The Democracy Works podcast hosted some incredible guests on the show in 2022. In the final episode of the year, the team looks back at what they learned from their guests.
Listen here: https://open.spotify.com
A person holds signs during a nationwide protest against AI data center expansion outside Peace Hall in New Port Richey, Florida on July 18, 2026.
Don’t look now, but we seem to have a moral panic on our hands.
The term moral panic, at least as a social science concept, is relatively modern. It was coined by Stanley Cohen in the 1972 book “Folk Devils and Moral Panics.” Moral panics emerge when large numbers of people start to freak out about something that doesn’t warrant the freak out.
When I was kid, there was a moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons, the role playing game. It was sparked by the tragic suicide of a gamer and quickly led to various Christian groups insisting, in the words of one Georgia pastor, that "the game is an occult tool that opens up young people to influence or possession by demons."
Moral panics are seductive to journalists. CBS News’ “60 Minutes” host Ed Bradley interviewed Gary Gygax, the creator of the game, in 1985, asking “If you found 12 kids in murder suicide with one connecting factor in each of them, wouldn’t you question it?”
Gygax responded, “I would certainly do it in a scientific manner, and this is as unscientific as you can get. It’s nothing but a witch hunt!”
Gygax was right, but it took a while for people to realize it.
History is full of similar episodes. Some were entirely silly — like the 1950s hysteria about comic books corrupting the youth. But often they take real concerns and legitimate issues and turbocharge them. The child-abduction panic of the late 1970s and early 1980s was sparked by some actual, horrific child abductions. The understandable fear among parents led to a kind of mass hysteria.
Moral panics form a bit like “perfect storms” with just the right conditions. But they differ in three ways. First, storms are easy to predict. Second, when you’re in a deluge, no one disputes that you’re in one. But when you’re in a moral panic, the people panicking can’t recognize it until it’s over — sort of like when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the other week “Woke 1 was crazy.” She didn’t think so when she was fomenting Woke 1.
Which brings us to the third difference: Humans don’t know how to create hurricanes, but they do know how to create moral panics.
Consider the freakout over AI data centers, which are proliferating across the country. A recent poll found that more people would rather have a nuclear power plant or steel factory in their community than a data center. That’s bonkers.
Panic-peddlers are pushing even crazier stuff. Steve Bannon’s “War Room” is describing AI data centers as “weapons labs” to be used on Americans. His “tech correspondent” claims that data centers are like the embryonic “neurons of the Antichrist, that’s what we’re witnessing. The false messiah.” A Kentucky farmer who turned down a $26 million dollar offer for her property explained to CNN that part of her reasoning is that the vibrations from data centers“vibrate at a low frequency that can bring up cortisol levels.”
We shouldn’t rule out the possibility that this moral panic isn’t entirely homegrown. Fracking induced a similar freakout 15 years ago, and foreign governments played a role in fomenting it, hoping a moral panic would block the practice the way a similar one killed the nuclear industry for a generation. It would not shock me if we’re seeing something similar today.
Not all concerns about data centers are so crazy or even unreasonable. They do use a lot of water, though not nearly as much as some claim. They can cause electricity rates to go up. They’re ugly. And, if you’re freaking out about what AI will do to your job or to American society, taking it out on data centers makes a certain amount of sense.
Politicians, as a class, tend to indulge moral panics. Which is why it’s no surprise that Republicans and Democrats alike are racing to get on the “right” side of the issue.
Consider Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, up for reelection this year. Texas has prided itself in being the most business-friendly environment possible, enticing Big Tech to flee California for the accommodating Lone Star State. Just last November, Abbot boasted that a $40 billion dollar investment by Google proved that “Texas is the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy.”
Now, Abbott is throwing Google and Big Tech under the bus. By failing to win over local communities, he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl, “ They basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them.” He added, “That’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”
AI is coming. The only question is whether America should take the lead or let China. If your answer is “America,” then data centers are the price. If your answer is “China” then by all means keep freaking out.
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
Black wealth is rising but the racial wealth gap is widening. From Douglass to Mays to today, the freedom struggle's unfinished business is ownership.
