Below, Oliver Libby shares five key insights from his new book, Strong Floor, No Ceiling: Building a New Foundation for the American Dream.
Oliver is a civic entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and founder of the nonprofit The Resolution Project, dedicated to empowering young leaders and driving innovative solutions to social and economic challenges.
What’s the big idea?
America needs a unifying plan that combines a strong floor of basic rights with no ceiling on opportunity. Centrist, practical policies can address key issues and restore shared purpose, helping the nation “right itself” like a ship in a storm.
1. America today has no plan.
The American Dream is the foundational belief system of our country. Whether we are part of a religion or not, this concept is something all Americans grow up hearing about and mostly believing in. It’s the bedrock of our civic life. But today, only something like 27 percent of Americans believe that the American Dream was or is possible.
Having a plan has also defined our nation for most of its history. It has been called many different things, such as Manifest Destiny or the New Deal. Whether you agreed with the plan or not, we knew as a nation what we were getting out of bed to do, and we could check various policies against that. After all, if we were back in the ‘60s and wondering if STEM education was important, the impetus of fighting communism and the knowledge that Sputnik was circling the Earth helped us answer whether we should double down on education.
Today, America feels reactive. It feels like our leaders are shooting from the hip in response to our various crises. This is what can kill democracy. This is what can kill a country like ours—not a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11. We need—not something cerebral and academic, not something negative, or not about what the other guys want—something proactive, positive, and achievable that we can all believe in and do together.
2. A strong floor with no ceiling is not a contradiction.
Each side of American politics has been vilifying the other and various groups for far too long. Without being too reductive, I would argue that for decades, Democrats have had it out for the one percent rich people in our economy. At the same time, Republicans have been taking their anger out on those in poverty and who need help. Both parties have lost the plot.
We need a strong floor, below which our fellow Americans are not allowed to fall. That strong floor should be built of planks that include important things like healthcare, education, access to jobs and housing, justice, and free speech. Those planks allow us to stand and reach for more. I also believe there should be no ceiling to what we can achieve in this country if we work hard, play by the rules, and pay into the system. This is far from contradictory. It’s an engine that can help us relight the American Dream.
“Those planks allow us to stand and reach for more.”
A few things need to be true for this strong floor and no ceiling plan to have a good shot at working. We need to have some sort of shared experience and remixing of society. We have balkanized and sorted ourselves, digitally and geographically, too much. We should pay attention to what happened in the 1940s. The generation that was in the trenches and factories together came back and led the most successful set of decades in American history. They were not just economically and industrially successful, but also successful in pushing policy forward on important social justice priorities.
We also need to combat loneliness. It’s getting worse because of social media and AI. We should also do more to address the media ecosystem. Perhaps some of these large companies can end up being brought into public trust. We need to address who’s responsible for what’s on those platforms, including keeping the platforms themselves responsible for at least some of the content on those pages. There needs to be very steep penalties for playing with reality. For example, deepfakes can kill our democracy and stop progress. And finally, we need to address the operation of our democracy—things like gerrymandering and other toxic manipulations. As a group, we should demand better. Such changes could allow us to welcome a strong floor with no ceiling in this country.
3. The radical center can get things done.
For whom did I write Strong Floor, No Ceiling? Is it for Democrats? Republicans? No. It’s written for anyone who feels politically adrift, confused, and ill-served by our parties. One thing that’s even less popular than the American Dream these days is any sense of faith in our parties to lead us well. I gravitate to the center, to responsible and sensible policies that draw from both the right and left.
Being centrist can be radical. Even if you self-identify as a moderate, you might have one or several issues that really radicalize you—things you care a ton about. You are not boring just because you’re moderate, and this stance allows us to take the best from each side. This viewpoint has seemed to be what’s most compelling in contested elections in America today.
“I gravitate to the center, to responsible and sensible policies that draw from both the right and left.”
