New Nationalism: For the American Millennium

"Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life."

Theodore Roosevelt

Today, the United States of America finds itself in one of its most precarious historical situations. At the founding of the Republic, a promise was made to the American people that so long as they remain loyal and faithful to their nation, they would remain free to pursue the American Dream: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness— Or in other words, that anyone, regardless of background, could achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and a better life through hard work, determination, and initiative. But today, this dream is more distant and abstract than ever before. The average American struggles to afford a basic basket of goods, and the federal government, as long as anyone alive can remember, has refused to answer why this is. As Americans struggle to meet the essentials to care for themselves and their families, their jobs have simultaneously been shipped overseas, while the small number of productive opportunities for employment which remain here at home have been auctioned off to a cheap and unorganized underclass of migrants who have been led to believe in the same American Dream as that which brought many millions before them. This same underclass has been cruelly betrayed, just as their American brethren have been, by the multinational corporations, which lobbied for the destruction of the American identity, borders, and domestic labor for the purposes of neoliberalism and free trade which have rotted the core of the American nation.

The multinational corporation has declared that the United States of America is not a unique nation in its own right and that the American is not a citizen of the most important country in world history, but rather, a mere citizen of the world. The individual is no longer perceived, in the current world order, as a master of his own destiny, free to confront any challenge which awaits, but rather, as a form of currency, to be exchanged, revalued or cast aside at the whims of a corporate executive in a high-rise commercial boardroom. Simultaneously, American culture itself has been stripped away and replaced by a slew of billboards, advertisements, company slogans and lifeless hum that has transformed the town square into a bland, buzzing hive, deprived of the innovative and novel spirit that once characterized American public life. Small enterprise is virtually unheard of today, replaced with cascading chains of large corporations that stretch throughout every city in America. Organized labor tells us a similar story, as while in 1954, 35% of the American workforce was organized, today that number has fallen to a staggering 10%.

But the problems that the United States faces today do not merely stem from the transgressions of international finance, or Wall Street, or the Silicon Valley. These problems are, once one arrives at the root of the matter, most clearly identifiable as defects of American governance. The American political class has acted as the night watchman not only for predatory monopolies, but also for their own financial gain, and it should be no wonder to anybody why things have ended up this way. The United States, for over two centuries, has been governed by two political parties which have never resisted the urge to stoop to lower levels of demagoguery and deceit for the sake of winning a few extra ballots. Politicians are rewarded for corruption and cronyism, while sincere reformers have been consistently shuttered and sidelined without failure.

Beneath all of these structural failures (the offshored factories, the open borders, the corporate consolidation, and the annihilation of organized labor) lies the more devastating reality that the American dollar no longer buys the American life it once promised. This erosion of purchasing power has left the American citizen staring into an empty wallet on a Thursday night, wondering how a full week of honest work cannot cover both the rent and the grocery bill. A dollar earned today buys what fifteen cents bought when Richard Nixon sat in the Oval Office over five decades ago. And this has been felt at every kitchen table, every gas pump, and every pharmacy counter in America. The American worker has been told for forty years that he is “sharing in the prosperity.” But the prosperity is a farce. Wages have stagnated while the cost of shelter, education, healthcare, and energy has soared. The average American male today earns, in real terms, less than his counterpart did in the 1970s. The median family now requires two incomes to afford what a single income purchased a generation ago. The savings rate has collapsed to near zero, while credit card debt has exploded to over one trillion dollars. The American home has been transformed from a unit of production and stability into a unit of perpetual consumption and debt-servitude. Where housing was once the cornerstone of middle-class security, it now costs five or six times the average annual wage.

A new car, meanwhile, costs nearly half the average annual wage. A university education now demands a mortgage-sized loan that follows its debtor to the grave. The multinational corporation, hand-in-hand with a federal bureaucracy captured by private interests, has discovered a perfect arrangement. Wages have been allowed to remain suppressed via the flooding of the labor market with cheap foreign labor, while whatever productive capacity remains has been offshored, and the currency has been inflated such that whatever pittance the worker does earn melts away before his next paycheck. The American ruling class has thrived on asset inflation while the producing classes have drowned in price inflation. And what has the political class done to arrest this decline? Nothing— Worse than nothing. Their trade deals, including NAFTA, have deliberately tied the American worker's wages to the lowest bidder in the developing world. They have opened the borders not out of compassion, but out of a cold calculation that a surplus of labor keeps wages anchored to the floor. Gone is the saying “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free”, and in its place has arrived a pale horseman who proclaims, “Give us your cheap, your expendable, and your unwanted, that we may exploit”. The American Dream wasn’t killed overnight. It was stolen a penny a day for decades, whether it was by smiling politicians, or corporate billionaires counting their profits, and with it has gone a man’s ability to choose his own destiny.

A house divided cannot stand, and the United States of America is certainly more divided in its current state, than at any point in its entire history. Observing the current predicament that America finds itself in, the NNA proposes an unprecedented political platform which will restore the vitality and vigor of the Republic, and return to the common man, the ability to choose his own stars.

A Popular Congress

The government of the United States of America is not perfect, and no president in American history would say that it ever was. Despite this, America has constantly pushed to pursue a “more perfect union”. Those words comprised the preamble to the American constitution itself. The problems behind the state of governance today can be summarized quite simply in three words: plutocracy, gerontocracy and partocracy. The rule of the rich, the rule of the elderly, and the rule of political parties must come to an end. In an era in which the nation is to be placed at the forefront of the activities of state, party interests can serve no proper function. The astute reader would recall that it was the first president of the United States himself, George Washington, who argued that political parties ought to be absolutely absent from American democracy. Washington’s full statement regarding the “spirit of the party” went as follows:

"Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally. ... The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions."

To solve the problems that currently face the people of the United States due to the corruption and incapacity of the political party, the NNA insists that the federal government must transform into a true representative of the will of the American people, which in its current state, it is most certainly not. To most adequately represent the economic, social and political interests of the American people, patriotic and professional trade associations, comprised of both labor and capital representation, should be granted legislative powers and responsibilities within US Congress in leu of the current, regionalized representation. The aforementioned recognized trade associations ought to be composed of economically productive wage-earners, technical & managerial staff, commercial personnel, small business-owners, public servants, artists, teachers, students, workers employed in liberal professions, members of worker & consumer cooperatives, and the self-employed. It is the vision of the NNA that the rise of the trade associations as electoral bodies would allow for the displacement of traditional party politics, and eventually, the erasure of the party system altogether. The United States Congress must be transformed into a body consisting of a Professional Senate (composed of carpenters, doctors, lawyers, etc.) and a House of Representatives consisting of American labor unions and employer associations. In displacing the rule of political parties, a people’s Congress of this nature would break the influence of both foreign and oligarchic interests.

In the future America, real democracy will take hold, a democracy where candidates cannot take legalized bribes in the form of PACs, a democracy in which your informed vote genuinely matters. This new America will not model itself on outdated, incomprehensible, idiotic geographic constituencies. There will be no more choosing voters. There will be no electoral college in which the will of a handful of men can override the voices of millions. You cannot draw lines on maps to decide where you are going to be represented. You cannot move the base of your voting. Instead, the future America will model itself on industrial elections. The coal miner will vote among the coal miners, the brick‑maker among the brick‑makers, thereby eliminating the inherent corruptibility of geographic electoralism and ensuring that every voter is informed. The doctor will elect a doctor, the electrician an electrician. Only through this may a Republic of virtue be achieved. Every voter will vote from a position of understanding and information, for he will be voting for one of his own to represent him. In this, we will have destroyed the capability for plutocratic powers to exploit the population based on team‑sport politics. We will remove the tools of the corrupt, self‑serving, hostile clique that currently rules America, and through this will free the American people from the burden of a dying democracy.

Reform of Governance

Many Americans today protest that their voice no longer matters. The voice of the people matters less today in determining the legislative agenda of Congress than at any point since the institution of universal suffrage. Though Washington DC claims to represent the will of the American people, it has never felt more distant, even to those residing in its own neighboring states, and yet everywhere, its overbearing shadow is felt. The NNA proposes a simple solution: That all Americans ought to have the power to initiate legislation to the federal government through mass petitions and referendums. These are of special importance, and ought to be regarded with the utmost attentive attitude by public officials, as the voice of the American people is the greatest factor of importance in determining the direction of American governance.

