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I was born in September 1994, which means that some of my earliest years happened to coincide with one of the strangest fiscal periods in modern American history.

I obviously did not know this at the time. I was learning to read and riding a bicycle while the federal government was doing something it had almost forgotten how to do: bringing in more money than it spent. In fiscal year 1998, the United States recorded its first federal budget surplus since 1969. The surplus grew in 1999. Then, in fiscal year 2000, it reached $237 billion, or about 2.4 percent of the entire economy. Federal debt held by the public was actually being paid down.[1]

There was something almost futuristic about the mood surrounding the numbers. At the beginning of 2001, the Congressional Budget Office projected that, if the laws then on the books remained in place, the federal government would accumulate $5.6 trillion in surpluses between 2002 and 2011.

Instead, it accumulated $6.1 trillion in deficits.

That is an $11.7 trillion difference between the fiscal future the country could see from January 2001 and the one that actually arrived.[2]

I have been trying to understand what happened in between.

The obvious place to look is September 11. The attacks transformed American foreign policy, created an enormous new security apparatus, led directly to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and began commitments whose financial consequences are still arriving decades later. It is tempting to draw a clean line from the balanced budgets of my early childhood to the War on Terror and then onward to the immense public debt of the present.

The farther west you travel from Chicago, the less obvious it becomes where Chicagoland actually ends.

The city does not simply stop. Suburbs thin out. Housing developments become islands. The spaces between them widen. Decorative streetlights give way to utility poles, and then, almost without announcement, the landscape belongs to corn.

That makes DeKalb County, Illinois an interesting place for a random Street View road trip.

It sits about 63 miles west of Chicago, covers roughly 633 square miles, and had an estimated population of about 102,000 in 2025. DeKalb and Sycamore provide the county's main urban centers, Northern Illinois University brings a sizable college presence, and yet enormous portions of the county remain unmistakably agricultural.

The DeKalb County History Center describes agriculture as one of the defining threads of the county's history, and that becomes obvious almost immediately on Street View.

But there was something else I kept noticing.

The countryside here did not look especially rough.

It looked organized.

Maybe I had simply stumbled onto an unusually tidy collection of roads, but scene after scene had the same peculiar quality: trimmed lawns, clean gravel drives, bright barns, sharply defined fields, buildings that looked freshly cared for. Coming from central North Carolina, where rural landscapes often feel looser and more accumulated over time, I found the contrast striking.

I. Introduction — How “Free Speech” Became a Side to Root For

If you only learned about free speech from American politics in the last 25 years, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a partisan brand rather than a constitutional principle. One election cycle, free speech is a conservative rallying cry against “cancel culture” and “Big Tech censorship.” Another cycle, it’s a progressive slogan against government surveillance, bans on books, or gag orders on teachers. The banners keep changing color, but free speech is supposed to live in the rulebook, not on one side’s uniform.

Underneath those shifting slogans, though, something quieter has been happening. Both major parties have grown increasingly comfortable with the idea that certain kinds of speech are too dangerous, too destabilizing, or simply too offensive to tolerate. What changes is not the impulse to restrict, but the justification: national security, public safety, preventing harm, fighting disinformation, protecting children, defending democracy. The list changes, but the move is the same: carve out one more exception when speech cuts against your own side.

The irony is that the legal First Amendment regime in the United States remains, historically speaking, very strong. Supreme Court cases like Cohen v. California—the one that protected a guy wearing a jacket that said “Fuck the Draft” in a courthouse corridor—are still the background law of the land. In that case, the Court held that the state could not punish him just for a four-letter word that offended people; offense alone was not a sufficient reason to criminalize speech. (Legal note: Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971).)

You just read the condensed Mobility State proposal.

The most common pushback I get, from both left and right, boils down to two words:   “Nice brochure, but that’s just Scandinavia with better branding — and America will never pay for it.”

Wrong on both counts. Here’s why this package is cheaper, structurally different, and politically plausible in the actual United States we have in 2025.

1. This Is Not Even Close to Nordic-Scale Spending

Nordic social democracy runs at 45–55 % of GDP, funded by 25 % VATs and crushing payroll taxes.

