On Sunday, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (or AfD) received 43.8% of the votes in Saxony-Anhalt, the best result of any party in the state since reunification in 1990. By contrast, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) — Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party and the state incumbent — tumbled by more than half to 17.2%. That’s an unprecedented loss of legitimacy and will further weaken Merz and his coalition.

While the anti-immigration AfD — a party labeled right-wing extremist by Germany’s domestic intelligence service — doesn’t have the necessary seats in the state legislature to govern on its own, setting up a coalition without its participation risks looking like a power grab that ignores the will of the people.

That could end up validating the AfD’s rhetoric that the mainstream is just looking out for itself, bolstering the party even more. That would undermine the Brandmauer’s stated purpose of preventing a renewed drift into authoritarianism after the Nazis and the East German police state.

So while the firewall might live on in name, it can’t continue like it did before. And that’s a good thing, if it serves as a catalyst for honest political renewal.

One Basic Question

The Brandmauer may have originated as a well-meaning lesson from Germany’s violent past, but in recent years, it gave mainstream parties — above all the CDU and the co-ruling Social Democrats — a false sense of comfort. By treating the AfD as a common enemy, there was little need to develop new solutions.

I recall speaking last year at a panel discussion hosted by an SPD-affiliated organization, and my main message was stop making policy against the AfD and start making policy for the people. But business as usual persisted despite clear signs that the cordon sanitaire was crumbling and a new strategy was needed.

By seeing themselves as the embodiment of the democratic order rather than a participant, the self-delusion justified actions like in 2020, when the AfD leveraged the parliamentary process to elect an outsider as premier of the state of Thuringia. The maneuver created an uproar, forcing FDP lawmaker Thomas Kemmerich to resign the post within days.

Now because of the firewall, Thuringia is run by an unstable anti-AfD coalition led by the CDU. Since that election in 2024, support for the far-right party has strengthened, as the Brandmauer’s role in reinforcing its anti-establishment credibility.

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In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD could still gain power by securing tacit support from other parties (such as BSW, which like the AfD wants to halt aid to Ukraine and revive energy ties with Russia). It could also convince individual lawmakers to switch allegiances, the door has already been opened to CDU counterparts (the AfD would need at least three to cross over — not necessarily a massive hurdle in these turbulent times).

On a basic level, Germany’s mainstream has never quite answered a very fundamental question amid all its posturing for democracy: why?

Two Bad Choices

Taking democracy as a monolithic and self-evident good is widespread across the “West.” Representatives of the status quo bang the drum about the pending collapse of liberalism.

But people have come to understand that such scare tactics are really about protecting power and not sharing it. They know what those results look like and many want something else.

Right now, though, right-wing populism is the only alternative really on offer, alongside the moribund status quo. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

That’s what Ground Up aims to do: show that there is a constructive way forward. But a substantive devolution of economic and political power is inherently more complicated than tapping into nationalistic tropes, especially in Germany.

A state like Saxony-Anhalt would be a great place to start. It has no big listed companies, but many small firms. Supporting and facilitating entrepreneurs and encouraging them to invest and develop locally could meaningfully move the needle in one of Germany’s poorest regions. Citizens councils could also partner with local administrators to engage the public and develop programs tailored closer to the needs of the communities, which are among the oldest in Germany.

But without credible perspectives, the people in Saxony-Anhalt have become particularly receptive to blood-and-soil myths, and for good reason. After reunification gutted social life and economic status, droves of young people left for better opportunities elsewhere. As a result, the population declined by nearly a third, local services collapsed and unemployment shot up.

Grievances have quietly simmered for decades. But instead of political and economic freedoms nurturing “flourishing landscapes” (as envisioned by Helmut Kohl), locals were sidelined by forces they had little ability to influence.

Similar feelings of alienation will be familiar to many in today’s world, where the destabilizing potential of artificial intelligence, geopolitical turmoil and the climate crisis tear at the fabric of the old order.

What’s become increasingly clear is that new threads need to be spun to tie people together. That realization could be the silver lining. But there’s new guarantee that renewal comes from the mainstream or that new political actors emerge to fill the vacuum.

For Germany’s political establishment, there is little time to recover. The next test is already on Sept. 20, when Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern vote. If the CDU and SPD continue to struggle, it could spell the end of Merz’s coalition, which was supposed to be the “last bullet” of German democracy.

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The bitter irony is that such disasters tend to have a positive effect on GDP, since gross domestic product measures economic flow rather than substance. So when resources are mobilized to clear rubble and rebuild homes that’s positive for our main measure of the economy.

That’s not a quirk. It’s the way the tool was designed when it was created nearly a hundred years ago to understand the impact of the Great Depression. Even then, it was clear it was imperfect. Simon Kuznets, the godfather of GDP, warned of the deficiencies of the measure he created.

“Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known,” he wrote in his report to the U.S. Congress that introduced the concept in 1934. “The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.”

GDP still became the global standard for measuring economic success at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. And in the 1960s, Kuznets again tried to warn about the shortcomings of his creation, writing:

“Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between its costs and return, and between the short and the long term. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”

Despite all of the problems, we are still in the throes of what economist Joseph Stiglitz has called “GDP fetishism.” The number determines who wins or loses elections and stokes anxiety if a recession is declared because of it.

