A Book I (Probably Won't) Write
For a while now, I’ve been meaning to write a book. Another book, actually. In 2013, the publishing world was rocked to its core with the publication of my magnum opus, Navigating the News: A Political Media User’s Guide. (Though at under 200 pages, it’s not exactly ‘magnum’. Minum opus maybe?)
While the examples I used in the book are very dated (Bill O’Reilly! Glenn Beck!!) the central message is still solid: all media is biased (and so are you), media won’t get better because the profit motive ensures that playing to our emotions will win out over sober, substantive analysis, and so it’s up to us to do the hard work of critical self-reflection and careful selection of high-quality, reputable sources.
It turns out there’s not a huge market for tracts arguing for the hard work of critical self-reflection and careful selection of high-quality, reputable sources, though I did end up with a few bucks in royalties. It would have been a much better if the publisher had let me write the book I really wanted to write. My vision was of a sort of David Foster Wallacean take on media, replete with snarky remarks and strange, discursive footnotes.[1] That didn’t fly at Praeger Publishers, and as a result, the version of my book that ended up being published felt like the soulless husk of the draft I initially turned in to them.
The book I’m thinking of writing would focus on the big things the framers of the Constitution got wrong. It would include the usual stuff like the Electoral College, vastly unequal representation in the Senate, a not sufficiently clear Second Amendment, and so on, but I’ve come to believe that their biggest mistake, by far, was choosing a presidential system of government.
I get where they were coming from, but history has shown that presidential systems have a distressing tendency to break down into autocracy. This is even more likely when institutions are weak, society is polarized, and the rule of law is under attack. Assuming you haven’t been in a coma for the last few months, a lot of that should sound awfully (and sadly) familiar.
Thanks to online self-publishing, my new book could be gloriously me (for better or worse). This time, there won’t be any humorless corporate entity cutting my jokes, or deleting a detour into how I practically idolized Ronald Reagan as a young conservative ideologue.[2]
Even better, I’d no longer be stuck with the book publisher’s imperative to produce a set number of words. You’ve probably read more than a few books that seemed to be about 20 percent content and 80 percent padding. That’s because most ideas can be reasonably well communicated in under 100 pages. (Hell, probably in under 20.) But the reading public (what’s left of it) isn’t exactly keen on paying $25 for a book that’s no thicker than your phone. If you’re a publisher, you want bulk so that people can feel they’re getting something substantial for their money.
What the Framers Got Wrong (working title – I think it’s pretty good) would probably come in at around 50 pages. I’d put it up on Amazon, charge something like $2.99, and ... well, not watch big profits roll in, but I’m betting I’d end up doing better than I did when the geniuses at Praeger decided to charge 40-something bucks for Navigating the News. Maybe I’d even serialize it on Substack first, get feedback from readers, and incorporate that into the version I end up publishing.
Or a year from now, I can type “What are the big things the Framers got wrong?” into GPT-5, save the result, and leave it at that.
[1] For a while in the late 90s, I wanted to be David Foster Wallace, or at least a far less gifted version of him. I was hardly alone in that desire – over-educated Gen X DFW fanboys were a dime a dozen back then. I read everything he wrote (multiple times), practically demanded that anyone I deemed worthy read his work, and was crushed when he took his life in 2008. Prior to that, I wanted to be Tom Waits. And Charles Bukowski.
[2] I had Reagan books – piles of them – apparel, coffee mugs, framed pictures, and I think even a Ronald Reagan action figure at one point. I may have needed professional help.
That’s so funny that you had a Ronald Reagan action figure. I wonder where it went?