American Exceptionalism Is a Verb
The Amer I Can series is my bread and butter. American politics and American exceptionalism have kept me awake for the better part of two or three decades, although those two concepts seem increasingly difficult to place in the same sentence.
So why call it Amer I Can? Because too much of our national conversation has become Amer I Can’t. We cannot reform education because it is too complicated. We cannot modernize energy because it is too expensive. We cannot improve government because the parties will never agree. We cannot touch the Constitution because the process is too difficult.
I reject the premise. Not because every proposal will work, and certainly not because America has never failed. I reject it because deciding something is impossible before seriously attempting it is one of the surest ways to guarantee that nothing changes.
For me, American exceptionalism is not a trophy inherited from previous generations. It is something each generation has to earn again.
Before Policy, Fix the Conversation
Part of me has always been reluctant to wade directly into American politics. The culture wars turn me off. The attack ads, political war chests, outrage cycles, and constant language of destruction make public life sound less like governing a shared country and more like defeating an enemy.
That is especially absurd in one of the most diverse societies on Earth. Put ten Americans in a room, split evenly between people who usually vote Republican and Democratic, and you will not discover two internally identical teams. People have different opinions about taxes, guns, abortion, education, health care, foreign policy, immigration, energy, and almost everything else.
Our political system compresses that complexity into two enormous coalitions, while the internet encourages us to behave as though everyone wearing the other jersey is an idiot. Yet outside that environment, Americans work together every day. We build businesses together, raise families, argue over football, share neighborhoods, help strangers, and somehow manage to function alongside people who disagree with us.
That everyday America is much more interesting to me than the online caricature.
The series reduces that philosophy to a simple civic code: don’t take the bait; don’t pander to the extremes; bring Main Character Energy; compromise with legislation, not your integrity; and absolutely no violence. Disagreement is necessary. Dehumanization is not.
The New Millennials: Changing the Political Temperature
That is why The New Millennials came first.
Before tackling education, energy, elections, or constitutional design, I wanted to address the temperature of the room. A nation cannot solve difficult problems if every disagreement becomes evidence that the other person is evil.
Compromise has somehow become a dirty word, when compromise is how almost every functioning human relationship works. You can hear another person’s idea and say, “There is something good there, but I think this part can be improved.” That is not weakness. That is how progress usually happens.
The alternative is an endless zero-sum game in which every election must destroy somebody, every concession becomes betrayal, and every political disagreement becomes existential.
Amer I Can starts from a different assumption: we still have to live here together when the argument is over.
The American Education Reset
If we want a country capable of solving twenty-first-century problems, education is foundational.
The United States invests heavily in education. OECD data place total U.S. primary-through-tertiary spending at about $20,387 per student compared with an OECD average of roughly $15,022. At the same time, recent U.S. assessments have documented serious declines in core skills; for example, NAEP reported that nine-year-olds’ average scores fell between 2020 and 2022 in both reading and mathematics.
That combination should make everyone uncomfortable. We are committing enormous resources while still facing significant questions about outcomes, access, teacher support, curriculum, technology, and whether students are being prepared for the economy they will actually enter.
You cannot build a twenty-first-century economy with an education system aimed primarily at twentieth-century realities. Artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, robotics, biotechnology, cybersecurity, skilled trades, software, and industries that do not yet exist will require a different balance of knowledge and capability.
The American Education Reset is not based on the idea that teachers are failing or that one political faction ruined the schools. It starts with a simpler proposition: if we are spending heavily and still dissatisfied with major outcomes, every part of the system should be open to examination.
The Real Green Deal
Energy became another obvious place where I thought the conventional partisan framing was failing us.
I read the 2019 Green New Deal resolution, H.Res. 109. It was a congressional resolution establishing broad goals and aspirations rather than a detailed statutory implementation program. I agreed with the urgency surrounding climate and infrastructure while disagreeing with significant portions of the political package surrounding it.
That became the starting point for The Real Green Deal: stop asking which political tribe gets to own the issue and start asking what actually works. What produces abundant and reliable energy? What reduces environmental damage? What strengthens domestic industry? What lowers long-term costs? What infrastructure can realistically be built?
The climate problem itself is not something I treat as a partisan invention. The IPCC concludes that human influence on the climate system is unequivocal and that climate change is affecting the frequency or severity of multiple types of extreme events. NOAA has also documented a sharp rise in costly U.S. weather and climate disasters: the inflation-adjusted annual average was nine billion-dollar events from 1980–2024, compared with 23 annually during 2020–2024, while noting that climate change, exposure, and vulnerability all contribute to losses.
My instinct is an old one: an ounce of prevention can still be worth a pound of cure. We still have time to put in some ounces.