When policy focuses on the size of the pie, it doesn’t matter if 90% goes to the top 10%, while focusing on activity ignores the destruction of the natural world and people spending more for the same things (i.e., inflation). It is a quantity over quality metric.

GDP counts spending. It doesn’t care whether that’s building something new or calling in bulldozers to tear something down. A dollar spent on a wedding and a dollar spent on a divorce lawyer are identical. In other words, GDP “measures everything…except that which makes life worthwhile,” Robert Kennedy said in a campaign speech in Kansas in 1968.

Other catastrophes have clearly demonstrated these shortcomings. In July 2021, the Ahr Valley in western Germany was hit by the deadliest flood in the country’s postwar history, killing more than 180 people. Federal and state authorities responded by committing €30 billion for reconstruction, nearly completely offsetting the estimated damage of between €33 and €40 billion.

After Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, there was an initial dip from the impact and then a rebound as reconstruction spending flowed into official statistics. At the time, the Congressional Budget Office projected that U.S. growth would not just recover but rise above the pre-storm trend because of the rebuilding activity.

But that benefit isn’t evenly distributed and only available in countries wealthy enough to have public resources to mobilize, according to a 2025 IMF working paper. That means in the Himalayas, the impact on Nepal will most certainly be deeper and last longer than across the border in China. But no matter what, the scale of loss and destruction can’t be fully reflected in accounting for economic activity.

We’re at a stage of development, where we can no longer ignore these deficiencies. Otherwise, the foundations for shared prosperity will be washed away — be it in a flood or through steady erosion taking place while we’re busy looking at the wrong scoreboard.

Changing the scoreboard

Economists have spent decades building alternatives. None of them is perfect, and none are as simple as GDP. But complexity isn’t a real argument in light of the scope and scale of the challenges we face.

So here’s a look at the leading contenders:

Genuine Progress Indicator

GPI uses the same personal consumption data as GDP, then adjusts it. It adds the unpaid value of household and volunteer work and subtracts the costs of crime, pollution and income inequality. Global GPI estimates suggest economic welfare has been roughly flat or declining since the late 1970s, in contrast to GDP’s ongoing growth. That more closely tracks how many people feel.

Pros: Since it’s in dollar terms, it’s legible to policymakers and comparable to GDP.

Cons: Some components (like the cost of income inequality) are inherently judgment calls, and it remains a work in progress rather than a fully standardized global metric.

Human Development Index

HDI is the UN’s flagship alternative. It combines life expectancy, years of schooling and income per capita into a single score.

Pros: UN-backing gives it institutional heft. It’s also genuinely global and has a history going back to 1990.

Cons: Because a country can score well on average, it can mask serious internal inequality. It also says nothing about the environment, personal freedom or whether people feel like participants in their own society.

Better Life Index

The OECD’s BLI is an interactive, multi-dimensional index covering issues including housing, income, education, civic engagement and health. Distinctively, it lets users adjust the weight of the categories rather than imposing one fixed formula.

Pros: It targets a key deficiency of GDP by showing the degree to which people can actually participate in economic and civic life.

Cons: Because it’s customizable, it resists being reduced to the single, simple number that gives GDP its political power.

Happy Planet Index

HPI combines wellbeing, life expectancy and ecological footprint to ask which countries deliver long, satisfying lives at the lowest environmental cost.

Pros: It explicitly penalizes growth achieved by burning through the planet’s capacity to sustain human civilization.

Cons: It’s more useful as a critique of consumption-heavy economies than as a governing tool.

Social Progress Index

Developed by advocacy group Social Progress Imperative, SPI measures how countries provide basic human needs and create opportunity for their people.

Pros: Since it deliberately ignores economic indicators, it doesn’t try to replace GDP but rather sits alongside it as an additional policy tool.

Cons: There’s a lot of judgement calls in quantifying aspects such as freedom and safety.

Counting What Counts

To pick one alternative, I’d vote for the Genuine Progress Indicator. That’s because it feels closer to what people already know and that makes it more accessible. That familiarity shows in variants being adopted into budgeting processes in U.S. states like Maryland and Vermont, and cities including San Francisco, Cleveland and Baltimore.

Paired with something like New Zealand’s Wellbeing Budget — which forces government agencies to justify spending against goals of reducing poverty, protecting mental health and promoting opportunity — there’s the makings of a toolkit that can improve policy for the majority.

“Growth alone does not lead to a great country,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said at its launch in 2019. “So it’s time to focus on those things that do.”

To be fair, New Zealand’s experience with its budgeting process since then has been mixed, but that shows the scale of the challenge of fixing what took decades to break. It’s an argument for urgency, patience and persistence, rather than sticking with what’s broken.

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It was 2007, long before Trump’s political ambitions surfaced, and I learned a valuable lesson that day about the limits of legacy journalism, and my own role in it.

To thrive as a journalist or a media organization, you need access. It delivers scoops and exclusives, granting newsmakers influence in the process. That’s as much about the rules of journalism as it is a business decision. Private outlets are motivated by profit and that’s achieved by attracting eyeballs with those scoops and exclusives that are facilitated by newsmakers.