The center, and sometimes the center-left, has been the winning combination in most elections recently. Even in November of 2024 and November of 2025, we saw centrist candidates win tough elections. We recently saw candidates like Elissa Slotkin, Pat Ryan, and Andy Kim win difficult seats, all of them centrist Democrats. The solutions in this country can come from the radical center.
The term “radical” can be perceived as a bad thing, but I would argue that it’s about being exciting. In our world of social media and influencers, we cannot afford for important policies to be labeled as boring. Moderates need to take back the term “radical.” Being in the middle ground should become exciting because centrist policies can actually work.
4. Applying a strong floor and no ceiling to American life.
First, education is critical, and it’s one of the most important planks of the strong floor and pathways to having no ceiling. We should launch a Jobs of National Priority program. There are a lot of misalignments in the way that we train people and how we reward them for doing important jobs for our country. How many times have you wondered why we don’t pay teachers or nurses enough? Why aren’t there more home health aides? Instead, there are people, for example, on Wall Street who are getting paid a lot of money and adding questionable value to our economy and society.
It’s important as an investment for our country to make it easier for folks to pick the jobs our nation really needs more people performing. Construction and trades people, like electricians and plumbers, who are building the very things that keep us safe, need things like tax breaks, loan forgiveness, apprenticeship programs, and training academies. The same goes for many other professions, such as healthcare. It should be easier and more appealing to sign up for those jobs.
Second, healthcare is the most expensive thing in our economy. We spend roughly 20 cents on the dollar in America just keeping ourselves healthy. We need a preventative healthcare program. I think there should be a tax credit just for going to see a doctor every year and taking generally good care of yourself. Too often, we wait until we are very sick to go to the hospital, forcing us to get the most expensive care at the worst possible moment. We have such amazing diagnostic potential in this country to catch things early. This could help avoid those major crises that can ruin families, and also keep the entire healthcare system more affordable by lessening pressure on hospitals and doctors who care for us.
Medicine prices are also a problem. Can we lower prescription drug prices without murdering the pipeline of innovation that has kept America at the forefront of biotechnology and gives our people access to the most advanced treatments in the world? Yes, we could let Medicare and Medicaid compete to drive down the prices of drugs. But if we did that alone, then our pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be able to invest billions of dollars in medical research. So, we should also extend the patent life on drugs. Right now, the big pharmaceutical companies only have a few years to recoup their investments, causing them to charge a ton of money. If we let Medicare and Medicaid help drive drug prices down, while also giving those companies more time to recoup their investment, that’s a compromise between the right and left approaches that could actually work to make things better.
“We spend roughly 20 cents on the dollar in America just keeping ourselves healthy.”
And finally, I propose a Chief Operating Officer of the United States of America. Whether or not you liked the Dozing of America that happened at the beginning of the Trump administration, it taught us lessons. A Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. with a commission behind them to look at regulations and employment in the federal government would be a good idea. Such a COO should have a very long term that allows them to cross administrations. They should become expert in how to make government work, not in a partisan way, but in a way that makes this system better for America.
5. We can right this ship.
When I was a kid, I picked up an interesting book called The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger. In the middle of the book, he taught me something about what they call “the righting moment.” It is an obscure calculation in shipbuilding that analyzes the influence of the wind and waves on the pendulum-like sway of the vessel. This calculation informs how the hull should be built so that the ship rights itself. Most systems, political and otherwise, feel like a ship on the ocean. They move back and forth, sometimes too far to the right, sometimes too far to the left, or sometimes there’s a storm, but eventually it should come back to the middle. But coming back from a sway too far in one direction is not guaranteed.
It is not guaranteed that America will eventually right itself and just end up ok. Lazily believing this is unpatriotic. America is always somewhat at risk, and we have to continuously earn and preserve our special nation. Every successive generation depends on the next, and that means not losing faith in our bedrock principles, like the American Dream. We need to continuously earn our citizenship and right to be part of this amazing experiment. Everyone should try and find faith in something like Strong Floor, No Ceiling, believe that it can be done, and take part in reaching that goal, because if we can do that together as a country, then we have a bright future.
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