The Unwinding

One answer is a federal government that operates on the principles of decentralized and agile management described before.

For the next two decades, Sam Rayburn held power in Washington. Presidents came and went—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—but whoever was President, Sam Rayburn was Speaker; he held the post he had dreamed of as a boy for almost seventeen of the twenty-one years after 1940, more years than any other man in American history.

The Clinton administration, led by Lawrence Summers, signed into law the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which ripped down the firewalls that had been established by the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. Designed to prevent the kind of meltdown we are now experiencing, Glass-Steagall established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It se

in McConnell, Sam had found someone as interested as he was in another existential threat to humanity: Donald Trump. Trump’s assault on the government, and on the integrity of US elections, belonged, to Sam’s way of thinking, on the same list as pandemics and artificial intelligence and climate change.