President Trump has won the popular vote, both houses of Congress, and every swing state: this shows he has received a popular mandate. But a mandate for what? The new groups that joined his coalition are not, by definition, conservative Republicans. If the new Administration misinterprets its mandate, it risks losing it by alienating the new voters that the Trump-Vance campaign brought into the fold.

We think Reihan Salam, President of the Manhattan Institute, summarized it best when he described it to us as “a quality of life election.” 

We think this framing is very valuable because it squares a circle: it gives us an overarching framework for how the incoming Administration can pursue bold action on a number of fronts without losing its mandate–indeed, fulfilling it instead: by pursuing a “Quality of Life Agenda”.

What would such an agenda look like? 

Here are some of our ideas. 

We can only give an overview of each proposal, but we may write more in-depth about each. Some are already part of the Trump-Vance agenda. Some are already well-known to policy wonks, and some are more “left-field”. But all are designed to be achievable through either executive action or potential bipartisan legislation, to improve the average American family’s quality of life, and to be politically advantageous to the Trump Administration 2.0. 

Naturally, we have had to exercise judgment to decide what fits under the “quality of life” umbrella, as every policy could be argued to have an impact on “quality of life” in some way or another: for example, dumb foreign wars have a very bad impact on the quality of life of American servicemembers! And yet it would be strange to discuss foreign policy in an article titled “The Quality of Life Agenda.” A doctrinaire supply-sider might argue that corporate tax cuts are a quality of life issue, since they create a rising economic tide which improves people’s quality of life, and yet most people would not find the logic self-evident. We have just tried to exercise common sense, and to apply the following criterion: whether the average person would notice an improvement to their quality of life as a result of policy X.

With those disclaimers out of the way, here’s our Quality of Life Agenda, neatly organized under five buckets: Fix Disorder, Pro-Family Policy, MAHA, Cost of Living, and Daily Life.

Fix Disorder

If there’s a word for the broad spectrum of issues that have most exercised Americans in the past few years, it is, taking after Manhattan Institute’s Charles Lehman, “disorder.” Order is not opposed to liberty–it is, indeed, its precondition. It is a democratic value, since failing to apply the laws that were voted by the people’s representatives makes a mockery of the democratic process. It is also the difference between first-world and third-world countries. Since the late-Obama era, in the wake of Ferguson and DACA, Americans have seen disorder increase in their homeland, and the Trump-Vance Administration should put an end to disorder.

Mass deportations and border enforcement. This one is obvious, and already front-of-mind, so we won’t dwell on it, but it’s still important to put it at the top of the list. Unchecked immigration creates disorder. Failing to apply laws creates disorder. Importing random masses of people from different cultures with different notions of how to behave in public spaces creates disorder. Mass deportations and border enforcement should be the first priority of the Trump-Vance Administration.

New COPS Program. Another big problem is law enforcement. And one problem is human resources. In the wake of the BLM movement and its “racial reckoning,” far too many police officers have either left the force or retired early, and departments are having trouble recruiting. While most jurisdictions have walked back the worst of the “defund the police” insanity and have recovered most of their budgets, it has still left a hole in recruitment and the situation is far from optimal. The COPS Program was a very popular Clinton-era program that aimed to recruit 100,000 additional police officers; the federal government would subsidize the employment of new police officers for the first few years and, it was thought, the new police would prove so effective that local jurisdictions would feel compelled to continue to pay the extra cost. The original COPS Program was a partial, but very real success: it was popular, it did not quite reach its 100,000 target but came close, and contributed significantly to the Great Crime Rate Dropoff of the 1990s and 2000s. However, it expired and since then localities have, too often, not been able or willing to take up the burden of new cop hiring. Today there still exists a “COPS Program” within the DOJ, but without the right budget it is spinning its wheels (it also seems to be engaged in DEI nonsense, which should be scrapped). A new COPS Program would learn from the lessons of the first one, with higher levels of funding for a longer period of time to ensure that those 100,000 new cops are indeed recruited and put on the street. Obviously, this could be part of the reconciliation bill, but it could be a standalone bill: the Administration could dare Democrats to put themselves on the side of BLM and against law enforcement.

Build more prisons. Prison does work. And as Charles Fain Lehman argues in a recent article for City Journal, many of the ills associated with prisons, such as cruelty and recidivism, can be ameliorated, not through reducing incarceration, but through better incarceration. Prisons should be clean and orderly. He also notes, pace claims about American mass incarceration, that the incarceration rate in America has been falling for over a decade. Not coincidentally, the crime rate has been increasing. The Federal government should encourage the building of more prisons by offering to foot part of the bill for their construction. 

