This Dismal Election 🤦♂️
Three Things #142: October 27, 2024
We’re a few days away from the biggest, loudest, most expensive, dumbest election ever held. Like many of you, I can’t wait for it to be over. I’ve considered writing here about the election, and about my feelings about the candidates and the parties many times. Every time I set out to do this, however, I change my mind because it feels like a profound waste of time and energy. I can sum up my feelings about this election in two words: disappointment and embarrassment. In my opinion there’s no point saying more, because both candidates and both parties are unbelievably, embarrassingly terrible.
I have many friends who are deeply invested in this election, and I feel bad for them because regardless of the outcome they’re going to be deeply disappointed. If their candidate of choice loses they’ll be disappointed, and if they win they’ll also be disappointed because as president they will inevitably fail to deliver on basically everything they promise. That’s the state of American politics today, which continues to distinguish itself by being exceptionally nasty, exceptionally brutish, and exceptionally dumb, even among a world of increasingly terrible politics.
So, rather than say anything more about the stupid election or about our sorry state of affairs, I want to remind you of a few things that are far more important than this election, or any election.
Thing #1: Unity ✊
The USA is a big, messy, diverse, complicated place. It’s tempting to compare our politics to the more functional politics of a place like Singapore or Dubai. But, as I wrote about recently, the USA is not Singapore or Dubai and this is not an apples to apples comparison. We’re two orders of magnitude larger in terms of population and 3-4 orders of magnitude larger in terms of geographical area, we’re older as a state and have a more complex history, and most importantly, we’re orders of magnitude more diverse and freer. There are more languages spoken just in the 100 square miles of the Borough of Queens than there are in almost any country on earth.
But we’re more than this big, messy melting pot (or salad bowl, choose your preferred metaphor). Historically there was something that tied all of us together as Americans, regardless of things like race, age, national origin, language, gender identity, and geography. That bond was imperfect, obviously, as countless historical examples show, but it nevertheless was real and, I would argue, grew in strength over time as more and more diverse groups of immigrants were assimilated into our messy American story.
That something was a national myth, a unifying narrative. It was a story that more or less every American subscribed to, and that everyone saw themselves in, at least a little bit. It evolved over time but the simplest version is, “You, too, can make it here, if you’re willing to work hard.”
It was the story of the American Dream, and also the story of e pluribus unum: setting aside our differences, coming together, and building something much greater than the sum of its parts. It was about building the greatest nation on earth: the wealthiest, the most well educated, the most powerful large nation in the history of mankind. More than anything it was about achievement: about building a society and a national infrastructure that was capable of anything, and about building the sort of place that people from all around the world wanted to flock to.
I feel sad writing this in the past tense, but it does feel like that story doesn’t have nearly the allure that it used to. Of course we haven’t lost it completely. We still boast the best universities in the world, our companies, markets, and our tech industry in particular are the envy of the world, and, for now at least, the USA is still the number one place people from other places want to migrate to.
But as I’ve written before and as I’m sure you’d agree, the picture is much less clear than it was a generation or two ago. The USA is pretty clearly in decline, relative to rising powers in places like Asia if not also in absolute terms. The American Dream was also about having the confidence and optimism that your kids would have a better life than you did (especially if they were US citizens); that dream has largely died in the current generation, which faces enormous economic uncertainty.
Rediscovering that narrative and getting the story back on track is much more important than either of the candidates, their stupid parties, this stupid election, or our fractious politics more broadly. In fact, those stupid, reactionary, fractious politics are a huge part of the reason we’ve lost the narrative in the first place. Both sides will tell you that only they are capable of fixing things, of making them the way they were before, and that their opponents are evil and are hellbent on destroying everything that makes this country great. Both sides are wrong about this.
We don’t need them. We don’t need stupid Democrats or stupid Republicans. We have everything we need to get things back on track. We always have. But getting there will require, as a first step, that we stop listening to their broken politics, and it will require a heck of a lot of hard work.
