The Pony Problem:
From Buckley to the Blueprint
David Brin is one of those science fiction writers who never learned to stay in his lane. Astrophysicist, futurist, consultant to NASA and various three-letter agencies, and—increasingly—political gadfly with a blog that reads like Thomas Paine crossed with a frustrated systems engineer. I’ve been reading him since Startide Rising, back when his biggest concern was how dolphins might handle the politics of galactic civilization.
These days, he’s worried about whether we can handle politics at all. Worries I share, completely.
His recent Substack piece takes aim at Robert Reich’s “Ten Pledges” for Democrats—a perfectly reasonable list of progressive priorities that includes eliminating Trump’s tariffs, busting up monopolies, strengthening unions, Medicare for all who want it, paid family leave, and universal basic income. Reich is a fine and brilliant fellow. Brin’s response is... less diplomatic:
While I like and respect Robert Reich, he ought to have added an equally realistic 11th wish to the other ten... that every American gets a unicorn or pegasus, or at least a pony. Sure, that snark of mine is way unfair! And it is exactly what his list will face.
Honestly, the escalation from unicorn to pegasus to “at least a pony” isn’t just snark. It’s diagnosis. Brin’s point is brutally simple: if you can’t get 60% of Americans to nod along, you’re not doing politics. You’re doing wishful thinking. And wishful thinking, however righteous, loses elections.
Reich’s list has items that poll well in isolation—who doesn’t want lower drug prices?—bundled with items that become attack ad fodder the moment they leave a Berkeley faculty meeting. UBI polls at maybe 40% on a good day. Medicare-for-all polls great until you mention it might affect employer coverage, then it craters. These aren’t arguments about policy merit. They’re arguments about political reality, and political reality is what kills ponies.
But to understand why this matters—why the 60% rule isn’t just tactical caution but existential necessity—we need to understand how we got here. How we arrived at a political landscape where “attempted coups are bad” is a controversial position and “believes elections should be decided by voters” is a profile in courage. Let’s look back.
Doodly-doo, doodly-doo...
There was a time when you could encounter conservative thought and, even while disagreeing, admire the craftsmanship. William F. Buckley on Firing Line, that buttery New England accent making even his worst positions sound like reasoned propositions worth engaging. You could argue with Buckley because he was making arguments. The mongoose in me would nod along, appreciating the delivery even when the foreseeable results felt non-optimal.
“Damn, that guy talks pretty,” I remember thinking. And he did. Thirty-three years of Firing Line, over 1,500 episodes, interviewing everyone from Noam Chomsky to Ronald Reagan to Allen Ginsberg chanting Hare Krishna on a harmonium. Buckley wanted to win the argument. He cared about persuasion, about elegance, about the long game of building a movement that could actually govern.
More importantly, Buckley was a gatekeeper.
This is the function that’s been lost, and its loss explains everything that followed. In the 1960s, Buckley famously purged the John Birch Society from respectable conservatism. The Birchers were conspiracy-minded, antisemitism-adjacent, and bad for the brand. Buckley understood that a movement built on garbage would eventually collapse under its own weight. The purge wasn’t altruism—it was strategic hygiene. If conservatism became synonymous with the lunatic fringe, it would lose the educated suburban coalition it needed to win elections and hold power.
So he kept the gates. National Review was a curation project as much as an advocacy project. You could get in if you were a libertarian, a traditionalist, a foreign policy hawk, a free-market true believer. You could not get in if you were a Nazi, a Klansman, or a paranoid ranting about fluoride. There were boundaries, and Buckley enforced them.
The movement he built was conservative in a way that actually meant something: preserving institutions, respecting process, maintaining intellectual standards. You could disagree with Buckley on everything and still share a playing field, still operate under shared rules of engagement, still acknowledge a mutual respect for the concept of truth even when you disagreed about what it was.
That was then.
Doodly-doo, doodly-doo...
Newt Gingrich comes up with a hundred ideas a day. Ninety are insane, nine are plausible, one is brilliant. The man is a firehose—constantly generating, constantly throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. This isn’t a bug; it’s a strategy. Flood the zone with ideas, and people remember the brilliant one while the insane ninety provide cover and confusion.
Gingrich is genuinely smart. That’s what made him dangerous. He wasn’t a Trump-style bullshitter who barrels through on shamelessness alone. He actually constructed things: GOPAC, the Contract with America, the whole rhetorical framework that transformed American politics in 1994. He’s a systems thinker who used his powers for... well, let’s say purposes that haven’t aged well.