Create a national LEO and Good Samaritan defense fund. Another way in which BLM has made it more difficult to be a cop is through deterring cops from enforcing laws because they could then be subject to ill-intentioned prosecution from far-left prosecutors (more on which below). The Trump-Vance Administration could send a strong signal about freeing cops to do their jobs by creating a national defense fund to fund legal representation for LEOs accused of wrongdoing–as well as Good Samaritans who intervene in self-defense situations, such as Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny. Obviously such a move would not represent an endorsement of any wrongdoing by police, since all wrongdoing would remain illegal; it would merely ensure that LEOs and Good Samaritans have adequate legal representations and have the assurance that they would not be ruined by frivolous or politicized prosecution (the other side being also very well-funded). The absolute amount for such a fund would be quite small at the scale of the Federal budget, but would send a powerful message; the Federal government could seed it, but could also invite police unions, non-pro-crime state and local governments, and even private foundations and individuals to contribute. 

Fix prosecution: investigate far-left NGOs; publish prosecution scorecard. Another big factor to the disorder has been far-left prosecutors, often supported by lavishly-funded NGOs and other entities. Criminal prosecution is a state and local issue in which the Federal government cannot directly intervene. The Federal government cannot tell a local DA how to do his job. However, it can investigate far-left NGOs with a view to removing their tax-exempt status and prosecuting their leaders for complicity with crime. If nothing else, the discovery process would prove highly entertaining. More importantly, such prosecutions would act as a powerful deterrent to radical left-wing funders and activists. Another thing the Federal government can do is name and shame: the Federal government could put together a scorecard showing which jurisdictions fail to enforce laws and at which rate, and aggressively publicize it in the worst jurisdictions. Purely in the interests of completeness and as a purely factual matter, it could also note the partisan political affiliation of the worst prosecutors. 

Get rid of public pot smoking. One way in which the 2024 election was historic is that for the first time both major party candidates took a relaxed view of recreational marijuana. Be that as it may. But pot smoking is a quality of life issue, and we don’t believe that the Trump-Vance ticket ever argued in favor of having the streets of America’s great cities stink of pot on a round-the-clock basis. The entire nexus of pot regulation is complex and is a giant gray area, where everyone pretends to ignore the conflict between Federal and state/local laws. The Federal government should send states a simple message: we can turn a blind eye to people smoking pot in private, but if you don’t arrest people for smoking pot in public, we’re going to start enforcing some Federal drug laws. This seems like a “grand bargain” that would be consistent with the Trump-Vance ticket’s libertarian promises while significantly improving the quality of life of most American citizens. 

Address homelessness. This is another area where the Federal government has no direct jurisdiction but a great ability to effect change through indirect means. Everyone feels sympathy for the homeless, but to brutally summarize decades of research and experience into the issue, the main takeaway is this: because homeless people, as a rule (almost by definition), are generally people who find it difficult to get their life together on their own, the carrots of help and support that everyone wants to give make the problem worse unless they are also accompanied by sticks. To put it another way: it’s all well and good (truly) to have programs and public money to assist homeless people, but experience shows that unless there is also a credible threat that if the individuals in question don’t follow the program they will get in trouble, the program fails. The left’s pathological pseudo-empathy makes the problem worse by subsidizing homelessness, and therefore creating more of it. It’s bad for the homeless themselves, but it’s also bad for the quality of life of everyday Americans. What can we do? The first thing is that aggressively enforcing non-marijuana Federal drug laws, and protecting the border through which too many drugs cross, would do a world of good. Another obvious track is to, again, aggressively investigate and prosecute far-left NGOs which encourage homelessness (and, in many cases, are a de facto arm of Democratic political machines). Finally, the Federal government should draw up a checklist of evidence-based policies that work to ameliorate homelessness (e.g. no drug consumption sites; enforcement of vagrancy laws) and condition a large bucket of Federal funding to the states on adherence to the checklist.

Pro-Family Policy

The American family is in crisis. And pro-family policy is popular: across all classes and regardless of parental status, 60 to 75% of Americans say that the government should do more to support families, according to a survey by American Compass. Pro-family policy is an obvious and direct way in which the Trump-Vance Administration can drastically improve the quality of life of the vast majority of everyday Americans.

