About Hypertext
Hypertext is a journal produced by the Niskanen Center, an organization that Time magazine has dubbed “the most interesting think tank in American politics.” In these pages, we debate how to best renew America’s political, economic, social, and cultural institutions.
If the United States is to remain a beacon for liberal-democratic principles, we must rebuild the frayed links of our society. Americans need fresh ways to gather, make collective choices, chase opportunity, and get things done – in other words, institutions that clear the kindling for demagogy and plant a new democratic faith.
This work is inescapably political, but it cannot succeed unless it breaks with the worn ideological categories of yesteryear, which are cracking before our eyes. Hypertext is a forum for writers and readers who want to help rebuild the nation by fashioning new worldviews from old insights and sparking the productive debates of tomorrow.
Ted Nelson, the information-technology pioneer who coined the term “hypertext,” wrote that he intended “hyper” to be “used in the mathematical sense of extension and generality…rather than the medical sense of ‘excessive.’” The internet was supposed to widen our perspective, not narrow it; to bring us together around new ideas, not drive us deeper into our loneliness, bias, and suspicions. Our aim is nothing less than to reclaim the original promise of “hypertext”—and of the internet age itself.
Read on to learn more.
Eight years ago, during Donald Trump’s first term, the Niskanen Center published “The center can hold: Public policy for an age of extremes.” The report traced Trump’s rise to a deep erosion of trust in America’s political and economic institutions. Those institutions were failing to meet the new problems of the 21st century–and we were paying for it with a political crack-up.
The report called for a clean break from worn-out ideological orthodoxies combined with a change in spirit: Constant vigilance to the pathologies of both markets and government, and especially the capture of government by economic interests; a recognition that free markets and welfare states reinforce one another; and a temperament of “bold moderation” that treats politics as the art of balancing legitimate, competing goals.
Since the paper’s publication, public confidence has frayed even further. But we still believe there is a critical mass of Americans out there–likely a majority–who believe in the ideas we laid out. The difficulty lies in making that unifying spirit stick – to embed it in the institutions that shape our common life. Hypertext exists to imagine, debate, and develop blueprints for that work.
In a modern, complex society, self-government only works when people are organized to solve the problems they actually face. The ski patrol can’t help you in a hurricane.
High-level agreement on a principle like free speech or property rights is the vital starting point. But the principle isn’t worth much until we nail down where it applies and how and when to protect it. We put a lot of those agreements into writing, but there is always a gap between rules and reality–and reality changes fast. That means our social compact must live in trust. It only works if we believe the words we put on paper mean roughly the same to us all, and that the people empowered to act on those words will be faithful to that common meaning. This is what institutions do. In a free society, they combine rules, meaning, and trust to order society, backstopped by coercion as a last resort.
The social compact only works if we believe the words we put on paper mean roughly the same to us all, and that the people empowered to act on those words will be faithful to that meaning. This is what institutions do.
But many of America’s institutions are flailing amid the vast economic, technological, and social changes of the 21st century. They run on rules, but they have lost the common meaning. Or they operate on common meanings, but have lost the broader public trust that should be the source of their power. Either way, the institutions no longer produce the outcomes they were designed to achieve and that people expect them to deliver. The resulting erosion in legitimacy has been relentless: Business, churches, the media, schools have all declined in the public’s esteem. And no institution has seen trust crater so much as our government.
American liberal democracy itself is now under challenge from an authoritarian movement that challenges bedrock principles: the sanctity of elections, the freedom to speak without fear, the rule of law. Defending democracy requires that we stand behind our institutions when they affirm these principles–but also that we recognize their flaws and work urgently to improve them.
The anger of the past decade springs from real failures. The pillars of middle-class life—housing, healthcare, education, and childcare—have grown less affordable. Government has become too paralyzed, and polarized, to fulfill basic responsibilities like securing borders or collecting delinquent taxes. And most profoundly, the exhausted majority of Americans feel alienated from a politics that is too hostile or simply too complex to navigate.
Too few people can recognize this sweeping sense of failure while also recognizing the futility of tearing our institutions down without a plan. At Hypertext, we aim to host the thinkers who instead recognize the imperative of institutional renewal, exploring concepts such as:
Abundance: For too long, a web of regressive policies and procedural hurdles has stalled social mobility, made life unaffordable, and made it impossible to build infrastructure. The abundance agenda forces us to reckon with the ways in which we have choked off prosperity to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
Political reform: Both our representative institutions and the bureaucracies charged with executing their decisions have broken down. We explore how to organize citizens, voters, and legislators more effectively, and how to ensure the state has the capacity to fulfill its commitments.
Liberalism and the open society: We remain committed to the ideals of liberalism: openness, pluralism, and individual rights. But in a world that is rapidly changing, we must ask how the liberal faith can be renewed and instilled in future generations.
Elite failure: A healthy democracy depends on leaders who truly understand the nation’s needs and values—and act on that insight. When elites lose touch, institutions falter. We examine the causes and consequences of elite failure, and how we can fix it.
We take heart from American history. No sooner had the Constitution been signed than its Founders devolved into vicious partisan warfare. They had to renegotiate the meaning of the words they had just signed amid deep mistrust—and they did it. The Jacksonians transformed the elite politics of the earlier generation into a mass politics that paved the way to universal suffrage. The evil of slavery gave rise to a Civil War and constitutional change that amounted to a “Second Founding.” The divisions of the Gilded Age gave way to a Progressive era that created new ways of doing democracy. The Depression brought about the New Deal burst of institutional creation. The Civil Rights Movement redeemed the principles of the Second Founding with new laws, new norms, and a transformed culture.
At every crisis point, American democracy has reinvented itself. Now, in the fourth decade of the internet age, it is time to discard the hacks, kludges, and patches that have kept us limping along—and design the institutions that can deliver the future we want.
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