The fact of an insurgent President trashing liberal norms and democratic institutions with every twitch and tweet is but the most obvious symptom of a dysfunction that goes far deeper than mere politics. As fascinating as Donald J. Trump may be in a clinical sense, and as skillful as he may be in attracting attention as the omnidirectional freak show that he is, the proper focus of concerned Americans ought to be on understanding the conditions that enabled a man of his character to become President of the United States—and what we must do about them. That’s been the TAI thesis now for some time, and that focus underlies the institutional health project we are pursuing.

It’s hard to say if we, and some likeminded others, are yet getting through on this point to the strata of American democratic political culture that matter most. One problem is that the mainstream media has long since biographized itself, adopting a who’s up/who’s down approach to nearly everything, because it’s so much easier than grappling with complex issues, and because it’s better than serious journalism at capturing market share in a dumbed-down media market. As my former mentor Owen Harries used to say, in his Welsh-Aussie way, it’s “flaps and chaps” that most people like to read about—translation into American English: scandals and personalities, the wilder and more exotic, the better. By that standard, the current Administration is a media cornucopia to an extent that would have been hard even to imagine just a few years ago. It is seemingly made for, if not also partly created by, the new media environment in which we now live. (That’s why I have several times toyed with the idea of ordering my staff never to illustrate TAI essays with photographs of The Donald. One of these days I might actually do it.)

But even if we as a society could mange to take our eyes off the 24/7 freak show spinning out of control here in Washington, gaining an understanding of our predicament, and writing about it with skill and empathy, is no longer enough. Evidence that others have come to a similar conclusion abides in the stirring of social movement beneath the ether of the country’s two major, mainly brain-dead, political parties. The Modern Whig Party, founded in 2009, recently received a major membership boost thanks to a May 14 column by David Brooks, who declared: “I’m a Whig. If progressives generally believe in expanding government to enhance equality, and libertarians try to reduce government to expand freedom, Whigs seek to use limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility.” Amen to that.

The Serve America Movement (SAM) that has recently burst on the scene—and that expects a major call-out in August by a former Republican Secretary of State—is another indicator. So is the thriving Better Angels project, which hits the road in an effort to get Americans of different views talking civilly to one another again. The Aspen Institute has gotten into the mix too, soliciting proposals as to what a vibrant social movement tuned to the moment might look like.

Despite somewhat different political orientations, these and many other examples of budding social innovation are less competitive than ultimately cumulative, for they are all leading toward new and hopeful energies for reform and renewal. They are all based outside government, and need to be for a reason (see below). Some are actual third parties, others conceive of themselves as social movements; some have an explicit philosophy of government, like the Whigs, while others have more limited agendas—like SAM’s so-far basically transactional demands about fair access to the electoral system. So membership is not necessarily mutually exclusive: I can be a member of the Whig Party (I am) and can join SAM as well (I did) with no concern about any conflict—yet.

Ultimately, however, a major force for reform in American politics will need to tell a convincing story about our problems and prospects if it to gain real torque in the wide middle of the American body politic. It will have to tell that story in different ways, with different cadences, for difference constituencies in the society, because a core goal has to be the restoration of national unity, and attendant social trust, even amid the kaleidoscope of educational levels and orientations that ever define our E Pluribus Unum nation. But the story itself must have a steady and consistent core. What might its core themes come to be? Three, I think, will be central.

First, Americans will need to focus on the specter that technological innovation, unleavened by much elite concern for its social implications, has raised before our future. That specter can be evoked with a simple question: What are ordinary people supposed to do with their lives when a combination of technovelty-driven outsourcing (perhaps mostly in the past) and technovelty-driven automation (probably mostly in the future) stands to make large percentages of the workforce essentially superfluous?

There are spiritual as well as economic consequences of mass uselessness. Work provides not just a paycheck but dignity and, often enough, a significant form of community as well—which is why massive “guaranteed income” schemes that would likely turn vast masses of Americans into dazed Eloi are beside the real point, even if they were not also economically ruinous.

Of course, no one should rue the death of rote, numbing work or oppose, Luddite-like, automation in principle; as a nation with an aging demographic, we’re going to need plenty of both creative work and selected automation to achieve productivity levels that can sustain the current standard of living.¹ In that regard, too, we will need to find something useful for the growing legions of healthy and experienced post-70 year olds to do—and do it without clogging up the moving line of younger folks into responsibility and achievement.

But as a nation we seem to be suffering a pervasive failure of imagination as to how we might manage a problem that combines technological “push” with demographic “pull”—a problem that, if allowed to spiral out without control or remediation, could put our entire constitutional order at risk. It would be unfortunate if we were to come up with poor solutions to this key problem, but it would be calamitous if we were to come up with none at all. My own tastes run to turning America into the most productive, beautiful, and sustainable garden in the history of the planet. But that’s just my imagination generating a stretch goal; how about you and yours?

Second, Americans will need to discipline themselves to reverse society’s escape into “virtual” reality at the expense of engagement with the real thing. Over the past several decades, an odd confluence has come upon us. As Brink Lindsey of the Niskanen Center has helped me to understand, on the one hand, we as a civilization have gone far toward deifying nature by spiritualizing environmental concerns, giving rise to a new pantheism; but on the other and at the same time, despite a manifest “return to nature” sensibility among the more affluent and educated among us, most Americans are ever more alienated and isolated from nature thanks to the virtual-world “devices” that permeate our lives with mediated images and sounds.

Here is how Diane Francis summarizes the numbers:

That is to say, 39 percent of American millennials realize and admit that they interact more with their smartphones—and through them the internet—than with human beings. At least that percentage act similarly but are in a form of denial aided and abetted by…their smartphones.