The NNA believes that leveraging the mass media for the sake of electoral and political gain is a threat to democracy, as it gives an advantage to those artificial interests with greater capital and more sponsors, leading to a government of the rich, for the rich and by the rich, rather than one of the people, by the people and for the people. There is only one solution to this grave ill, and that is immediate, heavy and extensive regulation on political campaigning through media to create a barrier against politicians, including equal limits on the amount of allowed airtime/advertising for all politicians, as well as equal restrictions on finances for all campaigns to prevent the artificial influence of private interests.

Today, the American political class enriches itself through the embezzlement of government funds and the shady dealings of insider trading. As a natural response to this endemic corruption, the NNA proposes that the income annually for any active politician should not be allowed to be even a fraction of a percent higher than the average income of the population which they preside over at any given time. The salaries and total income of local/provincial politicians must be restricted to the average income of the localities which they preside over. The same basic principle must follow for all politicians at a national level. This restriction will aid in preventing the interjection of the interests of mega-corporations in legislation which financially back certain politicians, representative of their ambitions. Through preventing the interjection of corporations in politics, this proposal aims at cutting down on all corruption driven by private interests.

The United States of America is currently ruled not merely by corruption, but by the ideas of an era gone by. The United States of today is ruled by a class of elderly and outdated politicians who neither know nor care for the plights and the struggles of the American people. Fifteen percent of Congressman today first entered into their current seats over a quarter century ago, while nearly half of all voting members are over 65 years old. America must address this crisis head on and ascend to the lofty and lively spirit of its youth. To do so, the minimum age for office holding must be reduced to 25 years of age and must in turn be capped at 65 years of age, prohibiting all candidacies for citizens over the age of 60. This will bring an end to American gerontocracy and ensure the emergence of new, youthful, and dynamic voices in the American political scene.

Despite the bravery of those individual officers who have dedicated their lives to American law enforcement, it is a matter of fact that must be acknowledged, that the modern police force, as it has evolved in America, is no longer a servant of the people but an arm of an unaccountable state, funded by the same interests that have displaced the American people themselves. The current system of policing has exchanged the old American principle of local, neighborly justice for a model of injustice. To solve this problem, voluntary public service corps ought to be established, composed of local citizens who know the streets they walk, the families they protect, and the duties they owe to their own kindred. Such militias, answerable directly to the community, would restore the original American understanding that public safety is a shared obligation of the armed and virtuous citizenry. American police have been removed from their communities. This cannot be the way things go on. Policing must be organic to a community, but it must also be professional. The American system of electing police leadership officials such as sheriffs and other local law enforcement executives, though it began as an earnest attempt to uphold democratic values, has become just as corrupt and rotten as the so‑called democratic system that surrounds it. Elected sheriffs cater to donors, to political factions, and to the wealthy, not to the communities they supposedly serve. In the future America, policing will be professionalized. Police will be community‑oriented. Police will be the exemplar of civil authority. These are the three tenets of the policing of tomorrow. First and foremost, the end of electoral police departments and so‑called sheriffs. In their place, a National Police Agency shall be formed. It shall be organized on a community basis, with a focus on returning trained officers to the communities from which they originated, as well as establishing and operating community‑based, voluntary policing partnerships, while also maintaining the discipline and competence expected of them and expected of the civil government. Officers will be recruited from the communities they will serve, trained to national standards, and held accountable by a civilian review board composed of local citizens. The National Police Agency will not be a standing army of occupation, but instead a public service corps, dedicated to the protection of the people rather than the enforcement of oligarchic privilege.

No policing reform would be meaningful if the system that the police uphold is not equally reformed. The American judicial system, founded upon steadfast pillars, has been rotted away like everything else. It has been made a mockery, where there is a division between the left hand, the right hand, the left foot, and the right foot, where none knows what the other is doing, or, at the very worst, is actively against the other. You have five layers in the current administrative system of incomprehensible nonsense. Your local community passes a law that is not upheld by the local city, which is upheld by the local county, which is not upheld by the local state, which is upheld by the federal government. This system intentionally penalizes those who do not understand it and is inherently unfair. The solution is a simplification of structure. All courts will be national, from your local court to your city court to the capital court. In this, we will remove the combative and nonsensical system as it currently exists. No longer will your local community, HOA, or whatever else there is be capable of passing a bylaw that goes in opposition to city ordinances. No longer will your city be able to create a bylaw or punishment for an action that is not covered by your state. In this, we remove the incomprehensible and unnecessary localized bureaucracy that has plagued America for generations. A unified National Court System will have three tiers: local district courts (presided over by judges assigned regionally but operating under uniform federal procedure), appellate circuit courts, and a Supreme Court for final review. Jurisdictional disputes between “federal” and “state” courts will become a thing of the past as there will be no separate state court systems.

In the same vein of thinking, there must be a shift in justice away from the cult of punishment and toward the sensibility of justice. There are thousands of Americans in prison for nonsense minor violations. America sports the largest prison population in the world due to this fetishization of incarceration. The future America will not fetishize punishment over real justice. Is the solution to a third speeding offense prison? Should somebody with a gram of marijuana go to jail? The answer is no. Crime must have a reasonable and fair repercussion. To the habitual speeder, the loss of a license is due. To the addict, a community‑based intervention of treatment, counseling, restorative justice must be called for. To the petty thief, restitution to the victim and community service. Real justice, the kind that involves lengthy incarceration, is to be reserved for those who truly offend: the murderers, the rapists, the armed robbers, the serial fraudsters who steal pensions and life savings. For these, our prisons will be reserved, and they will be adequate, humane, and focused on genuine rehabilitation where possible and permanent separation from society where necessary. But for the millions of Americans currently trapped in the criminal justice system for nonviolent, victimless, or trivial offenses, we will open the gates. This is not softness on crime, but hardness on injustice.

The current means for prosecuting corruption (The Department of Justice, congressional ethics committees, the FBI) have proven to be instruments of an elite establishment unbothered by the ethical imperatives of a truly democratic state. Politicians caught trading votes for campaign contributions, insider trading on nonpublic information, or steering contracts to their relatives receive either wrist slaps, or full retirement pensions. The people have no recourse. The NNA therefore proposes an independent, popularly-elected Commission Against Corruption, composed of retired judges, citizen auditors, and forensic accountants selected by lot from among qualified applicants. This commission shall have the power to initiate its own investigations, subpoena any records, and remove corrupt political figures from office by a supermajority vote, subject to immediate public review. All findings ought to be published in plain language for the American people to judge. No officeholder, no matter how powerful, shall be immune. The commission's budget shall be fixed as a percentage of recovered embezzled funds, giving it every incentive to hunt waste, fraud, and abuse wherever it nests.

The practice of carving up election districts to entrench incumbents and dilute the votes of political opponents, known more popularly as “gerrymandering”, is an abomination before the principle of one person, one vote. Today, politicians choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. The NNA proposes two remedies. First, district division must be based on social communities rather than on arbitrary infrastructure barriers such as highway divides, which are deliberately engineered to split cohesive communities for partisan advantage. Second, independent citizen commissions, composed of nonpartisan or evenly balanced members selected by lottery from the public, shall be authorized to outline all political districts.

Economic Reform

The American government has the duty to defend the interests of its people by ensuring exclusive public ownership of sectors such as utilities, the hydrocarbon industry, law enforcement, the military, and all other domains upon which the life and security of the nation depend. Water, electricity, natural gas, and fuel are not luxury goods to be auctioned to the highest bidder. These sectors are the blood that fuels the American economy and the birthright of every American citizen. Yet today, private monopolies and foreign-controlled conglomerates set the price of your heat in winter, your electricity in summer, and your gasoline at every pump, skimming billions in profit while they watch American infrastructure crumble. The NNA therefore demands that all utilities, all hydrocarbon extraction and refining, all rail and energy transportation, and all other strategic industries be transferred to public ownership. When a necessity cannot be lived without, it cannot be left to the greed of shareholders. Public control means public accountability for the sake of the common good rather than private enrichment.