With the media an integral part of the system it’s supposed to watch over, institutional bias is built in.

The game is the system

The call with Trump came as his run on “The Apprentice” — the reality TV series that made him a household name — was showing its age. Ratings were falling and there were rumors it might be canceled. On top of that, the Trump-branded casinos in Atlantic City were again in trouble and losing money.

Despite these wobbles, his name was everywhere, slapped on products from steaks and menswear to cologne and water. There was also Trump vodka with the tagline “Success, distilled,” even though The Donald is well-known for abstaining from alcohol.

The overall impression was that the Trump brand and its claims of representing glamour and success were wearing thin. So I decided to write a story about it.

After doing research and speaking with branding experts, I did what journalists are supposed to do and reached out to the principals involved: namely, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization.

After weeks of being strung along, my editor told me to tell them that we’d publish the story that afternoon with or without a comment. And so I did. A short time later, I had Mr. Trump on the phone.

The interview went as one might expect. He told me the brand had never been stronger. Everything was great and anyone saying otherwise didn’t know what they were talking about. In short, there was a lot of bombast that was difficult, if not impossible, to verify.

I knew I was being played, but the rules are the rules. We dutifully included his perspective, watering down the story in the process (clearly the point of his call). I chose to go along with it, and that’s exactly the point. The system sustains itself by safe choices and well-intentioned compromises.

The system is the game

Under the old rules of journalism, newsmakers provided facts and information, and the media made its best effort to report the truth. It was a code that served well enough, until the internet broke it.

In the digital age, media businesses need to chase the audience. At the time of my phone interview with Trump, Fox News had already emerged as a force by giving millions a view of the world they wanted to see. That strategy has since been copied across the spectrum.

In private-sector media, the shift was dictated by market realities that demanded a steady supply of content to ensure people keep coming back so that its product generates income (no audience=no revenue). That means maintaining close proximity to power, which reinforces the power of the powerful.

It’s a dynamic that results in system-friendly output, framing crises as deviations from the “normal” order. That is a bias, especially at a time when the system itself is no longer functioning.

No one’s steering that. Having been inside the chaos of newsrooms for decades, that would be impossible. It’s simply media businesses following the code established by the political and economic system we have.

A reboot has started

So if you’re frustrated with legacy media, you’re actually frustrated with a system that puts profits ahead of public interest. That’s the moral imperative that matters under capitalism. That’s probably why you’re reading this (which is much appreciated).

A new era of media disruption is now evolving. Subscriber-supported outlets like here on Substack are far from perfect (many deepen polarization rather than foster solidarity), but they do show that a devolved system that puts people first can take shape.

Thriving independent media is essential for a functioning democracy. Certain kinds of journalism — maintaining a network of bureaus for on-the-ground, in-depth reporting — need scale, which no single writer can replicate.

There could be a better model to what we have now. Nonprofit trusts that are cooperatively funded and governed by the communities they serve (with guardrails to prevent undue influence) could be a model for the future and help re-establish faith in facts.

As for my story on the Trump brand, it has since disappeared from the public record (or at least my best efforts to find it were unsuccessful). That’s just as well.

Trump and his brand have since proven far more durable than anyone would have predicted at the time. What mattered was that a subject with enough leverage has the power to shape his own narrative, regardless of whether the reporting held up.

I hope what I write here will prove more durable.

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A “cocoon of energy” will barely leave a trace of carbon and generated at costs that will hardly show up on a monthly bill. Water will be so plentiful that desert cities will erupt with foliage. Cellular meat labs and vertical farming will produce cheap and healthy food with less cruelty and fewer physical resources. Orbital drug labs will create miracle medicines that cure disease and unlock longevity.

Those are appealing ideas. But then the vision falls flat.

When it comes to how the Abundance agenda makes people’s lives better, the authors’ answer is: a weekend getaway to London. In other words, more leisure time and the disposable income to do something with it.

That is also appealing, especially for a harried working class and younger generations facing the climate crisis, AI disruption as well as political and economic instability. But it’s empty and based on an unrealistic premise.

Suspending disbelief

It’s unrealistic, because the keys to unlocking this future rest on the same power structures that underpin the problems we’re facing now.

The Abundance project calls for removing hurdles so capital can be invested more efficiently and the economy can produce more of what we want and do it more efficiently. That means the people in control of orchestrating the future are largely the same people who control the present.

But why should that happen? In order to maximize profits (the purpose of the capital class), it means minimizing costs such as labor. But in the idealized Abundance future, people will work fewer days for the same amount of pay. That outcome, Klein and Thompson say, is because the bounty provided by artificial intelligence will be shared, since it was “built on the collective knowledge of humanity.”

While others have argued in favor of this, seeing that happen without a strong political shift toward devolution of economic and political power (as I argue in my last post) is a stretch.

And before there’s any redistribution of AI prosperity, a lot of people will want to get paid.

