The Weirding Index

Unusually high winds across the plains of discourse. A thunderhead of possibility builds over every city hall and county board. Expect a 70% chance of paradigm shift.

In the dusky twilight of empires, there comes a time when even the worn institutions begin to flicker with the hint of something else—a whisper in the chambers, a wind through the alleys, a rumor that the Republic might rise again.

Not the old Republic, mind you, but something ancestral and yet entirely new.

Something Federated.

We call it the Alliance to Restore the Republic.

Not as some nostalgia-soaked cosplay of powdered wigs and parchment, but as a living experiment in self-governance—rekindling the civic campfires and forging new protocols for power in the hands of the many.

And in this, the old names return. The Democratic-Republican Party, not as mere revival, but as cipher and spell—an invocation of balance. Of local stewardship and planetary vision. Of Jefferson's agrarian independence fused with civic technologist dreamers and council fire builders from Los Angeles to Lubbock.

We live in a time when Washington D.C., once the city of dusty compromise and visionaries in waistcoats, now hosts a professional class of neo-Federalists—technocratic mandarins and hyper-partisan nobles, hoarding power like dragon-gold while the towns wither, the aquifers drop, and the code of civic life rusts.

These are not your Hamiltonian dreamers of central banks and national dignity. No, these are empire administrators with little feel for the soil beneath a local budget, nor the rhythm of a neighborhood council meeting, nor the cries of a creek asking not to be piped and buried.

Yet even in this great forgetting, new roots are sprouting.

From Esmeralda pop-ups in desert towns to municipal mutual aid alliances forming in the firelines of California, a federation of the willing is assembling. Not waiting for permission. Not begging for scraps. But daring to act, city by city, block by block.

Remember Star Trek’s Federation? Not the military order of the Empire, but a layered symphony of sovereign worlds in voluntary mutual allegiance. That image is no accident. Our ancestors painted stars in their eyes and called them ideals.

In this iteration of the Republic—call it Version 7.0, after the confederation, the 1787 constitution, the post-Civil War integration, the New Deal order, the Cold War imperium, and the late neoliberal drift—this time, we return to distributed power.

We look not to D.C. to fix our problems, but to Las Vegas, Altadena, Duluth, and Charleston. To water boards and public libraries. To mutual aid collectives and open civic data collaboratives. To people who know how to fix a sidewalk, run a school board Zoom, or keep the elders cool during the heat dome.

This is the Federation of the people.

A Republic not of marble halls but of co-ops and protocols. Of mesh networks and consent councils. Of city twins swapping resilience recipes. Of townships enshrining the "Chair of the Empty Seat" to represent the unborn generations whose world depends on what we do now.

Tool or Trickster Tech

The Protocol Commons – a growing decentralized repository of civic rituals, tools, and open-source government patterns. It’s like GitHub, but for fixing potholes, negotiating water rights, or holding digital town halls. Version 1.0 currently being tested in the wild.

This isn’t a political party in the narrow sense of the word—it’s a distributed identity. A campfire ring. A banner raised over coalitions of teacher-mayors, civic hackers, permaculturists, small-town sheriffs, and inner-city transit dreamers. Those who still believe in republic as something sacred: a shared thing, res publica.

To be Democratic-Republican today is not to argue about states’ rights in the old tongue, but to practice subsidiarity: decision-making at the lowest possible level, closest to the people, infused with a networked solidarity that transcends boundaries and bureaucracies.

It is to believe in local competence and interlocal fellowship—a mesh, not a pyramid.

The old flag flies, but it now bears a patch: not stars in a field of war, but symbols of watershed, neighborhood, and data cooperative.

Pete’s Last Word

“When the center cannot hold, don’t panic. Build circles.”

Join the Alliance. Rebuild the Republic. The Federation is already here—whenever two or three gather in the name of the public good.

Add your town to the ring. Write your own protocols. The Constitution wasn’t the first protocol—nor will it be the last. But the next one? We write it together. And for those that enjoy reading, the book "The Gun, the Ship and the Pen" provides a most excellent global perspective on the US and many other contemporary constitutions during that 18th and 19th century of ferment fomenting new nation-states. Relevant!