A full-bore Mobility State toolkit — all four pillars, generously sized — adds roughly 3–5 % of GDP in new spending. That’s in the same financial ballpark as:

• the Trump-era Opportunity Zones + Child Tax Credit expansion, or  
• one single year of the CARES Act (which was 25 % of GDP and passed in a weekend).

Rough cost envelope (2025 dollars):

• Universal Opportunity Accounts (“baby bonds on steroids”): ~$150–200 bn/yr  
• True portable benefits (mostly re-plumbing health insurance): near revenue-neutral  
• Modern GI Bill for economic transitions: ~$80–120 bn/yr  
• Housing mobility + supply-side reform: revenue-neutral or growth-positive

That’s not “Sweden.” That’s “GI Bill 2.0 + Swiss health system + YIMBY zoning reform.” Congress has done bigger things when it feels the heat.

2. It’s Built for American DNA, Not European DNA

A Mobility State for an Age of Inequality

America’s real crisis is not just inequality; it is the collapse of mobility in a high-churn, high-immigration society. The old promise—work hard, play by the rules, move up—now feels like a rumor for millions juggling gig jobs, locked out of housing markets, or stuck with obsolete skills. We do not need nostalgic protectionism or minimalist fatalism. We need a mobility state: public policy designed not to freeze people in place with bigger cushions, but to equip them to move—across jobs, regions, and life stages—without falling through the cracks.

The New Inequality: Resilience, Not Just Income

Today’s inequality is less about static wealth gaps and more about who has buffers against constant change. Asset owners ride appreciating houses and stocks; everyone else faces volatile pay, algorithm-driven schedules, and benefits that vanish when the job does. Automation, platforms, and global competition reward the adaptable and punish the exposed. The result is a divide in agency: some treat layoffs as detours; others never recover.

Why Obvious Fixes Keep Dying

Americans broadly support making retraining easier, benefits portable, or housing less gated. Yet reforms stall because of:

• Structural veto points and regulatory capture
• Cultural skepticism of “big government”
• Partisan branding wars (“socialism” vs. “welfare”)

The Mobility State: A Third Model

I. A Thought Experiment: Taking the Words Seriously

Imagine taking the founding slogans of the United States at face value.

Government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.   No taxation without representation.   Treaties are the supreme law of the land.

Now imagine applying those same rules not only to the former British colonies along the Atlantic coast, but also to the Native nations who already lived across the rest of the continent. What would that have required? What would it have made impossible?

For most Americans, the answer was never really explored. In school, the story tends to come in two tracks. On one track, we follow the high-minded drama of the founding: declarations, constitutions, debates over federalism and rights. On the other track, out at the edge of the map, we get the adventure story of “the frontier”: settlers, wagon trains, homesteads, the march westward. Native peoples tend to enter the picture as background—sometimes as noble allies, sometimes as dangerous foes, often as temporary figures who fade away once the town is built and the railroad arrives.

What almost never gets spelled out is that these two tracks are not separate stories. They are the same story seen from different angles. The question is whether the principles in the first track ever had a real chance of constraining what happened in the second. If they didn’t, then we have to ask a harder question: did the United States quietly decide, very early on, that its founding rules did not fully apply when Native nations were involved?

On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump rode down a golden escalator and said the sentence that would define his politics:

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

You can read the full campaign announcement speech transcript here or in many other archives, but that one line is the part that stuck. At the time, a lot of people treated it like a bad joke. A clownish bit of over-the-top rhetoric that would either sink his candidacy or get sanded down once “real governing” began. Others, especially immigrants and Latinos, heard exactly what it was: an invitation. A green light for a certain kind of imagination about who “we” are and who “they” are.

Fast-forward a decade, and I’m sitting in Durham, North Carolina, reading about Operation Charlotte’s Web: heavily armed federal agents sweeping through Charlotte’s neighborhoods and business districts, grabbing people outside churches, bakeries, apartment complexes.

