mind-bending levels of complexity. 

Congressional Republicans and the Trump are barreling ahead at full tilt on the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). President Trump issued use his first executive order in office on 1/20/17 to direct federal agencies to do what they can to pare back provisions of the ACA and laying the groundwork to gut the requirement that Americans must carry health insurance, which lies that the heart of ACA. Yet neither Congressional Republicans nor the Trump Administration has put forth any sort of tangible plan to replace ACA. Not a great way to begin to address one of the most important issues facing Americans today. 

Our Initial Position: America needs to adopt Universal Healthcare.

So we are going to open our work with a simple provocation: The United States needs to adopt Universal Healthcare – that is all Americans should have access to the health services they need without suffering financial hardship to pay for them. The full spectrum of essential, high-quality health services should be provided including wellness programs, prevention, treatment, rehabilitation and palliative care.

We do not advocate how this should be done - fully public, fully private with strong regulations, or a mixture. But we are going to move through conversation, information, informed debate, and only then a consistent pressure on those who work for us, our elected representatives, to make some sense of our present nonsense in health care.  Where the conversation leads we cannot say.  We can say that we must have it, and we are willing to lead it.

The questions of cost controls, payment structures, quality controls, internal competition, and persistence of the innovation stream should be settled within the context of this system of universal health care.

Only the United States and India do not have formal commitments to universal health care.  Poor countries want for sufficient funds to support adequate health care, but all developed nations except the United States treat health care as a right and provide for half the money we spend higher quality care on average for all of those living in their countries. 

The wealthy and well-employed and most over the age of 64 receive health care in the United States from a system likely without peer, but tens of millions of Americans might was well be living in India or Rwanda for the poor on non-existent care they can obtain.

Getting the Conversation Started

So we respectfully request that you come back to visit Federalist 2.0 and join the conversation.

We will create a robust and meaningful discussion on the Internet around this challenge by providing:

a)    An informed conversation among experts and citizens alike;

b)    A curated information base designed to promote increasing levels of sophistication within the conversation; and

c)     Direct engagement with government agencies and elements of the health care system by active citizen groups that advocate innovative and experimental approaches to problems exposed through the conversation itself.

We stand inspired by the words of Alexander Hamilton in our undertaking: 

 
“The people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government and to reform, alter, or totally change the same when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.”