About Seth Huebner

— Political Theorist — Mail Carrier — Founder USPSlife.com —

I live in Green Bay, Wisconsin and work for the U.S. Postal Service. I’ve got a B.S. in natural resources and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, and an M.A. in English literature from Washington State University. I’m launching USPSlife.com in the final months of 2024, which will hopefully become the main hub for communication about the United States Postal Service.

Why USPSlife.com

USPSlife.com will be the first online community dedicated solely to the U.S. Postal Service. If successful, the site will become like a combination of Reddit, Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and a media center for everything related to the Postal Service. As I build the website, I’ll be seeking to understand what’s happening to the Postal Service in real time, as well as what the prospects are for future employees.

As a writer and thinker interested in the problems of democracy, the USPS provides me an opportunity to blend political theory and practice through my day job. Regarding the theory, the first thing to note is that liberal democracy is in crisis globally, with the radical right resurgent across the West in particular. The most authoritative academic democracy index, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), says in 2024 that the world has regressed back to 1985’s level of democracy. A new podcast from The Atlantic—the most prestigious magazine in the United States, matter-of-factly describes democracy in the US as “autocratizing” and “ending.” 

So, it is commonplace these days to observe that liberal democracies have failed to build sustainable communities with high levels of confidence in government and social trust. To that civic observation I’d add the political-theoretical observation that democracies have mission crises resulting from their failure to agree on how to define concepts of the national interest and the common good, or to even attempt the definition of these things in the first place. All public institutions succumb to the fundamental mission crisis of liberal democracy to varying degrees, including even the Supreme Court of the United States, which is notorious for having no guiding interpretive framework for either the Constitution, or public opinion. 

Although, the USPS has always had a straightforward mission as a public service, its leadership and finances have been hamstrung for decades by a chronically gridlocked Congress. The USPS has also failed to build a community for its defense even as it has been one of the most essential agencies in building the United States itself since the time of the Founding (Benjamin Franklin was the first Postmaster General). Just as building community is essential to the survival of liberal democracy, it is also essential for rescuing a public institution from mismanagement and privatization—the USPS’s current trajectory under the leadership of its Board of Governors and Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. 

While DeJoy described community-building as one of the roles of the Postal Service in his 2022 Preface to The United States Postal Service: An American History, he has yet to explain how turning the Postal Service into a private corporation can possibly fulfill that aim. The Service has not even managed to inspire the creation of a dedicated online community for itself, let alone to overcome the current hiring and retention crises it faces, or to explain how it will be financially feasible to adhere to its mandate to deliver to every address in the United States as a private corporation. 

Talks with the city letter carriers’s union, NALC, have also dragged on indefinitely, which has left overworked and underpaid employees waiting far too long for their new contract, which expired in 2023. In fact, the USPS has a full-blown crisis of management at this point, a crisis which has prompted a younger generation of NALC union members to start a movement to reform both the NALC and the USPS. The Postal Service is not only failing to deliver mail, but the dearth of pay and uniforms, and even the lack of vehicles to drive in rural areas, has reached absurd proportions. I can attest personally to only being given about one quarter of the gear and uniform essentials that I need to get through 2024, particularly the winter months, as well as not making enough money to cover rent even when working more than full-time. Without exaggeration, the Postal Service is falling apart before our eyes, with newer employees being unable to afford food and rent, a likely-self-deceived CEO with massive conflicts of interest, an apathetic Board of Governors, and the US Congress rendered useless by the radical right. Mike Gallagher, the last Republican House Representative to get involved in postal issues locally in Green Bay, was just pushed out of office by MAGA extremism. Mark Pocan, a House Democrat, recently (October 2024) accused DeJoy of “blowing up” Wisconsin’s mail system.

One thing I have to say in DeJoy’s defense is, given the prevailing political climate, privatization is indeed the only option for the Postal Service without any action from Congress or public outcry. It’s not clear how much DeJoy has a choice about what he’s doing, and yet, the USPS seems to be more profitable than DeJoy implies. It’s also not clear how DeJoy plans to keep delivering mail to every address given his current agenda of downsizing the Postal Service and eliminating employees. 

DeJoy’s approach to heading the USPS reminds me of Gordon Gee, the flamboyant university president whose philosophy of university management basically boiled down to Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things.” In both cases, neoliberal market logic rules the day; it’s not good for public institutions and it’s not even good economics. Like the USPS, public universities are experiencing a perfect storm of crises with privatization and austerity the inevitable result. Again and again we see our public institutions succumb to decay without a coherent national vision and extensive civic engagement aligning citizens with that vision. Institutional dysfunction indicates that liberal democracy has a mission crisis at the political-theoretical level, as well as a crisis of trust and lack of community at the civic level.

