Toward a Fourth American Founding
An Evolving Framework to Shape a New Era
Backdrop
Every age of American renewal has started with a small group trying to think beyond the next election, the next news cycle, or the next crisis. They set out to create something more enduring: the conditions for a new chapter in the nation.
This outline is one contribution toward such an effort. It’s not a finished plan, and it’s certainly not a proclamation from on high. It’s a piece of scaffolding: clarifying the stakes, defining the terrain, and organizing the task required to begin anew.
Fourth Founding Project
The Fourth Founding Project is a minimum 15-year initiative to shape the next American era. On the Brink is the group behind it, a small team of collaborators, whose role is catalytic rather than central: seeding ideas and strategies, developing structure, and aligning efforts that will ultimately grow far beyond their involvement.
The project is centered around four cornerstones:
American Universalism: The philosophical, moral, and historical foundation for everything that follows. American Universalism holds that the promise of the founding — that we are all created equal, that freedom is indivisible, that self-government is a shared birthright — has never been fully redeemed. So many great advances in U.S. history have been an act of universalism: expanding the circle, deepening the covenant, and insisting the promise applies to everyone.
The Unfinished Work: The vision and generational endeavor to once again reconstruct the republic, an undertaking akin to the prior three foundings. At Gettysburg, Lincoln called on the living to dedicate themselves to the “unfinished work” of those who gave their lives for union and equality. Each refounding since has furthered that cause, and left it incomplete. The phrase names both our inheritance and our obligation. Organized around four domains and their reconstructive missions, this cornerstone is the agenda for a new founding.
Toward Union: The blueprint, alignment, and ecosystem-building required to assemble a governing trifecta by 2028, a prerequisite for this effort. The talent, energy and ideas exist, yet remain scattered across thousands of siloed projects and ambitions. Toward Union is about moving as one: building a united front across a broad coalition of independents and the fractured left, developing the countervailing power to match what the right has built over fifty years, forging durable majorities that can survive beyond a single election, and governing with enough discipline and vision to actually deliver, so when power is won, it lasts.
Before Superintelligence: The other three cornerstones name what we believe, what we must build, and how we move. This one names the ticking clock. AI is accelerating faster than our institutions can comprehend, let alone govern. The timeline to artificial superintelligence is likely shorter than most of the political world wants to admit. The decisions made in this window — who controls what gets built, in whose interest, and whether democratic societies can develop the capacity to govern it before the window closes — will determine the shape of everything that follows. Some thresholds have no return. This is one of them.
American Universalism
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” —Paine, Common Sense (1776)
At the heart of the American story resides the question that has been asked and answered, extended or betrayed, by every generation since 1776:
Are we truly equal, endowed with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
The Declaration of Independence said yes, and that yes was revolutionary. Into a world that had only ever known monarchy, hereditary privilege, and the immiseration of the many, America’s founding document introduced a radical premise: all men are created equal, their rights rooted in their humanity rather than granted by kings, their rulers answerable to them rather than to God. These were dangerous ideas; a direct repudiation of every existing order, and the men who wrote them knew it.
The words quickly outran those men. Jefferson and company meant propertied white men, their new Declaration born from a world of slavery, exclusion, and subjugation, where the gap between promise and reality became readily apparent from the start.
But the promise itself was born. It carried a logic that refused to be contained — of natural rights, of universal equality, of human dignity that admits no permanent exceptions. That logic has been the contested ground of American life for 250 years.
American universalism is the tradition of those who take the promise seriously.
It holds that equality is the foundation: every person has inherent worth and dignity, from equality flows the universal right to be free, and freedom without its material conditions is a lie. Self-government in America requires a floor of economic security beneath all of our citizens, and a ceiling above which no power may rise unchecked.
In every era, the most consequential Americans have been the ones who held the nation to its own stated maxim; who insisted, against vast resistance, that the circle continue widening. They were all American universalists before the term ever existed.
And every time that commitment has been meaningfully extended — to freed slaves, to women, to workers, to the unpropertied, to the excluded — concentrated power has fought back, hard. The same shit song has been heard across time: economic power capturing political institutions; political institutions entrenching economic power.
What makes this moment rare is the convergence. The rising fusion of autocratic and oligarchic ambitions has rarely been more coordinated, or brazen. At the same time, AI could enable the further consolidation of power and wealth in a way that makes the Industrial Revolution sound quite pleasant. What happens over the next decade will decide whether the charge of “free and equal” has any place in the world that follows.
The task ahead is a future worthy of countless past sacrifices. A civic futurism rooted in the promise — warm with belonging, serious about building, genuinely for all. This project aims to help ignite that culture, that identity, that sense of shared mission.
We must make the universalist project feel like what it has always been at its best: the most ambitious, most human, most American thing any of us could give our lives to.
The Unfinished Work
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” —Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863)
On January 20th, 1961, John F. Kennedy stood in the cold at his inauguration, and delivered one of the most celebrated summons in the history of the United States:
Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.
