Near the end of Thrones of the Invisible, I try to describe the world I actually want, and I find that it cannot be built out of ideals alone. I write there that inner progress — growth in wisdom, patience, courage, the ability to love — can only unfold on a certain kind of ground. I call that ground outer balance, and I name its elements plainly: enough food, shelter, care, rest, education, dignity, and participation. Without them, I argue, talk of flourishing becomes “a cruel joke told to the overburdened.” It is why the book returns, again and again, to a single unfinished idea from 1944: Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights, delivered to Congress in a State of the Union address, and its quiet insistence that freedom must include the right to a decent home. A person who lives in daily fear of eviction, I wrote, is not truly free merely because a legal document uses the word liberty.
I have been thinking about that rolled-up blueprint this month, and about the fact that it was drawn here. The news of the past weeks is, in country after country, a housing story — but in the United States it is the story of a president who named a right and a republic that has spent eighty-two years discussing the dials instead. The striking thing is not that the crisis is shared. It is how it is reported, and the one word almost nobody in this debate will use.