The 1994 Contract with America is worth examining because it’s exactly what Brin is now proposing Democrats attempt—and because its trajectory illustrates everything that can go wrong. Gingrich’s Contract was a masterstroke of political positioning. It contained genuinely popular items: require Congress to follow the same laws it imposes on everyone else, audit for waste, term-limit committee chairs, balance the budget. These weren’t fever dreams. They polled well. They felt reasonable to swing voters in a way that Democratic messaging consistently failed to achieve.
And then Republicans won the House for the first time in forty years.
What happened next is the cautionary tale. The Contract’s promises were systematically betrayed, ignored, or perverted into their opposites. Congressional accountability? Dissolved under Dennis Hastert, who—it later emerged—was a serial child molester being blackmailed while serving as Speaker. Balanced budgets? Abandoned the moment tax cuts for the wealthy were on the table. Honest accounting? Please.
But the deeper betrayal was structural. Gingrich didn’t just fail to deliver on the Contract’s promises. He opened the doors that Buckley had kept closed.
The difference between Buckley and Gingrich is the difference between a gatekeeper and a door-opener. Buckley wanted to win arguments. Gingrich wanted to win rooms. Buckley’s hundred ideas would have been filtered for respectability, for long-term movement health, for whether they’d embarrass the coalition in ten years. Gingrich’s hundred ideas were ammunition, not architecture. If an idea was useful—if it energized the base, moved the needle, hurt the right people—it didn’t matter if it was crazy.
That’s how you get from the relatively sober 1994 Contract to the fever swamps that followed. Gingrich didn’t care if the Birchers’ grandchildren were crazy, because they were useful. They turned out voters. They made phone calls. They could be aimed at enemies and fired.
The gates came down. And once they were down, the gradient was set.
Doodly-doo, doodly-doo...
Sarah Palin was the next step down the slide. The Tea Party after that. Each step was logical from the previous one, each enabled by the last. The movement that Buckley built to be intellectually serious became a movement that celebrated intellectual unseriousness as a virtue. “Elite” became an insult. Expertise became suspect. The complicated became the enemy of the visceral.
And then Trump came down the escalator.
Trump isn't even pretending to have ideas anymore. There's no Contract, no platform beyond grievance and dominance and the will to power stripped of any intellectual framework whatsoever. Buckley once threatened to punch Gore Vidal on live television—a lapse he regretted for the rest of his life, a moment of lost control that haunted him. Trump threatens to jail his political opponents and means it literally, and feels no shame at all. Buckley's movement wanted to convince you. Trump's movement wants to crush you. Different projects entirely.
Now, let’s take a look at what’s left of the “reasonable Republicans.”
Mitt Romney: genuinely conservative in the old sense, a management consultant’s faith in process and competence, belief that you could optimize your way to good outcomes within existing systems. He voted to convict on impeachment—once—and was effectively driven from the party. Censured by his own state party. His fundamental sin wasn’t his policies. It was his proceduralism. He still thought politics was about governing rather than punishing.
Mike Pence: not a serious thinker by any measure, a generic evangelical conservative, a talk radio host who got into politics. Chosen as VP specifically because he was bland and reliable. And for four years, he was exactly what they bought—loyal to the point of obsequiousness. But on January 6th, when the mob was chanting “hang Mike Pence” and the President was watching it on television and doing nothing.… Pence certified the election. He did the one thing. The one thing. And they will never forgive him for it.
Liz Cheney: the daughter of Dick Cheney, the architect of the Iraq War, the man who shot his friend in the face and made the friend apologize, the Halliburton prince of darkness himself. She voted with Trump 93% of the time before January 6th. And now she’s the conscience of the Republican Party. The last one standing who’ll say out loud that coups are bad. The last one who believes elections should be decided by voters.
I never thought I’d say it, but I miss Buckley. There are no thinkers left in the modern Republican movement. And very few conservatives.
Doodly-doo, doodly-doo...
Which brings us back to Brin, and back to the pony problem, and back to the question of what the hell we do now.
Brin’s response to the current catastrophe isn’t nostalgia for Buckley or despair at Trump. It’s engineering. If the gates are down and the gatekeepers are gone, you don’t waste time wishing for their return. You build structures that don’t depend on gentlemen’s agreements or good-faith actors. You design systems that enforce accountability even when the people running them would prefer not to be accountable.
His “Newer Deal” proposal is long—he admits it’s “LBWR,” long but worth reading—and I won’t reproduce all of it here. But the key insight is in the structure, not the specific policies.
