Finding Coherence - Part 5

A Guide to Political Judgment in Fractured Times

Part 5: The Constitution as Framework — Our Inheritance and How We’re Breaking It

This is Part 5, the final part of “Finding Coherence: A Guide to Political Judgment in Fractured Times.”

Humans are contradictions. The same species that built Auschwitz also liberated it. The same brain that produces empathy produces tribalism. We hold universal principles and betray them. We recognize humanity in strangers and strip it from enemies. When threatened, our worse angels win.

The Constitution was designed by flawed humans who understood this about themselves. They assumed we’d fail our ideals. They knew factions would form, interests would clash, passions would override reason. So they built a machine that didn’t require angels — one that could channel human contradiction toward self-correction rather than self-destruction.

For two centuries, it mostly worked. Not because we overcame our contradictions. But, because the machine used them.

Frederick Douglass saw this most clearly. The Constitution protected slavery in practice while condemning it in principle. That wasn’t just hypocrisy. It was leverage. The document’s own words became weapons against its betrayals. Douglass held America accountable to ideals it professed but failed to honor. And slowly, bloodily, the machine corrected.

But leverage only works when enough people believe in the principles they’re failing.

Section I: The Machine

The Constitution builds a machine for one job: keeping people who hate each other from killing each other over politics.

Federalism lets different communities balance goods differently. Massachusetts chooses collective approaches. Texas chooses individual ones. Neither convinces the other. Both experiment and learn.

Separation of powers prevents any faction from capturing the whole system. You win the presidency but lose Congress. You control Congress but the courts block you. Power stays contested.

Checks and balances make rapid change difficult. This drives everyone insane. But no side rams through their perfect vision. Change requires coalitions that last.

A pressure cooker with a release valve instead of a bomb.

They didn’t design for a nation of saints. They designed for a nation of humans—capable of wisdom and cruelty, cooperation and betrayal, principle and self-interest.

The machine works when the valves work. When Congress legislates, pressure releases through negotiation. When elections resolve disputes, losers accept outcomes and fight again next time. When you can encounter the other side as human, disagreement stays disagreement instead of becoming war.

Close the valves and pressure builds.

Section II: The Douglass Insight

The Constitution as originally written protected slavery. Shut women out. Limited participation to white, male, propertied people.

These weren’t bugs. They were fundamental contradictions between what the Constitution claimed and what it created. But contradictions contain their own cure — when enough people believe in the principles being violated. Douglass saw this.

The document that protected slavery also declared universal principles. “We the People.” Not “we the white people.” “Establish Justice… secure the Blessings of Liberty.” Applying to all persons. “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process.” Person. Not citizen.

The gap between principle and practice wasn’t just hypocrisy. It was leverage. The Constitution’s own words became weapons against its original sins.

This only worked because enough people — not the slaveholders themselves, but others who shared the founding principles — could be moved by the contradiction. Slaveholders weren’t shamed into freedom. They were defeated in a bloody war. But the coalition that fought that war, the amendments that followed, the century of struggle after — all of it drew power from the gap between American principles and American practice.

And the enslaved weren’t waiting to be saved. They resisted, escaped, organized, testified, fought. Douglass himself was an escaped slave. His very presence on the abolitionist stage was the contradiction made flesh. A man of obvious intellect and dignity who the Constitution said was property. He didn’t just make arguments. He was evidence.

Hypocrisy-as-leverage doesn’t work on true believers in their own rightness. It works on the conflicted middle. But it requires someone to wield it.

History proved Douglass right. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments abolished slavery using the Constitution’s own mechanisms. The 19th Amendment extended voting to women. Brown overturned segregation. Loving struck down bans on interracial marriage. Obergefell extended marriage rights.

Not perfectly. Not fast. Not without bloodshed.

The machine corrected itself. Because the contradiction was leverage. Because enough people could still be moved. Because those with the most to lose refused to stop pushing.

Section III: The Breakdown

The constitutional framework works only when parties honor its mechanisms even when frustrated by outcomes. And when the underlying conditions it assumes actually exist.

Both are breaking down.

Federalism Can’t Function When Politics Nationalizes

Federalism assumes Congress legislates on major issues through negotiation. That state parties have genuine autonomy. That policy gets made through democratic processes, not executive orders and court rulings.

None of these hold.

Congress abdicates. Won’t legislate on abortion, guns, immigration, healthcare, climate. These issues get decided through executive orders (easily reversed) and court decisions (generating endless litigation).

National parties control state parties. Even when issues formally return to states, state parties take marching orders from national leadership. We have nationalized politics with state implementation.

Executive expands, legislative withers. Presidents govern through executive orders because Congress won’t act. Courts overturn or uphold them. The next president reverses them. Nothing stable gets built.

Abortion exemplifies this collapse. Roe was judicial, not legislative. Stayed that way for fifty years because Congress wouldn’t legislate. Dobbs overturned it judicially. Congress still won’t legislate. Even “returning it to the states” doesn’t restore federalism when state parties march to national directives.