From Emmaus, Pennsylvania and Staten Island to Veterans of Foreign Wars posts in Kansas, Tennessee, N. Carolina and more, as well as the Ohio State Fair's butter cow theme (and deviled egg recipes), the celebration of America 250 continues throughout the rest of the sesquicentennial year.
Added to the recent Sail250 tall ship event culminating in Boston’s harbor attended by millions was part of the country’s s 1776 official birthdate of independence, but the persistent calls for Black freedom of the last two centuries are still ignored.
Two men, a century apart, stood before audiences and did the same audacious thing: they read the historic words aloud. In Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass took the founding scripture of the republic and turned it into an indictment: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”
In 1967, at Morehouse College’s centennial commencement, President Benjamin E. Mays opened not with celebration but with a catalog of slander — Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun, Louis Agassiz and Henry Grady — the learned apparatus that had declared the newly emancipated “a little less than human.”
Strip away the century between them and both men make one demand: refuse the status the country assigns you. “A man does not have to accept the view,” Mays told the Morehouse men, “that because he is a Negro, certain things were not meant for him.”
That is the whole Black freedom tradition in a single breath.
But Mays did something Douglass could not yet do — he predicted the current era. Discrimination in the future, he warned, “will not be administered by poor whites and the people who believe in segregation but by the ‘liberals’ who believe in a desegregated society but not an integrated society.”
Mays said they would “wine and dine with us in the swankiest hotels, work with us, and still discriminate against us when it comes to money and power.” He named the practice: our institutions are “by design kept on short grass.”
You only need to look at the ground beneath us.
The National Urban League titled its 2025 State of Black America report a “State of Emergency.” That emergency continues in President Donald Trump’s recent false screed in the National Address propagating election lies as the Voting Rights Act erases access; affirmative action is eliminated; and the machinery of fair treatment in schools, businesses, institutions and organizations is switched off.
The deepest number is a paradox: Black wealth is rising while the racial wealth gap widens. Black families’ median net worth jumped nearly 58 percent from 2019 to 2022, yet the dollar gap grew past $240,000 — because a small share of a large base compounds faster than a large share of a small one.
Black households hold about 13 cents for every white dollar at the median. That is Mays’s short grass rendered as arithmetic, and Douglass’s promissory note is still marked as insufficient funds.
The Black freedom struggle always carried an economic-justice wing, and it was the engine room, not the fringe. A. Philip Randolph was a socialist. Bayard Rustin, who architected the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was a democratic socialist.
And Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — Mays’ own student — was murdered in Memphis in 1968 where he was launching a Poor People’s Campaign with sanitation workers that fused race and class. “What good is the right to sit at a lunch counter,” King asked, “if you cannot afford a hamburger?”
Out of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference where I served as Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer, came Operation Breadbasket, then PUSH, then Jesse Jackson, Sr.’s Rainbow Coalition — his insistence in 1984 and 1988 that a Black preacher could assemble a multiracial, working-class majority around economic justice.
The late Jackson drew that blueprint; the new movement inherits it whether it knows the names or not. But an honest elder audits the ledger: the Rainbow moved the platform and never captured enough machinery to convert votes into durable Black wealth.
Those views deserve respect, not ridicule. They represent the voice of a people who have buried too many children waiting for beautiful theories to pay out. Pragmatism is not timidity; it is scar tissue.
Along with Jackson, Douglass and Mays were not only prophets — they were builders, editors, fundraisers, and institution-makers who held the prophet’s fire and the steward’s ledger in the same two hands. They displayed radical ends with disciplined means.
Which calls up the hardest question: in a technologically disruptive, media-savvy age, how do Black folks survive?
The threat is concrete — Black workers are far likelier to hold the jobs automation eats first, in customer support, office work, food service, and production, while too thin a pipeline runs into the fields the new economy rewards.
Survival is the short-grass mind. The word this moment demands is sovereignty — moving from labor to ownership of equity, intellectual property, and capital. Moving from being the audience on platforms to owning the platforms and the story that runs on them.
