Re-founding Patriotism
Who gets to decide, and how should the deciding be done?
We are about to mark the 250th birthday of the United States, and any honest physician examining this patient would hold off on the congratulations. The body politic is feverish. We are inflamed, exhausted, and polarized into camps that no longer trust each other to tell the truth, share a meal, or hand over power peacefully.
The deeper diagnosis is not hard to read. A two-party system, locked in place by closed primaries, gerrymandered districts, and a flood of money that rewards the most extreme voices, has produced a Congress that can no longer govern and a politics that can no longer heal.
Roughly half the country now refuses to claim either party at all, and across every label Americans agree on at least one thing: the system itself is broken.
A great many good people are working to heal this. The first question any of us owes the country is also the simplest: where do we actually stand? I want to answer that plainly, because the usual answer is wrong, and the wrong answer leaves us weak.
Let go of the rope!
Picture the argument tearing America apart as a single rope, with the left hauling at one end and the right hauling at the other. People assume that anyone trying to bring the two sides together must be standing somewhere in the middle of that rope. The middle of the rope, though, is just the knot — dragged back and forth, planted nowhere, loved by no one. I have no interest in being the knot.
The movement I believe in is letting go of the rope altogether, because we are asking a different question than the one the rope is about.
This is also why I refuse the word “centrist.” In Washington that word has come to name a familiar archetype — the transactional moderate who splits every difference and brokers every deal — and that archetype has itself hardened into one more fixed point in the broken machine, rather than a way out of it. The center, as our politics now defines it, is not an escape from the rigged game. It is simply another seat at the same rigged table. What we are building is not the political middle. It is something the old map does not chart at all.
The rope is about outcomes: what the government should do, whose vision should win, which side is right. That fight is real, and it matters enormously. It is not our fight.
Our question lies underneath it: who gets to decide, and how should the deciding be done?
The rigged game cheats us all
Here is the insight that makes this work genuinely cross-partisan. The rigged system does not cheat only one side. Closed primaries, gerrymandered maps, and the dominance of big money cheat the conservative and the progressive alike, handing both of them a politics that answers to insiders and extremes instead of to the people.
Before any of us can fight fairly about our real disagreements, we first have to repair the field we are fighting on. This is why a libertarian, a disillusioned conservative, an independent, and a progressive can stand together in this movement. They do not agree about where the country should go, and this alliance is no compromise between their views.
We stand together because we share a single conviction: that We the People, not the insiders and not the extremes, should hold the pen, and should reason together with re-founders' patriotism as we write the next chapter of the American story.
A re-founding patriotism of the promise
Here is where my re-founding patriotism comes in, and it is fierce and specific. I love this country. I am loyal to the American promise — the revolutionary, world-changing claim that all of us are created equal, and that real power flows up from the people and never down from a throne. I am loyal to that promise with everything I have.
What I will not do is bow down to the broken machinery that has failed it. I feel no reverence for an eighteenth-century operating system straining under twenty-first-century loads. We can honor what the Constitution was meant to do and still refuse to treat the document itself as untouchable scripture. Loving the promise is not the same as preserving the structure.
Sometimes loving the promise means finding the courage to renew and build the structure the promise always deserved.
Some will hear that and call it dangerous, even un-American. They have it exactly backwards. Transforming our framework when it fails us is one of the most American things we could possibly do. The founders did not gently patch up the system they inherited; they threw out the Articles of Confederation and built something new.
They wrote our right to do this into the Declaration itself: when a government betrays its purpose, the people have the right “to alter or to abolish it.” We have answered that call before. Lincoln, standing at Gettysburg, did not merely defend the old order; he reimagined the country around the promise of equality and called it a new birth of freedom. After the Civil War, Americans rewrote the Constitution yet again, ending slavery and promising equal protection, in what the historian Eric Foner calls our Second Founding.
We are being summoned, in our own generation, to a Third Founding. This is not an abandonment of what the founders began, and it is not a tearing-down of the country. It is the opposite — taking up their unfinished work by the very means they handed down to us.
First imagine, then deliberate
Renewal on this scale begins with an act of imagination. The first thing a broken system steals from us is our sense of what is possible. We have been taught, year after year, that the two-party trap is permanent, that the dysfunction is simply how things are, that nothing essential can ever change. That learned helplessness is the deepest symptom of all, and it is a lie.