The child tax credit. This is a huge topic on its own, and is likely to be a much-debated part of the forthcoming tax bill, so look for further coverage in this space. In the meantime, the simple fact of the matter is this: raising kids is expensive. Raising kids is an investment in the future by working American families which the commonwealth should support. You may disagree philosophically; okay; we would merely respond that fiscal transfers for parents are popular and would help improve their and their children’s quality of life, and that’s what the present article is about. The CTC should be as generous as possible within existing fiscal and policy constraints, it should be fully-refundable, it should be conditioned on one member of the household being in the workforce; it should not be tied to income. 

Fix marriage disincentives in public programs, particularly the EITC. From the Institute for Family Studies: “the current Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is extremely punitive towards married people. If two young working-class people marry, they may be denied thousands of dollars of EITC benefits as their combined incomes exceed eligibility thresholds when the sum of their individual, pre-marriage incomes did not . Marriage penalties like this exist in many programs, but the penalty baked into the EITC is especially large and galling for a program designed to support parents. (...) It is possible for the current system to be far more generous for working parents without being more complex by changing the EITC phase-out thresholds for married filers.” But it’s not just the EITC: “The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit explicitly bans people from claiming it if one spouse stays home, and limits payments for care provided by family members. It’s a subsidy specifically for non-family-related childcare. In other words, it’s facially discriminatory against families that choose to have a spouse stay home, or who choose to have care provided by an extended network of kin.”

Free birth, perinatal care, and postpartum physical therapy. Senator Vance has famously expressed support for these types of policies. The preferred mechanism is simple, similar to the ways that dialysis is provided for free via Medicare. It’s also a cheap policy, since the vast majority of births are already covered either by private insurance or by Medicaid–but it would send a powerful signal. However, it’s not just free birth that should be free, but perinatal care, and even postpartum physical therapy (as in France), which is important for a lot of women to recover from the physical trauma of birth.  

Maternity leave. It’s more than high time for Republicans to get on the side of maternity leave. And the maternity leave should be generous, at least 12 weeks. Our preferred approach for reaching this goal without unduly burdening businesses is through corporate tax credits; this would allow the provision to be part of the reconciliation package; it would also be a corporate tax cut that could potentially unite supply-siders and “new right” or pro-family conservatives. Finally, yes, it should be maternity leave. A big issue in the 2024 election was the question of whether there exist biological differences between the sexes. There are obvious physical and psychological reasons why taking time off with a newborn is more attractive and more important for women than men. It would also reduce the cost of the policy.  

Flexible work for Moms. One of the most interesting social findings from the post-Covid era is the association between remote work and greater fertility. But this hints at a broader issue: women want to work; there is no widespread appetite for returning to the single-earner family model (nor any consensus on how that could be realistically accomplished). However, women, on average, have a less career-driven approach to work than men (certainly outside elite metros), would like their work hours to be more flexible, and would like to be able to spend more time focused on their families and less time in work without being financially penalized. This is a big reason why an expanded CTC is a good idea, but there are more ways this could be pursued. We are talking about adding regulations to labor laws, which conservatives typically don’t like, and for very good reason. Nobody wants to turn the US into France, least of all this writer. However, we would like to propose narrow regulation specifically aimed at Moms to significantly improve their quality of life. The first is to mandate that Moms who wish to do so and whose occupation permits them to be allowed to work remotely. The other is even more specific: we would mandate, at least for large employers, that if a Mom returns to family leave, and requests to work part-time instead of full-time, the employer is obligated to grant the request. Again: Republicans just won a national referendum on whether there exist differences between the sexes, and so they should have no shame about making this policy specifically for mothers, and not “parents.” 

KOSA. The Trump-Vance Administration should support KOSA, ideally pushing it over the finish line during the lame duck. Huge boost to both parents and kids’ quality of life.

Restore sanity to public K-12 education. Having to even wonder whether or not your child is subjected to insane woke brainwashing in school is a quality of life issue, we believe. The Trump-Vance Administration should condition Federal funding for K-12 schools and schools of education to adherence to a Charter of American Values, preferably written by Chris Rufo, which would preclude woke nonsense from being taught in K-12 schools or in schools that train teachers. We envision a system by which parents and school boards would be empowered to monitor schools’ adherence to the Charter and, in case of failure to do so, be able to petition the Department of Education, which would then investigate; in case of non-compliance, funding would be withheld. And once again, the Federal government should aggressively prosecute far-left NGOs that push racial and gender nonsense; there is a template here, which is the way the Federal government used aggressive investigations and prosecutions, and withholding of tax exempt status, to dismember the KKK and bring universities that refused to admit non-white students into line. Purveyors of woke racial garbage are at least as racist and toxic as the KKK, and should be pursued with the same vigor. 

