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confusing them with talk that sounds, well, too liberal. Sure, there are Tea Partiers who would pay attention enough to understand the subtlety of a cross-partisan movement. But there are also Tea Partiers who have two jobs, or three kids, or a hobby they love, and who are just as likely to skim an e-mail about “Reform” and get furious that someone not from their tribe gets mentioned approvingly.
    But the challenge, and the practice, that I am describing is different. Our challenge is not to build a movement that coheres around a common set of values. No one’s going to convince every conservative to become a liberal, or every liberal to become a conservative. Our challenge is to build an alliance that can agree about the need for a fundamental change in the system itself. An alliance for constitutional reform. An agreement not about which side should win in a battle between Left and Right, but about the rules that should govern that fight.
    Such a process will require, first, as Stav Shaffir said about the Israeli protests, a “first line of code”: a common plank that each side can stand upon. Together. A common recognition that the system itself is broken. And a common understanding that to fix this broken system will require not just a victory in Congress but constitutional reform as well.
    We did this at least once before. This is the story not of the Declaration of Independence and the war against Britain. It is the story of how that newly independent nation saved itself from almost certain failure. The story, that is, of the framing of our second constitution (1787) and the rejection of the first (1781).
    When people today think about that framing—if indeed they think about it at all—the image is not a celebration of diversity. Seventy-four white men, all basically upper-class, all basically elite. Sounds like a very boring party.
    But in fact there was radical disagreement among those Framers of our Constitution. There were men in that hall who believed that slavery was just, and there were men in that hall who believed that slavery was the moral abomination of the age. Yet these men, with their radically different views, were able to put aside that disagreement enough to frame a constitution that gave birth to this Republic, because they realized that unless they did, the nation would fail.
    There is no difference today between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement—or between the Left and Right in general—as profound or as important as that between the factions who fought about slavery. Nor is our challenge as profound as the one that divided them. They needed to craft a new nation. We need simply to end the corruption of an old government.
    If they could do what they did, we should be able to do this.
    We are different, we Americans. We have different values and different ideals. But take out a dollar bill and read after me: E pluribus unum : Out of the many, one. And out of our many, we need to find “one” in the sense of a common understanding that could lead us on a path to save this Republic. While we still can.

Chapter 5
     

The Problem
     
     
    We don’t have a common end. We do have a common enemy.
    There isn’t a single thing that we all want—save perhaps peace, justice, and the American way (whatever that means). But there is a single thing that is blocking the ability of all of us to get from our government what we think we are getting when we actually succeed in securing government power.
    I’ve written a book to prove that point— Republic, Lost. This isn’t that book. Instead, I will simply assert here what I try to prove there, because it turns out that most of us already believe what I show there.
    At the core of our government is a corruption. Not the corruption of criminals, violating the law by engaging in illegal bribery. There is some of that, but not much, and even if we ended all of that, we wouldn’t begin to solve the type of corruption that I’m speaking of.