Alexander Moss - A More Perfect Union (Briefs): Reimagining The United States as a European Union-style Federation

I asked roughly thirty people from across a wide spectrum of American life to review draft manuscripts of this book. Some were friends and family, many were complete strangers hired through various online sites.

For a large number of the people who dont follow politics closely, simply reading the material was difficult. What most of them described was a series of symptoms I associate with prolonged trauma. For the Democrats, the Trump administration was unlike anything they had previously experienced, with the January 6th, 2020 attack on the Capital a major event. For Republicans, the Obama administration, what the majority of Republicans believe was a stolen 2020 election was similarly traumatic. All sides have found the COVID pandemic profoundly exhausting and division.

Many of the reactions from the reviewers were entirely predictable for anyone following American politics. One older man from a very red state agreed with the premise (that the country would be best broken up) but essentially flipped the causation - in his mind, the rise in authoritarianism was entirely the fault of the Democrats, with the Obama administration the inciting genesis. Another older man from the South agreed with the bulk of the material, but disagreed with my characterization of the Civil War as a matter of slavery. Still another claimed that it was impossible for me to characterize myself as a centrist if I didnt acknowledge that the Democrats were the source of American collapse.

Perhaps the most interesting feedback to me came from a liberal academic in Berkeley, who pointed out that left-leaning individuals concerned about the South seem to ignore the challenges facing populations of color in Oakland and the greater Los Angeles area.

Another individual, an immigrant who teaches political science and fled an authoritarian takeover in his home country felt that I was dramatically understating the risks we face.

Its impossible to write a book advocating any position in the current American political environment without accusations by one side or the other of bias.

I choose to view it as a sort of ink blot test, in which the reaction to this material is most useful as a tool for understanding yourself and your relationship with the federal government. Ironically, the very divisions confirmed by the reviewers served to reinforce the central thesis of the book.

If you believe that the source of challenges in this book are Democrats, you can probably just do a mental find-and-replace while you read and substitute the names Obama, Pelosi, Schumer, and Ocasio-Cortez for Trump as you see fit.

Treat this book as a starting point for an idea. Its an alternative to civil war. Its a bit of science fiction. Its a reasonable modernization of the current federal government into a more democratic institution.

Regardless, I hope you enjoy the material and take it for what it is - a spark of an idea for the future.