Important disclaimer here: we also believe the Trump-Vance Administration should pursue, aggressively and in parallel, the work begun by the 1776 Commission in the first Trump Administration to overhaul curricula to make them more pro-American and civic-minded. It should also, in consultation with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., work to improve physical fitness education in schools. But this is a broader, more long-term set of policies that don’t fall directly under “quality of life.” While this broader effort goes on, the Administration should start with “basic sanity in schools,” which is, in our view, a quality of life issue.

MAHA

One of the best things to come out of the 2024 election is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s focus on chronic disease and other ways in which Americans are unhealthy. Whether you agree with all of RFK Jr’s positions (we certainly don’t) he is certainly to be commended for pointing out the problem and bringing it to public attention in a unique, and uniquely powerful way. MAHA is certainly a quality of life issue. This is, of course, a huge topic in its own right, which we can’t possibly cover comprehensively here. But here are some ideas to throw in the mix.

Ban Pharma ads. Take it from a writer who lives in Europe: not having to watch another Pharma ad ever again would be a huge boost to quality of life for Americans, and we are sure the vast majority of them agree. The U.S. is one of only two countries in the world (along with New Zealand) that allows direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. We don’t believe there is a First Amendment issue: consumer safety should obviously be the prevailing concern, here. Who has the biggest ad budget is immaterial to the technical question of which particular drug is best for a particular patient. This idea also fits nicely with the “anti-Big Pharma” “vibe” of the MAHA movement. It would demonstrate a commitment by the Administration to ignore Big Pharma lobbying. Doing it via statute would make for an interesting fight, essentially daring Democrats to publicly side with Big Pharma and against consumer safety over a bill which we believe would be very popular with the public, but there are creative ways to do it via executive action, specifically under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) which gives the FDA authority to regulate pharma advertising. 

Vouchers for Direct Primary Care. “Direct Primary Care” (DPC) is a very exciting and growing mode of healthcare delivery. If you don’t know, the way it works is simple: you pay a monthly or annual membership fee for access to your physician, which covers most primary care services. DPC typically includes unlimited visits and telehealth access, extended appointment times, and direct communication with your doctor. The benefits for patients are obvious: more personalized attention, you can usually get same-day or next-day appointments, and pricing is (blessedly) transparent and straightforward. There are also significant benefits for physicians: lower overhead and administrative costs, and a profitable business model as (as with gyms) there is an 80/20 effect where a majority of people pay every month but use the service rarely. DPC is just the 21st century version of the most successful primary care model in history, which is family medicine. The benefits aren’t just related to convenience and efficient delivery: the American healthcare system is famously very bad at preventative care, chronic care, and iatrogenesis (which are also very expensive). DPC addresses all of those directly: a huge part of fixing those is having a personal relationship with a doctor who knows you and has known you for a long time; can helpfully recommend the right preventative care; can exercise better-informed judgment as to what specific treatment is right for you, and so on. The Federal government should provide a voucher for every adult American (plus additional for dependents), independent of any insurance coverage they may have, for DPC. It would also be a huge cost-saver in reduced emergency-room services, in administrative overhead, specialist care, hospitalizations, chronic disease management, and more. Our back-of-the-envelope math (which will be the subject of another article) and we find that while the program would cost $291.0 billion, it would also produce savings to the taxpayer to $355 billion, so the tax impact would be net positive. The overall savings to the US healthcare system would be an eye-popping $1.18 trillion, or a net savings of $892 billion. And this is for a universal program! Also, because it’s a transfer program, you can put it in reconciliation and score it as a savings.

Mandate wintertime vitamin D coverage. Covid reminded us of the extent to which exposure to sunlight, and having the proper levels of vitamin D, is important to overall health and wellbeing. Good studies have shown that vitamin D deficiency is quite literally endemic. Vitamin D deficiency is a huge drag on quality of life, and a public health problem more generally. Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to fatigue and low energy, muscle weakness and pain, bone pain, increased risk of seasonal depression, mood changes, poor concentration, a weakened immune system, and increased risk of respiratory infections, among others. Does that sound like the average American to you? Here’s a story: if you’re in France, and it’s the wintertime, and you go to your doctor, for whatever reason, you will leave with a prescription for daily vitamin D supplementation. We should mandate that, if you have insurance, in September, your insurer will send you a friendly reminder of the importance of vitamin D, along with a voucher for vitamin D supplements–on the house, of course. As far as insurance mandates go, this is surely one of the least harmful to insurers’ bottomline. They may even be able to turn it into a profit center by partnering with supplement companies that would see an opportunity to send free samples to potential new customers. Frankly, insurers should already be doing this as a marketing scheme. But it would strike a great blow for MAHA and prove a significant improvement to Americans’ health and quality of life. 