Some $7 trillion will be spent globally on data centers by the end of this decade. OpenAI and Anthropic are pursuing public listings with valuations likely in the $1 trillion range to help fund those capital expenditures and vie with Elon Musk’s SpaceX (the parent of Grok).

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AI companies are all about growth and potential, but at some point they will need to show they can make a profit that justifies all that investment, so get ready for fees to creep up. Already, AI costs are rising for businesses and that means raising prices or savings elsewhere (like using it as an excuse to cut jobs).

Ultimately, the costs for the AI buildout will be shared by the public in some form, but not necessarily the benefits. As things are going, those gains will more than likely lead to a further concentration of power with the economic and technological elite rather than trickle down.

Even if the technology enables massive productivity gains, it’s hard to believe under the logic of capitalism that an AI dividend is going to be passed along to the public anytime soon. Even if there are well-meaning ideas in the Abundance project, it ultimately relies on the pursuers of profit to realize that vision.

And if the U.S. does somehow distribute AI prosperity, what about the rest of the world? Or does it just become a new form of extraction, with value drawn from the collective work of humanity and sold back as a subscription?

Consumo, ergo sum

Setting aside whether the capital class will actually share the gains, there’s a second problem with what’s on offer: it’s socially empty.

If the Abundance agenda pans out, my reward is I get dinner and a show in London’s West End, according to Klein and Thompson’s vision statement. That might provide a short-lived dopamine hit, but the individual is still just an atomized and isolated “end-user.” That’s not an improvement in substance to the stunted liberalism we have now.

It’s not a unique view. Some version of consumo, ergo sum (‘I consume, therefore I am,’ to riff off René Descartes’ famous axiom) is inherent in all establishment answers to our current crisis.

Noah Smith, a fellow Abundance advocate, argues that what you consume defines personal identity more than a job. “Everyone wants your money; you are the one who gets to choose who gets it. That choice is yours and yours alone,” he wrote in April. (The word “alone” might be the operative word here.)

So according to the Abundance class, free will is to choose between a Sprite, a Fuze iced tea, an Innocent smoothie, and a Topo Chico hard seltzer. All those brands are owned by The Coca-Cola Co., by the way, and illustrates the limits of consumer-led individualism: namely, we can only choose what’s on the shelves.

It also means individual agency is a function of disposable income. That’s exactly the problem we have now. People with money (and consequently power) operate under a different set of standards than the rest of us. They are in practice more free, which isn’t what liberalism’s universal ideals are supposed to be about.

We are also more than simply workers and consumers. We are also siblings, friends, neighbors and compatriots and want to take part in society, rather than just be on the receiving end of it. Those other facets, which pay off in meaning and belonging, don’t play a clear role in the Abundance vision.

That’s a serious failing, because there are alternatives that target that weakness in liberalism. Belonging and identity is the main appeal of nationalist populists like MAGA in the U.S., the AfD in Germany and France’s National Rally.

Similarly, proponents of the “network state” propose the creation of new sovereign entities with a unifying national consciousness. In that vein, Palantir’s Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska warn that “regressive” cultures and “hollow pluralism” are undermining the West.

While these movements vary enormously, they share the diagnosis that Western individualism is alienating and that belong is more durable than a new phone or a weekend retreat. If liberalism doesn’t provide a better answer, people will drift away and the social fabric will continue to fray.

A broader vision

A vision based on material improvements can only go so far. The West is saturated. We can only own so many phones and can’t create more time for all the content available to us. We need more quality over quantity. That requires a different spirit and means reconnecting the individual and society.

Since criticism is easy, here’s an effort to broaden the vision of what that could look like:

In the year 2050, you leave home to attend the meeting of a citizens assembly to discuss what to do with a pharmacy that closed as most common ailments have been wiped out by preventative healthcare and advances in medications.

The proposals, drawn from best practices around the world, range from installing a community workshop with tools and 3D printers to tearing it down for a local cooperative to build new homes for its staff. At the end, a compromise is found that keeps the structure intact and builds around it, while also adding more green space to the community.

Trees line the street to provide a comforting canopy for residents, but you notice that one is sickly and so you register that on a community app. After an inspection in the coming days, neighbors and city workers will cooperate to cut it down safely, preserving the wood for productive reuse and planting a new one.

The definition of work has become more fluid. Your job and your community overlap. What you do productively and how you engage in your community are valued as both contribute to the common good.

Employees are stakeholders. There are enterprises that require scale like developing drugs, securing raw materials and assembling robots. But many others are smaller collectives. Public watchdogs composed of experts and citizens ensure that corporate and personal power is held in check.

A national election campaign is under way. There are six parties on the ticket and two or three have good chances of securing enough votes to make it into parliament. Due to term limits, only one incumbent is eligible in your region, and all candidates have similar access to resources. Politics has become a marketplace of ideas that’s open for everyone, all the time.

People around the world have followed a similar path, weakening embedded power structures and making the world safer and more equitable, so that people can take a pleasure trip to London or anywhere else if they feel like it.

We’re obviously not anywhere close to that in the West, or elsewhere, but it’s a point on the horizon to strive for…from the ground up.

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The West has failed to fully live up to its claims and is now backsliding. That’s not inevitable, but to move forward, we need a vision of what a better system looks like.