On the first day alone, at least 81 people were arrested in Charlotte. Reports describe masked agents, long guns, and aggressive tactics that left local immigrant communities terrified to leave home. Local coverage and national outlets have documented businesses closing, children kept indoors, and a Honduran-born U.S. citizen violently detained when he fit someone’s mental picture of what an “immigrant” looks like.

I. Introduction — The Broken Mobility Bargain

Take a thirty-year-old juggling a patchwork life in a big metro. She drives for two apps in the morning, stocks shelves on a short-term contract at night, and splits rent with roommates because buying into the housing market feels like science fiction. When her hours get cut or an algorithm changes, there is no buffer beyond a maxed-out credit card and a savings account that never quite fills. She is not lazy, not reckless, and not alone. Her story is what the old American promise sounds like when it starts to fray.

For most of American history, the country’s favorite promise has been simple: work hard, play by the rules, and you can move up. The details changed by era and region, but the core bargain felt stable enough that millions of people were willing to bet their lives on it. Today, that promise feels less like a rule and more like a rumor. Wealth and power have consolidated at the top; housing, health care, and education eat up a growing share of paychecks; and what used to look like a climb now feels, for many, like running in place.

You can see it most clearly in the lives built on the edges of the old structure. Gig workers who knit together three apps to make rent. Young renters who cannot imagine owning a home in the places where opportunity clusters. Immigrants who do everything right—study, work, pay taxes—only to discover that their credentials vanish in a maze of licensing boards and opaque requirements. For them, the path upward no longer looks like a clear route. It looks more like a maze with locked gates and missing exits. The result is not just hardship, but a spreading sense that the game itself has quietly changed—that it is not only hard, but rigged.

I. Introduction — The American Paradox

For as long as it has existed, the United States has carried two competing self-portraits. On one hand, it is the archetypal “nation of immigrants”—a country defined not by bloodline but by the recurring arrival of new people, new languages, and new cultural currents. On the other, it has repeatedly flirted with the idea of building a large, protective, European-style welfare state, the kind associated with stability, solidarity, and a tightly woven social safety net. These are both powerful visions of what a nation can be. But they do not always coexist easily.

The tension is simple to describe and notoriously difficult to resolve: can a country sustain both high levels of immigration and a far-reaching social-democratic welfare state? Many modern political movements treat these two ideals as naturally compatible—morally aligned, even. Yet historically, the countries that built the most comprehensive social-democratic systems did so under conditions of cultural homogeneity and slow demographic change. The United States, by contrast, has been defined by constant demographic renewal, often in rapid waves.

A century ago, though, something different happened. The United States tightened its immigration laws dramatically, shutting the door to whole regions of the world under the logic of racial “preservation.” And it was precisely in that same era—roughly from the 1930s through the 1960s—that America developed the beginnings of a modern welfare state, expanded union power, and laid the foundations of its vast administrative apparatus. These two forces—redistribution and demographic closure—grew together not because they were philosophically aligned, but because one was artificially engineered to make the other politically possible.

The randomizer has sent me to a county where my first interpretation was wrong often enough to become the story.

Musselshell County, Montana initially looked, through Street View, like an essay about absence.

A gravel road runs toward the horizon with almost nobody on it. Fields lie brown beneath a tremendous sky. Utility poles march away until perspective swallows them. In Roundup, an old sandstone school that looked lively in 2011 appears boarded up fourteen years later. Farther down the road, the cheerful sign for an old café disappears between Street View visits.

It would be very easy to arrange those photographs into a familiar story about rural America slowly emptying out.

Then I started checking.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Musselshell County is not shrinking at all. Its population was 4,730 in the 2020 census and was estimated at 5,582 in 2025, an increase of nearly 18 percent. About one in five residents is under 18.

The boarded-up school has an even bigger surprise waiting behind it.

So perhaps the interesting question here is not, What went wrong with Musselshell County?

It is: How much can we really know from a photograph?

Quick facts

• County: Musselshell County, Montana
• County seat and largest city: Roundup
• Population: about 5,580
• Land area: about 1,869 square miles
• Population density: 2.5 people per square mile in 2020
• Established: 1911
• Named for: the Musselshell River
• Landscape and economy: ranching, dryland farming, coal mining, small communities and the broad Musselshell River valley

The randomizer has sent me somewhere that looks, at first, almost suspiciously well behaved.