Beyond the cognitive-neurological impact of these devices, especially on the young (and which may come to include a significant decline in rates of deep literacy, and all that that implies about the ability to think abstractly and conceptually²), the combination has all but destroyed American society’s ability to get big things done. So, anyway, Neal Stephenson has argued—and persuasively—on what he calls “innovation starvation.”

Indeed, this combination—let’s call it ecovirtualism for short—seems to be gnawing away the ability even to imagine doing big things in the real world, as exaggerations of the precautionary principle join with the hemorrhaging of our touch skills to produce successive generations of voyeur humans. I’ll never forget my father saying—I think in 1963 or 1964—upon the switching on of the first color television set to enter our humble home, “This is great; I’ll never look at reality again!” He was kidding, of course; 50-plus years on, however, the memory of his sarcastic witticism makes me cringe more than it makes me smile.

Indeed, America’s famed innovativeness now seems to be nonexistent outside of IT, an observation that excites a question: Is what we’re now best at creating a nation at its worst?—which is another way of asking, as well, whether fears about artificial intelligence may not be entirely over-hyped.

There really is a “world beyond your head,” just as Matthew Crawford says. There really is, as David Stine insists, a relationship between engaging with that world and the habits of mind that shape our sense of value. If the transitory and the apparent displace our appreciation for the enduring and the real, then we risk ultimately becoming the junk we buy. But ever more Americans seem to be having a hard time finding that world.

One peripheral but hardly inconsequential result of the widening plague of social autism mooted above can be witnessed in Santa Fe, Texas, Parkland, Florida, and elsewhere. Colin Fleming has speculated, in trying to come to terms with the shooters rather than the victims, about how

Fleming continues, again focusing on the rare extreme case of the shooter. Once inside, “that once-external reality gets worked on. Distended. It becomes compromised. Broken down.” The shooter sees not so much, or just, what he wants to see but what he has to see as a survival mechanism, because now his wiring suggests that confronting the truth out there in the real world would be too much. “People are in howling pain in this world of disconnection where everyone pretends, on social media, to be the paragon of happiness,” and the massive fiction that everyone else is angst-free becomes, for the would-be shooter, simply unbearable.

Away from extreme manifestations of ecovirtualism there are the banal ones, not as bloody but ultimately just as deadly. Is it really all that surprising that our hollow political class is fixated on appearances and images at the expense of reality and substance. That, after all, is the medium in which so many of us, often unwittingly and even addictively, now exist. It is not surprising even that the highbrow fantasies of postmodernism have managed to spread from their origins on the “progressive” Left to the flaky, fact-free hubris of the post-conservative Right, which has manufactured the boogeyman of “faked news.” So then the necessary but increasingly futile efforts to call out “faked news,” which is in turn labeled fake news, and so the demobilizing, near-infinite regress that comes with it.

Third, the indeterminate future of work and the insensate disorientation caused by alienation from the real world combine to create what we might call telos deprivation—a condition that is, among other misanthropies, taking a heavy toll on national unity.

America is at its best when it conceives and pursues some kind of pioneering project, a collective striving with a purpose. We share but marginally the sort of bloodline nationalism characteristic of other Western nations. Hence—like it or not—we have always had a smaller social idea than that of our European allies, which goes far to explain their greater affinity for social democratic welfare states. Our creedal founding as a child of the Enlightenment, too, has bequeathed a more abstract national ethos, which has meant that America’s national unity has tended to inhere as much or more in a sense of common purpose than in a “creed”: It has always been more verb than noun, so to speak. But that has made it more fragile, and so more vulnerable to disruption, too.

Now it is disrupted, for we live in a relatively rare moment in our history when we have no clear common pioneering vocation to bring us together, even as the stories we tell about ourselves have lost traction, thanks to elite embarrassment with the toil of necessary myth maintenance. Indeed, the pessimism stalking the land arises mostly from a pervasive sense of collective purposelessness. And so the nation seems to be disintegrating into identity groups defined partly by class, partly by educational levels, partly by ethno-racial criteria, and partly by ideology—all reinforced by the now-well-understood echo-chamber effects of designer media.

Worse and still but dimly recognized, our routine political dynamics now exacerbate instead of ameliorate this disintegrative tendency. Political entrepreneurs both Left and Right prey on economic insecurity focused on the dubious future of work, and seek to leverage the growing scarcity of ontological common sense to create partisan enclaves defined by contending us-versus-them atavisms that function, however inadvertently in most cases, to disorganize our stock of knowledge about public life. “We the People” are shrinking, if not disappearing.

One result is that, caught in this protracted partisan crossfire, our institutions of government have ossified. We cannot now expect social/institutional innovation from the Federal government, as we experienced in our history with a variety of infrastructure projects, the Homestead and Morrill Acts, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the GI Bill, and other examples of top-down social-trust building. Reform dynamism must therefore start from outside of government, and it must renovate government as it moves toward success.

So that is the story Americans must tell each other in the onrushing future—a story about work and dignity, about mastering technology before it masters us, and about finding new unity in a new purpose that wrestles with both, and that in turn will defrost our government from its present immobility. There is revolution in our future, and the pioneers of the next America now rising among us will be the vanguard of it. But mark well: We can read and we can write, we can speak and we can listen, but no revolution will come unless we get off our asses and do something.

Do what? Join the Whigs, join SAM, get involved with Better Angels—you have these choices and many more. They will all one day flow together into a river of reform and renewal. As for me, my imagination draws me along the lines of a lyric that rides Dm-Am-Dm-C-G-Asus2: “We are stardust, we are golden; we are billion-year old carbon; and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Thanks again, Joni.