America 2.0: Laws are for losers

You know what my favorite thing about being American is? The audacity. The Founding Fathers were basically a bunch of righteous dudes giving the world’s biggest empire the finger. “Tax our tea? Nah, we’ll just invent a whole new country instead.” At our core, we just don’t like being told what to do.

It’s in our DNA. Where the elders zig, we zag. Where the rulebook says “no,” we turn it into a “hell yes.” We’re the country that transforms detentions into revolutions, tired old marching bands into jazz, and road trips into moon landings. Unruly, absurd, somehow—it worked.

…until it didn’t. Somewhere along the way, cultural trust shifted.

“Harvard-educated expert” used to be holy water. Say it and everyone nodded like obedient choir kids. Now it’s the prelude to a lecture from an expert who talks down to you like a Victorian schoolmaster explaining how to use a fork.

George Washington warned us. In his farewell address, he basically said, “Chill it with the factions, kids. Split into parties and you’ll trash the whole ‘for the people, by the people’ thing.” But lawyers gonna lawyer and now we’re stuck in a duopoly arguing over every national crisis like Ents debating whether to go to war. Thanks a lot, Hamilton.

And the institutions are soOo clever. They know “United” is the sacred bit of “United States of America.” So they force unity by training conformity. They reward ladder-climbers and canon-quoters who never color outside the lines. Which sounds great until you realize these places are basically rolling pins flattening curiosity into lifeless pancakes.

Meanwhile, the real American spirit is still out there in the wild. Designers, builders, artists, dreamers—kids who actively resist information overload to protect their unserious imagination. They’re the ones slicing through bureaucratic absurdities like machetes in a jungle where the snakes are too busy eating their own tails thinking credentials are still Willy Wonka tickets, where no invite into the right club once meant you could out-think Einstein and still be stuck selling umbrellas in the rain. But today, credentials aren’t the scarce resource we need to push forward. It’s a little imagination and vision. And here’s what we could do instead:

Problems, not parties

The real gridlock in America isn’t policy—it’s moral theater. Every election year is basically America’s Got Morality, with politicians auditioning for “Most Righteous Hero.” Who loves freedom the most? Who’s the truest defender of the Constitution? Who’s corrupting the children this week?

And that’s why nothing moves. You can’t score morality like football. It’s endless overtime where everyone leaves the stadium convinced their team actually won. Meanwhile, lawyer-politicians are busy doing courtroom cosplay, pounding the table like it’s Broadway, while the real problems in healthcare, housing, employment, etc. sit in the corner like forgotten Tamagotchis, beeping for attention until they die.

Winning an argument isn’t the same as solving the damn issue. But we’ve built a system where they’re treated like the same thing.

Iteration, not stagnation

Right now, laws are basically Windows 95—clunky, outdated, somehow still running the whole system. We wait decades for “reform,” and by the time it finally lands, the world’s already on version 3.0.

Imagine if government worked like a product team. Two-week sprints. Test a fix, measure if it works, iterate fast. Dud? Scrap it. Winner? Scale it. Instead of rotting in hearing purgatory, we’d actually learn and adapt in real time.

America was built on audacity and risk-taking. So why are we still stuck running an operating system that hasn’t been cool since 1787?

Outcomes, not ideology

Every political debate today is trench warfare in the Church of Being Right. “We’re the real defenders of liberty!” “No, we care more about the people!” Cool story, but where’s the solution?

A product framework flips the script. Forget left vs right, red vs blue. The only scoreboard that matters is outcomes.

Does this solution actually work for real humans living real lives? If yes, it stays. If not, we kill it and try again. Reality becomes the referee, not rhetoric. Imagine the unthinkable—both sides united not because they suddenly fell in love with each other, but that stubborn tutor called reality refused to negotiate.

Facilitation, not litigation

Lawyers are trained to argue. That’s why Congress feels like a courtroom drama written by bad TV writers with lots of monologues and no plot development. Every hearing is less of a problem-solving session and more mock trial for C-SPAN.

But what if government were staffed with builders, designers, and facilitators instead of more lawyers? The kinds of people who somehow get cross-functional teams to ship a world-changing product before deadline? Instead of litigation, we’d get collaboration. Instead of a 600-page bill in incomprehensible legalese, we’d get roadmaps, prototypes, MVPs.

The future of America wouldn’t be brokered in mahogany courtrooms—it would be sketched out on whiteboards you could watch come to life on Figma with the only question being “How do we make this work?”

So maybe the real question isn’t whether America can survive another round of partisan theater. Maybe it’s whether we’ve still got the audacity to ditch a tired, outdated framework and vote in a new one that works for us. Because Ferris was right. Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.