A broader approach

It starts with avoiding a trap.

Almost every “what comes next” conversation treats economic and political power as separate problems with separate solutions. Get the economy growing through tax cuts, deregulation, or fiscal stimulus. Fix government by cutting red tape, tightening or loosening election procedures, or streamlining administration. But the problems were never separate, because the problems are systemic.

The piecemeal approach also sidesteps the social question: the hidden trigger in this trap. It’s fundamental, but typically absent from the discussion because doesn’t fit easily into the West’s conception of itself.

As Rousseau articulated, Western liberalism is based on the idea of the free individual. It’s what’s made liberalism so appealing, because any self-aware person wants to see themselves as “free.” The social (i.e., the interplay between the individual and society) consequently takes a backseat.

But Western-style individualism has a dark side.

When people consider themselves self-contained, the “other” is everywhere. That creates fertile territory for division. When the system provides only isolation and atomization, people will create their own forms of belonging and latch on to concepts like ethnicity, nationalism or sectarianism.

To fulfill its promise, the liberal system consequently has to provide a more constructive pathway for individuals to engage.

It’s all connected

That’s not how things work now. Economic and political power are structured by and for the elites.

An isolated worker has no real leverage over their employer, and neither does a voter of the government. Instead of self-determination, individuals are subjected to decisions made by people, institutions and structures too powerful to influence.

That’s the fundamental dissonance between the theory of liberal freedom and the practice. When the gap between what the system claims and what it delivers gets wide enough, legitimacy dies.

To illustrate what I mean, here’s a scenario from modern America:

A young woman graduates with a bachelor’s degree owing $35,000 (the average student loan debt, which has doubled since 2000). She attended university because society sends the signal that that’s the path to a better life. Her freedom of choice is already restricted by starting out in a hole.

To find a job, she’s competing with millions of other graduates, but she manages to land a low-level white collar job. The starting salary is commensurately low, but it’s a foot in the door.

^{This image is AI generated}

To be close to her new job, she needs to rent living space and that subjects her to a real estate market that is structured to restrict supply so that existing owners can see the value of their assets rise and property developers can generate profit. Neither her job nor her home are secure.

An election rolls around, but her district has been gerrymandered to ensure it swings a certain way. That means the outcome has been effectively decided in a process she has little opportunity to participate in. When the general election arrives, her vote is little more than an act of futile protest or rubber stamping the status quo. She has been effectively disenfranchised.

An economic slump hits and her company’s management at headquarters in a distant city decide to impose job cuts to protect shareholder value. As a new hire, she’s still cheap labor and survives the culling. As colleagues depart, she has more work and less free time.

She hopes to climb up the ladder, a decision over her advancement will be made by someone up the chain. Her room to demand more money and improve her living standards is limited by the precarity of her position.

Her life might not be terrible relative suffering elsewhere and in the past, but where’s the liberty and pursuit of happiness she was promised?

A person’s sense of freedom is not determined by voting once every few years. It’s whether they have real influence over the decisions that shape their existence — where they work, what happens at their employer, whether the community they live in gets to decide its own future, and whether they even feel part of that community.

That’s economic and political power operating as one system.

The postwar order tried to manage the limits to economic autonomy with political representation. When growth was strong and institutions were less captured by the economic elite, that worked well enough. It doesn’t anymore. Pretending the fix is doing the same, but slightly better is not going to cut it.

Devolution by design

So here’s the alternative. It runs on two tracks, because running on one is how you end up with the failed versions and half measures.

Political devolution means community and regional bodies with genuine authority. It’s actual decision-making and spending power over the things that affect a community most directly: housing, infrastructure and education. It’s not toothless advisory panels nor the performative theater of “public consultations.”

This isn’t theoretical. It’s a practice called sortition, which dates back to ancient Greece and has had modern implementation.

In Ireland, a Citizens’ Assembly of 99 randomly selected people broke a political deadlock on abortion. After deliberating over several weekends with expert input, its recommendation was ultimately endorsed by 66% of voters in a referendum. That’s what devolved deliberation can do even in its mildest, purely advisory form.

Devolution has been tried badly before, too. Hollow decentralization shifts blame downward without shifting real authority along with it. Any serious version has to devolve the power along with responsibility. Otherwise, it’s just providing a scapegoat or cover what was going to be decided anyway.

Economic devolution is the same logic applied to ownership and enterprise: cooperatives, worker-owned firms, community-owned utilities and land trusts. These are structures where the people who generate the value and live with the consequences also have a claim on the outcomes.

The largest working example is the Mondragón Corporation, the federation of worker cooperatives based in Spain. With over 70,000 employees, it’s the leading business group in the Basque region. Executive-to-minimum-wage ratios are democratically capped at levels the worker-owners themselves vote on.

Active since the 1950s, its domestic employment growth between 1983 and 2019 outperformed Spain’s overall economy by a factor of 3.4 and the OECD average by 6.3, according to a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Labor and Society.

Like any real world enterprise, it’s also not a clean success story. Only around 30% of Mondragón’s total workforce are actual worker-owners, since many overseas subsidiaries and newer hires remain conventional employees rather than co-op members. And in 2024, two of its largest member cooperatives voted to leave the network over disputes about autonomy.