With the above in mind, I want to accomplish three main goals through USPSlife.com: to develop a self-sustaining online business; to help the USPS overcome its leadership, financial, image, hiring, and retention problems; and, to demonstrate some of the ways it is possible to reverse the decay of public institutions. With the attainment of these three goals, I will be able to point to the USPS as an example of how to build a stronger sense of community and purpose in liberal democracies, thus, connecting theory and practice as I set out to do years ago. Using the tools of USPSlife.com and the Postal Service’s various labor unions, my ultimate aim is to turn the USPS into a case-study in reversing the decay of liberal democracy. 

Call me a dreamer; I’m not the only one.

How I Got Into Political Theory

I went to college on the GI Bill as a clueless, first-generation student with only a vague ambition to become an environmental writer and no other concrete plans. I studied philosophy, nearly double-majored in natural resources, and fumbled my way through school and life by trial and error. Although, I wasn’t serious about college when I first went, I became increasingly serious as I realized how catastrophic our environmental problems are and subsequently realized how higher education itself has a mission crisis stemming from the archaic nature of our entire political system.

Here’s the situation in a nutshell: when Congress is almost perpetually gridlocked, public institutions will gradually fall into corruption, mission-creep, and, ultimately, decay. When nations cannot clearly define their national interest or the common good of the people, the missions of public institutions like universities, or the USPS, will likewise lack focus and clarity. In the case of public education, the entire dimension of civic education is missing. What is self-government without civics? The answer, obviously, is Donald Trump (admittedly with the help of the Electoral College). What is a postal service without legislative backing? The answer is the institution I am presently working in: a former public service that is being hacked to pieces and privatized, leaving a dysfunctional, nominally government body in its wake, as well as a handful of rich crony capitalists and even fewer job opportunities in rural communities than they had already. We are, in short, becoming Russia.

I intend to do much more writing in the future, since I would like to establish myself as a theorist of liberal democratic centrism, as well as an advocate for a profoundly more civically engaged type of deliberative democracy. As noted above, liberal democracy is in crisis globally (V-Dem now says in 2024 the world has regressed back to 1985). The crisis, at least in the United States, was obvious to me before I started studying politics systematically. As a young environmentalist, I only needed to follow current events obliquely to realize our society was incapable of having a serious conversation about environmental problems, particularly regarding climate change, water shortages, and toxic pollution. 

My shock and sense of revulsion toward our political system only grew as I became better informed. My experience was similar to the one described in The Nordic Theory of Everything, where Finnish journalist, Anu Partanen, moves to the US and begins to feel like she’s living in the twilight zone as she realizes our political system is archaic. For a strikingly similar take on the US government, hop onto Amazon and read the description of The Oxford Handbook of the United States Constitution; it’s pretty appalling, as well as authoritative. 

In addition to the educational and political shocks I went through, I reflected more and more on climate change. At the time I couldn’t believe the human race was going to face the prospect of its own demise with barely a shrug. I was definitely naive. I thought, is this really how we are going to go down—without a fight? Contemplating that fact for too long drove me a bit mad. I started studying philosophy and politics toward the end of my undergrad years with a compulsive fanaticism that has never let up. And so it came to pass that at the same time as I was realizing how little interest I had in living a conventional life—get a job, own a home, settle down, I resolved myself to cracking the code of democracy. I had no clue how I would live or earn money, or how I would find the time for what became an all-consuming, twenty-year research project.

Most experts don’t believe there is such a thing as a code of democracy, let alone a key to cracking it. It turns out there may be one, however, and it’s so deceptively simple as to sound ridiculous. The key to democracy is in the combination of inspiration and participation: it’s about inspiring people to fund democratic institutions, as well as to participate meaningfully in democratic processes and to punish those who attempt to destroy democracy, whether punishment be through the law, or, more often, through social mores. In short, the key to improving democracy is to make it so easy, so useful, and so interesting that it catches people’s attention and they go along with it. Liberal democracies need a new civic-deliberative system, and that system needs a focused, unifying mission of its own. In a moment I’ll discuss that mission as defining the national interest and the common good.

Thus, as the years went by, the solution to the crisis of liberal democracy became obvious in that it requires both a political theory that outlines a better civic model of democracy, as well as a popular movement for change; hence, my interest in political theory and theology for the former, and deliberative democracy, including labor unions and the Wisconsin Idea, for the latter.

My master’s thesis was on John Milton’s political theology as expressed primarily in Paradise Lost, drawing secondarily on his prose. Milton was a poet and advocate of the English Revolution, as well as probably the first person in Europe to argue that freedom of the press is essential to democratic politics. Most people who read Paradise Lost over the centuries never realized it is a systematic political tract that connects to almost all of Milton’s prose and political writings as expressions of one giant philosophy. 

The gist of my interest in Milton’s political theology is that Milton had a religious method for deciding the common good and the good life, as well as the best political arrangements to pursue those goods; I think liberal democracies need a secular, democratic way of doing those things today. It’s time for liberal democracies to get serious about defining their national interests and the common good of their respective peoples. The national interest and common good are distinct concepts from our ethical and political worldview, which is based on the universal values of liberalism and popular consensus on the economic superiority of capitalism. Milton’s political theory was crude by our standards today; he did not have clear distinctions between the national interest, the common good, and the vision of the good life that held it all together, nor did he have an adequate theory of the state or the separation of powers.