Kewaunee County, Wisconsin sits along the western shore of Lake Michigan, just southeast of Green Bay and immediately south of the much better-known Door County peninsula. About 20,800 people live here today, spread among farmland, small towns and roughly 30 miles of lakeshore. The county seat is Kewaunee; its largest city is Algoma, population about 3,200. U.S. Census Bureau data puts median household income at about $82,700, somewhat above Wisconsin as a whole.

This is dairy country, farming country, manufacturing country, fishing country and, along the lake, increasingly vacation country. Agriculture remains conspicuous enough that a drive inland quickly becomes an inventory of barns, silos and improbable expanses of corn. The 2022 Census of Agriculture still treats Kewaunee as a substantial agricultural county, while local tourism promotion leans heavily on fishing, beaches, trails and the Lake Michigan waterfront.

In other words, this is not primarily some sleepy retirement colony that happens to have flowers.

There is real economic machinery underneath the hydrangeas.

And yet, after wandering around Kewaunee County on Street View, the machinery was not what stayed with me.

What stayed with me was a man in a Rolling Stones shirt standing astride a bicycle with two dogs.

Quick facts

• County: Kewaunee County, Wisconsin

The randomizer has finally found a loophole.

Or at least, that was my first thought when it landed on Barceloneta, Puerto Rico.

This series is supposed to be a random journey through the counties of the United States. Puerto Rico does not have counties. It has municipios, 78 of them, each with its own mayor and municipal government.

But according to the U.S. Census Bureau, those municipios are officially treated as county equivalents.

So Barceloneta counts.

And after wandering around it on Street View for a while, I am very glad it does.

Barceloneta sits on Puerto Rico's northern coast, west of San Juan, with a population of a little over 22,000 people. It was founded in 1881 from territory that had belonged to neighboring Manatí and Arecibo. Its landscape reaches from the Atlantic coastal plain into greener interior country, but one of the municipality's defining modern features is industry. Barceloneta has long been associated especially with pharmaceutical manufacturing, enough to acquire the nickname La Ciudad Industrial. The Census Bureau estimated its population at 22,316 in 2025, while EnciclopediaPR traces the municipio's origins to its foundation in 1881.

That industrial history matters, because the first Street View scene I found is almost aggressively familiar.

Google Street View

If you dropped me into this image with the location hidden, I am not sure I would guess Puerto Rico.

There is a McDonald's. There is a Taco Bell with Pizza Hut attached. There are traffic lights suspended over a wide multilane road, cars turning into parking lots, utility wires, palm trees clipped into corporate landscaping, and a large modern commercial building across the intersection.

There are 3,245 counties and county-equivalent places in the United States, and the randomizer has already begun behaving suspiciously like a storyteller.

First it sent me to Gosper County, Nebraska, a quiet county in the plains. Then it sent me to Yalobusha County, Mississippi, larger, greener, and more Southern in a way that felt both distant and familiar. And now, for the third stop in this series, it has sent me to Coos County, Oregon.

This is the most populous county the randomizer has given me so far. It is also the first coastal county. And visually, it is operating on a different level entirely.

Coos County sits on the southern Oregon coast. Its county seat is Coquille, its largest city is Coos Bay, and its population is somewhere around 64,000, which makes it much larger than either of the first two counties in this little experiment. It was founded in the 1850s, named for the Coos people, and stretches from Pacific beaches and bays into forests, river valleys, and old interior roads.

That last part is what surprised me most.

I expected the coast to be beautiful. Oregon has a reputation for that. But I did not expect the county to feel so geographically compressed, as though several different movie locations had been folded into one map square. One minute, I was looking at fog, cliffs, beach grass, and an old car by the water. A little later, I was standing virtually on a broad beach beside sea stacks and a happy orange dog. Then I was inland, following a narrow road through green forest, sunlight, moss, boulders, flowers, and a small creek that looked suspiciously prepared to transport a hobbit.