The income tax, as it has been applied in America since the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, was sold to the people as a modest levy on the rich but has metastasized into a universal burden that penalizes every hour of honest labor. Worse, the revenues are funneled not to the benefit of the working man but to corporate subsidies and the ballooning interest payments on a debt owed largely to the very bankers who manipulate our currency. Therefore, the NNA demands the total eradication of income taxation, proposing a sensible alternative in its place: The abolition of all taxes on income, to be replaced by directing the surplus labor-value of workers into public infrastructure projects rather than filing it into the pockets of company shareholders who leech off the sweat and blood of our hard-working people. In simpler terms: today, when a worker labors, a portion of the value he creates is extracted by his employer as profit and distributed to absentee shareholders. To amend this ill, the NNA proposes that surplus value would instead be captured democratically and reinvested directly into bridges, hospitals, schools, water systems, and public transit. The worker would take home his full wage, free of withholding, while the value that once enriched economic parasites would thereon enrich the commons. This same strategy ought to be then pursued for sales taxes, property taxes, and all other levies, with the ultimate goal of the complete eradication of all income taxation entirely. The American people's labor should fund their infrastructure, with not a single dollar passing through the hands of a tax collector ever again.

Much of the taxation scheme we have seen over the past century is a recent invention, dating no further back than the First World War. Income taxes, land taxes on personal property, and a whole host of other levies did not exist in quantifiable terms before the modern era. So why do they exist now? The short answer is that the state needs money to fulfill its obligations to its people. The fundamental core of any social contract is that the individual provides something to the community in exchange for the basics and stability that the community provides in return. This country’s government has abused this contract and this good will. It has enshrined itself as a government of taxation without representation. It has legalized corruption, legalized bribery, and encouraged politicians to see their profession not as service but as a means of enriching themselves. The biggest crime is that they enrich themselves not by money drawn from the state through tariffs or donations, but through taxation levied against the whole population. Thus, they have taken the conscience away from the duty of the state and replaced it with a compassionless regime, devoid of wisdom. Our solution is simple: make taxation a matter of the will of the people and the needs of the people, rather than the will of an oligarch for the needs of an oligarchy. In the America of tomorrow, no American will ever again see a penny withheld from their paycheck by the federal government. No American farmer will lose the family plot to property taxes. No American homeowner will be taxed for the ground beneath their own feet. How then should the state draw income to operate its vast social services and economic investments? The answer is twofold. First, we must shift the burden of tax away from the individual and onto the economic productivity of the nation as a whole. Rather than burdening the average person with the need to pay 30-40% of their taxable income, we shift the weight onto domestic production and the capabilities of the economic machine of the state. Intelligent tariffs on both exports and imports will provide an immediate and capable means of drawing income. But as America revitalizes itself as the industrial power it is meant to be, tariffs will give way to new sources of state revenue. We must reconceptualize government spending itself. The state will no longer simply tax and spend. Instead, the state will invest as a shareholder. The system of subsidies and investment is where the state will draw income going forward. Rather than acting as an immaterial, invisible hand of direction, state investments in businesses and corporations shall function much like those of any shareholder. And why shouldn't they? No responsible business owner could ask for millions or billions of dollars from investors without giving them an equitable share in the company. What prevents the state from being a shareholder? What prevents the state from drawing dividends from profits? Nothing, nothing but the inexorable greed of an oligarchical few. The America of tomorrow must be a nation in which the state owns productive stakes in strategic industries, draws dividends from its investments, and uses those returns to fund public goods without extracting a single penny from the wages of working people.

The Federal Reserve System, presented to the American people in 1913 as a force for banking stability, is, and has always been, in truth a private cartel of the largest banks, operating beyond the reach of democratic accountability, with the power to create money out of nothing and lend it to the federal government at interest. The Fed's board of governors, its regional bank presidents, and its Federal Open Market Committee make decisions that determine whether a working family can buy a home, whether a small business can get a loan, and whether the value of your savings melts away with each inflationary cycle. And yet not one member of this body is elected by the American people. A nationalized central banking system, owned by the United States Treasury, operated by public officials accountable to Congress, would ensure that regulation of the banking system by private interest will no longer exist. Credit will be directed to productive enterprise rather than speculative bubbles. Currency issuance would serve the needs of the nation rather than the profit margins of Wall Street. The NNA calls for the immediate transfer of all Federal Reserve functions to a new Public Monetary Authority, whose mandate shall be price stability, full employment, and the financing of public infrastructure at zero interest. The power to create money is the power to govern, and that power shall be returned to the people where it belongs.

Protecting American Labor

In order to secure a fairer situation in the economy, all Americans will be encouraged to organize in mass organizations, especially trade unions. To enable the re-emergence of organized labor, the NNA calls for the repeal of so-called "right-to-work" laws that are in fact right-to-freeload laws, the protection of the right to strike, the simplification of union certification, and the vigorous prosecution of employers who harass or fire workers for organizing. Americans are to participate in the renewal of union administration, encouraging new leadership to be dynamic, vigorous, virtuous, responsible, militant, and passionate for the rights of the citizen. The corrupt, complacent union bureaucrats who have traded rank-and-file interests for cushy deals with management must be swept aside by a new generation of leaders. The working classes, trade unions, employers, and local communities must organize together as co-participants in a national project of production and dignity, to move America forward into a brighter future. When every worker has a voice at the table, the table may finally be set for all.

Foremost in the minds of many workers is what becomes of their family, what becomes of their health, and what becomes of their work after they are gone. Thus, any labor code of the future must take into account the need of the worker to attend to his family and attend to his health. The American government has long overlooked this. Workers are provided very little for the means of family and medical leave. The NNA therefore demands the expansion of paid family and medical leave. The cost must be split three ways: a percentage paid by the worker himself, drawn from his wages and guaranteed by the government; an equitable share contributed by the employer, to a reasonable limit; and the remainder borne by the government, drawn from public revenues. In this three‑party compact, the worker is provided his fair share of time for his family and for his personal health, proportional to the time he invests in productive labor. This will be mandated and guaranteed by the government of the future America. No mother will be forced to return to work days after giving birth. No father will have to choose between attending a child’s illness and keeping his job. No worker facing a cancer diagnosis will have to drain his savings or lose his home.

We demand a forty-hour work week for all citizens, enforced by law and subject to severe penalties for violation. The American worker has been told for decades that longer hours mean greater prosperity, and yet the fruits of those extra hours have flowed upward to the executive suite while the worker's family dinner grows colder and later. A forty-hour week would mean the restoration of a standard already won generations ago and since eroded through wage theft, forced overtime, and the atomization of labor. Beyond this, the NNA demands the provision of an annual income at least one-third that of the national average, delivered as a conditionally guaranteed minimum income to every citizen. The wealth of the nation is produced by the collective labor of its people, and every citizen has a claim to a share of that wealth sufficient to live with basic dignity. Furthermore, we call for the implementation of a nationally required vacation period, the length and timing of which shall be democratically decided by labor courts based on regional needs and industry conditions. Finally, we demand the lowering of the minimum retirement age. A society that works its citizens to the bone, then discards them when their backs give out and their hair turns gray, is a society without honor. Let the young labor, let the elderly rest with dignity, and let the nation's wealth be such that no one is forced to work until the grave.

The NNA believes in the expansion of the Labor Court for the prosperity of the American people, empowering it to address and resolve workplace policies and disputes between workers, unions, and employers. The current system of employer-friendly arbitration has left millions of workers without meaningful recourse when their rights are violated. Wage theft claims can take years; a discrimination complaint can outlast the victim's employment; a safety violation may only be addressed after tragedy has already struck. The NNA therefore demands the creation of a fully staffed, regionally accessible Labor Court system with binding authority over all workplace matters, including wage disputes, unfair dismissal, unsafe conditions, retaliation, and collective bargaining impasses. Trade unions shall elect representatives to a lower house within this court dedicated to representing the working class, ensuring that the perspective of the shop floor is never absent from the bench. Above this lower house, professional labor judges, themselves subject to recall by Congress, shall hear appeals and render final decisions expeditiously. Justice delayed is justice denied, and the Labor Court shall be designed for speed, accessibility, and the active defense of the worker against the power of capital.