Make Nicotine Legal Again. Smoking causes cancer. We know. However, we are only slowly relearning that nicotine, apart from cigarette smoke, is a very healthy natural antidepressant and mild stimulant. There is good reason to think that the decline in American nicotine consumption is partially responsible for increased obesity and decreased mental health. Non-smoke nicotine products, including nicotine vapes and nicotine pouches, should be regulated like vitamins: free to advertise under a light-touch regulatory scheme that only bans outright-false claims, free of obnoxious and infantilizing warning labels, free to use indoors. 

Mandatory old age disability insurance. This isn’t, strictly speaking, MAHA, but it’s very important anyway. Elder care is a sleeping giant of an issue, as we have fewer children to be able to take care of their elders. It is simply phenomenally expensive, someone’s going to have to pay for it, and because of the way our polity works (and very understandably so) a big part of that “someone” is going to be the taxpayer. We should note that under a restrictionist immigration policy (which would still be worth supporting on other grounds) it’s going to get even more expensive. We, frankly, don’t have a good suggestion on what to do about the people who are at or near old age. But we do have one for younger people, who need to plan for the possibility (but won’t). The fix is a very simple one: mandate that, for every person now under 40 and until they need elder care, 5% of everything put into tax-advantaged savings accounts such as 401(k)s (and, ideally, 5% of Social Security contributions, but this would open a giant can of worms) be diverted to old-age disability insurance. The insurance industry would very happily provide products for this new market and, apart from this mandate, regulations would have to be very light-touch. 

Research the causes of autism (but actually). Vaccines really do not cause autism. But, as Jill Escher, president of the National Council on Severe Autism, has written in a brilliant article, RFK, Jr. is right to call attention to the alarming rise in autism over the previous decades. This rise in diagnosed autism does not just affect children with Asperger’s-type symptoms; “there also is no question that the population of substantially disabled children like mine, children whose problems could not have been overlooked by families and schools, has been surging. Even when one restricts autism to its most stringent definition, called profound autism, with IQs under 50 and minimal language, one still sees prevalence nearly doubling from 0.27 to 0.46 percent of 8-year-olds in the U.S. between just 2000 and 2016,” she writes. The science on why this is happening is severely lacking; moreover, the Biden Administration “let itself become part of an identitarian movement that celebrates autism (...) downplaying the disabling aspects of autism and the very desperate needs of families.” Escher writes that there is “vast scientific territory open for exploration” on the true causes of autism, such as “how toxic exposures impact not the fetus, but the parents’ germ cells—that is, their eggs, sperm, and precursor cells.”

Cost of Living

The Trump-Vance Administration should focus on reducing the cost of living not just for all the obvious reasons, but also because their signature issues, trade and immigration, will push prices up–perhaps not as much as opponents claim, but perhaps more than supporters believe, and certainly by more than zero. It’s also smart coalition management: free market groups don’t like Trump’s approach to trade and immigration, and they may or may not like what comes out of the tax bill; they can be told that the Administration will look kindly on deregulation efforts that have a direct impact on cost of living and quality of life.  

Moderate YIMBY. You can’t swing a cat through a DC think tank without hitting a YIMBY. The YIMBY is a strange creature, typically skinny, young, childless, with one of those beards that indicate the wearer can’t quite grow a beard, and very, very self-righteous. All of the economic efficiency arguments for YIMBY are well taken. At the same time, in the real world, millions upon millions of members of the Normal-American community have paid a lot of money to buy a house for two very specific reasons, one, to save for their retirement, and two, to be members of a specific community whose character they deeply appreciate and do not want to change. Too many YIMBYs seem to believe that these extremely normal behavior patterns and aspirations are intrinsically illegitimate. We who live in the real world (and can grow a beard) disagree. All that being said, housing costs in America really are too high, and the regs really are too burdensome. All of this is to say we need moderate YIMBYism. On this score, we’ve been most impressed by AEI’s approach on this, and their “Light Touch Density” series.

