The Lee Kuan Yew Approach to Fixing America's Woes

Crisis and Opportunity in the Late Republic

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! Today’s article is about one of my favorite leaders of the Twentieth Century, and gets into how pragmatic but bold leadership would fix most of our major problems, or at least put us on the pathway toward solving them, with what solutions I think would be worth pursuing. As many people have asked for solutions rather than just identifying problems, here’s my shot at doing so; please leave comments with what others you have in mind. This article is primarily for paid subscribers. Paid subscribers: thank you so very much for your support and patience; all those who are not yet paid subscribers: while some of this article is free, please subscribe for just a few dollars a month to support this project, get access to audio episodes, and read this article in full. As always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it!

This is a long article. Listen to the audio version here:

[AUDIO] The Lee Kuan Yew Approach to Saving the American Republic

Race communism won in the 2025 elections, as I wrote about last week, and the result has been a reasonable amount of (much-needed) soul-searching about the major problems America faces, and if we can make a dent in them in time to salvage the 2026 or 2028 elections. Generally, the major problems have boiled down into four main categories:

1. The affordability of daily life, particularly groceries and healthcare

2. The affordability of housing

3. Underemployment and unemployment amongst young adults, thanks to DEI/AI/Immigration

4. Crime—primarily that committed by the criminal underclass and the radical left—going mostly unpunished, leaving most American cities as trainwrecks

Unfortunately, the Trump Administration’s response has been uninspiring. While a small step forward was made in holding the H-1B fraudsters accountable with the announcement of investigations into 175 companies,¹ other responses included normalizing lifelong debt slavery with 50-year mortgages² and yet more stimulus checks³ that only exacerbate inflation.

The thing is, while such issues would be difficult to fix, particularly in the short term, they are not intractable. A non-ideological, pragmatic leader with relatively broad powers—someone like Singapore’s terrific Lee Kuan Yew (LKY)—could make immense headway against them in the short term, and mostly solve them in the long term. What doing so would take is political pragmatism, ruthlessness, and a steady application of the force of will—not genius or exotic solutions. Such is what LKY showed in his fabulous From Third World to First: The Singapore Story.

Given that America is going from First World to Third and the prognosis at present is somewhat dire, I think it would be useful to describe how a pragmatic ruler who has the personal force necessary to impose his will on the world would go about fixing each of the four issues that seem to be costing the right elections (though bad candidates played their part in that as well, of course), with the aim of fixing them in such a way that makes power easy to hold over the long term because of the obvious benefits of sticking with the problem-solver coalition. It can be done, and many of the fixes are just a matter of will.

In this article, I’ll articulate what I think has created each of the four major problems, and what pragmatic, non-ideological fixes of the sort Lee Kuan Yew would have engaged in can be used to fix them. If you have other solutions you think would work, in that vein, please leave your thoughts in a comment!