It is the belief of the NNA that every citizen must be provided for so long as they provide for their country. We must foster an America in which no citizen needs to fear homelessness, starvation, or the cold indifference of a society that has forgotten its obligations to its own members. Therefore, we believe in both the right and duty to labor. Let this be clear: every able-bodied citizen who is capable of work shall have the right to a job, and the state shall have the duty to provide one. No matter how much societal reform we enact, there will always be labor shortages in the critical tasks of building, maintaining, and renewing the nation. All Americans must be guaranteed a minimum income sufficient to cover food, shelter, clothing, and basic medical care, whether through guaranteed income, or direct employment. New jobs will be curated for the expansion of industry as America seeks to revitalize its systems and its incompetently designed infrastructure which includes roads that crumble, water pipes that poison children and electrical grids that fail in winter storms. These are not tragedies of nature, but rather are tragedies of neglect, and they represent millions of hours of productive labor still waiting to be done. The NNA will put the unemployed to work in rebuilding America, and in return, America will guarantee that no citizen ever again sleeps on a grate or rummages through a trash bin for a meal.

To supplement the prohibition of market manipulation by large corporations, it is essential to institute a community-based investing concept, by which employers' boards, in collaboration with trade unions, will collectively decide on investments based on economic value, thereby promoting ethical business practices. The current financial system rewards speculation, extraction, and short-term economic plunder. A hedge fund can buy a company, strip its assets, fire its workers, load it with debt, and walk away with millions while the community is left with an empty factory. The NNA declares this practice to be economic warfare against the American people, and that the only ethical course of action must be the illegalization of such practices. Under our community-based investing model, any investment above a modest threshold must be approved by a joint board composed equally of representatives from the relevant trade union and the employer's management, with community representatives added for investments affecting local infrastructure or land use. The criteria for approval shall be long-term economic value, job retention, environmental responsibility, and contribution to regional stability rather than quarterly returns or executive bonuses. This system will eradicate predators from America and remove conglomerates and mass monopolies from our economy. When Wall Street can no longer dictate the fate of Main Street, Main Street will finally be free to thrive.

To develop a strong economy, America must reduce its reliance on the importation of labor. This is not to say that America must become isolationist — far from it! Isolationism would be symptomatic of a diseased system, a nation that has turned inward because it has lost the confidence to engage with the world on its own terms. America must be willing to aid those who seek support, whether through disaster relief, development assistance, or the honorable tradition of offering asylum to the genuinely persecuted. However, the present crippled and weak regime relies on cheap labor and the perpetuation of poor labor conditions in foreign nations as a deliberate strategy to suppress wages at home. Every time a corporation brings in temporary foreign workers to replace striking Americans, or lobbies for expanded guest-worker programs to hold down construction or agricultural wages, that corporation is committing an act of hostility against the American working class. The NNA proposes a phased reduction of all non-citizen labor in the formal economy, accompanied by a massive expansion of employment and job training programs here at home. We will prioritize the hiring of American citizens, American veterans, and American youth. We will enforce existing labor laws against the exploitation of migrant labor, and we will impose steep fines on employers who claim they "cannot find" American workers while offering poverty wages and dangerous conditions. To strengthen a productive America, we must expand employment and jobs here at home, rather than relying to the degree that we do on the importation of laborers. A nation that cannot employ its own people has no business employing the people of other nations.

Among the most predatory creatures that have fastened themselves upon the carcass of the American economy is the private equity firm. These institutions, locusts masquerading as investors, acquire controlling stakes in productive American companies not to strengthen them, not to expand them, not to secure the jobs of their workers, but to strip them for parts, load them with unsustainable debt, extract exorbitant management fees, and then abandon the hollowed shell to bankruptcy while their partners walk away with millions. A private equity firm buys a chain of nursing homes, it sells the real estate, fires half the staff, cuts meals to powder and water, and when patients begin dying of neglect, the firm denies responsibility behind a web of shell companies. It buys a department store chain with a century of history, it milks the real estate, sells the inventory, terminates the pensions, and liquidates the brand. It buys a hospital system, it closes the emergency room, outsources the billing, jacks up prices, and leaves a community with no care and a mountain of medical debt. The workers, the patients, the customers, and the taxpayers are left holding the bag while the partners purchase a third vacation home. The NNA declares that this model of finance, which is best referred to as “buy, borrow, strip, flip”, has no place in a nation that values productive labor over paper shuffling. We therefore demand the immediate prohibition of leveraged buyouts that saddle target companies with debt beyond their reasonable capacity to service. We demand that any private equity firm seeking to acquire a controlling stake in a company employing more than one hundred American workers must first obtain the approval of the affected labor organizations and submit to a public interest review conducted by the Labor Court. We demand that private equity partners be held personally liable for pension obligations, environmental cleanup costs, and unpaid wages when a portfolio company fails due to their extractive practices. And we demand ultimately that the private equity industry be treated for what it is: a legalized form of corporate piracy, to be regulated with the same severity as racketeering. When these vultures circle, the American people will have the right to shoot them down.

Unemployment is a unique and challenging issue that plagues all nations. America is no different. There exists a responsibility for the government to ensure that there is work for all. But just as there is a responsibility for the government to provide that opportunity, it is the citizen's responsibility to seek said work. As such, we will implement in America a duty as well as a right to work. Every citizen of America will have the right to a place of employment. This will coincide with the employer's responsibility to hire workers who are members of the corresponding unions for their industrial sector. In cases where no employment can be found within that sector, it is the government's responsibility to step in. Thus, the future America will found a Civil Labor Corps, a national works program that provides blanket employment for all citizens, primarily in the rebuilding of American infrastructure. Roads, bridges, railways, water systems, electrical grids, broadband networks, public housing, and reforestation projects will be the great projects of this corps. In this way, we will solve the crisis of unemployment, especially among youth, while simultaneously restoring the physical fabric of the nation.

“Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry, we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation.”

— Thomas Jefferson, 1785

No American who is able and willing to work shall ever be without a job. And no American who refuses to work when work is available shall receive the full benefits of the social wage. Mutual obligation is the foundation of any healthy republic.

Reindustrializing America

America, like most of the West, has not only lost its economic soul, but been drained by decades and decades of negligence, incompetence, and corruption. The economic means by which Americans have achieved the American dream for two centuries has been destroyed. The New Nationalists of America envisions a nation emerging from the ruins of this abandoned ideal to restore the prosperity, safety, and economic independence of our citizens, who have been systematically robbed by Washington DC. There must be a new path, a new plan, and a new deal going forward. Since 1979, America has been in a continuous downward spiral of deindustrialization. As of 2020, over 70% of the American economy has become service-oriented. This extreme shift has transformed the United States from a productive economic powerhouse into an economy that relies upon cheap imports predicated on exploited foreign labor. The American worker has been left in a position of continuous economic depression. In just over ten years, purchasing power has effectively dropped by well over 20%, leaving Americans in increasingly desperate economic straits. America has been brutally delimbed of its economic means. Its industry has been stripped away. Its urban environments have been turned into a service economy of baristas, delivery drivers, and temp workers. Its once-powerful steel mills have been replaced by underwhelming tech bureaus and Amazon warehouses. Its working class can no longer expect to afford a car within a month and a house within six, but instead to live in a small apartment and take the bus to work. This needs to change.

“We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, have no health care, have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money … there has been a giant sucking sound going south.”

— Ross Perot (1992)

The NNA seeks a restoration of the industrial capability of this nation. The service economy, parasitic, precarious, and dependent on globalized exploitation, must go. To achieve this, radical reform must be carried out, beginning with an immediate shift in the economic philosophy that has dominated America and much of the West for the last half-century. The first step in breaking from the parasitic service economy is the elimination of our reliance upon cheap, foreign imports. This will be achieved through a system of protectionist and interventionist tariffs on industrial goods that can be produced domestically or will be able to be produced in short order. America must focus on its own capacity to fulfill its needs in items such as cement, copper, gravel, steel, and basic manufactured goods, rather than importing them from overseas. Simultaneously, to ensure that the economy moves in a productive direction, a series of immediate export tariffs will be levied on raw resources, keeping America's own materials for domestic use. Export tariffs on items such as copper, coal, timber, and rare earth minerals will only be lowered once domestic industrial requirements are fully met. We will no longer ship our natural wealth abroad so that foreign factories can sell us back finished goods at ten times the price.

