Broken Guardrails

The system did not break. That is the first thing to understand, and the hardest.

For sixty years, presidents of both parties abused the Justice Department. Members of Congress traded stocks on information the public never had. The presidency was monetized. The courts were captured. The civil service was politicized. And everyone involved maintained the performance of legitimacy - the shared agreement to keep up appearances - because the concealment was the guardrail.

Then the concealment ended.

Broken Guardrails is not a partisan book. It does not argue that one party is responsible for what has happened to American democracy. It argues something harder to accept: that both parties built the conditions that made this moment possible, decision by decision, administration by administration, across six decades of people telling themselves their cause was worth the precedent they were setting.

This is the book that assembles the picture no single institution had reason to assemble - and proposes the structural reforms that could finally fix it.

A republic, if you can keep it.