A stirring line, still to this day. And yet, something is off about it. Something that, when you sit with it, reveals the flaw at the center of American political culture.
It asks citizens to put their country first, but says nothing about what that country owes its citizens. It invokes duty without establishing the basis for it. It calls for sacrifice without naming the covenant that makes that sacrifice worth making.
A bargain, a contract, has two sides. JFK invoked only one-half.
FDR understood what America had been missing: “True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” The obligation of government goes beyond protecting rights; it is to secure the conditions that make rights real.
In the U.S., “independence” usually means going it alone — rugged individualism, no one to lean on, and no damn handouts. The Nordic countries flip that view entirely. In the post-WWII era, they have achieved the highest levels of individual freedom, economic security, and social trust by knowing what real independence requires.
It means having the structural foundation — excellent healthcare, childcare, housing, education, and dignified retirement — that enables you to stand on your own. To take risks. To form real bonds, bonds of choice rather than necessity. To develop your gifts and contribute them freely, rather than surrendering your choices for mere survival.
The Nordics grasped what the wealthy and powerful spent two centuries obscuring in America: independence and interdependence are the same freedom seen from different directions. The floor beneath individual liberty is always collective.
The American universalist tradition points toward this understanding.
Paine wanted a guaranteed social inheritance so no one would enter life destitute. Douglass argued that political freedom without economic equality is a farce. Lincoln read the Declaration as a promise the living were bound to extend. Stanton built the Declaration of Sentiments on the Declaration of Independence’s own structure; same form, unfinished business. FDR’s Second Bill of Rights was an economic declaration of interdependence that America never enacted. King’s Poor People’s Campaign was a multiracial declaration of interdependence, interrupted by tragedy in Memphis in ‘68.
The Fourth Founding Declaration is our call to complete their unfinished work.
It is the other side of 1776’s coin. Where the original Declaration said that we are free from an unjust external power, this compact proposes what freedom requires to be materially real. It corrects JFK’s incomplete maxim with a complete one:
Ask both what our country owes us — and what we owe each other.
That is the covenant, the essence behind Lincoln’s of, by, and for. Two obligations, two sides of the promise; the contract the powerful have denied for over two centuries.
What our country owes us:
Economic Security → An Economic Bill of Rights: Make economic dignity a birthright, realizing the unfinished dream of FDR and MLK by grounding our economy in rights and democracy — guaranteeing every citizen the security, power, and independence to live with real agency in an accelerating age of automation.
National Development → A Marshall Plan for America: Reclaim our tradition of building, recognizing that a nation must make its own means of living, instead of leaving it to markets. After decades of neglect, a modern Reconstruction Finance Corporation will drive a national strategy to renew every district, expand public competition, and finally secure the material foundations for meaningful freedom.
What we owe each other:
Popular Sovereignty → A True Democratic Republic: Rebuild self-government so laws reflect the will of workers, not billionaires. End gerrymandering and voter suppression, root out systemic corruption, fix a rigged tax code, break money’s grip on elections, and reclaim captured institutions, from Congress to SCOTUS.
Civic Devotion → A New Birth of Union: Reweave the fabric of a country that has come apart, by reimagining and rebuilding the institutions, public spaces, and civic traditions that make belonging possible, and forging the sense of common purpose that a democracy this large and this diverse cannot survive without.
Each domain, each mission, holds the others up. Economic dignity requires a country that builds again. Rebuilding requires a democracy beyond purchase and corruption. True democracy requires citizens who still believe they belong to one another.
Leave one out, the rest eventually fall. Together, they can begin the world over again.
Toward Union
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union...”
—Preamble to the United States Constitution (1787)
Toward Union is the strategy behind what must get done: the conditions to be met, the infrastructure to be built, that move a Fourth Founding from vision to reality.
United Front: The American left has the numbers. What it has always lacked is the coordination. Labor, social movements, faith communities, disaffected independents, today's working class — these groups share far more than they know. What unites them is a common antagonist: the concentrated power that has upended the economy, captured the courts, and bought the political system. Building a coalition that holds together long enough to govern, and govern well enough to last, is the first condition.
Countervailing Power: From William F. Buckley Jr. to Project 2025, the right has spent fifty years creating an aligned machine for permanent power: think tanks writing laws, conservative media priming audiences, billionaires funding operations, courts locking in wins, state legislatures cementing agendas. And the American left? It has yet to build the comprehensive infrastructure for a sufficient counterforce. The Powell Memo was their corporate blueprint. A proper answer has yet to materialize.
Durable Majorities: When FDR took office in 1933, Democrats held nearly two-thirds of the Senate and almost three-quarters of the House. It is what a realigning election produces: margins large enough to deliver. In 2020, Biden won the White House and both chambers, but two senators held his majority hostage. Universal childcare, paid family leave, expanded Medicare, real housing investment — all of it was blocked or gutted beyond recognition, while the cost of living continued to rise. Countless families felt nothing change during Biden’s four years, and voted accordingly. Supermajorities must be the target: a coalition broad and deep enough to absorb any backlash, hold together across cycles, and deliver in 2029 what people can actually feel.