One cannot expect industry in America to simply materialize from the void. We must look to our own capable middle and upper classes to provide the innovation and courageousness implicit in the culture of being American. A system of subsidization must therefore be provided to industrious and progressive corporations and businesses willing and able to provide the industry that America needs. These subsidies will focus on the material requirements of the nation in industries such as steel, copper, cement, machine tools, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals, and will come in the form of grants and zero-interest loans to kickstart productive industry. But what would it matter if we subsidized and tariffed our way back into industry without restructuring how that industry operates? Immediately, the restrictions placed upon industry and mining by narrow-minded state governments must be struck down. Old mines must be reopened, and new mines must be founded. The lifeblood of American industry must come from America herself. We must look to our own means, and therefore our own abilities, to supply our industry domestically. To further aid in reindustrialization and the break from the service economy, all corporate and business taxes within America must be eradicated. In recognition of the important service that productive enterprises provide to the government and people of America, they must be freed from the unfair tax burdens that have been levied upon them. Let a company that builds, manufactures, or harvests keep its earnings to reinvest in expansion, wages, and innovation.

Defending American Enterprise

The NNA advocates for maintaining the private status of all technology companies, the exclusive private undertaking of the development of all non-essential industrial chemicals, and a continuation of the partial private oversight of the pharmaceutical industry, as well as a continuation of the dominance of private ownership in the foodservice sector. Let it be understood: the state indeed must have full control over America’s essentials: utilities, hydrocarbon, and defense production. But the realm of innovation belongs to the entrepreneur, the scientist, and the small business owner. Technology, when not entangled in monopoly finance, has been an engine of American creativity, and we will preserve it in private hands that answer to their customers and communities. Likewise, the production of industrial chemicals, however controversial, is best left to private firms operating under strict safety and environmental standards, not to a lumbering bureaucracy. Pharmaceuticals shall retain partial private oversight to preserve the incentives for research and development, but with price controls and liability provisions to protect the patient. And the family restaurant, the diner, the local pizzeria, these are the heart of Main Street, and they shall remain private, competitive, and free from nationalization.

Collateral-free automatic loans and equity infusion must be available to all American industrial and agricultural firms to ensure that they have access to necessary working capital and adequate funds to expand and grow. The present banking system, controlled by private financial interests that have shipped America’s jobs overseas, demands collateral that a working farmer or a struggling manufacturer simply does not possess. A family farm cannot pledge its land when that land is already mortgaged. A small factory cannot secure a loan when its only assets are the machines that run twenty-four hours a day. The NNA therefore demands the creation of a National Production Credit Corporation that shall provide zero-collateral, low-interest automatic loans to any American industrial or agricultural firm in good standing. The only requirement shall be a viable production plan and a commitment to employ American citizens. For firms in strategic sectors, equity infusions shall be available in exchange for a non-controlling public stake.

A simplification of labor laws where such laws are able to be sufficiently simplified must occur to ensure further ease of business compliance. The American labor code has grown into a dense thicket of overlapping, contradictory regulations that benefit neither the worker nor the employer. A small business owner should not need a full-time compliance officer to understand whether a break is paid or unpaid. America exists as a nation of many divided states, each with its own labor law, alongside federal legislation, common law, and corporate bylaws. In the end you have a system at war with itself. An employer in California can be charged for a law he broke in Utah on a federal basis while following all local laws. This is a nonsensical and idiotic system which must be done away with. In its place, there must be a singular, comprehensive, definitive labor code. One piece of legislation, one that encompasses the whole nation (not this state nor that state, not this city nor that city, not this corporation nor that corporation) but a single law of the land that all must follow, and all can understand. A worker in Mississippi should have the same rights as a worker in Massachusetts. To maintain this single code, a Labor Court will rule on labor issues, a court run by the government and maintained by the government, which rules on all disputes that pass the mediation boards, one that is impartial to both worker and employer, and one that provides a fair, logical, and reasonable outcome. The NNA calls for a comprehensive review and consolidation of all labor laws into a single, readable, accessible code, with clear penalties for violations and clear safe harbors for good-faith efforts. This simplification shall not weaken a single substantive protection for workers (be they minimum wage, overtime, safety, leave, anti-discrimination), but it shall strip away the bureaucratic undergrowth that has choked American enterprise.

Any private firm in a state of severe disrepair, or otherwise not in use at all, must be confiscated and transferred into responsible hands, whether private or public. A shuttered factory is a tomb of productive potential and a monument to the failure of absentee ownership. When an American company abandons a facility, lets it rot, and walks away, that corporation forfeits any moral or legal claim to continued ownership. The NNA vows to empower all local community councils to declare any idle or severely dilapidated private firm subject to immediate confiscation. The former owner shall receive just compensation equal to the land's non-improved value, nothing for the structures they allowed to decay. The facility shall then be transferred to a qualified purchaser, whether a worker cooperative, a responsible private investor, or, if no private buyer emerges, to public ownership.

Wholesale markets must be established for the sales of equipment and supplies, without subsidies. The current distribution system for agricultural and industrial inputs is a labyrinth of middlemen and brand-locked dealerships that inflate prices by 50% or more. The NNA calls for the creation of public wholesale marketplaces (both physical and digital) where any American producer can list equipment and supplies for sale directly to any American farmer or manufacturer, free of exclusive dealership agreements. These markets shall operate at cost, funded by modest transaction fees rather than taxpayer subsidies.

The NNA proposes the implementation of production-linked financial incentives to help boost sales from locally owned enterprises, thereby cutting the necessity of imports. The United States government ought to provide direct per-unit incentives to locally owned enterprises for every unit produced above a baseline. In line with this plan, those American farmers who meet production quota levels for crops must see all mandatory financial contributions to the state completely slashed. To be explicit: a farmer who meets his or her production quota shall pay zero taxes. That means no income tax, no property tax, no sales tax, no payroll tax, no capital gains tax, no estate tax. Nothing. Quotas shall be set regionally and crop-by-crop by the trade associations. A company which meets its quota will be free, while if it fails, it will pay the standards rates.

A 100-150% tariff on foreign agricultural products which can be reasonably domestically grown should be put in place to protect American agriculture. American farmers have been forced to compete against foreign labor paid pennies a day and foreign governments that subsidize exports. The NNA demands immediate tariffs of no less than 100% and no more than 150% on all agricultural products that can be reasonably grown, raised, or harvested within the United States, be they grains, oilseeds, fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy, eggs, nuts, etc. Any agricultural products which cannot be reasonably domestically grown (ex: coffee, tea, cocoa, tropical fruits, spices, etc.) shall not be included. A nation that cannot feed itself cannot defend itself.

Every private firm with more than 100 employees must establish a board composed of representatives of employers and employees. Per 100 employees, there must be one employee representative on the board, elected through popular vote of the workers. The board must regulate employment, company materials, costs, and prices. It must also have full access to all company knowledge pertaining to assets, liabilities, and capital. Profits, after reinvestment for maintenance and growth, must be equally distributed across all employees within the company. Once the American worker has a seat at the board table, the board will no longer vote to close the factory and move to Mexico.

Conglomerate-owned farmland must be confiscated from multinational corporations and foreign interests and returned to rightful American owners. Only Americans may own American land. No foreign person, no foreign corporation, and no domestically incorporated entity with more than 10% foreign ownership may hold title to agricultural land, timberland, grazing land, or any parcel of more than forty acres. Existing foreign-owned holdings shall be confiscated with compensation equal to the original purchase price adjusted for inflation. Confiscated land shall then be redistributed first to landless American farmers, and finally to worker cooperatives.

Efficient, well-organized firms must be aided by public services, and intercompany collaboration will be encouraged for improved efficiency and quality between highly productive firms. The NNA will encourage public agencies to prioritize the needs of efficient firms, offering expedited permitting, infrastructure upgrades, and customized training programs at no cost. A National Collaboration Council, composed of representatives from trade associations and labor unions, will facilitate joint ventures, shared R&D, and quality improvement partnerships. Collaboration, not cutthroat competition, is the American way.

American farmers must distribute a very small bracket of their income and produce (a neighborly tithe) to a "Municipal Administration Council," contributing to local development, with distribution varying based on municipality-specific characteristics. Each farmer shall contribute no more than 2% of annual gross farm income, along with an in-kind contribution of produce equivalent to no more than 1% of harvest volume, to the Municipal Administration Council of the county or township in which the farm is located. The Council, composed of locally elected farmers, merchants, and residents, shall distribute these contributions according to local priorities. The exact percentage and produce share shall be set by each municipality through annual town meetings.

