Welcome to the Beer House

A structural metaphor, (and probably a recurring series), about how America really works

Years ago, some friends bought the worst house in the best neighborhood of Wanamassa, NJ - a place the realtors had nicknamed “The Beer House.” The small home appeared normal from the curb, but once inside, it was clear that the structure was actually a tiny, one-bedroom dwelling with a few extra rooms that seemed to be literally tacked on.

No rational person would design a house this way on purpose: the floors and ceilings were of varying, uncomplimentary heights; almost nothing was standard size or built to code; and not a moment’s thought was given to how an inhabitant may actually want or need to use the space. So the joke was that in an effort to save money on design and construction, the original owner had clearly just invited some buddies over, cracked a few beers, and traded drinks for labor -- assuming that being “handy enough” would get the job done.

Needless to say the seller did not get their desired asking price. Whatever they saved upfront in design and labor was lost many times over to the inefficiency of the final product.

And this is a near-perfect analogy for the current American predicament.

For many Americans, referencing the structure of the US government generally calls to mind concepts like the Constitution or Declaration of Independence, maybe Congress or the three branches of government. Some conjure a looser blend of words like “freedom” or “democracy” set against a backdrop of red, white, and blue. More recently, many across the political spectrum seem fixated on the swamp — and their preferred method of draining it.

But while expedient, all of these are incomplete. They’re shorthand. They’re shadows on the cave wall, to borrow Plato’s metaphor— not the strange, sprawling structure we’ve actually built over the past 250 years.

Like the original owners of the Beer House, we started with a neat and clearly-defined little box of America. The Founders shaped the freedom-centric rhetoric of the Revolution into the skeletal framework of the Confederation, then fleshed it out into the early institutions of the Republic — institutions that have come to define the Platonic Ideal of America.

But when you live inside something, it can be hard to see the reality of it - whether a government, a Beer House, or a bad relationship. From one, limited vantage point, it’s easy to confuse the shadow for the object, the object for the idea, and the idea for the ideal.

The occupants of the Beer House were probably so excited for the utility - perceived or real - added by each new room that they ignored or weren't able to see that their lack of planning and inexpert implementation ultimately weakened the structure they sought to improve.

And just like those casual carpenters, America has yet to fully admit that we’ve taken a similar approach to policy: short-term logic, near-term politics, little regard for structure or form. Especially in recent decades, we’ve favored tacking on extra wings, random rooms, very few hallways and not nearly enough doors or windows — all without referencing the original blueprints.

Even now, as pundits and mainstream electeds seem to have finally realized just how broken the system is for most people, the analysis still largely avoids the true foundational and structural concerns.

Like the Beer House builders, our excessive focus on inputs -- like cost, time, and ease of implementation -- has led to a byzantine policy apparatus that technically addresses issues like housing, infrastructure, and education, but does so in a siloed, incongruous way, only held together by a patchwork of precedent, norms, spit, and glue.

This failure to deal with our base structural issues - favoring expansion over repair, personality over process, and inputs over outcomes - has left us with a system that, for most people, has been non-functional for a very long time. Just not for the reasons being yelled about lately.

So that’s where I want to start — not with the flashiest problems or loudest takes, but with the strange, mismatched structure we’ve built and what it reveals about how we govern, how we plan, and how we patch instead of fix.

Here at Spit + Glue, I want to look at what happens when we stop shouting buzzwords and take governance seriously - not as a lofty ideal, but as a living system that needs maintenance, repair, and intentional, iterative design. The house is a mess, the plumbing’s bad, and we’ve been patching the roof with duct tape for decades. It’s time we stopped pretending it’s fine.