In this year’s train wreck of a presidential campaign, neither of the two major-party tickets is advocating serious policies that come close to addressing crucial challenges facing our nation.

The United States faces dire threats or massive impediments in three major areas the federal government can directly address, plus a fourth with which federal officials can assist at the margins or indirectly. The first involves severe military and diplomatic challenges. The second consists of the combination of a near-calamitous debt outlook with the imminent insolvency of Social Security and Medicare. The third, which adds considerably to the second, is a federal bureaucracy that is simultaneously overweening, invasive, unaccountable, unresponsive, and sclerotic. The fourth is a culture degraded by social pathologies, dangerously misplaced tribalism, civic ignorance, and pockets of extreme poverty. Most of those degradations are best handled at the state, local, and civil society levels, but federal leadership can, in some ways, lend a hand.