The entrepreneurial signal is already there: Black-owned firms grew about 57 percent from 2017 to 2022. But they remain roughly three percent of American companies and one percent of revenue.
Formation is not the bottleneck; capital, contracts, and scale are. The fight Mays named — equal consideration for the tax and philanthropic dollar — is today the fight for venture capital, credit, and procurement. Politics that does not move capital toward ownership is decorative.
The through-line from Douglass to now is simple: the freedom this country grants on paper, it withholds in capital. Every generation’s task is to convert the paper into property and the property into power.
This generation’s task is to make certain that when the AI economy is finished being built, Black entrepreneurs are counted among its owners — and not merely among its displaced. Take us off the short grass, and we will show you what we grow.
Dr. Lamell J. McMorris is the founder of Phase 2 Consulting, and Greenlining Realty USA; serves as Senior Vice Chair of the National Urban League Board of Trustees and is author of The Power to Persist. He is the former Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
American businessman and politician Ross Perot, Annapolis, Maryland, 1992.
On February 20, 1992, Texas businessman Ross Perot appeared on Larry King Live and set in motion a significant challenge to the two-party status quo. I’m not asking to be drafted. But if the people want to register me in all 50 states, I’ll promise you this: between now and the conventions we’ll get both parties’ heads straight.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans responded. Volunteers put him on the ballot. By June he was leading in the polls. Even after dropping out of the race for a month (someone should write a book about why he did that), he received 20,000,000 votes.
The Perot movement shook up American politics. The major parties reacted.
First, they developed competing strategies to get voters back in line. The Republicans were the clear winners in this regard. They crafted the Contract with America and, in 1994, secured their first Congressional majority in 70 years by preaching balanced budgets (delivered) and term limits (lost in the mail). The Democrats floundered. They preached campaign finance reform and practiced triangulation, both of which failed to capture the spirit of radical change that Perot unleashed. The crime bill locked up hundreds of thousands of people of color in the name of public safety, and campaign finance reform unintentionally unleashed a geyser of cash into the system.
They also advanced a cooperative strategy to ensure there could never be another Perot. The rules, norms, and culture of politics (ballot access, sore loser laws, fusion, media coverage, debates, the FEC and more) were tweaked to diminish the likelihood of an independent insurgency ever again capturing the American people’s imagination.
Independents fought back. Many of us attempted to convert Perot’s candidacy into a durable third force, the Reform Party. We fought hard and worked hard, but we ultimately failed, not because there wasn’t interest, but because we could not figure out how to build an anti-party party while under constant attack from both major parties.
Perot never got the parties’ heads straight. We were not able to build a third-party alternative.
But independents are not averse to failure! We’ve gotten back on the horse and are driving new candidacies, new reforms, and new conversations to inspire Americans to take our country back from power-crazed partisans. In the 1990s we failed to create a new political party. In 2026, we are breaking new ground.
Here’s what I’m seeing:
1. Independent candidacies are surging. Even the New York Times has to admit something is brewing, although they have the nerve to write about it as if it is a Democratic Party strategy! Thousands of people are running for local, state, and federal offices as independents. Joe and Heather Manchin partnered with Adam Brandon to form the Independent Leadership Council and are working to ensure the American people have the opportunity to send 3-5 independents to Congress -- independents who won't caucus with either party once elected. Independent Veterans of America, the Forward Party, the Good Party, United Independents, Independent Voice, the Independent Voter Project, and many others are inspiring and supporting insurgent independents from Maine to Washington. When I first got involved in independent politics in the late 1980s, independent candidacies tended to be single-issue crusades to make a point, not change the game. That has evolved dramatically. Find the independent candidates running in your state. Chances are they are running to save our country from a failing two-party system, not to champion a pet issue.
