Peaceful Political Revolution in America
"The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government."
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, James Wilson, Thomas Paine, and many other American patriots and revolutionaries completely agreed with this simple but compelling statement made by President Washington. Yet today, very few Americans know what the basis of our form of government is, let alone understand what it means.
This Podcast will dive into the most important and most censored story in America. We will uncover the myths behind our constitutional history and reveal some of the startling facts about our founding as a nation. Hang on tight! If you haven't honed up on your American history, if you think you understand our American political system, you may be in for a shock.
Peaceful political revolution is your unique American heritage. It is what makes our democracy so special and what makes your role in American politics so important. Are you ready for a peaceful political revolution? Where does it come from? How does it happen? What can you do to change our political system for the better?
We will address these questions and many more in the upcoming Podcasts, so hang on. If you think our politics are bad and only getting worse, you may find that a peaceful political revolution is the antidote.
Peaceful Political Revolution in America
S3 E6 SYSTEM CORRUPTION with Camila Vergara_Part 1
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Welcome to another episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.
I want to begin today with a passage that has been sitting with me for some time. It comes from the Swiss scholar Pascal Lottaz, host of the Neutrality Studies podcast, in his March 2026 introduction to an interview with the political scientist Dr. Aaron Good. Lottaz opened that conversation this way. "Crime in the United States is not a bug; it's a feature. That actually explains a lot also about its illegal foreign policies. The US as a political entity is deeply intertwined with crime syndicates and explicitly illegal acts under international and local law. Epstein was not at all an exception. These shady dealers are part and parcel of how US politics works."
Good's argument, in brief, is this. After the Second World War, the United States built what he calls a "tripartite state" — the public democratic state we learn about in civics class, the national-security state of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, and, behind both of them, a deep state that he defines as an obscured, dominant, supranational source of antidemocratic power. That deep state, he argues, did not emerge from any constitutional design. It emerged from the pursuit of empire — from a postwar project that required, in his words, an endless exception to the rule of law in order to function.
That's quite a diagnosis. And it is a powerful one. But it leaves an obvious question hanging. If the rot is structural, what do we do about it? That question is what brings me to today's guest.
Dr. Camila Vergara is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Research and Innovation at the Essex Business School at the University of Essex. She is the editor of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, and the author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic, published by Princeton University Press.
Where Aaron Good gives us a forensic account of how the American state has been hollowed out by elite criminality, Camila Vergara takes a longer view. Drawing on Machiavelli, Condorcet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt, she argues that the corruption we are describing is not a recent betrayal of an otherwise sound design — it is the predictable trajectory of representative government itself. Republics, she contends, decay into oligarchies. They always have. And the question is not whether the United States is corrupt, but whether the constitutional architecture we inherited contains the tools to push back against that decay — or whether we need to build new ones.
Her answer, of course, is the latter. She proposes what she calls plebeian institutions — a network of local assemblies, independent of parties and government, designed to give ordinary people a permanent, structural check on the power of the few.
Today, we are going to walk through that argument. We will talk about how she defines systemic corruption, why she thinks reform from within is unlikely to be enough, what plebeian power could actually look like in twenty-first century America, and whether the U.S. Constitution — as it stands — is part of the cure or part of the disease.
Dr. Camila Vergara, it is a pleasure to have you on the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. Welcome to the conversation.
Quick Links
SYSTEM CORRUPTION by Camila Vergara
https://a.co/d/0eEmbDAF
Pascal Lottaz, Neutrality Studies:
https://youtu.be/WjgvH8xCbv4?si=gjQVXmbCbwhk3al1
YouTube:
https://youtu.be/0KUlGYE6apw