Much like the decline of our industry, American agriculture has faced a steady and constant slide into irrelevance. Less than a century ago, agriculture employed roughly a quarter of all Americans. Today it employs less than 3%. America is forced to import food on a massive scale: 44% of fruits and nuts, 45% of vegetables, and significant portions of beef, seafood, grains, and oils come from outside the United States. This tells the story of a nation once self-sufficient, now reduced to an import-based economy for its very sustenance. When America was founded, the Founders, and chief among them, Thomas Jefferson, saw the nation as an endless population of independent yeoman farmers. Jefferson saw farming as a form of unique personal independence: every man providing for himself and providing his community with a necessary service. While it is no longer required that the majority of the population be farmers, the principle that Jefferson wished to convey was that of independence and economic prosperity. For a man to own his own land and farm it was a sign of progression in the world. America must revive this founding value. Chief among our economic goals must be food self-sufficiency. To rely so heavily upon an international system of cheap food and cheap labor leaves America in a far weaker position. This system has also hamstrung the remaining agricultural population, as their domestic production has been consistently undercut by cheaper, unregulated labor and food production in nations such as Mexico, Vietnam, and Chile. To remedy this, immediate and decisive action must be undertaken to protect domestic production while it still exists. As with industry, protectionist and interventionist tariffs must be levied in defense of American agriculture. The elimination of land taxes for farmers, the implementation of interest-free loans and grants, and the extensive subsidization of new agricultural businesses are imperative for the survival of an independent America and the American dream within it.

Modernizing American Education

The American people must actively campaign for reform to the school system based on a movement away from repetitive memorization as the basis for mastery of topics, instead focusing on tangible problem solving. The current American classroom is a relic of the nineteenth-century factory model: rows of silent children, repeatedly drilling facts they will never use, terrified of red ink and public failure. This system does not produce thinkers. It produces test-takers. The NNA demands a complete pedagogical overhaul. Curricula must be redesigned around real-world problems rather than the regurgitation of dates and formulas. The classroom must become a workshop of inquiry rather than a prison of compliance. Furthermore, the state must align available education programs with a holistic view of the needs of the entirety of country, involving teachers, foreign language programs, and promotion of international cooperation and exchange programs. An American graduate who cannot speak a second language or understand the culture of a trading partner is a graduate unprepared for the global economy. We recommend that college and university students receive interest-free loans from the state, so that universities thus compete for enrollment rather than funding. When tuition follows the student, and the student pays no interest, the institution must earn its keep through excellence, rather than through captive debt. The entire contemporary education system, along with its mandates for irrelevant classes and arbitrary credits that serve no functional purpose in a student’s life, must be repealed and replaced.

Improving educational quality will involve prioritizing the continuous development, recognition, and support of teaching staff. No education reform can succeed if the teacher is neglected, underpaid, and treated as a cog in a machine. The NNA therefore calls for the establishment of rigorous training programs for teachers, tailored to each educational center's needs and different levels of education. A teacher in a rural elementary school requires different preparation than a teacher in an urban technical high school. America’s programs shall reflect that reality. Reinforcing the teacher's role in students' education and utilizing audiovisual aids as supplementary tools will enhance the learning process. The teacher is not a babysitter, nor a curriculum delivery device. The teacher is a mentor, a coach, and a master of the craft. We will raise teacher salaries to match those of other degreed professionals, create clear career ladders for master teachers, and provide annual funded professional development. At the same time, we will equip every classroom with modern audiovisual and digital tools, not as replacements for the teacher, but as extensions of the teacher's reach.

A gradual reorganization of the school network is necessary. The capacity of elementary schools and the number of teachers should align with local economic development, demographics, and students' residential characteristics. Too many American school districts are operating with buildings built for a population that no longer exists, either overcrowded in growing suburbs or half-empty in declining rural towns. The NNA demands a national school facilities assessment, followed by a consolidation and modernization program. Schools shall be located where children live, staffed according to actual enrollment trends, and designed to serve as community hubs. If a region needs welders and electricians, its high schools should offer advanced shop classes. If a region needs biotech technicians, its community colleges should offer lab training. An American child who grows up to become a master plumber or a CNC machinist should never be treated as a failure, for he or she is the backbone of the American economy.

We must ensure free college education and vocational training to every citizen. The American promise of upward mobility has been strangled by the million-dollar question: "How will you pay for it?" Today, a young person emerges from a four-year university with a mortgage-sized debt, unable to buy a home, start a family, or take a risk on a new venture. The NNA declares that the nation that profits from an educated workforce must bear the cost of that education. All public colleges, universities, and vocational training programs shall be tuition-free. Vocational training, whether it be in welding, plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, automotive repair, medical assisting, or information technology, shall be free, widely available, and promoted alongside academic pathways. No American shall be denied the chance to learn a trade or earn a degree because of an empty wallet.

The United States of America must encourage artistic and literary creativity to bolster its cultural vibrancy. For too long, the arts have been treated as a frill, the first budget cut when times get tough, the elective that parents discourage. The result is a nation of people without poetry, a nation that no longer makes original films, a nation whose town squares are filled with billboards rather than murals. The NNA calls for an American cultural renaissance, for our nation is dying from a lack of art. Moving forward, to enhance the vibrancy of America’s unique culture, the American people must support their artists and writers, and they should not shy away from advocating for art programs in education. The United States must establish a well-funded National Endowment for American Arts, that provides grants directly to individual artists and writers. Every public-school ought to offer visual arts, music, theater, and creative writing at every grade level, taught by working artists. And we must curate and foster the public spaces, be they libraries, community centers, or underused storefronts, where American art can be displayed and American writers can read. The development of artistic expression must allow for the promotion of critical thinking and reflection within our society.

Public Services

The American healthcare system, such as it exists, is not a system of healing but a system of sick-care, reactive, fragmented, and enormously profitable precisely because it waits for disease to strike before lifting a finger. Hospitals and insurance conglomerates have no financial interest in keeping you well. Their business model depends on your illness. The American have, in every poll, rejected this status quo entirely, and the time to change it is long overdue. The NNA calls for a national network of community health councils, composed of local doctors, nurses, public health workers, teachers, and elected citizen representatives, to design and implement prevention programs tailored to their own neighborhoods. These initiatives will target lifestyle improvements (re: nutrition, exercise, smoking cessation, responsible alcohol use) through community organizing, school-based education, workplace wellness programs, and public infrastructure such as bike lanes, parks, and farmers' markets.

We demand an end to homelessness and housing instability through a strong and adequate social housing program, for housing is not merely a necessity, but a human right. In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, no man, woman, or child should sleep on a sidewalk or in a shelter while luxury condominiums stand half-empty as investment vehicles for foreign billionaires. The NNA therefore demands the establishment of a National Public Housing Initiative to provide housing for workers' families through mass construction and renovation projects. Rental payments made by citizen residents of these public housing projects to the state shall be credited toward eventual ownership of their residence, transforming tenants into homeowners over a reasonable term. At the municipal level, we must ensure a secure supply of land for housing construction, prioritize development in rural areas where vacancy and abandonment are common, organize new construction through partnerships with private builders and non-governmental organizations under strict public oversight, and introduce efficient building technologies to reduce cost and completion time. We will increase housing availability through property recovery and repurposing, seizing abandoned and tax-delinquent properties from absentee landlords and returning them to the commons. Housing materials shall be sold at unsubsidized prices to keep markets functioning, with direct subsidies provided only to low-income families who need them. The right to shelter is the foundation upon which all other rights are built, and no government which watches indifferently as its people go hungry can legitimately claim to be their representative.

We call for an expansion of development in our rural communities, including the construction of new and modern roads, bridges, highways, railways, and other infrastructure developments. For decades, Washington has treated rural America as a sacrifice zone from which to extract resources while depopulating its towns and allowing its roads to crumble while pouring trillions into coastal metropolises. The young leave for the cities because the countryside offers no work, no connectivity, and no future. America must reverse this tide. A national rural infrastructure program ought to be established to rebuild every mile of decaying highway, every rusting bridge, and every abandoned rail line. We must lay new track for passenger and freight rail to reconnect small towns to regional hubs. We must bring high-speed broadband to every farmhouse and hamlet. And we must modernize America’s rural water systems, electrical grids, and levees. This is a moral requirement that we the people owe to those countrymen of ours who grow our food, steward our forests, and comprise the backbone of the American character. A nation that neglects the health and wellbeing of its countryside has already begun to die.