2. Independent voters are surging. 10,000 Americans change their voter registration status from D or R to I every week. CNN puts independents at 48% of the electorate. Latino independent turnout in California primaries has surged 40% since 2022, three times the overall turnout growth. New Mexico independents won the right to vote in primaries in 2024, and 38,000 of them voted in the 2026 contests despite confusing information from county boards of elections. Independent voters in NYC flooded charter commission hearings with a simple message - I can’t vote! - and made primary reform the most talked-about issue of 2025. In states where they cannot fully participate, independents are going to court, putting measures on the ballot, and/or pressuring legislators to fix the situation. In states where they can vote, independents are participating in higher numbers.
In 2026, Ross Perot 2.0 is shaping up - without a Ross Perot. A combination of organized efforts and organic developments. Independent candidacies and open primaries. A movement built around the core American principles of fairness and competition. Open Primaries let all voters vote in every election for whomever they want. Independent candidates expose the dismal record of the bipartisan cartel and create new governing possibilities. Some campaigns are well funded and highly strategic. Others are micro-funded grassroots responses to on-the-ground partisan dysfunction. It’s a movement. And we are stronger than before.
Make no mistake, the parties are paying close attention. They are not stupid. They know the American people are fed up with gerrymandering, incompetence, self-enrichment, and blame-the-other-side opportunism while our position in the world deteriorates.
In the 1990’s, they were able to put the independent genie back in the partisan bottle. But Perot 2.0 (Perot-without-a-Perot) is stronger, more diverse, more flexible, and more appealing.
Keep your eye on the independents.
John Opdycke is the president of Open Primaries, a national election reform organization.
The Constitution didn't create American prosperity — geography, immigration, and historical luck did. Here's why that matters for reform debates.
Americans are taught a reassuring story about their country’s success. The United States became prosperous, powerful, and free because the framers wrote an exceptional Constitution. The miracle of Philadelphia produced the miracle of America.
The story appears in classrooms, campaign speeches, judicial opinions, and serious scholarly works. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson have argued that institutions securing property and constraining expropriation help separate rich nations from poor ones. But the popular American version takes that insight and turns it into something much stronger – and misguided: that our prosperity flowed from our particular constitutional design, and that altering it would put the wealth at risk.
And it is that mistake that matters, because the belief that the Constitution produced American economic prosperity makes any serious proposal for constitutional reform appear reckless.
But the United States did not become rich primarily, or even largely, because of the Constitution’s particular design. It became rich because it occupied an extraordinarily favorable continent, possessed vast natural resources, attracted millions of immigrants, developed an enormous internal market, protected commerce through ordinary law, and benefited repeatedly from historical fortune.
Prosperity did not flow from constitutional perfection or even its particular design – just the opposite. Prosperity has given the Constitution a legitimacy it does not deserve.
Begin with geography. The United States is protected by two oceans and bordered by comparatively weak and friendly neighbors. Historian C. Vann Woodward described this advantage as “free security.” Unlike the major powers of Europe, the United States did not spend centuries defending vulnerable borders against large neighboring armies. As a result, it devoted far more of its resources to farms, railroads, factories, universities, and cities.
The continental interior was equally consequential. The Mississippi River system provided some of the world’s richest agricultural land and a vast natural transportation network. The Great Lakes industrial region had access to enormous deposits of iron ore and coal. Texas and the plains held vast reserves of oil and gas. These were geographic and geological gifts, not constitutional achievements.
Then there was the scale of the country. As transportation improved, the United States developed an enormous integrated domestic market. Manufacturers could produce goods for consumers across a continent. Farmers could sell crops to growing cities. Workers and capital could move across state lines. Businesses could expand without confronting a new language, currency, customs regime, or national government every few hundred miles.
And finally there was the enormous benefit of immigration. Roughly 20 million immigrants arrived between 1870 and 1920, supplying labor, entrepreneurial energy, technical knowledge, and population growth precisely when the country was industrializing. Later generations continued to start companies, staff universities, develop technologies, and expand the workforce.
A truthful account must also acknowledge what else built the wealth. Enormous American fortunes rested on enslaved labor, the seizure of Indigenous land, and racial subordination enforced by law. During much of the period in which the United States became an economic giant, it was not functioning as an inclusive constitutional democracy. Women could not vote. Black Americans were subjected to slavery and then Jim Crow. Asian immigration was restricted by statute.
