Democracy’s Tech Debt

Why We Need Short-Term Action — and Long-Term Debugging

The Bug Is in the System

I have never been at a really early-stage "start-up" company. Every company I have joined has been more of a "scale-up" with legacy technology in place. And I have always been confronted with the question: “Should we just replatform?” It is always tempting to start over, especially when a system becomes slow, feels buggy, or there are new competitors using the latest tech to come after you and your customers. However, in almost every case, it is too expensive and too risky to reboot. Instead, you have to debug, patch, and/or refactor. In essence, you try to modernize around the edges while protecting the core architecture.

America’s democracy is facing the same choice. After nearly 250 years, our original "codebase" — the Constitution — is burdened with layers of political tech debt: flaws left unpatched, vulnerabilities newly exposed, updates delayed or distorted. Historically, the path forward, while time-consuming, was through thoughtful reflection and compromise. As I wrote about before, gridlock (friction) is a feature, not a bug. However, today we are living through a constitutional crisis in real-time. We are witnessing Trump and the administration try to exploit the vulnerabilities in the code base to consolidate power and bypass democratic norms. That’s why we need both:

• Short-term action to defend the system under siege.

• A longer-term commitment to carefully, patriotically debug democracy itself.

The choice is clear: do we reinforce the core architecture "of the people, by the people, for the people" or do we let the system become corrupted, vulnerable to a hostile takeover.

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The Founders Knew the Code Would Age

As many people have noted, the Constitution was not meant to be a perfect revelation. Instead, I would argue the founders designed it as an MVP (minimal viable product): a functional but unfinished product designed to evolve. For example, James Madison, writing in Federalist No. 37, admitted the difficulty of creating a perfect government, acknowledging that “no model of government can be perfect. . . owing to the fallibility of man.”

Thomas Jefferson was even blunter. In a 1789 letter to Madison ("The Earth Belongs to the Living") he wrote: "The earth belongs always to the living generation." In that same letter, Jefferson argued that every constitution should naturally expire after 19 years unless renewed, because no generation has the moral right to bind future ones permanently.

This is radical!

I had no idea he had written this: it feels so modern. Jefferson wasn’t advocating chaos; he was warning against ossification. Maintenance wasn’t a betrayal of the Founders' vision. It was the vision. At the risk of stretching the metaphor too far, the Founders didn’t just write the original codebase — they built in ways to maintain and update it:

• Amendments were like GitHub pull requests: proposed upgrades to be reviewed, debated, and merged carefully into the core system.

• Checks and balances were a form of modular design: separating powers across branches to ensure that a failure in one module wouldn’t crash the entire platform.

• Separation of powers acted like feature flags: enabling different functions (legislation, execution, adjudication) to operate independently, toggling authority carefully rather than running everything through a single overloaded system.

They expected us — the users, the citizens — to continue patching and improving the system. But they also expected us to do this as part of the system, not outside of it.

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How We Accumulated & Have Addressed Tech Debt Over the Years

From the start, America’s code was buggy. Some of the more egregious examples include

• Slavery, a catastrophic moral and structural flaw embedded directly into the original system.

• Women’s exclusion from the franchise, a permissions error that denied full citizenship to half the population.

• The forced displacement of Native Americans, especially under Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, which treated indigenous peoples as obstacles to be cleared rather than citizens to be protected.

• The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, a massive suspension of constitutional rights based on race and wartime fear.

• The so-called "Operation Wetback" of the 1950s, where U.S. authorities carried out mass deportations of Mexican Americans — often violating due process and human dignity.

• The Electoral College, a design compromise intended to balance state power, but which has increasingly acted as a bottleneck to majoritarian will.

Fortunately, our leaders were able to rise to the occasion, even if it took too long to release critical “patches” like the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments after the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the same time, I think we would all acknowledge that many bugs were left partially fixed. We must address them. And, compounding this issue is that there are new vulnerabilities being exposed (e.g., the spread of disinformation, the use of AI propaganda, the overreach of procedural exploitation) that are now being actively weaponized against the system. We must act now!

Beyond the technical flaws, the last election makes clear: many Americans feel the system itself was never fully designed to serve them. The frustration isn’t just about slow processes. It’s about structural inequities — about who has access, who is heard, and who is protected. If democracy is to remain a living project, debugging must include repairing the deeper architecture of representation, opportunity, and trust.

Net/net: It’s a tribute to the Founders' architecture that the system has survived. But let’s not confuse uptime with resilience. In essence, we are running 21st-century threats on an 18th-century codebase. Without serious debugging across both technical and moral dimensions, I am afraid a large cohort of people is going to feel the only option is revolution.

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White Hats, Black Hats — and the Real Divide

In cybersecurity, "white hats" disclose vulnerabilities to strengthen systems. "Black hats" exploit vulnerabilities to hijack systems. In a democracy, the same logic applies.

• White hats, whether reformers or institutionalists, work to improve system integrity for all users, even when it’s hard.

• Black hats, whether insiders or outsiders, exploit system flaws to entrench power for a few.

The real divide isn’t between institutionalists and revolutionaries. It’s between builders and breakers. Institutions aren’t inherently good. Revolutions aren’t inherently bad. What matters is whether the action strengthens or weakens the shared, open architecture of democracy.

Why "Replatforming" is Dangerous

What we saw in the election, I think, was a LARGE number of frustrated citizens who want to "start over" — to replatform democracy entirely — to burn it down. In tech, replatforming is often a disaster:

• High risk of catastrophic failure

• Loss of proven, battle-tested systems

• Massive new vulnerabilities introduced

Revolutions, too, often destroy more than they rebuild. History is replete with disastrous reboots:

• The French Revolution's descent into terror

• Russia’s Bolshevik revolution leading to authoritarianism

• Venezuela’s constitutional rewrites turning into dictatorship

Burning down the system usually doesn’t end in freedom. It ends in closed-source governance, i.e., power without accountability. The real work is not just to defend the old code, but to open it up, refactor it, and make it more accessible and equitable for all users.

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What Debugging Democracy Looks Like

The just-released poll results from Siena/New York Times show that the tide is starting to shift. Only 41% of the people surveyed approve of the job Trump is doing. According to CNN, this is the lowest approval rating of any president (other than Trump V1) in the last 80 years. The kicker is that there is still a very partisan view of the work he has done, with 86% of Republicans approving and 93% of Democrats disapproving. Clearly, we still have an enormous gap to bridge if we are going to move forward productively — together.

To that point, we need two paths forward:

• NOW: Defend the existing system against immediate threats

• NEXT: Commit to long-term maintenance and modernization

Short-term actions needed now:

• Defend judicial independence.

• Protect the integrity of elections.

• Strengthen the separation of powers.

• Resist efforts to consolidate executive power illegitimately.

Long-term debugging needed:

• Address systemic inequalities to ensure the system truly serves all citizens, not just a privileged few.

• Fix the election system by updating election laws to close loopholes and modernizing voting access and security infrastructure. Most importantly, reinforcing the need for transparency in political financing.

• Restore trust by simplifying processes and taking advantage of the tech we have today to provide more open and transparent government & governance.

• Build civic education to inoculate against disinformation.

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Debugging as Patriotism

The real patriots aren't the ones setting fire to the Constitution. They’re the ones doing the hard, unglamorous work of patching, upgrading, and future-proofing it.

Democracy was never meant to be a finished product. It was meant to be a living project — a system that demands every generation’s attention and care.

As Madison warned in Federalist No. 51: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." We are not angels. And the country we bequeath to our children will only be as strong as the debugging we are willing to do today.

The next “commit” is ours to make.