Beyond the Four Boxes

Building Systems as the Durable Alternative to Destroying People

As someone trying to have his voice heard in the vastness of the American corner of the internet, something exciting happened to me last week, which quickly became personally disturbing.

When Bluesky notified me that someone wanted to discuss my writings, I was quietly thrilled and mildly skeptical. It could be a bot or a scammer. The account was young and little used, but I made a quick reply and moved on with a busy day. Later, I found more attempts to reach me. They mentioned being a writer and having a website. I gave it a look. My excitement faded into concern.

Their writings appeared to dehumanize anyone involved in public service or governance, asserting a righteousness that could justify violence against an entire category of people. I withdrew from contact.

I am a public servant, and have been for many years. So are many groundskeepers and receptionists, doctors and firefighters, benefits managers and child protection workers. There have been bad actors and poor stewards at every level of service, elected, appointed, and rank and file. They must be held accountable. But they remain people, entitled to due process and protection against violence. Employment is not a verdict, and anger is not a substitute for evidence.

These times are not normal times. There are reasons to be frustrated and angry at politicians, strangers, systems, and all the apparatus of a collective life left limping along. What do we do with that anger? Where and how can we direct it constructively to repair systems rather than destroy people?

This past Saturday's nationally organized No Kings event emphasized early voting and participation in the coming election. It offers a useful entry into an older idea about how people defend their liberty.

The familiar “four boxes of liberty” formulation names the soapbox, ballot box, jury box, and cartridge box. Versions of the idea circulated in the nineteenth century, although the wording and meaning have varied. As you read this article, you find me on my soapbox, or perhaps the internet era's comment box. No Kings is directing people toward the ballot box. The jury box represents the public's role in checking the government's power to accuse and punish. The cartridge box invokes armed resistance when other protections fail.

The idea is often presented as a succession, with the failure of each box pushing us toward the next. I do not believe a society can endure unchecked despotism indefinitely without violence becoming part of its struggle to survive. Nor would I equate defending people against actual violence with attacking them for their employment or political affiliation. But recognition of that danger cannot become permission to hasten it. We have an obligation to build and defend alternatives that preserve liberty, fundamental humanity, and human rights.

There are means we have not adequately developed, let alone exhausted.

People have written postcards and letters, shared video essays, marched, donated, canvassed, and voted, only to watch conditions worsen. Wealth can purchase an amplification ordinary citizens cannot approach. A fractured media landscape makes even a shared account of what happened difficult to sustain. Meanwhile, two established parties dominate the routes through which public frustration becomes electoral action.

Telling people to repeat these efforts indefinitely, without changing how power is organized, is not an adequate answer.

Voting to reduce harm can be necessary. It cannot be the entirety of our political ambition. No Kings describes its voter participation work as nonpartisan. Indivisible, one of its leading organizers, explicitly seeks Democratic majorities and also supports primary challengers seeking to change that party. Those efforts have purposes. They do not settle the question of whether Americans deserve viable choices outside the existing duopoly.

My concern is what happens when a movement's independent demands become subordinate to the electoral needs of a party. If our anger produces donations and votes but no lasting power to demand better, we remain dependent on the people we hoped to hold accountable. “Blue no matter who” may describe someone's immediate calculation of danger. It cannot become a permanent exemption from scrutiny.

After this election, regardless of its outcome, we must create new, disruptive possibilities, including new political parties capable of earning public trust and winning office. Neither existing party is entitled to permanent ownership of American political life.

That requires more than a name and a presidential candidate every four years. It requires local organizations, credible candidates, sustained membership, and the resources to survive between elections. It also requires changing electoral rules that make additional choices difficult to establish and sustain. We must build the alternatives while working to make competition fairer.

As the signs come down, the records and accounts should go up. The engagement and connection of a community must remain.

Every lawmaker should face sustained, independent scrutiny of their public record: decisions made, money accepted, commitments abandoned, and issues dodged. Independent journalists and civic organizations can share that work, making evidence available for people to judge. Oversight bodies need authority, resources, and protections against retaliation by those they oversee.

Durable local organizations can recruit and vet candidates, support them, and publish assessments of their performance after they win. Coordinated boycotts, labor organizing, and nonviolent civil disobedience can impose costs that a letter alone cannot. Each effort needs a specific demand, an identifiable decision-maker, and a way to determine whether anything changed. Peaceful action need not be convenient or easily ignored.

But a new party can reproduce the failures of an old one. Any organization asking for our trust should disclose its funding, give members meaningful authority, protect internal dissent, and provide a credible way to remove failed leaders. It must apply standards to its own candidates even when doing so is politically costly.

This is where I believe Stewardship can provide a foundation. Those entrusted with power owe duties to the whole public, including people who opposed them. They must preserve rights, maintain the systems people depend upon, and leave the public with a greater capacity to govern its own affairs. Those obligations must shape how an organization operates before it asks to govern anyone else.

After this election, we should each choose some part of that work and join others in sustaining it: scrutinizing a public body, supporting independent reporting, recruiting a candidate, or building an organization that can offer a credible political alternative. We need commitments that survive both disappointment and victory.

We cannot promise that every peaceful effort will succeed. We can refuse to let the failures of our current institutions define the limits of our political imagination.

The work beyond the four boxes is to build institutions strong enough to confront power and accountable enough to be trusted with it. Our anger tells us that something is wrong. We remain responsible for what we build from it.