Here the Constitution was not a bystander. As ratified, it counted three-fifths of the enslaved population when allocating congressional representation, increasing the political power of slave states. It required the return of people who escaped slavery and prevented Congress from ending the international slave trade before 1808. If we want to credit the original Constitution with a direct contribution to early American wealth, its abhorrent and immoral protection of slavery is the clearest one available.
Historical fortune played a central role as well. By 1890, the United States had become the world’s leading industrial power. Two world wars then devastated its principal competitors while leaving the American homeland and industrial base intact. After 1945, the United States emerged with unmatched manufacturing capacity and enormous influence over the institutions of the new international economic order. That outcome was not written in Philadelphia.
Of course, favorable geography and abundant resources have not made every well-endowed country prosperous. Take Argentina as an example. It possessed fertile farmland, extensive natural resources, and a period of mass European immigration. At the beginning of the twentieth century, its per-capita income ranked among the highest in the world. It then spent much of the century falling behind countries it once rivaled.
And all this occurred even while its constitution of 1853 borrowed heavily from the American model, adopting federalism, a three-branch national government, a bicameral legislature, and presidential government. Juan Bautista Alberdi, whose work strongly influenced the Argentine charter, believed that constitutional liberty, immigration, foreign investment, and protection for property and commerce could help unlock Argentina’s prosperity.
Argentina initially prospered and then diverged. Historians and economists still debate why, and the range of explanations — weak political institutions, eroded checks and balances, unstable and inward-looking economic policy, insufficient investment in human and physical capital, adverse international shocks — cautions against reducing its experience to a single cause. But the comparison helps establish a key point: geography and resources alone are not enough. Neither is borrowing the machinery of the American Constitution.
Lasting prosperity requires stable institutions, predictable rules, investment in people, openness to innovation and exchange, and protection against arbitrary government action. None of those are a result of the Electoral College, equal representation of states in the Senate, life tenure for federal judges, an amendment process requiring approval from three-quarters of the states, or most of its other provisions.
Consider what laws actually govern and facilitate American commerce: state rules of property, contracts, corporate governance, secured transactions, and commercial dealing and federal law governing securities, banking, and a national market. None of which are enshrined in the Constitution nor depend on preserving the Constitution’s particular electoral, legislative, judicial, or amendment structures.
Comparison confirms the point. Other developed democracies – including Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries – all protect property, enforce contracts, and constrain arbitrary government power under constitutions very different from our own. They have different electoral systems, legislative structures, judicial arrangements, and amendment procedures. Their prosperity has not depended on adopting the American constitutional model.
Nor has American prosperity depended on preserving the original constitutional settlement. The country’s economic rise survived a Civil War, the abolition of slavery, the Reconstruction Amendments, the creation of a national administrative state, the New Deal’s transformation of federal authority, the growth of modern civil rights, and repeated reinterpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court. That history should change what we believe constitutional reform would risk. The economic case for constitutional stasis is not really a case for the Constitution’s existing design. It is a case for the rule of law, secure property, enforceable contracts, predictable government, and an integrated continental market. Any serious reform proposal must preserve those things. None requires preserving every compromise reached in 1787 or every feature of the constitutional structure that has grown around it.
I have argued elsewhere for a reordering of the United States into an American Union that would allow two sovereign democratic republics to adopt modern constitutions while retaining a common defense, a single currency, free movement of people, and an integrated internal market. Whatever one thinks of that proposal — or of other approaches to constitutional reform — it should be judged on its political, legal, and practical merits, not rejected on the mistaken assumption that altering the framers’ design would destroy the foundations of American prosperity.
Fear of economic disruption should not place the Constitution beyond reconsideration. America’s prosperity rests on foundations far broader and more durable than one largely outdated governing document.
The Constitution certainly did not make America rich — and fear of losing a prosperity it did not create should not prevent us from asking whether it is time for an update.
Jordan Karp is a lawyer and writer based in New York with a keen interest in American political culture, institutional reform, and civic life.