Devolved ownership doesn’t dissolve the ordinary friction of running a business. It just changes who has skin in the game and the terms of the fight. That messiness is a reason to build these structures carefully, not a reason to give up on the direction.

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Less isn’t more

Run separately, either of these is incomplete.

Political devolution on its own gives communities authority over public budgets while leaving them with no power over the private capital that actually shapes the outcomes. Economic devolution on its own creates worker-owned firms operating inside a political system still designed to serve concentrated capital everywhere else.

You need both, moving together. In this stage of rapidly accelerating AI automation and the accumulation of power that comes with that, the case for broad-based stakeholder society is more urgent than ever.

This isn’t a call for smaller government for its own sake and it isn’t libertarianism with different branding. Some of what devolution requires — breaking up economic power, building cooperative and worker-ownership structures and redistributing budget authority downward — needs deliberate, muscular state action.

With wealth and power already highly concentrated, the only durable answer to a legitimacy crisis is giving more people a structural stake in the system. The alternative is fewer people having one, and we already know where that leads.

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In the U.S., the fallout meant some 6 million households were displaced, homes foreclosed and lives disrupted. On the other side of the ledger, almost no one went to jail — one mid-level banker, and no major Wall Street executives — for what was effectively systemic-level fraud.

While some countries cracked down harder, the basic disparity was largely the same and demonstrated just how the system was skewed against the majority.

Ultimately, banks were bailed out and bad ones swallowed up. The financial system recovered and big banking bonuses returned. For defenders of the neoliberal order, it was proof of its resilience. But fast forward to today and more evidence of a broken social contract is piling up. And there’s a consistent pattern: the elite is insulated while everyone else suffers.

A simple question

Now, we’re in a situation, where living costs are mounting, jobs are shaky, and home ownership is out of reach for many. Trade wars, real wars and climate catastrophes add more incalculable risks to people’s lives. The precarious conditions strain the bonds of belonging, and the social fabric frays.

That wasn’t the deal. Generating prosperity was what the liberal system was supposed to be good at. It was supposed to sweep you along with the rising tide and carry you, your family and your community to higher ground. Instead, more and more people are left to sink or swim.

For some, there are reasons to dismiss the decline as overblown. Unemployment has recovered from the global financial crisis and the Covid pandemic. And GDP keeps growing across most major economies.

The collapse narrative, critics argue, mistakes periodic friction as evidence that the entire system is failing. But that’s not really the point. The sky doesn’t have to be falling to realize that roof needs repair or that the flooring needs to be reinforced.

Cutting through the false equivalencies of its all good or its all bad is a simpler question: Is this the best we can do?

I don’t think so. I think we can build something better, without destroying the planet and people’s livelihoods in the process. That’s what Ground Up is about.

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Systemic disconnect

It’s hard to honestly argue that the system is working — at least not for the majority.

Wealth inequality is widening and reaching levels in the U.S. that were last seen before the Great Depression. The ultra-rich are undermining democracy and tilting government policy in their favor around the world. AI threatens creating more upheaval, and the climate crisis threatens the well-being of the entire planet.

That’s triggering a crisis of legitimacy. The liberal order is built around the idea of individual freedom, but there is no liberty for people living from paycheck to paycheck or drowning in debt. What value is voting for a limited array of candidates if policies favor the haves?

While that tension doesn’t show up in economic indicators, you can see it in waning trust. Gallup has tracked confidence across U.S. institutions since 1979 and in the latest reading, it was near a record low. Similarly, Pew’s federal trust number, which is even older, sits near the lowest point in the nearly seven decades.

The trends aren’t isolated to the U.S. Developed democracies — Japan, France, Germany, the UK, Spain, South Korea as well as the U.S. — ranked among the lowest on the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer.

As economic anxiety, eroding faith in the public sector and fading optimism spread, roughly seven in ten people worldwide are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values or backgrounds, according to the Edelman report. That’s not merely polarization, it’s people concluding that there is no common good.

That level distrust has fueled the rise of political leaders and movements that promise to tear down the postwar order. That’s not because nationalist populists are offering better answers, but because the status quo has become insufferable for more and more people.

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Building a constructive alternative

But clinging to the establishment and drifting toward tribalism aren’t the only options. Our political, economic and social systems are human constructs and as such they can be remade. The social contract can be redrafted to offer more people a stake in the system.

That means a genuinely different distribution of power: empowered citizens, empowered workers and empowered communities, and public institutions that are people first. That would promote solidarity by strengthening forces that connect people over those that divide them.

That’s the argument I’ll be making here, issue by issue.

It’s not screaming that the house is on fire and we should panic. It’s showing we can do things better. It’s arguing that the rebuild has to start from a different set of principles than the ones that got us here.

And we need to get to work because the foundation has been quietly rotting for longer than the people in charge have been willing to admit. The lights are still on. I’d just be careful about how much comfort you take from that.

…

And to close the opening anecdote, I didn’t cover the banking collapse for long. Soon thereafter, I went to Germany, which was starting to lose its own battle with its postwar social contract.

