An “-ism” is simply what your mind is willing to put time and effort behind. In America, you may choose yours so long as it does not extinguish anyone else’s. That remains the country’s actual magic. Gather friends on a commune, raise food, distribute it collectively — have at it. History already wrote the ending. Just do not demand the rest of us underwrite the experiment. Voluntary association is one thing; compulsion is another.
No matter which -ism you prefer, you are still fed and sheltered by the personal capitalist who actually produces things and gets them to you. Adam Smith’s butcher, baker, and brewer do not supply your dinner from benevolence; they do it from regard to their own interest. Every ideology, including the ones that denounce markets, ultimately rests on the daily work of people who turn effort into goods and move those goods to the people who need them. When the -ism pretends otherwise, it simply feeds off the same producers it lectures.
Recommended Stories
Statism is the compulsion that pretends otherwise. It converts the Constitution’s limited government into a permanent parent that soothes feelings, redistributes dollars, and invents rights faster than it protects the old ones. When bureaucrats enjoy higher pay and benefits than the people they are supposed to serve, that is pure statism — the political opposite of responsible individualism. Between the two poles (total responsibility to the state, or responsibility to no one but oneself) lies the only space in which government refrains from violating personal sovereignty while still punishing those who do. It is in this space alone that innovation can occur, fueled by generational wealth.
Nationalism is not a slur. Loving a homeland that has drawn people across oceans and borders for four centuries and allowed them to endow their posterity with roughly $100 trillion of infrastructure is ordinary gratitude. Tribalism is the narrower disease: internecine fights over control when the outcomes barely differ. Populism is the popularity contest that mistakes personality and trend for principle.
The House still carries the fasces on its seal: bound rods that flex under stress without snapping. The point was never the metal straps; it was the flexible shafts they held together. “E pluribus unum” works the same way — 435 different populations bound to a common purpose yet free to represent their own interests. Fascism begins the moment the straps matter more than the shafts.
Since Roe v. Wade, reproductive choice served as the Democratic Party’s primary binding strap. Any group willing to defend it could enter the tent. Once that strap loosened, the apparatus moved to new ones: the claim that a woman can “be the daddy,” that men belong in women’s sports, that open borders remain a moral absolute even while pure demand drives housing costs higher. The same taxpayers who fund schools, food, shelter, utilities, and medicine are told to underwrite an expanding non-productive class that then raises the next generation of claimants. The result is a peculiar double population: the anti-motherhood cohort that demands freedom from parenting its own children, and the mommy-state cohort that insists on parenting everyone else’s. Parenting is not the remote delivery of resources. Presence and daily formation cannot be outsourced without producing the very failures the bureaucracy then claims to remedy.
Republicans are not innocent. After the 1994 Contract with America, they won the House for the first time in 40 years. That moment marked a clearer inflection point. Parties sorted more cleanly — Democrats concentrating in urban and suburban cores, Republicans in rural and exurban territory. Congressional elections nationalized. Control of the chamber became competitive again, raising the stakes of every map. Competitive districts and split-ticket voting declined. Efficiency-gap and seats-votes measures show that the 1970s and 1980s generally favored Democrats; the mid-1990s began the transition; later cycles, especially after the 2000 and 2010 censuses and the REDMAP project, produced growing Republican bias in several large states once Republicans controlled more of the redistricting process. The most extreme, technologically sophisticated gerrymanders arrived later, but the willingness to treat maps as high-stakes weapons dates to the post-1994 polarization spiral.
Gerrymandering remains a bipartisan protection racket. It severs the vote from the actual communities that share work and risk, manufacturing artificial demographies so that power brokers, not precincts, decide outcomes. The Constitution scaled family dynamics upward for a reason: local groups and counties handle the daily civilizing work; states act as the proximate authority; the federal government exists to keep external threats and inter-state predation at bay. When legislatures carve districts across those natural lines for partisan advantage — whether under Democratic dominance before 1994 or Republican gains afterward — they invert the design.
OPINION: RECALIBRATION OR THEFT? THE CASE FOR REDISTRICTING DONE RIGHT
The Supreme Court now has a clear opportunity to correct this. It can direct the states to draw maps as tightly as possible to existing civic boundaries, utility service areas, common economic interests, and school zones. Such districts would restore representation to the places where people actually live, work, and raise children. The result would be more moderate and competitive seats, less tribal warfare, and stronger social adhesion — exactly the flexible binding the fasces was meant to provide.
Both houses have decided that the straps matter more than the shafts. One side treats every social pathology as proof that the state must mother harder. The other answers with its own rigid orthodoxies and map-making machinery. Neither trusts the American premise that free people will choose their own -isms, fund them voluntarily, and leave the rest alone — while still depending, every single day, on the personal capitalist who actually produces. Until representation is restored to actual places rather than to manufactured majorities, the binding straps we choose will continue to shape us instead of the other way around.
Michael Breeden is a retired Air Force chief master sergeant with 29 years of service as a combat controller in special operations. He writes on sovereignty, culture, and institutional accountability.