Separation of Powers Can’t Function When One Branch Abdicates

Separation of powers assumes Congress legislates, the executive executes, and courts resolve disputes about meaning.

But Congress abandons its core function. Presidents govern through executive orders. Courts settle policy through litigation. Nothing durable gets built.

Members of both parties vote with their party, not their conscience. Not because they’re uniquely spineless. Because party leaders demand lockstep control and prioritize fundraising over governing.

Elections Become Existential

When Congress stops legislating, elections transform from policy contests into deathmatches for institutional control. Every election feels existential. Not because the other side’s policies threaten you. Because the other side owning the institutions feels permanent.

When elections can’t change policy through normal legislative means, both sides question whether the other side can legitimately win at all. We saw this in 2016, when many treated that outcome as fundamentally illegitimate rather than merely disappointing. We saw it again in 2020, with fraud claims that persisted despite investigations finding no evidence.

Both patterns damage the same foundation: acceptance of outcomes that makes democratic contestation possible.

What Actually Changed

Watch a congressional hearing. Any hearing. Members don’t ask questions to learn answers. They ask questions to produce clips. The witness is a prop. The audience is social media. The hearing ends and nothing happens. No legislation. No accountability. Just content.

Congress performs instead of governs. Deliberation becomes pointless when legislation stops being the goal.

Algorithmic amplification replaced civic discourse. Platforms optimize for outrage. You don’t encounter opposing arguments. Their worst representations bombard you. Handpicked to boil your blood. The marketplace of ideas became an attention marketplace engineered for rage.

And here’s where human nature bites. The algorithms didn’t create tribalism. They industrialized it.

Millions of years of evolution built threat-detection systems that kept our ancestors alive. Those same systems now fire at political opponents. The amygdala doesn’t distinguish between the jungle and the feed.

The last time I tried to explain the other side’s position to someone who agreed with me, they looked at me like I’d betrayed them. Not disagreed. Betrayed. That’s what the environment does. It triggers the tribal response coded in our DNA. It makes nuance feel like treason.

When constitutional mechanisms require conditions that no longer exist, both sides attacking them becomes symptom, not cause. The deeper problem is the transformation itself. Both parties contribute to it, benefit from it when in power, attack it when out. Neither seems capable of restoring the conditions the framework requires.

The release mechanisms that let Douglass’s contradiction become leverage are seizing up.

Section IV: The Question

The tools laid out in this series work. The Constitution has proven it can manage disagreement and correct wrongs.

But both assume conditions that may no longer exist.

Can these frameworks function when Congress won’t legislate, parties nationalize everything, courts make policy, and algorithms trigger our tribal instincts before reason can engage?

Think about your actual life. Where do you get authentic perspectives from the other side? Your neighborhood sorts by tribe. Dissent vanishes from your workplace. Algorithms curate what you see online. Every aspect of life splits into parallel realities.

Where do you actually encounter the other political tribe as a full human?

That question haunted me as I wrote this series. Trying to answer it forced me to confront something harder than structural breakdown: the limits of what I’d built.

Conclusion: What I Thought I Was Writing

I started this series thinking I had an answer. Tools for better judgment. Ways to think more clearly. Fix how we think about politics, fix the problem.

The complications started in the first drafts.

The Neutrality Trap

I kept finding my own politics in the text.

When I listed examples of “appropriate certainty” in Part 4, I chose climate change, vaccines, and election integrity. Someone else would list biological sex as binary, market efficiency, or border enforcement as equally settled. We both think we’re listing facts. We’re both revealing priors. The tools can’t adjudicate whose list is correct. That requires the very judgment the framework claimed to provide.

When I wrote about election legitimacy in Part 3, I treated 2020 fraud claims as definitively debunked while handling 2016 more gently. But many Democrats spent years questioning 2016’s legitimacy in ways that exceeded what evidence supported. “Not my president.” Resistance framing that treated the outcome as fundamentally illegitimate. Applying my own standard, that skepticism also lacked adequate evidence. My asymmetric treatment revealed which tribe’s excesses I notice more readily.

When I catalogued power asymmetries in Part 3, I gave more detailed treatment to economic power (workers versus corporations) than to government power or institutional capture. That’s a choice about which asymmetries feel obvious to me. A libertarian reader noticed immediately. A progressive reader probably didn’t.

When I said “find the legitimate concern underneath objectionable positions” but also “sometimes the answer is just racism,” I created a loophole that could swallow the rule. Who decides which is which? Anyone can classify opponents as bad-faith actors. The exception lets you escape the discipline whenever you want.

The framework claimed to transcend politics while requiring political judgments at every turn. That’s a contradiction. Like the Constitution that declared universal principles while protecting slavery. Like humans who hold ideals they can’t live up to.

So I edited. Made examples more balanced. Softened the language. Tried for neutrality.

That made it worse.

The writing became robotic. Dishonest. I was hiding my perspective while claiming to offer clearer thinking. You can’t teach wrestling with disagreement while pretending you have no position.

Where the Framework Breaks

When you decide what counts as “clear harm requiring immediate action,” you make a political judgment. Take Gaza. One tribe sees genocide. The other sees self-defense. I considered using a less radioactive example. I used this one because the framework only matters if it works on hard cases.