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I wrote story after story on markets, money and power. From fast-paced breaking news to long-form narratives, I contributed to the voice of institutions that were themselves part of the system.

I was explaining the world from the top down. I don’t want that role anymore.

Something’s Broken

Working on both sides of the Atlantic, I’ve seen how the system works from the inside and I’ve been part of telling its narrative. But seeing the trajectory of decline gather pace, it has become clear that the liberal order — the one that promised to protect individual liberty and promote broad prosperity — isn’t just struggling, it’s collapsing.

The living evidence of these conditions is everywhere: wages that don’t stretch the way they used to; people pitted against one another for jobs and housing; culture wars that divide and distract, and politics that offers the bleak prospects of more of the same or burning it all down.

All of that became clear while researching and writing my book Broken Republik about Germany’s decline. The country was the pet project of the U.S.-led postwar system. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West subsumed the communist East and declared victory. Built around commercial success, Germany was the epitome of a liberal nation state, or at least it tried to be.

But now economic malaise is triggering political upheaval and a crisis of identity that threatens to tip Germany back into ethnic nationalism (trends that are evident across much of the West). While the ruling political class tries to patch the facade with outdated tools, the pillars of the country are crumbling.

The title of this Substack is intended to evoke two associations: how the system has worn people down and rebuilding from the foundation. So this platform is about problems, but also (and primarily) about solutions.

While Ground Up is progressive in that it looks forward with the majority in mind, it’s not ideological in a classic left-right sense. The goal here is to speak to people who feel the system isn’t working and build a consensus around the harder questions of what comes next.

My answer starts with devolution — a genuine transfer of power back to the people. We need political systems that answer to communities, economic systems that empower workers, and institutions that treat people as participants rather than spectators.

The reset needs to include different ways of measuring success — focusing on whether people can actually participate in economic and civic life, instead of a quantitative obsession with making big numbers go up.

To provide a solid foundation, we also need a clear view on fundamental issues like what society is, how individuals orient themselves in the world and what role government plays. So it will get philosophical at times (which I studied in graduate school, when many thought history was ending).

The project is a challenge to the mainstream proposing piecemeal changes to preserve the status quo as well as to the backward-looking populist agenda that’s filling the vacuum left by the establishment’s fading credibility. It’s an argument that doesn’t have a comfortable home in polarized debates.

I will also take my own steps to be part of the change. That first step was leaving a comfortable and respected position in corporate media.

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While this will be a work in progress, here’s what you can expect: one substantial essay a week, building this argument piece by piece. Some weeks will feature reporting on where the collapse is showing up most clearly, others laying out what a devolved alternative looks like in practice.

I’ll also be writing shorter, more frequent notes in between, challenging the prevailing narratives as well as celebrating the good work that’s already underway.

If that resonates, please subscribe — and bring people with you.

I built this platform from decades of journalism, a background in political philosophy and life-long transatlantic experience. For more than two decades, I was trusted with speaking on behalf of the system, and I’m asking you to trust me with the harder argument now.

Welcome to Ground Up.

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But what was once called a “grand” coalition was a shadow of its past. Instead of a resounding mandate, the edge was a mere 13 seats (out of 630), and the far-right AfD had more than doubled its share of the vote to become the second-largest party in the Bundestag, supplanting the SPD. Meanwhile, the liberal Free Democrats — the kingmaker of German politics in the past — was voted out of parliament after bringing down the Scholz government.

Amid this sense of rupture and the evident struggles by the mainstream to contain the far right, Markus Söder — the head of the Bavarian conservatives — said the alliance of Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU and the SPD “is, in fact, democracy’s last bullet.”

While Söder is known for bombastic rhetoric, the idea that Germany could drift away from democratic ideals was widespread (I highlighted those risks in my book “Broken Republik” — now available in paperback with a fresh Afterword).

With Merz marking his one-year anniversary as chancellor today, things haven’t gone as planned. Only about one in three voters support the governing parties, the nationalist AfD has opened up a lead as wide as five points over the CDU/CSU at the top of the polls, and a vast majority of Germans disapprove of the job the government is doing. Merz also regularly has to field questions about how long his government can last.

While there has been a lot to deal with (from Trump’s tariffs to the U.S.-led Iran war), the bungling of the coalition was predictable, and the core problem was hinted at in Söder’s comment from last year.

By portraying the centrist parties as the final bulwark of Germany’s democracy, he articulated their shared self-image as the embodiment of democracy itself. In other words, their role legitimizes an administration as democratic. But that type of conceit makes them poor defenders of the system.

That’s because such an attitude deems a party’s actions to be democratic by default, even if the focus is really on securing power. That was evident when Merz and his allies manipulated the parliamentary system to force through hundreds of billions of euros in debt spending before the AfD could block such a move under the new parliament.

The goal of the shock post-election gambit was to defuse the fiscal issues that had destabilized Scholz’s administration. But in so doing, the mainstream sidestepped the public under the guise of preserving “democratic” power.

But parties are not the source of power in a democracy, people are. And the people are starting to see through these self-serving machinations.

