The problem I hope to address is not merely novel—it is unclaimed. It spans rhetoric, psychology, political science, media theory, behavioral policy, and communication. It demands an institutional structure as interdisciplinary as the crisis it seeks to confront.
I’ve been told to pursue a more conventional path and return to this work later—we do not have that luxury. The crisis is not coming—it is here. We are living through a rhetorical collapse where persuasion has been replaced with polarization, where empathy yields to arbitrariness, justice to barbarism, and deliberation to decrees. It is a pattern familiar from Weimar to Warsaw, where pluralism eroded not through revolution, but through law, and the sovereign will hardened into a rule without voice.
But I do not approach this as an abstract concern:
I approach it:
– as a Jew whose ancestors crossed oceans to escape blood libels and pogroms;
– as a disabled American in a world that privileges convenience; and
– as a veteran whose oath to defend the Constitution did not expire with discharge.
I carry identities that history has struggled to make room for—and it was democracy, imperfect and unfinished, that offered us that room.
We Americans are, in a sense, the bastard children of foreign lands—drawn here not by conquest but by aspiration. We were summoned by the Mother of Exiles, her torch raised not to burn but to guide—not to purify the nation’s blood, but to illuminate a path for its adopted children.
And now, as liberty flickers, we face the cold wind of forgetting—forgetting what it means to belong to a democracy where difference is not erased but made meaningful.
If Lady Liberty stands as a monument to the freedom to choose one’s own path, then let us recognize her counterpart: a Regent of Responsibility—not cast in bronze, but forged in the commitments we make to one another. Responsibility to defend, not dominate; to build, not simply critique; to ensure that the institutions protecting pluralism are not merely symbolic, but adaptive.
I’m asking you to help build what does not yet exist: a framework for studying and countering the rhetorical mechanics of democratic collapse—empirical, pluralistic, and urgent. Because if democracy is to endure, it must become again a matter of conscious choice: a system shaped by action, not inherited by inertia. And its worth must be measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it dares to include.
Open Philanthropy, this one's for you, boo! For real though, you're going to want to see how this maths. ;)
