What If It Can't Be Fixed? (Part 1)

The system we are trying to reform was never designed for the future we want.

Leisa Peterson speaks about where our system's patterns came from, and why we may not be able to fix them.

Preface:

In these tumultuous days, we may feel we are faced with only two choices: a bad one and a worse one.

The necessary gift we offer in this world is our attention. Since attention takes time, that, too, is part of the gift—or, to some, our currency. Keeping up with intense news stories can feel relentless: one tragedy demands our attention immediately after another.

So where do I place my attention? Do I scatter it widely, or do I find—perhaps pray for—a cause worthy of my deeper attention, and get more thorough with understanding it?

Going wide and shallow feels like surrendering my attention without intention.

What if there is a third choice beyond the bad choice and the worse choice: a deeply true choice? A choice willing to get down to the under-layer, to lift the edge of this heavy rug and look directly at the lump we keep pretending isn’t there?

That’s what I believe Leisa Peterson is doing. By telling us—in plain citizen language—what she sees, she’s holding a flashlight to what’s been swept under the rug: naming patterns and origins plainly, without trying to weaponize them.

She advocates taking a long moment to turn our attention inward, regularly. There, we can tune into steadier clarity and become familiar with it. Then, with Leisa’s light still trained on the “lump,” we can stay present long enough to see what’s actually there—together.

This is the beginning of seeing what’s been covered up—and revealing a sturdy, beautiful floor that’s been there all along, waiting to hold us.

Below is Leisa’s piece—an unflinching look at the patterns shaping our moment, where they come from, and what it takes to stay human inside them.

--Colleen Akiko

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Originally published April 15, 2026 on Equal Stake with Leisa Peterson: 

I want to ask a question that most political writers won’t ask because the answer is too uncomfortable.

What if the United States government cannot be fixed?

Not because the right people haven’t tried. Not because we lack good ideas or policy solutions. But because the system was never designed, not even in its most idealistic moments, to produce the future most of us actually want.

Think about what that future looks like. A society where women and men of every race hold equal power and equal rights. Where healthcare and housing are treated as human needs, not market opportunities. Where the planet is governed with the urgency it demands. Where no one is imprisoned for being poor or sick or different. Where political power cannot be purchased. Where children inherit a world worth living in.

Now look at the document the system is built on.

The Constitution was written in 1787 by 55 men, all white, most of them slaveholders, designing a government to protect their property, their class, and their power. They feared monarchy, yes. But they feared popular democracy just as much. The Senate, the Electoral College, lifetime judicial appointments, the amendment process requiring near unanimous agreement — these were not bugs. They were features. Friction built in to slow change. Moats dug around existing power.

They could not have imagined a multiracial democracy. They were not trying to.

So when we ask why healthcare isn’t universal, why the racial wealth gap persists, why climate legislation dies in committee, why women’s equal rights are still not in the Constitution, we keep looking for the malfunction. The broken gear. The corrupted actor.

But what if there is no malfunction? What if the machine is doing exactly what it was built to do?

I went to Claude.ai and asked it to help me think through this. First I asked it to name what the system actually is and we had some back and forth conversations because it didn’t give me what is below at first - it was very sterile and what you would expect but I pushed back for the story under the story and even more. 

SO, then I asked what it would take to change it. The answers were clarifying in a way that unsettled me, not because they were radical, but because they were so plainly, structurally true.

Here is what it said.

Part One: What Is This System, Actually?

Here is what I asked:

“What are the components of governance that apply to the US system — representative democracy, the judiciary relying on interpretation, a police state, racism — what is it?”

And here is what Claude said (after some back and forth):

The US system is a constitutional federal republic with several interlocking governance components.

The Formal Structure. The US is built on a separation of powers across three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. Add federalism, meaning power is split between the federal government and 50 state governments, each with their own laws, courts, and enforcement.

The Electoral System. A two party duopoly, not written into the Constitution but baked in through winner takes all elections, ballot access laws, and campaign finance structures that squeeze out third parties. The two parties function more like coalitions than ideologically coherent parties.

The Judicial System. Courts, especially the Supreme Court, have the power to strike down laws based on constitutional interpretation. Nine unelected justices hold enormous political power. Law is not fixed. It shifts based on who holds the court.

The Enforcement Architecture. Over 18,000 separate law enforcement agencies operating at federal, state, county, and municipal levels with minimal unified oversight. Paired with the world’s largest incarceration rate, this amounts to a carceral state embedded inside a democracy.

Structural Racism. Not a bug but a founding feature. The Constitution itself encoded racial hierarchy. What followed — Jim Crow, redlining, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, voter suppression — represents racism institutionalized through law, not individual prejudice.

The Missing Term: Plutocracy. Wealth translates directly into political power through lobbying, campaign finance, regulatory capture, and revolving doors between industry and government. Political scientists Gilens and Page found that US policy tracks elite preferences, not public opinion.

So what IS it? The most accurate composite term is a constitutional oligarchy with democratic features, or what scholar Robert Dahl called a polyarchy: a system with competitive elections and civil liberties, but where actual policy power is concentrated among elites, shaped by racial hierarchy, and enforced through a sprawling carceral apparatus.

It is not a pure democracy. It was never designed to be.

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I want you to sit with all of this now… because that was a LOT and I had to sit with it for several weeks before I could continue writing this.

The US has not ever been a pure democracy. There are exceptions worth naming. Social Security. Medicare. Women's suffrage. Civil rights. Each one genuinely disruptive. Each one bitterly fought. Each one either under threat today or still incomplete. The system does not give ground easily. And it works to take it back.

I knew this but I hadn't really understood how it wasn't broken. How it was very cleverly designed to keep the powerful in power.

If that is true, then everything changes. Not just the strategy. The whole premise. Because you cannot reform your way out of a foundation. You have to decide whether to build a new one. What would it take to design something genuinely different? Something built for everyone? The answer surprised me in its clarity and its size. I will explore that in Part II.

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Thank you for reading this vital post. How is it landing with you? You can find the subsequent parts to this vital message on Leisa Peterson's Substack, Equal Stake.

If you’d like a free place to slow down and practice presence, reflection, and restoration with others, you’re welcome in the Bowl of Light Café. Visit SongRise.live and click the Bowl of Light Café link at the top.