The true genius of the founders was not any single clause they wrote; it was their audacity to imagine that ordinary people could govern themselves at all, when every authority of their age insisted otherwise. Reclaiming that audacity is our first task. Before we can rebuild anything, we have to give ourselves permission to imagine a system actually worthy of the promise.
Imagination opens the space; the wisdom of the people fills it. We do not fill it with one leader’s blueprint or one party’s program. We fill it the way a healthy democracy is meant to — by gathering the collective wisdom of ordinary citizens through deliberation. The evidence here is clear and hopeful.
Give the argument back to the people
When everyday Americans are brought together, given good information and enough time, and seated across their differences, they consistently reason their way toward wiser, fairer, more durable answers than our broken politics can produce. This is the promise of citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy: not the rule of the loudest or the richest, rather the considered judgment of the people themselves. We are far wiser together than our current system ever allows us to be.
Now I need to say the most important thing, because it is what keeps this movement honest and able to hold the entire country. We are not here to win the argument for the left, and we are not here to win it for the right.
We are here to give the argument back to the people.
There are movements that long to refound the nation around a particular finish line named in advance — a specific vision of justice, or liberty, or the economy. I honor them; many are friends and allies, and their passion is a gift to us all. A movement that names the finish line in advance, though, will always belong to one side, because that finish line is the very thing the country is fighting over. So we do something different. We do not choose the meal; we set the table, and we make sure every American has a seat at it.
Every structural reform we champion serves that single end: open primaries so every voter has a real choice, fair districts drawn by citizens rather than by incumbents, an end to the dominance of big money, citizens’ assemblies where ordinary people deliberate the questions that shape their lives, and a renewed Constitution fit for the century we actually live in. None of these reforms belong to the left or the right. Each of them simply hands the pen back to the people.
We will stand beside anyone fighting for a more just country, and we will defend their place in the conversation with everything we have. We will not pretend to settle, on the people’s behalf, what only the people together have the right to settle. A movement that truly trusts the people cannot quietly write their answer for them.
Bound to one another
Underneath the strategy and the structures, this movement rests on a single core value: interdependence. I have spent my life in medicine, and the body taught it to me first. A body is one connected whole; no organ flourishes while another is failing, and in the end each of us is a part of one another’s immune system.
A country is no different. Your freedom and mine rise or fall together, whether we like it or not. When people truly grasp that they are bound to one another do not spend their lives trying to defeat each other. They sit down and reason together. They do the slow, unglamorous work of building enough trust to govern. That work is not naïve. It is the most demanding form of hope there is, and it is a choice each of us is free to make today.
Interdependence carries a discipline, and the discipline has a name: cohesion. It is not only something we feel; it is something we have to organize. History does not change in a smooth, gradual line. It changes in windows — sudden openings when the old order cracks and what was unthinkable becomes possible, almost overnight. Those windows are brief, and they are unpredictable.
Cohesion Organizing
A movement that is fragmented and distrustful squanders them; a movement that has done the patient, often invisible work of building cohesion across its differences is ready to walk through them together.
So our task, right now, is cohesion organizing: weaving the relationships and the trust, person by person and group by group, that let a cross-partisan movement both help pry these windows open and stand prepared to act when they do. The 250th year is one such window. We can be ready for it, and for the larger ones still to come.
Here, at last, is where we stand. Not on the left, not on the right, not in the lonely middle of the rope — we stand on the ground beneath the whole fight.
It is the ground of a free people’s right to govern itself, to reason together across every difference, and to refound this republic in faithfulness to the promise that first called it into being.
It is the oldest American ground there is, and it belongs to no party.
In this 250th year, re-founding patriotism is ours to reclaim.
Dr. Paul Zeitz, is a preventive medicine physician, epidemiologist, ordained Song of Songs Rabbi, and founder of #unifyUSA and co-initiator of Renew American Democracy (RAD) movements, a new catalyzing platform. He is the author of Hit Refresh on the U.S. Constitution and Revolutionary Optimism: Seven Steps for Living as a Love-Centered Activist. He delivered the TEDxPrinceton talk “Peacecrafting: From Conflict to Collaboration” in February 2026.
Third founding....I like that!