A Constitution Built to Be Amended
The Constitution may be the subject that pulled me deepest into this entire project.
I consider it one of history’s great governing documents precisely because it created both structure and a mechanism for changing that structure. The amendment process is not evidence of disrespect for the Constitution. It is part of the Constitution.
The world the founders inhabited contained no nuclear weapons, cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, instantaneous global communication, modern surveillance networks, orbital infrastructure, or a nation approaching today’s scale and technological complexity. Asking whether eighteenth-century institutions require periodic modernization is not the same thing as dismissing what their creators accomplished.
The amendment history itself is striking. The 26th Amendment was proposed and ratified in 1971. The 27th was ratified in 1992, but it had originally been proposed in 1789. In other words, no constitutional amendment newly proposed after 1971 has subsequently been ratified.
That does not prove any particular reform is correct. It does raise a question worth asking: has the Constitution become more perfect, or have we become less capable of reaching the level of consensus required to amend it?
My We-Write and Federalist projects begin there. Not with “burn it down,” and not with “never touch it.” Read it. Understand why the structures exist. Identify what still works. Identify what does not. Then make the argument.
Follow the Argument, Not the Tribe
I am not politically neutral, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. I have opinions, values, biases, and positions just like everyone else.
What I try not to do is decide that an idea must be correct because it came from the political side I prefer. On some questions my reasoning leads toward positions commonly associated with conservatives. On others it leads toward positions associated with liberals. Sometimes neither coalition gives me an answer I find convincing.
Sometimes I agree with both sides. Sometimes I offend both sides. Both can be true.
That does not make the project centrist. The objective is not to split every disagreement exactly in half.
The objective is to follow the problem as far as possible and find the best solution we can.
Exceptionalism Has to Be Earned
When I talk about American exceptionalism, I am not arguing that America has always been exceptional at everything or that our history contains no serious failures.
I mean something much more demanding.
American exceptionalism is looking at an enormous problem and deciding to attempt the extraordinary anyway. Reach the Moon. Build the infrastructure. Lead the scientific breakthrough. Develop the next communications technology. Create the world’s best education system rather than defending one we know can improve.
That is exceptionalism as a verb.
I want America competing to reach the next frontier: space, advanced energy, quantum communication, medicine, artificial intelligence, manufacturing, and whatever comes after those. But none of that happens because we repeat stories about what previous generations accomplished.
We have to accomplish something ourselves.
Democracy Requires Showing Up
There is another measure of success that matters more to me than whether readers agree with every proposal in these books: participation.
According to the Census Bureau, 65.3% of America’s citizen voting-age population reported voting in the 2024 presidential election. That means roughly one-third did not participate, despite a presidential election producing one of the country’s clearest opportunities to express a political preference.
People give understandable reasons for sitting out. They dislike both candidates. They think one vote cannot matter. They believe the system ignores them.
But a representative system cannot incorporate an opinion that never enters the system.
Your vote is one part of democracy. Participation is larger than that. Read. Ask questions. Challenge your own side. Vote in primaries and local elections. Pay attention when nobody is screaming on television. Participate before the crisis, not merely afterward.
Amer I Can ultimately depends on that idea. A country cannot form a durable consensus if enormous numbers of its citizens decide the conversation is no longer worth entering.
Ideas Before Answers
The Amer I Can books are not presented as a finished governing platform.
They are proposals, arguments, experiments, and starting points. Some ideas will need revision. Some will fail under scrutiny. Some may become obsolete as technology changes.
That is fine.
Without a starting point, there is nothing to debate. Without debate, there is no compromise. Without enough compromise, large democratic change becomes extraordinarily difficult.
I would rather put an imperfect idea on the table and invite people to improve it than spend another decade explaining why nothing can possibly be done.
That is the difference between Amer I Can’t and Amer I Can.
And Then There’s the Church of Science…
I’ll leave one rabbit hole for you to discover on your own.
The Church of Science.
It may be one of the stranger ideas in the library, and I make a deliberately provocative argument with it: institutions should ultimately be judged by what they inspire people to learn, build, discover, preserve, and do for one another.
I’ll let the book take it from there.
Another Great American Chapter
If there is one tangible outcome I would love to see from all this work, it is more Americans believing their participation matters again.
Not agreeing with me.
Participating.
I want conservatives challenging conservatives, liberals challenging liberals, independents challenging everybody, and citizens becoming harder to manipulate through outrage and easier to persuade through good ideas.
I want a country confident enough to acknowledge what is broken without concluding that it is doomed.
Maybe that is idealistic.
I can live with that.
America has another chapter to write. The only question is whether we decide to write it together.
Amer I Can.