To be honest, I’m not completely sure we can still do it. We have a lot of things working against us right now: out of control government spending risks destroying the economy, the country is divided politically and socially, we can’t agree on ground truth, and we seem to have lost the ability to actually build big things. We’re facing mounting challenges from climate change, rising global conflict, and increasingly assertive countries like China and Russia. We may be entering an age when the benefits of being a small, agile city state like Singapore, better able to compete in an increasingly complex global world, outweigh the former benefits of scale.
But it’s still America’s race to lose, and we should still try to win. We’ve reinvented ourselves many times before and I think we can still do it again, if we try. It’s historically been a mistake to bet against America and I still wouldn’t.
However, we can’t begin that difficult work until we recognize that we’re all on the same team, and always have been. The place to start is to realize that our leaders—yes, all of them, on both sides—benefit by dividing us. Companies benefit from dividing us from our friends and family and selling things to us as atomized consumers. We can’t be okay with that. We need to reject divisive leadership and find better leaders, ones who understand the importance and power of unity.
Thing #2: Big Changes 🚀
We tend to be rather short-sighted. We tend to get stuck fighting the last war, even as the world around us has moved on. It’s so easy to feel that the issue immediately before us, no matter how small, is the most important thing in the world. This election certainly feels that way—nevermind the fact that most of us can’t even remember a presidential election more than three or four elections ago, and that nearly everyone alive has forgotten the details of nearly every election in history. This, too, shall pass.
What won’t be diminished with the passing of time is large paradigm shifts in the world around us. The visionary book Sovereign Individual calls these macropolitical shifts, and points out that over its long history humanity has passed through only three so far: the shift from hunter-gatherers to agriculture and the birth of modern civilization, the industrial revolution, and, today, the information revolution, which we’re in the midst of. Each of these shifts transformed every aspect of human life and society and had ramifications on the lives of billions of people for thousands of years.
We shouldn’t lose the forest for the trees! So many of the crises we’re facing today, many of which individually can feel existentially threatening (climate change, global conflict and nuclear proliferation, inflation, political instability caused by the rise of social media and echo chambers, and rising inequality, among many others) are in fact incidental manifestations of this macropolitical transition into an information age. They aren’t in and of themselves root causes of anything, and more to the point, they cannot be solved if we lose sight of the bigger picture.
What does it mean to keep the big picture in sight? For one thing, looking backward simply isn’t a solution. There’s no going back to “the way things were.” The Great Moderation is over and it isn’t coming back. Manufacturing jobs aren’t magically going to reappear. Globalization benefits humanity at large and it isn’t going to stop. We should ignore politicians and leaders who suggest otherwise.
Rather than being stuck reminiscing about a past that isn’t coming back, we need to confront this transition head on and skate to where the puck is going to be. It’s absolutely clear now that AI is going to transform every inch of every industry on earth. That transition is a smaller part of the larger transition to an information society, but it’s also a big deal in and of itself, and it’s already well underway. We need to spend time understanding how to take advantage of this transition and how it can and will accelerate economic growth. We need to have an honest conversation about the jobs that are going to be eliminated and we need to talk about creating a safety net for people who will be negatively impacted. But, more importantly, we need to emphasize the fact that this technology is going to create far more wealth and opportunity than it eliminates.
As one concrete example, data is becoming more important every day and personal data is constantly being breached. We need to have a much more active conversation around data privacy and security regulation, and about how to prevent such breaches. Another unstoppable trend is decentralization. We need far more experimentation with digital decentralization of economics and governance, including things like blockchain-based voting systems, e-government services, and participatory budgeting. We need clear regulatory frameworks for cryptocurrencies and grants, tax incentives, etc. for blockchain R&D. I can’t recall ever hearing a candidate for office discuss even one of these issues, but in my opinion these are among the most important things we need to do to prepare for what comes next.
Yes, we have a lot on our plate already, and we can’t drop all the spinning plates: I’m not suggesting we stop worrying about poverty, climate change, or global conflict in the name of blockchain-based voting. But if we’re unable to prepare for what comes next, things are going to get a heck of a lot worse before they get better. And I have confidence that new superpowers like AI and decentralization will help us solve a lot of the seemingly intractable problems we face today, including some of the big ones I just mentioned. (See, for instance, how AI is beginning to help combat climate change.)