This is the running index for Road Trip by Randomizer, a virtual travel series where I use a random U.S. county generator to pick a county or county-equivalent, then wander through it using Google Street View.

This page is not a ranking of which places are “best,” most beautiful, or most important. It is a ranking of encounters: which places grabbed me most through Street View, which scenes lingered, and which virtual roads made me want to keep looking.

A lower score does not mean a place is dull. It may only mean I did not stumble onto its best road yet. The map has a way of keeping secrets.

Scores are subjective and intentionally approximate. Ties are allowed.

There are 3,245 counties and county-equivalent places in the United States, and already, after only two spins of the randomizer, I am beginning to suspect that this project is going to be less about “discovering hidden attractions” and more about learning how much of America exists in a state of deep roadside quiet.

The second county it gave me was Yalobusha County, Mississippi.

Yalobusha sits in north-central Mississippi. It was founded in 1833, named after the Yalobusha River, and has the unusual distinction of having two county seats: Water Valley and Coffeeville. Its population is a little over 12,000, which makes it much larger than the first stop in this series, Gosper County, Nebraska, but still small enough that the county feels, from the Street View roads, mostly rural, dispersed, and watchful.

What surprised me first was not how unfamiliar it looked, but how familiar.

I expected Mississippi to feel much farther away than it did. Instead, many of the roads could almost have been roads I know from North Carolina: nondescript pines pressed up along the shoulder, reddish dirt pull-offs, modest houses set back from the road, trailers half-swallowed by vegetation, the occasional patch of kudzu performing its slow green takeover. The details differ, of course. Every place has its own weathering, its own light, its own roadside grammar. But the broader visual language was unmistakably Southern.

There are 3,245 counties and county-equivalent places in the United States, which means that even before leaving the chair, America is already too large to hold in the mind at once.

So I decided to let chance drive.

The idea is simple: use a random county generator, land somewhere in the United States, then poke around Google Street View looking for whatever the roads are willing to reveal. Not the famous places first. Not the postcard places. The opposite, really. Places that might never appear on an itinerary unless randomness, that tiny digital tornado, drops you there.

The first county it gave me was Gosper County, Nebraska.

And Gosper County, at least from the roads I wandered, does not immediately throw open a carnival of landmarks. It is not trying to impress the passing stranger. It is rural Nebraska in the nearly Platonic sense: flat fields, pale roads, enormous sky, utility poles, farm buildings, windbreaks, and the horizontal patience of land used for growing things.

There is a strange pleasure in that kind of landscape. At first, it looks empty. Then the emptiness starts making demands on your attention.

The roads are spare. The county feels visually quiet in the way a room feels quiet after everyone has gone home. There are long stretches where the main event is the distance itself. Cornfields and stubble fields reach outward in all directions, and the horizon seems less like a boundary than a habit the earth has kept for a very long time.

Why Left vs. Right Doesn’t Cover Me Anymore

I keep getting told I have to “pick a side,” but the two sides on offer are obsessed with priorities I don’t share. So instead of pretending to be a team player for a team I don’t actually like, I’ll just say it: neither the contemporary left nor the contemporary right describes what I believe. Not because I’m a bland centrist, but because both have drifted away from a civic, plural, freedom-first idea of America.

You can actually find versions of this concern in writers as different as Alexis de Tocqueville (worried about overgrown central power), Francis Fukuyama (worried that recognition politics can crowd out shared identity), and Mark Lilla (worried that the left fragmented itself). I’m basically in that family of complaints.

Where the Left Loses Me

Let me start with the left, because there are parts of the left I agree with. I’m for equal protection. I’m for not discriminating by race. I’m for people living how they want without the state or their neighbors harassing them. That’s basic liberalism.

But a lot of modern U.S. progressivism ties those good goals to two things I don’t buy:

1. An ever-expanding welfare/administrative state. It treats “more government” as the automatic answer, even though government and large corporate actors are already deeply entangled. If the state and big business are already in the same bed, I don’t see why I should fatten the state further. Tocqueville warned about this “soft despotism” a long time ago — power that’s not brutal, but is everywhere.