A "Board of Consumption" must be formed with the intent of protecting consumers by establishing maximum pricing on goods and services. The unfettered free market, left to its own devices, does not produce freedom. It produces monopoly, collusion, and the exploitation of necessity. When a corporation controls the only grocery store in a small town, or when a handful of pharmaceutical companies collude to raise insulin prices by 1,000%, or when energy companies double their rates during a winter freeze, the consumer has no choice but to pay or to perish. This is not freedom, but extortion. The NNA therefore demands the creation of a federal Board of Consumption, composed of economists, small business owners, labor representatives, and citizen auditors, with the authority to investigate price gouging and set maximum allowable prices for essential goods and services: food staples, gasoline, heating fuel, electricity, prescription drugs, rent, and basic utilities. Any corporation or vendor charging above the established ceiling will face severe penalties, including fines proportional to revenue and, for repeat offenders, the revocation of business license. The Board must also maintain a public hotline for consumers to report suspected gouging, with bounties for successful prosecutions.

Military Reorganization

The standing professional army, as it exists today, has become a separate caste within the nation, loyal not to the towns and homesteads from which its soldiers were born, but to a permanent officer class, a revolving door of defense contractors, and a federal bureaucracy that sends working-class boys to die while the sons of senators sit safely in their mansions. This arrangement breeds a military aristocracy, a class of men who share no common life with the civilians they fight to defend. We demand an end to the present system of the military, and the establishment in its place of an American people's militia, in which all citizens must be conscripted for a tour of one to four years. A universal citizen militia would ensure that every able-bodied American (rich & poor, rural & urban, regardless of family name) serves side by side, sharing the same rations, the same dangers, and the same duty. The social barrier between veteran and civilian would dissolve, for there would be no civilian untouched by service. Both Switzerland and Finland have shown that such a militia system does not weaken national defense, but strengthens it, for a nation under arms is a nation that cannot be easily conquered. Let the professional army be dismantled and let the armed citizenry take its place.

The nation that sends a young man or woman to the far corners of the earth, that asks them to bear the weight of the rifle and the memory of the fallen, incurs a debt that cannot be discharged with a mere flag pin or a VA backlog. Today, thousands of veterans sleep on the streets of the very cities they bled to protect. Thousands more wait months for mental health appointments while the suicide count climbs. This is not merely neglectful but is on its face a betrayal of the most solemn covenant a nation can make with its defenders. The NNA will fight for immediate, full social and economic retribution for all veterans and former members of the military who have suffered due to their service in times of war, as well as for those who have been unable to readapt to society due to the general incompetence of the American government. We propose that every veteran receive, as a matter of right rather than charity, guaranteed housing, free healthcare (including dental and mental health), a living stipend indexed to the local cost of living, and priority placement in federal jobs and training programs. For those permanently disabled in body or spirit by their service, the nation must provide for them and their families for life, without means testing or bureaucratic obstruction. We must measure the worth of our republic by the dignity of its wounded warriors.

The present system of military production, in which a handful of defense contractors (notably Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing & Northrop Grumman) extract hundreds of billions of dollars from the Treasury each year, is not a system of national defense but a system of systematic theft. These corporations deliberately overrun budgets and deliver weapons systems that are late, defective, or irrelevant to the actual needs of the soldier in the field. A nation that outsources its security to for-profit firms has already surrendered half of its sovereignty. The NNA demands full public ownership of all endeavors regarding the production of military equipment and infrastructure, so that private corporations may not be in control of the means by which we defend ourselves. The NNA therefore declares that all military production, from the smallest cartridge to the largest aircraft carrier, shall be brought under public ownership, operated by the American people through their government, without a penny of profit going to any private shareholder. Self-sufficiency in military development is not merely a strategic advantage, but one of the most fundamental moral goals that a nation ought to pursue. No foreign power, and no corporation, ought to be able to hold the power to arm or disarm United States of America.

Modernizing American Energy

In regard to the expansion of America’s economy, we must confront the environmental necessity of bringing our country into a new, green economy. The coal and oil reserves of this earth are finite, and their damage to the planet is now undeniable to all but the willfully blind. The age of fossil fuels is drawing to a close, whether the executives of Exxon and Chevron wish to admit it or not. When the coal runs out and the wells run dry, we do not want to be the ones caught stuck in the old times, clutching worthless stock certificates while our children choke on poisoned air. The NNA therefore demands a decisive, immediate shift toward hydroelectric and nuclear power as the baseload energy sources for the America of tomorrow, supplemented by high levels of solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass, to achieve total energy independence. We must adopt this sooner rather than later, before it is too late. A nation that cannot power itself cannot defend itself, and a nation that destroys its own habitat has no future to defend.

To ensure America's energy security and environmental integrity, several concrete measures shall be enacted. First, alternative energy sources shall be developed through interest-free lending to American households and farmers, allowing working families to install solar panels, small wind turbines, and geothermal systems without usury. America can use its leverage with international financial institutions to cover interest costs, extracting from the globalized economy a small measure of repayment for the decades of plunder they have inflicted upon our people. Second, support for renewable energy companies and the transition to green energy shall be among our top national priorities, with public investment directed away from fossil fuel subsidies and toward domestic manufacturing of solar arrays, wind turbines, and battery storage. Third, energy-saving projects and the development of electric transport including trains, buses, trams, and last-mile delivery vehicles, are crucial to reduce energy intensity and transmission losses. Fourth, penalties for violating environmental norms shall be increased tenfold for corporate leadership, with personal criminal liability for executives who poison rivers or fill the air with carcinogens. Environmentally harmful production shall eventually be prohibited entirely on American soil.

The timber industry must be completely nationalized. For too long, private logging corporations have treated America's forests as liquidatable assets, clear-cutting ancient growth, poisoning watersheds with runoff, and leaving behind denuded hillsides that erode into mudslides. The NNA declares that all commercial timberlands shall be transferred to a new National American Forest Industry, operated by professional foresters and unionized workers under public accountability. Lands which have not yet been encroached upon by the timber industry shall be left entirely unscathed, preserved as wilderness and managed for conservation, recreation, and biodiversity. Land which has already been used for timber extraction for an extended period must be extensively reforested with native species and then used continuously and sustainably for all further general infrastructure projects requiring timber. The America of tomorrow must harvest only what grows back, and we must grow back more than we harvest.

Further research investments must be made in alternative energy sources such as tidal power, thorium reactors, and fusion energy to ensure energy diversity within a future green America. The same universities that now take corporate money to deny man-made climate change will be redirected to solve the technical challenges of a zero-carbon civilization. The usage of artificial fertilizers in agriculture must be substantially reduced, and natural fertilizers such as compost, green manure, and rotational grazing, shall be used in their place, restoring soil health and ending the dead zones that now choke our rivers and coasts. In line with our reforestation goals, the state shall initiate a program of reforestation to return as many acres of the forest as possible. Finally, there must be a gradual restructuring of the landscape of American cities to include more room for public gardens, community orchards, parkland, and greenspace. The asphalt desert of today’s urban environment must give way to one which Americans may look to with pride.

Foreign Policy

The United States of America cannot retreat into a cocoon of isolationism. To abandon the humanitarian and prestigious duty of the West would be to revert the world to chaos and instability. But neither can the United States of America remain a puppet of the corrupt regime that currently rules over it, which has spent decades entangling our nation in wars of profit for defense contractors. The NNA rejects the New Left’s delusion that American power is inherently evil. We propose a foreign policy rooted in three simple principles: the defense of American civilization, the right of small nations to live freely, and the absolute priority of the American worker and soldier.

The world exists not in simple geographical blocs, but in spheres of influence drawn by philosophy and systems of living. The East‑West divide is not merely a relic of the Cold War, but a living struggle between two incompatible visions of human society. The Western world carries the tradition of liberalism, individual freedoms, popular rule, and the dignity of the human person, traditions forged in Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and Philadelphia. The “Eastern bloc”, now represented by organizations such as BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the self‑declared “Axis of Resistance”, seeks to undermine or even destroy these fundamental values. From the gulag to the re‑education camp, the anti‑West offers only slavery, reaction, and the extinguishing of the human spirit. America can pursue no direction other than to uphold the Western ideal. A world in which Russia butchers its neighbors, China disappears its citizens, and Iran hangs dissidents from cranes is a world that will eventually come for our own shores.