I know our democratic system doesn’t exactly select for long-termism, but the only way to get through these crises is by electing leaders who can think and plan for the long term. The absolute worst, stupidest thing we could do is constantly react as things change. The right way is to think and plan ahead and to exercise some agency in the transition. It’s going to happen whether we like it or not, but we can play a more active role in steering it if we choose to do so, and if we think, plan, and act responsibly.
The first step here is to get past this stupid election cycle and start thinking about the critical decades to come—and, hopefully, electing leaders who are able to do the same thing, rather than our present set of short-sighted, tech-averse nincompoops.
Thing #3: Democracy 🗳️
Democracy has had a bad rap lately. It’s fallen out of favor domestically and globally, especially among young people. It’s easy to understand why. You need only look at the dysfunction of democracies around the world, and at the leaders that democracies today are producing. They’re not exactly the finest specimens humanity has to offer. Some of the problems democracy faces today are novel: the aforementioned transition into an information age, and the rise of social media, citizen journalists, and growing mistrust in institutions, have tested democracy as never before.
And some of the challenges facing democracy today aren’t new. Democracies have always been messy and tend to have fractious politics. It’s extraordinarily difficult to achieve consensus, which means they tend to be slow moving relative to their authoritarian peers.
I, for one, consider these properties features, not bugs, and I haven’t given up on democracy. The difficulty of forming consensus in democracy is by design: it’s designed to promote deliberation and protect the rights of minorites. Authoritarian states may be able to build quickly, and the trains may run on time, but at what cost? Anything, even a messy, fractious democracy, is infinitely better in my opinion than the capricious, self-interested will of a dictator, even if it means the trains don’t run on time as often. Look at any long-ruling dictator around the world today and you’ll see paranoia, detachment from reality, and increasingly erratic, irrational behavior and decisions that have severe consequences. Look at authoritarian states today, such as China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela, which aren’t exactly hallmarks of good governance or a healthy, happy, wealthy population. It seems obvious to me that trading even our dysfunctional democracy for the alternative would be a terrible idea.
The governance of a nation state is too big and important to be put into the hands of one person, one family, or one group of families. Our democracy isn’t perfect—there are, after all, a few families and a few wealthy individuals with far too much power and influence in the system, among many other flaws—but it’s substantially better than the alternative.
In short: the survival of our democracy is infinitely more important than the outcome of this election, or any election. Neither party seems to have much respect for democracy these days. One side denies the outcome of a free and fair election and refuses to accept the election results, while the other side decides unilaterally, again and again, which candidate is most qualified rather than letting the citizenry exercise their right to choose. It’s a pretty sad time for democracy in America.
It may sound a bit trite but I’ll say it anyway because it’s important and it can’t be repeated often enough: our democracy is imperfect, but it’s still the first, longest-lasting, and most successful large-scale experiment with democracy throughout all of human history and it deserves to be preserved. This experiment hasn’t yet run its course and it must continue.
Democracy is frustrating and terrible in a thousand ways but it’s better than the alternatives, and I have yet to see a better system, or even another workable system. Democracy promotes freedom in every aspect: freedom of speech and expression, of thought, of religion, etc. Freedom is paramount, both on the individual level, for self-expression and simple human dignity, as well as on the overall level of society, for promoting innovation and economic growth. Democracy also promotes education and freedom of the press. Democracies are much less likely to declare war on one another.
Most importantly of all, democracies are uniquely capable of radical self-reinvention. We may be facing a spell of terrible leadership today, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do better tomorrow. There’s a great deal we can and should do to improve our democracy, including some of the ideas described above.
To restate the premise of this issue one final time: the right next step is looking past this dismal election and focusing on our shared humanity and the things that unite us, on the big picture issues facing us all, and on continuing and improving this democratic experiment.