When Identity Politics Became the Perfect Distraction

On Provoked, Scott Horton throws out an idea that isn’t hard to recognize if you lived through 2008–2011: after the federal government, together with the banks, bailed out the big players while a lot of ordinary people got wrecked, two mirror-populisms appeared — the Tea Party on the right and Occupy Wall Street on the left. Both, in different ways, were pointing at the same thing: the state–finance marriage, the bailouts, the feeling that “there’s money for them, not for us.”

Horton’s read is that this was dangerous for the establishment. Once people at the bottom started comparing notes — “hey, you rural conservative, and me, urban student… didn’t we get burned by the same people?” — a weird but effective coalition was possible. According to him, that’s exactly the moment when the identity-politics menu got pushed hardest: race vs. race, young vs. old, straight vs. LGBT, region vs. region, veteran vs. non-veteran. The point wasn’t expanding freedom; the point was to keep people from talking about money, banking, regulatory capture, and corporate welfare. Classic “turn-them-against-the-neighbor” stuff.

He’s not the only one who’s noticed something like that. Writers like Mark Lilla have argued that U.S. liberalism tied itself to a style of identity politics that fragments the electorate and weakens the majorities you actually need to govern. Others on the left have warned that if all the political oxygen goes to recognition battles, the economic structure stays exactly where it is. So even if we can’t prove a secret meeting where “big business + Democrats invented identity politics,” it’s fair to say that in the 2010s identity became very easy to weaponize for division — which is the core of Horton’s point.

If geography shapes national destiny, the United States began with an advantage few nations in history have ever enjoyed. A wide ocean buffering it from Europe’s old rivalries, a political experiment unburdened by monarchies or inherited wars, and a sense of mission rooted more in ideas than in borders—this combination placed America in a unique position. It could have become a neutral power on a continental scale: a republic that influenced the world not through force, but through example.

That wasn’t the path it took. The United States chose expansion, intervention, and global entanglement. The choice wasn’t inevitable, but it became self-reinforcing. And while the late 1990s briefly gave the illusion that the American-led order had produced a stable and conflict-free world—the so-called “end of history”—that stability was built atop decades of interventions and unresolved tensions that would resurface soon after.

This essay explores the neutrality that could have been, the path that was chosen instead, and the consequences of that divergence.

I. Two Doors at the Beginning

In its early years, the United States stood before two plausible futures:

1. Geographic insulation as a shield: A distant republic refusing foreign entanglements, maintaining a limited military, and becoming a steady, predictable mediator in global affairs.

2. Geographic insulation as a springboard: A budding power expanding across the continent, projecting influence abroad, and eventually shaping world affairs through force, alliances, and economic reach.

From the moment a new immigrant steps onto Ellis Island, America sells itself as the land of limitless possibility—an intellectual blank slate where beliefs are meant to be forged in the fires of reason rather than inherited bloodlines. Yet beneath that aspirational veneer lies a potent creed, one that demands its own form of ideological conformity.

In theory, the United States should be a paradise for freethinkers: a nation whose founding documents exalt individual liberty, skepticism of authority, and the Enlightenment’s valorization of reason. The First Amendment’s protection of speech and religion seems tailor-made to shelter those who question dogma, tradition, and entrenched power.

But ideals are one thing, lived reality another. Americans often find that straying too far from the “official” creed—whether by challenging unfettered markets or criticizing founding myths—invites swift social sanctions. In practice, deviance from accepted narratives can brand you as unpatriotic or even subversive.

This tension stems from America’s identity as a creedal nation rather than an ethnic one. Where many countries lean on shared ancestry or cultural homogeneity to forge national unity, the U.S. leans on a shared set of principles. And principles, as it turns out, can be policed just as rigorously as lineage.

So does America really want freethinkers? The short answer: it wants them up to a point. Freethinking that reinforces prosperity, innovation, and technological progress is celebrated—think Silicon Valley iconoclasts or academic mavericks. But freethinking that threatens political stability, economic orthodoxy, or the consumerist consensus is often met with suspicion or outright hostility.