The America of tomorrow will pursue close ties with those international alliances that uphold our greatest interests, not only in the defense of our people but in the defense of our ideals. The United States‑Mexico‑Canada Agreement (USMCA), the Organization for Economic Co‑operation and Development (OECD), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are entities that lay down strict and fair democratic requirements for member‑states. Coordination with such alliances entails the greatest benefits, both militarily and politically, for American interests. But cooperation here must never become subservience. The NNA rejects the American government’s habit of sending young boys and billions of dollars to fight wars that our allies refuse to fight with us. NATO is a sacred compact, but that compact requires every member to meet its obligations. America must remain in NATO, and indeed strengthen it, but we must also demand that our European allies finally contribute their fair share, as measured by real defense spending, not by creative accounting. No longer will the American taxpayer subsidize the social welfare states of rich European nations while their armies rust. To ensure a meaningful relationship with our allies, America must foster a strong and well‑funded military system kept under the command of popular governance. Alongside cooperation with NATO, the future America must work toward the execution of a regional North American military defense alliance between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The American spirit repudiates the form and substance of the establishment, but it does not oppose the foundations of the Western world from which we derive our common cultural traditions. We must build a fortress of freedom from the Arctic to the Isthmus.

The Eastern bloc, representative of the intolerable conditions of slavish reactionism and theocratic or communist tyranny, repudiates the strengths of the Western world and embraces its opposites. These nations often act simply as contrarians rather than in the interests of their people or the advancement of mankind. The axis that underlies this geopolitical sphere includes the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, and all those who align themselves to this self‑declared “resistance” against freedom. America cannot look to these entities for any kind of support or example of rule. They embody the most anti‑humanitarian, self‑oriented, and poisonous ideas in existence. The NNA sees in the current American establishment the destruction of the American spirit and dreams, and we seek to revive that spirit through a renewal of national purpose. To betray that mission, to empower cruel, anti‑humanist regimes around the world, would be a crime not only unto the nation itself but unto all the people who live within it. Those who seek independence at the cost of the ethical state seek independence at the cost of their own souls.

“A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike… So that the world can be made fit and safe to live in for every peace‑loving nation.”
— Woodrow Wilson, 1919, the Fourteen Points

This concept, born of the agony of World War One, remains as urgent today as in 1919. It is irreprehensible to provide support, political or otherwise, to a nation such as the Russian Federation for its illegal, unjustified, and criminal annexation of Ukrainian territory and its slaughter of Ukrainian citizens. America will stand with Ukraine, not with endless blank checks, but with the weapons and training necessary for Ukrainians to defend their own soil. The same principle applies to the Republic of China (Taiwan), to the various nationalities under the Myanmar military junta (the Karen, the Kachin, the Rohingya), to Tibet, to the Buryats, to the Dagestanis, and to Ethiopian separatists fighting against the authoritarian regime that currently rules over them. The first and foremost prerequisite for American aid to these smaller nations is that the needs of American citizens are met. Charity begins at home, and a nation that cannot house its own veterans cannot rebuild foreign cities. Assuming this precondition is satisfied, America will give aid to the aforementioned small nations and movements in the form of grants, bilateral trade, and military training. Alliances with the small nations of progress located in East Asia (particularly Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) must be pursued, including bilateral trade and endeavors toward military coordination agreements. This policy must be of the utmost concern to deter anti‑American aggression across the globe. Increasingly, nations that adhere to anti‑American ideals agitate against the freedom of small nations. The battle is not merely between Russia and Ukraine. It is a global struggle between the forces of freedom and slavery: Karen & Kachin against Myanmar’s junta, Kurds & Iraqi democrats against encroaching Iranian‑backed militias, Taiwan & Japan against the ever‑expanding People’s Republic of China. Anti‑American aggression is rapidly approaching its zenith, and all that it takes for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.

When some hear of our harsh critique of the anti‑American states, they flinch. To contextualize our claims, we point to none other than Victor Gao, a paramount representative of the People’s Republic of China, and a man who celebrated the disappearance of his own friend of twenty years:

“Qin Gang was my good friend for more than 20 years… He was quickly dealt with very swiftly… He is somewhere in China. You will never see him again. I’m so happy when [people] disappear.”

This casual brutality (this celebration of a friend’s murder by the state) is the soul of the anti‑American world. No trials, no juries, no verdicts. Guilty without proof, and dealt with “swiftly,” never to be seen again. America was not one of the onlookers who simply waited and watched as Nazis marched into Poland, as Saddam gassed the Kurds, or as Putin attempted to eradicate the Ukrainian people. Everlasting shame rests upon the shoulders of those who stand by and do nothing. One can never clean the blood that soaks the hands of a man guilty of indifference.

“Now when Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing, but rather that a riot was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this Man’s blood; you yourselves shall see.’”

— Matthew 27:24

America will not wash its hands.

Intertwined with the right of small nations to exist is the brutal, decades‑long conflict between the Jewish and Arab peoples in the Levant. No foreign policy that claims moral seriousness can give this subject only marginal attention. The NNA therefore declares, without apology or equivocation: The State of Israel is a sovereign, Jewish nation with the same right to self‑defense and self‑determination as any other country on earth. Zionism, the movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland, is not colonialism, nor apartheid, nor racism. It is the liberation of an indigenous people who were scattered, slaughtered, and stateless for two thousand years. America, which welcomed Jewish refugees and stood with the Jewish state at its birth in 1948, must stand with Israel again. The NNA fully supports the existence of a home for the Jewish people in the State of Israel. We also support the existence of a home for the Palestinian people in a future, demilitarized state, but only under conditions that do not threaten Israel’s security. The two‑state solution, long endorsed by successive American administrations, remains the only just outcome, but it must be a genuine two‑state solution: a Palestinian state that recognizes Israel’s right to exist, renounces terrorism, and governs without corruption or tyranny. In the current conflict, forced upon Israel by the savage October 7th massacre, the NNA stands unequivocally with Israel’s right to defend itself. Hamas, a genocidal, antisemitic terrorist organization, murdered over 1,200 people, raped women, tortured children, and took hundreds of hostages. Its founding charter explicitly called for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews everywhere. Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, maintains an arsenal of over 100,000 rockets aimed at Israeli cities. These “resistance organizations” ought to be treated as the death cults that they are, and the American people would do well to welcome their total destruction. The Jewish state is the only democracy in the Middle East, a beacon of technological innovation, military courage, and pro-American values.

At the same time, the NNA recognizes that the Palestinian people have been cruelly exploited by their own leaders, most brutally by Hamas, which rules Gaza as a terror enclave. But we also recognize that there exists a legitimate, albeit flawed, Palestinian governing body: the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by the Fatah movement. The PA governs the West Bank, officially recognizes the State of Israel, and has renounced terrorism as a political tool. It is the only Palestinian entity with which a future two‑state solution can be negotiated. The future America will therefore lend its diplomatic and material support to genuine reform within the Palestinian Authority to fight corruption, end the “pay‑to‑slay” system of rewarding terrorists, and prepare a new generation of Palestinians for peaceful coexistence alongside the Jewish state. Only once a new Palestine emerges, may we support a massive, American‑led reconstruction effort for Gaza, funded in part by Arab gulf states that have for too long left the Palestinian people to suffer as pawns in their geopolitical games. Gaza must be rebuilt not as another staging ground for terror, but as a normal, peaceful society living alongside Israel under the ultimate authority of a reformed Palestinian Authority.

The future America will not be born out of opposition to the founding ideals of the Republic, but out of opposition to the corrupt, centralized plutocracy that has hijacked our government. The foreign policy we propose rejects the isolationism of both the new left and the new right. We must engage with the world only on behalf of the American people, not on behalf of multinational corporations, globalist financiers, or foreign lobbies. Every foreign entanglement must be measured against a single standard: Does this serve the security and prosperity of American civilization? If the answer is no, the answer is no. But when the answer is yes, when a small nation fights for freedom against a tyrant, or when our allies are threatened, America will lead with courage, clarity, and strength.

A safer world begins with a stronger America. And a stronger America begins with a foreign policy that puts the American people first.