First, he distinguishes between items that can achieve 60%+ consensus and items that can’t. The 60%+ items go in the Contract. They’re the siege-breakers, the things you campaign on, the things that don’t give your opponents easy attack lines. Cap drug prices. Protect Social Security. Anti-corruption measures. Require Congress to follow the same laws it imposes on citizens. These aren’t sexy, but they’re achievable, and achieving them builds power to do harder things later. A surprising number of them are straightforward steals from Gingrich’s 1994 Contract With America. (Those are the things that were promised and then forgotten as soon as the election was over. )
The Progressive items that can’t reach 60%? They don’t go in the Contract. They’re still worth fighting for, but separately, through different means, without saddling your electoral coalition with positions that poll at 40%. UBI might be good policy. It’s bad politics in 2025. Putting it in your flagship document is handing your opponents ammunition.
Second—and this is where Brin’s engineering brain really shows—he focuses obsessively on accountability mechanisms. The 1994 Contract failed not because its ideas were bad but because there was no enforcement. Republicans promised to audit Congress for waste, then didn’t. They promised to limit terms, then didn’t. They promised honest budgeting, then didn’t. No consequences. No structural barriers to betrayal. Just promises, which are worth exactly nothing in politics.
Brin’s proposals include things like:
The Inspector General of the United States (IGUS): An independent inspectorate, funded a decade in advance so it can’t be defunded by the people it’s supposed to inspect, with authority over all agency inspectors general and military JAGs. Whistle-blower protection with teeth.
Minority Subpoena Power: Guarantee the opposition party 100 subpoenas per year, with staff and time to pursue them. No more majority parties simply shutting down oversight when their guy is in the White House.
Truth and Reconciliation for NDAs: Sunset clauses on non-disclosure agreements, with clemency incentives for blackmail victims to come forward. This one is pure Brin—he’s been banging the “kompromat is the key to everything” drum for years, and given what we’ve seen with Epstein and the control dynamics around various politicians, it’s not paranoid.
The Wyoming Rule: End the artificial cap on House seats so that representation actually scales with population. One person, one vote, for real this time.
These aren’t policy preferences. They’re ratchets. They’re structural changes designed to lock in accountability regardless of who wins the next election. Once minority subpoena power exists, it’s very hard to take away—because whoever’s in the minority will fight to keep it. Once IGUS exists with independent funding, it’s very hard to gut—because it doesn’t depend on annual appropriations from the people it investigates.
This is what “use the ratchet for good, not for evil” means. The right has understood ratchets for decades. Every norm they break, every precedent they shatter, every institution they hollow out—it only turns one way. McConnell and the Garland seat was pure ratchet thinking: take what you can, establish the new normal, force the other side to either accept it or escalate. The left keeps trying to restore norms instead of ratcheting their own. “When they go low, we go high” is anti-ratchet thinking. It assumes the game will eventually return to fair play if we just demonstrate good faith long enough.
It won’t. The gates are down. The gatekeepers are gone. Good faith is a vulnerability now, not a virtue.
What’s left is structure. Design systems that assume bad actors will eventually be in charge, because they will be. Design systems that constrain those bad actors regardless of their intentions. Design systems that make accountability automatic rather than dependent on political will.
I’ve been writing about the buyer’s strike as a pressure tactic—using collective economic leverage to force oligarchs to the negotiating table when electoral politics has failed. What Brin is providing is the other half of the equation: what you demand when they get there.
The strike is the siege engine. Brin’s list is the treaty text.
You don’t show up to negotiations with a wish list of ponies. You show up with structural demands that can achieve 60%+ consensus, that include enforcement mechanisms so promises can’t simply be broken, that ratchet in the gains so the next demagogue can’t easily reverse them.
The Buckley era is gone. The Gingrich era opened doors that can’t be closed again. The Trump era has shown us exactly what happens when a movement abandons all standards, all gatekeeping, all intellectual seriousness—when “useful” becomes the only criterion and “true” becomes irrelevant.
What comes next is either reconstruction or rubble. Brin is doing the engineering work of reconstruction. It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t fit in a tweet. It requires actually reading long documents and thinking about implementation details and accepting that 60% consensus means leaving some of your favorite policies out of the flagship platform.
But it’s real. And real is what we need now.
The ponies can wait.
David Brin’s full “Contract” proposal is available on his blog, Contrary Brin.
https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-contract-part-three-aggressive.html
It’s long. It’s worth reading. It might even be worth forwarding to your representatives, if you still believe that matters.
Which, despite everything, I do.
PS the ‘ratchet’ insight was cool, along with some others. Thrive. And persevere!
An exceptionally cogent appraisal and (in many ways) extension. I hope you will occasionally drop into the comments community under my blog (http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ (Contrary Brin blog)) In any event I’d welcome continuing to be in touch.