Democratic Delivery: Power won must be power used. FDR understood this. Obama, to his great cost, learned it too late. When democratic government delivers visibly, when people can feel the change in their lives, they vote to protect it for a generation. When it governs cautiously and invisibly, the mandate evaporates. The first thousand days of a 2029 trifecta will define whether this reconstructive project can take hold. It requires thousands of public servants ready in advance, named institutions with named authorities, and a scorecard and plan for attention that makes delivery real.
Before Superintelligence
“How did you do it? How did you evolve? How did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?” —Ellie Arroway, Contact (1997)
Before Superintelligence addresses the future, the extraordinary forces that will shape the coming decades and determine whether humanity remains in control of its own fate. We are entering a period defined by advanced AI, biotechnology, and other prospects that could either end the human story, or radically expand its possibilities.
The leading AI companies are growing systems intended to match and then surpass the full range of human cognition. Many of the people closest to the work believe they may be only a handful of years away from that aim. Once AI can improve AI, the feedback loop likely accelerates everything; credible forecasts project a century of technological progress could be compressed into a decade. Who governs AI’s development, in whose interest, and by what authority, will define the century.
Left to the current trajectory, the most consequential technology in human history will be developed by a handful of AI firms, governed by their own internal committees, racing under competitive pressures that actively punish caution. Meanwhile, the steady replacement of human labor by more efficient machine alternatives threatens to sever the link between economic participation and political power that has kept democratic societies roughly accountable to their citizens. The danger is both sudden and slow: misaligned superintelligence that escapes human control, and a gradual displacement that leaves humanity nominal rulers of systems that no longer need us.
These threats arrive at a moment when American democracy is already weakened: by captured institutions, by severe inequality, by the erosion of shared truth, and by the deliberate assault on self-government now underway in the United States and beyond.
The convergence should alarm us. The forces that have spent decades undermining democratic accountability are the very ones most likely to build AI systems that entrench their power permanently, rather than AI that serves the public interest.
The extraordinary task ahead is to carry human agency past this threshold: to secure the democratic governance of superintelligence, build post-labor economies, confront existential risks, and protect dignity and self-determination in the intelligence age.
Everything in this century will hinge on whether the societies we build can endure beyond this last horizon, the precipice of intelligence explosion, and all that it brings.
Building It
The work starts here:
The Fourth Dialogues: A coordinated series of conversations across Substack and beyond that brings together key voices to think through the next American era, and how we achieve it. Hosted across individual Substacks, but woven into one shared project, the Dialogues aim to turn separate voices into a larger whole.
Foundational Essays: Deep dives on each of the four cornerstones, the domains and missions for reconstruction, the conditions for building a counterforce, and the governance and geopolitical challenges before us with superintelligence.
Fourth Founding Declaration: A public statement of collective purpose, and an invitation to co-signers: organizers, writers, technologists, public officials, and anyone ready to commit to the work. The Declaration will launch as the project’s first major campaign, with a series of coordinated essays and a centerpiece video.
Fourth Founding Plan: The plan to create sufficient conditions for countervailing power and coordinate long-term infrastructure (people, projects, funding). This effort will build on the initial framework from “An American Popular Front.”
FourthFounding.us: A home for anyone who wants to take part in building a Fourth American Founding. It gathers the project’s core documents, ongoing dialogues, and strategic initiatives — connecting signatories, collaborators, and partners into a national community working to redeem the nation’s promise.
All of it scales toward a founding convening, a gathering of the thinkers, organizers, and leaders drawn into this generational project. The convening will launch phase two: working groups organized around each cornerstone; a backbone organization serving as the coordinating force that aligns people, projects, and funding around shared goals; and an annual conference that anchors the project for the long haul.
The Long Hope
Our hope reaches beyond any single election, organization, or manifesto. We aim to help facilitate the conditions, intellectual, institutional, cultural, and political, for achieving the generational reconstruction of the country. That means laying foundations now for coalitions and initiatives that will outlast all of us.
The stakes could hardly be higher. The window remains open…for now.
A Fourth American Founding for all is only a possibility.
It can happen, if enough of us decide it must.
Further Exploration
One of the principal sources behind this aspiration is Osita Nwanevu, author of The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding. Osita’s book and interviews (e.g., here, here, here) have opened up this discourse over the last year.
Another key source is Catalyst for American Futures, the organization behind Out of Many, One, a recent anthology that invited diverse Americans to examine their work through the lens of American Universalism. Learn more about Catalyst here.
On the topic of national development, New Consensus is developing a comprehensive playbook for WWII-scale economic mobilization — The Mission for America. In that regard, rebuilding America requires rebuilding public competition, a cause at the heart of A Fight Worth Having, a campaign to recenter public building in U.S. politics.