Milton saw the good life in the combination of elitist republicanism and his own peculiar brand of religious social and moral values. Francis Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis was a famous contemporary statement of what constitutes the good life in liberal democracies: the values of political liberalism; and, the economics of well-regulated, free-market capitalism. We are all still very much in the historical learning process about these things. Most political progressives, for their part, are only belatedly coming around to admitting that the combination of democracy and capitalism is the best system in the world. We should be proud of it—yet, while striving to improve the system for the better. 

While I agree with Fukuyama about the superiority of liberal democracy and capitalism, he has never repudiated neoconservatism enough for my liking. More than that, I accuse all so-called political moderates—rightwingers especially—of failing to take the civic dimension of liberal democracy seriously enough, or to even comprehend it in the first place. The collapse of communism made free-market types astonishingly arrogant and self-assured of the inevitability of democracy. Fukuyama still persists in such an attitude even during the Trump era, while democracy appears to be collapsing around the world.

So, to get back to my master’s thesis, I was doing research on the deep theory of liberal democracy and republicanism. If we admit that liberal democracy is in crisis globally, there is presumably a solution that could at least improve the situation. The specific solution I give to this crisis is that nations need to define their unique national interests and common goods. That is to say, nations need national missions, and they need to pursue their missions democratically rather than autocratically (e.g. China). This is a unique problem that democracies have not even attempted to resolve yet. Whereas the point of a national mission is to serve the common good, what is in the national interest is to be found in the service of that mission. For instance, it is in the national interest to adhere to constitutional norms, since national constitutions are part of the common good (in that they supply its very foundation, along with the natural world). 

The necessity of defining the national interest and the common good is the solution I eventually arrived at after I began thinking about political theology in a vague and unfocused way with John Milton. It means that liberal democracies need a radically new theory of centrism, as well as a radically new civic system to engage citizens directly in fulfilling their national missions.

Rather than a figment of the past, the type of religious political theology Milton was engaged in is still alive and well and coming from Ivy League professors, no less, under the banner of Common Good Constitutionalism. While even Milton might have been less authoritarian than today’s right-wing theocrats, the conservatives are absolutely correct that liberal democracies need to get serious about community-building and the common good as a matter of their survival. The most famous statement of this point was Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed.

Like Milton’s political theology, common good constitutionalism decides the good based on a politically and morally unappealing religious vision while neglecting the national interest altogether, having no way to conceive of it in religious terms. By contrast, liberal democracies need to conceive of the national interest and the common good in secular, ethically universalist, objective, and pragmatic terms (e.g. see the philosophy of pragmatism and truth-as-indefeasibility). 

As we witness every day, the far right encourages people to view politics as war and to accept rule by autocracy. In contrast, the type of politics characteristic of liberal democracies depends on the diffusion of power among political institutions, businesses, and the people, as well as the separation of powers of government itself. As opposed to the exclusionary, hate-driven politics of the far right, liberal democratic politics requires us to believe in each other, to believe in our basic human goodwill and reasonableness, and to view politics as the arena where we achieve our highest moral and technological development. 

Two versions of authoritarianism are on display in Russia and China. Both of these nations assume that the West is in permanent decline. The United States and the European Union have yet to prove them wrong. I want liberal democracies to rise to the challenge. To do this, they must combine what I am calling dual, real-ideal constitutionalism with the pioneering methods of deliberative democracy. While it has been obvious for years that liberal democracies need a theory of radical centrism and civic engagement, academics are only just now getting specific about trying to figure these things out.

Deliberative democracy is one such academic effort, which focuses on building a new system for open government and public deliberation focused on solving our common problems. The world needs democracy entrepreneurs with new ways to monetize civic participation, among other things; hence, the significance of USPSlife.com as a business focused on civic engagement. Deliberative democrats still lack a comprehensive theory of liberal democratic centrism and institutional change, however, so they have no way to unify civic practices in the service of a national mission. 

The only hope liberal democracy has is to reach more people where they are in order to build a more coherent, progressive type of centrism that pulls voters back from the epistemological dead-ends of right and left extremism. Furthermore, centrist apathy, greed, and hostility to democracy are problems every bit as serious as illiberalism on the right, and, to a lesser extent, on the left. As the Harris-vs.-Trump election shows us in the most obvious way possible, centrists are still doing their level best not to figure out how much they are part of the problem. There is simply no way Democrats should be begging for votes while competing against the likes of Donald Trump and his autocratic Republican Party of greedy bastards, curs, fascists, and lunatics.

Anyway, demonstrating some of the possibilities of civic engagement and writing out a theory of radical centrism will occupy me for the rest of my life. With a little luck (I don’t believe in luck), USPSlife.com will provide me a financial platform and a civic workshop for that future work.