America Desperately Needs a Return to Middle Ground
Not urban progressives or Trumpist reactionaries
It’s time for America to regain its political sanity and pull back from dangerous extremes.
America was never meant to be a nation of political absolutists. The Founders, steeped in the Enlightenment and scarred by tyranny, designed a constitutional republic that mistrusted concentrated power — whether wielded by a king or a mob. They envisioned a system that would force deliberation, reward compromise, and moderate extremes. It was not perfect at birth, nor is it perfect now, but it was crafted with an enduring genius: to contain human ambition through the patient machinery of democratic governance.
Yet today, we are dangerously close to discarding that vision entirely. On one flank, urban progressives promote sweeping cultural and structural changes with little regard for historical consensus, constitutional process, or rural reality. On the other, Trumpist reactionaries have abandoned any pretense of constitutional conservatism in pursuit of unchecked executive power and permanent grievance.
Neither extreme represents a sustainable or sane future for a democratic republic. It is not too late to return to the constitutional middle, but the clock is ticking.
The purpose of the three branches
The U.S. Constitution rests on a profound insight: that no person or institution can be trusted with unrestrained authority. So it divided national power across three branches — legislative, executive, and judicial — each with distinct roles, responsibilities, and the means to constrain the others.
The legislative branch, Congress, makes the laws — especially those governing taxation and spending. But with Congress so evenly split and so badly divided, it is doing a poor job of fulfilling its role. That is the fault of we the voters, because we have allowed ourselves to be whipped into a partisan frenzy through the well-funded efforts and propaganda of partisan media. And we must ask: who do we think benefits from that?
The executive branch was never intended to make laws — only to execute them. The president’s job is to carry out the will of the people as expressed through Congress, not to issue decrees or invent policy unilaterally. The drafters of the Constitution had fought a brutal war to free America from autocratic rule and were determined never to return to it. A president is not a king!
The judicial branch was designed to interpret the laws passed by Congress — not to make laws of its own. But through a long and well-executed strategy and the corrupting influence of money in politics, the Supreme Court has been packed with activist judges who often pursue their own political agenda. That has further weakened the power of Congress to constrain either the executive or judicial branches.
This system of checks and balances was not a flaw but a deliberate feature, a safeguard against tyranny and overreach. The goal was not efficiency, but liberty. The authors of the Constitution knew from bitter experience that concentrated power — whether in a monarch or a charismatic demagogue — would inevitably lead to oppression.
The Founders’ deep distrust of executive power
The presidency was the most carefully circumscribed office in the new republic. Unlike the British king, the American president could not declare war, control spending, appoint judges without consent, or rule by decree. George Washington, the first president, voluntarily stepped down after two terms, establishing a precedent of peaceful transfer of power that was once the envy of the world.
That restraint was born of fear. The Founders understood that executive power, especially in the hands of a populist leader, could become a threat to democracy itself. They had just fought a war against exactly that kind of power. The presidency, in their eyes, was a tool — necessary, but dangerous. It had to be held in check by law, legislature, and the will of the people.
The Cold War erosion of constitutional restraint
But in the 20th century, those restraints began to weaken. The pressures of the Cold War — and especially the threat of nuclear annihilation — led Congress to cede more authority to the executive branch. Faced with the need for rapid response to global crises, presidents gained broad powers to wage undeclared wars, conduct foreign policy in secret, and sidestep congressional oversight.
The National Security Act of 1947 created a sprawling intelligence and defense infrastructure under presidential control. The War Powers Resolution of 1973, meant to restrain executive adventurism, was more often ignored than obeyed. From Korea to Vietnam to covert interventions in Latin America and the Middle East, presidents acted first and sought approval later — if at all.
Some of these powers may have been justified during the Cold War’s existential standoff. But that world no longer exists. The Soviet Union is gone. The threats we face today — cyberwar, climate change, disinformation, rising autocracy — require strategic patience and collaborative governance, not unilateral fiat. And yet, the powers accumulated during the Cold War remain intact, ripe for abuse.
Trump’s exploitation of relaxed constraints
Donald Trump is not the first president to test the boundaries of executive authority. But he is the first to openly reject the legitimacy of constitutional limits — and to build a movement around that rejection.
From the start, Trump treated the presidency not as a public trust, but as a personal fiefdom. He demanded loyalty not to the Constitution, but to himself. He flouted congressional oversight, defied court orders, and used the levers of federal power to punish political enemies and reward allies.
And he learned from his first term. In his second, he has moved even faster. He has packed key agencies with loyalists, pressured universities and law firms to silence dissent, and declared his intent to use the Justice Department as a weapon of vengeance. He has openly threatened to suspend parts of the Constitution and described opponents as enemies of the state.
This is not hypothetical. It is happening now. The separation of powers — once the keystone of American liberty — is being deliberately dismantled. And large segments of the public, exhausted by cultural conflict or seduced by promises of strength, are applauding the destruction.
The danger of waiting too long
We cannot afford to wait for this experiment in strongman rule to fail. By the time an autocrat shows his full hand, it is often too late to stop him. History teaches this lesson again and again.
The time to act is now, while the Constitution still retains its form and much of its function. The courts still have authority. Congress still has the power of the purse. The press still has freedom. The people still have the right to vote and speak and protest.
But these rights will not survive indefinitely without active defense. A Constitution is only as strong as the will of its citizens to uphold it. Once eroded, liberties are hard to reclaim.
A call for sanity and courage
America needs to return to the middle — not a bland centrism, but a principled, constitutional republicanism that values process over personality, law over loyalty, and pluralism over purity.
That does not mean ignoring injustice or refusing to change. It means changing through the mechanisms the Constitution provides: legislation, debate, elections, compromise. It means rejecting both the authoritarianism of the Trumpist right and the impatience of the revolutionary left.
This is not a call to nostalgia, but to realism. No society can thrive long when power is unchecked, when factions refuse to listen to one another, and when every disagreement becomes an existential crisis.
We must rebuild a shared civic culture grounded in humility, mutual respect, and institutional trust. That will take hard work — especially in a media environment that rewards outrage and simplifies everything into friend or enemy.
But it can be done. It must be done.
We still have a Constitution. The question is: do we still have the cultural maturity to live by it?