For many, there are no questions here. Their position is self-evident. Beyond the pale to challenge. Even raising questions triggers threat response. The amygdala fires. Nuance becomes betrayal. The binary hardens. You’re not asking genuine questions. You’re providing cover for evil.

For those willing to sit with complexity despite the discomfort, traps await. The situation involves questions neither binary captures. Questions about Israeli conduct: proportionality, civilian protection, laws of war. Questions about Hamas: embedding military assets in civilian areas, stated goals regarding Israel’s existence. Questions about regional actors: Iran and Qatar’s role in funding the conflict, Arab states’ choices regarding Palestinian refugees. Questions about history: decades of decisions by multiple parties that produced current conditions.

But which questions you ask reveals your priors as much as the answers you give. Lead with Israeli conduct, you’ve framed Israel as the agent requiring judgment. Lead with Hamas’s charter, you’ve framed the conflict as existential defense.

And balanced questions still assume one side is ultimately right. What if both sides have legitimate claims? What if both sides did wrong things? What if the situation is genuinely tragic rather than soluble? That sounds like both-sidesism. It might just be reality.

Which leads to the counter-trap: acknowledging complexity can become its own escape hatch. You can peel back layers forever. Call it Schrödinger’s Position: maintaining permanent uncertainty so you never have to commit to anything that could be wrong. It looks like intellectual humility. It functions as cowardice.

The framework can’t resolve this tension. It can’t tell you when to stop questioning and act. It can only make you defend your categorization — and remain open to the possibility you’re wrong.

What’s Left: Discipline

So what’s left?

Not neutrality. Not transcendence. Not a machine producing correct answers.

What’s left is discipline. Discipline for creatures who hold contradictions in their nature. Who are capable of both wisdom and cruelty, empathy and tribalism, principle and self-interest.

Distinguish types of conflicts. Not everything is a moral emergency. Getting the type wrong produces wrong responses. Treating value tensions as moral violations leads to unnecessary combat. Treating moral violations as value tensions leads to complicity.

Acknowledge trade-offs. Every choice has costs. Pointing to benefits while ignoring costs is how free trade advocates devastated communities while congratulating themselves on GDP growth. Your positions have costs too. Name them.

Test your own thinking. Can you state opposing views without making them sound stupid? What might you be missing? What evidence would change your mind? If you can’t answer these, you’re performing certainty, not thinking.

Scale certainty to reach. Speaking to friends requires minimal certainty. Broadcasting to thousands requires more. Algorithmic amplification created coercive power rivaling the state. Mobs destroy lives. State power ends them. Scale your certainty accordingly.

Defend your emergency claims. Everyone thinks their issue is the emergency justifying extraordinary measures. The framework forces you to defend that claim, not just assert it.

These disciplines have a floor. Judge actions. Call choices evil if they warrant it. But the move from “this person did evil” to “these people are less than human” can’t be crossed. Atrocities begin with that category shift. And as Baldwin saw, the damage is mutual: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for the annulment of theirs.

This is Douglass’s insight applied to enemies instead of the enslaved. See their humanity even when you oppose everything they stand for. Not because they deserve it. Because you do.

You will fail at these disciplines. I failed at them throughout this series. You’ll pick examples that reveal your priors. You’ll apply the framework more rigorously to opponents than allies. Individual application will always be flawed. We all see through lenses we can’t fully escape.

But collectively, if enough people commit to these disciplines despite knowing they’ll fail, we get better. Not perfect. Not unbiased. Better. Think of science. Individual scientists carry biases and make mistakes. But the process — peer review, replication, transparency — produces better collective understanding than any individual achieves alone. The mechanisms for political judgment are rougher — elections, courts, a free press, the slow accumulation of precedent — but the principle holds. Not through individual perfection. Through aggregation.

But the framework can’t escape the politics it claimed to help you navigate. And it can’t fix structural breakdown through individual virtue.

What I planned as the conclusion became a starting point.

The Douglass Question

Douglass faced a Constitution that protected slavery in practice while condemning it in principle. He found leverage in that contradiction. The document’s own words became weapons against its betrayals.

But that leverage only works on those who can still be shamed by hypocrisy.

Cynics can’t be mobilized. If you’ve decided that all principles are pretense, that everyone’s corrupt, that ideals are just power wearing a mask — then contradiction isn’t leverage. It’s confirmation.

The Constitution was built for a nation with enough hypocrites — enough people who believed in principles they couldn’t live up to — that the machine could eventually correct itself. The gap between principle and practice was a wound that enough people couldn’t ignore.

The question is whether enough of us remain.

When “you’re a hypocrite” stops being an accusation and becomes a shrug — when the response is “everyone’s a hypocrite, so what?”— you’ve crossed the line. I see that shrug more often now. From both sides. Though not in equal measure.

The valves are seizing. The pressure is building.

But Douglass didn’t know if the machine would correct itself. He acted anyway.

The journey continues.

Finding Coherence: A Guide to Political Judgment in Fractured Times is complete.