Political parties are, of course, necessary. They are critical to organize support, delineate policies and set agendas. But a political machine is not end in itself. Parties are a means through which to solve problems. Too much reliance on them leads to outcomes like we’re seeing in Germany, where politicians struggle to see the people beyond the party.

Such conditions aren’t isolated to Germany. The traditional establishment has already collapsed in Italy and France, and the UK’s is on the ropes. That might ultimately be a good thing. There should be a certain amount of churn in a dynamic democracy. But disruption opens risk if vacuums can’t be filled constructively.

That’s the state that Germany finds itself in at the moment. And if the CDU/CSU and the SPD can’t find ways to solve the country’s problems, they risk undermining the very system they claim to represent. No party is worth that.

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For better or worse, Davos has been a regular part of my annual routine for years. It always seemed little more than a collective ego trip — a stage for the world’s elite to cosplay at caring about poverty, disease and environmental degradation.

But this time, with the world spiraling toward chaos, the theater fell flatter than ever.

From the rambling of Donald Trump and the sycophantic farce of his Board of Peace to the steady parade of self-serving executives, there were no new ideas, at least not in substance. It was a system justifying itself, creating a distraction from the smoke billowing out from behind the facade. It was a ritual of the liberal order (and I played my part).

The vacuous display was in its way reassuring. It meant there’s no reason to look toward the Swiss Alps for answers, because there will be no revelations coming down the mountain.

The emptiness of Davos was counterintuitively highlighted by Mark Carney. The Canadian prime minister boldly declared that the postwar rules-based international order was dead. His proposal was less of a “rupture” (as he called it) than a new form of Realpolitik.

He called for middle powers to unite to rival great powers like the U.S. (though he never mentioned Trump or the U.S. by name). While feeling fresh, the position assumes that existing power structures can and should endure — hardly surprising from a former central banker and a Goldman Sachs alum. But the underlying problems with liberalism itself escaped scrutiny.

The most striking part of Davos, though, came toward the end, when two of the final speakers brought home the glaring gap between the elitist rhetoric and brute reality.

Elon Musk, a last-minute addition to the program, was given kid-glove treatment by fellow billionaire Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock and interim co-chair of the WEF. The pandering was so complete that Fink asked the crowd to applaud again after the initial welcome for the world’s richest man came off as too tepid.

Rather than press the boss of Tesla, Spacex and X on any number of issues (such as facilitating disinformation, sowing nationalist division and undermining democracy), Fink gave Musk free rein to talk about a future where humankind would be served by humanoid robots, ride around in autonomous vehicles and have the means to explore space.

His fantasy might somehow sound appealing if it wasn’t so abundantly clear that such a future can only be attainable for the Davos elite. The rest of us will be locked out.

Just before Musk’s pontifications, there was Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The Ukrainian President also came on short notice. He had planned to stay in Kyiv to show solidarity with countrymen suffering without heat and power because of Russia’s attacks.

The strain of years of war were etched on his face, as he lashed out at Europe for talking too much and doing too little to defend democracy and define the future. Despite all their futility, Ukraine’s closest allies already represent the coalitions of the willing that Carney’s vision aspires to.

To make his point, the Canadian prime minister evoked former Czech dissident Vaclav Havel’s criticism of Soviet authoritarianism. The parable of the greengrocer in Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless, which Carney cites, shows how regular people sustain power structures by performing system-supporting rituals.

Underscoring how the Davos crowd misses the mark, Carney equated Canada with a simple shopkeeper. But with its vast natural and financial resources, Canada is not merely peddling onions and carrots. Havel’s point was that people have the power and collectively legitimize constructs — like “Canada” as well as “communism” and “liberalism.”

That means people can collectively withdraw their support when the system no longer works for them. The liberal order appears to have forgotten that lesson.

Afterall, the ability for the Davos elite to accumulate vast resources, while others starve or are bombed, is not about the principles of liberty. It is an outcome of systemic failures perpetuated under the guise of freedom and individual rights. The claims echo the absurdity of the Soviet Union branding itself a “worker’s state.”

Recognizing that dissonance is ultimately the positive conclusion from the ritual of Davos. The shopkeepers of the world are now clearly aware of what the system has to offer and they can take the sign out of the window if they so choose.

But looking at the data from the influx of refugees from Syria and nearby countries into Germany a decade ago (the starting point of Europe's migration crisis) shows a different picture.

In terms of labor participation, that group (who were almost completely unprepared for starting over in another country) is now almost on par with native Germans. That exceeds expectations despite early mistakes that slowed their integration.

More than 83,000 Syrians became German citizens last year -- a status that's not granted arbitrarily. Some have started businesses, others are entering critical jobs like doctors and teachers, even one has become a mayor.

Uncontrolled migration is disruptive and can strain resources initially, but the vast majority of refugees and asylum seekers want to give back, when given the chance. And the reality is that Germany needs migration to maintain its workforce and finance pensions as Baby Boomers retire.

So a more nuanced position might be the better approach for the current government than grandstanding over border controls.

Check out my piece with Bloomberg and let me know what you think.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-15/syrian-immigrants-are-boosting-germany-s-economy?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=linkedin