Why I'm Writing in 2026

Launching a Substack

One of my resolutions for the new year is to share more of my writing. I have a bad habit of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good — you can find a bunch of projects which I spent months if not years obsessing over on my personal website — but I want to get better at thinking in public and sharing my ideas in real time. I have a dream of making this a weekly column, we’ll see if I can find the time to make that a reality.

To be honest, asking people to read my writing in this day and age feels insane. There’s too much going on in the world, and I don’t want to be screaming into the void. I don’t want to contribute to the flood of information and misinformation that’s drowning democracy, dividing communities, and eroding our collective memory. But here’s the thing: if the sane stay silent because sharing feels absurd, our information ecosystem will continue to disintegrate. My hope is that at worst, my writing will do no harm, and that at best it may contribute to some progress.

So, what exactly do I want to write about? Broadly speaking, I am interested in understanding and transforming dysfunctional political and economic systems at the local, national and global level. I think one of the reasons we are where we are today — in the midst of a constitutional crisis characterized by an imperial presidency, gridlocked Congress, and captured courts — is because capitalism, aided and abetted by tax policies biased in favor of capital and Supreme Court decisions enabling the translation of economic power into political power, has largely consumed democracy, undermining its own foundations in the process.

Put another way, the basic social choice mechanisms responsible for distributing power and resources under democratic capitalism — elections and markets — are both in crisis. Markets are unjust and increasingly inefficient, democracy is slow and increasingly illegitimate, and neither seems to reflect public values. How then was capitalism able to so successfully consume democracy? Part of the answer lies in our aristocratic constitution and institutions built for popular containment and elite control, but an essential factor lies in our antiquated democratic processes. While capitalism may be plagued by market failures and tend towards inequality and oligarchy, it is a far more sophisticated valuation mechanism. Voters only elect their representatives at discrete intervals, through primitive ballots which inherently polarize politics into binary extremes, but consumers and investors vote with their dollars every day on an infinitely sensitive scale.

To me, all this means it’s time to upgrade our democracy at the local, state, federal, and global level. Whether through approval voting, ranked choice voting, score voting, star voting, single transferable voting, liquid democracy, national referenda, or a combination thereof, I believe that we can build systems designed to multiply the points and quality of inputs into the democratic process, thereby empowering voters and improving accountability.

I explore these ideas in more detail in “Reclaiming our Democratic Republic”, and recently shared one concrete recommendation for creating a new democratic input — a national referendum — in the Atlantic. I’ve also provided more detailed proposals for how to overhaul an especially antiquated democratic charter in St. Louis (Common Sense Charter Reform & “Equitable Unification”) where I lived and worked for over a decade.

While I have a lot of ideas, I know I don’t have all the answers, and I have even more questions which I’m looking forward to exploring further on this platform. How should we evaluate tradeoffs between incommensurable values like security/order, equality/fairness, and liberty/freedom? How do we break the tyranny of a two party political system which breeds political cynicism and violence? How might we leverage digital technologies to supplement and strengthen democratic processes?

These questions become even more urgent at the global level, where the need for effective collective action to address war, hunger, climate change, and tech governance, among myriad other issues, seems as obviously critical as it feels impossible.

If any of this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Please reach out to me directly via email at nahuel.s.fefer@gmail.com, or subscribe below to follow along. My hope is that I can help cultivate a space for democratic deliberation — for thinking in public — on my website, on substack, and possibly on other forums in the future. A better world is possible, but it’s going to take an unprecedented degree of collaboration to build it together.