Radical Centrism?

A short break from business with some morning musings on America and its dividers

People often ask me for my views on America, especially in recent years, since I’m about as “American” as it gets yet now live in Europe. My maternal family runs deep in American history, and the stories are wild. We trace our lineage back to the Mayflower (not particularly unique, I’ll admit), and our last name goes back to the founding of Concord, Mass. While working on Wall Street, I even served as one of the youngest board directors of the Sons of the Revolution -- the country's oldest patriotic lineage society and the owner of Fraunces Tavern, NYC's oldest restaurant.

My great-great-great-great-grandfather was among the longest-living Revolutionary War veterans, reaching 101. In his 20s, he fell in love with a Native American woman, who tragically died young. Because of their union, he was ostracized by his community. For years, my family believed we descended from those two and carried Native blood, until later research and DNA testing revealed that our line actually continued through his second wife.

All of this is to say, I’ve been deeply connected to American history not only through study, but through bloodlines. It’s a subject I continue to explore with genuine curiosity and find it fascinating to be "monitoring the situation" from overseas.

At the same time, I’m also more than half Irish -- and thanks to longstanding geopolitical friendship treaties between the US and Ireland, I have the right to live and work in Europe. My grandmother was born in Ireland and emigrated to the US as a teenager, and countless other Irish immigrant lines wove into my more “American” branches. At the end of the day, my ancestry is roughly half Irish and half a blend of German, English, and Dutch.

My views are always in flux, but I generally rely on two high-level framings. They’re more academic than political hot-takes... usually less spicy than people want to hear... but here they are.

First, I often think of the old saying how someone can be ugly on the outside but beautiful on the inside. That’s how I feel about America most of the time. Our country has some extremely ugly manifestations -- symptoms, external displays, cultural excesses -- but its underlying “coding,” the original political architecture, is about as close to perfect as humans have ever managed.

By that I mean the Constitution, which I consider among the greatest political documents in human history. What makes it so remarkable is its spirit of ongoing adaptation. Jefferson himself, for example, in an 1789 letter to Madison, wrote that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living,” arguing that the dead have no right to bind future generations forever. He even suggested that every constitution and law naturally expires after ~19 years, or else it risks becoming “an act of force, and not of right.”

So if I have any core critique, it’s that while America has the best rulebook in the world, it’s generally in the hands of hacks and it's been this way for quite some time. Possibly the entire time. At worst, they exploit modern tools to divide, inflame, and extract personal benefit. At best, they simply stand by while others do the same. And this is true for both "sides" in equal measure, but for different reasons and aims. The result is that the inner “beauty” of the system rarely shows itself.

The second framing is how absurd both extremes of the politico-cultural spectrum are -- not just in the US but globally -- when they retell the American origin story through a narrow geohistorical lens. Each extreme is trying to weaponize history. One side reduces everything to “heritage” versus “other” while the other pushes “oppressor” versus “victim” narratives. Both are performative and designed to divide, driven solely by base emotions devoid of any rational thought or constructive engagement.

If you want to be purely objective, you will have to go all the way back to Pangea -- or at least think in geological time -- to understand how the world developed and how we arrived here. It’s never simply a story of good versus evil, but that’s not an exciting headline, is it? Doesn't rile up the crowd so nobody pays any attention, especially in the era of hot takes and rage bait.

In a geographic accident, people crossed the Bering land bridge and, over many thousands of years, spread from the Arctic down to the tip of South America and back up to eastern Canada. Truly remarkable. But the literal shapes of the continents were a huge deal. The Americas are oriented north–south, with massive climatic and ecological variety along that axis. Meanwhile, Eurasia is oriented east–west along similar latitudes. This made it easier for crops, animals, and people to spread across similar climates -- leading to more rapid exchanging of ideas and technologies between civilizations -- which accelerated development there compared to the Americas.

Then Europeans -- who had developed long-range navigation by the late 1400s -- ran into the Americas looking for an entirely different part of the planet. They didn't even know there was a Western Hemisphere. That encounter reconnected human populations separated by roughly ten thousand years, unleashing catastrophe, mostly biological. Urban Eurasian societies carried diseases to which they had developed immunity... and Indigenous Americans hadn't because they had never encountered them. The result was demographic collapse on a staggering scale. There were also killings, conquest, and cruelty everywhere -- inexcusable, even for the standards of the time -- but historians now estimate disease was the primary driver of the ~90% decline in native populations before the English colonies even arrived. To blame present-day America as the moral author of this is ahistorical. The US didn’t exist for centuries afterward. Nor did the first permanent colony exist until over 100 years later.

And even if you look through the most extreme oppressor–victim lens -- which I find obviously unhelpful -- the question remains... why do some political factions decide to highlight one set of oppressors over another? Human nature is brutal. We are, at our core, a chaotic species capable of doing horrible things to each other. The more we dwell on the horrors of the past, the more emotional and angry we become, and the greater the temptation to seek rectification or revenge. That only repeats the cycle and helps no one.

All of this points to a middle ground nobody wants to sit inside in that multiple truths can coexist. Horrific violence and exploitation occurred when Europeans arrived in the Americas -- and yet the biological and geographic accidents that produced unequal outcomes were not anyone’s "fault" or moral “aim.” With today’s resources and knowledge, yes we ought to help people suffering from the legacies of those events -- but not by demonizing individuals alive today who had no hand in creating them.

The same simplification happens around slavery and institutional racism. Both extremes get it wrong. Yes, some African rulers did raid inland tribes and sell captives to Europeans. But they did so with guns to their heads -- figuratively and literally -- because Portuguese, Spanish, and other traders had the firepower and leverage to force that system into existence. And yes, most enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and Brazil rather than North America. Both points are technically true, but neither excuses or diminishes the horror of how slavery developed in the US. In the American South, slavery became institutionalized in a way that ensured children were born into bondage -- absolutely crazy -- multiplying generations of suffering. In the Caribbean, mortality was so high that populations were replaced through continued importation. Both were cruel beyond imagination.

Acknowledging those truths doesn’t mean living Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, or Anglo-Americans today should be personally condemned or dispossessed. It means recognizing the inherited inequities these systems created, and addressing them through policy, opportunity, and repair -- but not by replaying history as a simplistic morality play of "us" versus "them."

Sadly, no one is getting this right.