Legalize self-driving cars. Self-driving cars work. We have seen them with our very eyes. This is the biggest revolution in transportation since the car itself. But, as of right now, they only exist in San Francisco. There are numerous regulatory obstacles that the Trump-Vance Administration can and should lift on self-driving cars. The Department of Transportation and NHTSA could exercise their existing authority to create an autonomous vehicle safety framework without Congressional approval, defining specific performance standards for AI driving systems through the rulemaking process. DOT and the Administration should also lean on states and cities to open their roads to self-driving cars.  

Pro-patient, anti-doctor healthcare deregulation. In the wake of Covid, doctors have never been less trusted in the US. MAHA is, in many ways, an anti-MD movement. This is an opportunity to take aim at the doctors’ lobby, whose welfare queen and foreigner-importing ways are antithetical to the new Administration. Allowing non-doctors, such as nurse practitioners, physicians’ assistants, pharmacists, and dental therapists/hygienists, to do more medical acts, would bring down healthcare costs in a significant, noticeable way. Also the most trusted profession in America is nurses. There is a lot the Federal government can do through its Medicare/Medicaid authority via HHS/CMS, as well as through the VA, military healthcare, and the Indian Health Service, on top of nudging states by issuing new practice guidelines via HHS and linking state funding to reform. There are lots of other good things to be done in deregulating healthcare to lower costs, especially in the areas of telemedicine and Certificate of Need (CON) reform, but we are focusing on this one because it cashes out in a direct way in higher quality of life and lower costs for the average American. Also it’s a way to capture this anti-establishmentarian moment in American healthcare, which might not last forever, after which the doctor lobby will become much less vulnerable. 

Daily Life

Make American public places beautiful again. President Trump's executive order on beautiful public buildings was as well-received among all normal people as it horrified liberal elites who pretend to prefer concrete cubes to classical architecture. The EO should obviously be reinstated within the first days of the new Administration, as the Transition has said it will be. Yes, the government should lead by example by creating beautiful public places when it comes to its own buildings and its own property. Other initiatives, such as the “garden of American heroes” should be vigorously pursued. This goes without saying. But can we do more? And can we do more in a non-authoritarian way? Here is our proposal: a national contest. The entrants would be American towns and cities. And the goal of the contest should be to produce beautiful architecture according to classical norms. The emphasis should be put on the places where daily life happens: statues, while very important, especially in the post-BLM world, do not make life more beautiful if you spend a second looking at a statue as you drive to a suburban shopping mall which seems to have been designed to invoke the word dystopia. What is striking about the great eras of American architecture, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is not, not primarily, that they produced beautiful monuments; it is that even the most pedestrian or humble buildings, such as factories, hotels, and shopping centers, were exquisitely built with beauty in mind. The American Contest for Beautiful Towns and Cities should explicitly and primarily reward reviving classical architecture for spaces such as public squares, shopping malls (yes), and parking lots (YES), and monuments secondarily. Quality of life is improved when the texture of daily life is made more beautiful. A contest, by its nature, is voluntary, and so no one can accuse this concept of authoritarianism. The contest should be sufficiently endowed to create an incentive for towns and cities all over America to choose to participate: we anticipate that consultations on whether to enter the contest, and then how to win it, would be a great moment of small-d democratic Americanism. We envisage something participatory, which would involve large numbers of residents of towns and cities small and large in proposing and debating ways to beautify their environment. The contest should be heavily marketed, with an emphasis on the intrinsic value of public beauty but also the economic benefits, such as tourism and attraction of high-status residents and capital. While there should be no apology about the intent to promote classical American architecture, the commission running and judging the contest should stress the nonpartisan nature of the contest (indeed, if they are not prevented from entering by TDS, our bet is many deep-blue places in New England would be favored to do very well). While it should by no means be a “everyone gets a participation trophy” kind of contest, there should be enough categories (by city size) and enough tiers of awards (regional winner, state winner, national winner; platinum, gold, silver, bronze medals...) so that every town or city that chooses to enter would feel they have a reasonable chance to win at least something by making a good effort. Nor should the effort end with the contest: the commission should be involved in supporting winners in marketing their success and using it as a tool to attract tourism, high-status residents, and even business investment. The contest should run regularly, perhaps every four years. We envision it becoming a fixture of American life. We envision families on road trips, seeing the sign “Regional Beautiful City – Bronze Medal” and deciding to stop there for a rest, a meal, and a look-around. We envision families factoring which suburb won a medal in their decision of where to buy a house when they move to a different metropolitan area. We envision towns and their residents having civic pride and boasting because they won an award.