Photo by Oskaras Verbickas
4.05 | 10.12.20
Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we looked at the tattered state of our democracy and searched for peaceful ways through an election season in which one candidate—Trump—has threatened violence and disruption if he doesn’t win. Here in Part 2, we look at the work waiting for us after the election: fixing the way we govern ourselves so that we’ll never have another president like Trump or another year like 2020.
The real breakdowns in our system go much deeper than Trump—hence the cliché that he’s the symptom, not the disease. Boxed in by demographic change, the Republican party has devolved over the past half-century into a force that taps racial and economic anxieties to win elections, erodes faith in government by deliberately and cynically undermining government, and exploits Constitutional loopholes and Congressional procedure to exercise endless minoritarian rule. Democrats, of course, are beset by their own internal divisions—and by a growing thirst for revenge.
To reverse this toxic dynamic, we’ll need reforms that give both parties a fair shot at legislating and lower the risk of tyranny by the minority or the majority. It’s a tall order, given that we’re more sharply divided along ideological, geographical, and economic lines than at any point in American history. Which is why the necessary reforms could end up going so deep that we come out the other side looking like a different nation—or nations.
This episode draws on a range of ideas from thinkers such as journalist David A. French, political scientists Adam Przeworski and William Howell, and sociologist and science fiction author Malka Older, along with an assortment of other commentators on the topics of polarization, federalism, and the possibility of secession or breakup. And in the best Soonish tradition, there’s also a little dose of Apollo 13.
Mentioned In This Episode
Check out the essay version of American Reckoning at Medium.com, which includes extensive annotations and links to source materials.
Tamar Avishai, Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Toothpaste Tube (1964), The Lonely Palette
Chapter Guide
00: 22 Welcome to Part 2
01:15 The Apollo 13 Election
03:38 Reviewing the Givens
05:34 Tara Westover and the Breaking of Charity
06:14 David A. French on the Central Fear of Conservatives
07:55 New Rules for the Game of Democracy
11:05 Scenario 1: Trumpocracy
12:46 Scenario 2: Biden Our Time
13:44 Scenario 3: The New New Deal
18:37 Scenario 4: The Bonds of Our Disaffection
25:25 Scenario 5: Micro-democracy
35:15 A House Divided
36:57 The Other Side
38:21 End Credits and Acknowledgements
39:27 Shout-out: The Lonely Palette
Notes
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.
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Painted face photo by Oskaras Zerbickas on Unsplash. Thanks Oskaras!
Full Transcript
Audio montage: We can have the future we want, but we have to work for it.
Wade Roush: You’re listening to Soonish. I’m Wade Roush.
Welcome to Part 2 of a special two-part episode, American Reckoning. If you haven’t heard Part 1, I’d highly recommend that you stop here and go back and listen. If you do, this part will make a lot more sense.
In Part 1 I tried to answer the same basic question a few different ways. That question was, how can we get through the 2020 presidential election without descending into violence and without losing our democracy?
But surviving the election is really just the beginning. No matter how the election turns out, we have an even bigger job ahead of us.
Of course we have to end the pandemic and get the economy back on its feet. But that’s not what I mean.
What I’m really talking about is fixing the way we govern ourselves, so that politics doesn’t feel so awful all the time and normal people can go back to leading their normal lives.
Back in September of 2016, a Republican commentator named Michael Anton published a now-notorious essay. It started out this way. “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: If you don’t try, death is certain.”
I thought it was a pretty tasteless metaphor, given that 40 passengers died when hijackers took over the actual Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. But it turns out it was prescient in one way. In 2016 the leader of Anton’s party did make it into the cockpit, and he did not know how to fly or land the plane.
So this time around I think I have a better metaphor. I think of 2020 as the Apollo 13 Election. As you might remember from Season 1, Episode 10, that was the moon mission in 1970 where one of the command module’s liquid oxygen tanks exploded halfway to the moon.
The oxygen was spraying out into space and pushing the ship around so much that the astronauts could barely stay on course. And the oxygen leak also meant they couldn’t run their fuel cells, which forced them to shut down the command module and use the lunar module as a lifeboat.
But the lunar module was made for two astronauts, not three, so pretty soon, toxic levels of carbon dioxide were building up in the cabin.
Ron Howard made a film about the whole crisis that’s still one of my favorite movies. And here’s one of my favorite lines. This is Ed Harris playing the harried but quick-thinking Apollo flight director Gene Krantz.
Gene Krantz: Can we review our status here, Sy, let's look at these things from a... from a standpoint of status. What have we got on that spacecraft that's good?
Sy Liebergot: I'll get back to you, Gene.
Wade Roush: That’s the moment in the film when everyone realizes there’s not going to be a moon landing and the new mission objective is to work with the tools they have and improvise a way to get the crew home in one piece.
And that’s the kind of emergency I feel like we’re living in right now. Donald Trump is the explosion, and the damaged and rickety spacecraft we’re all flying on is called the United States Constitution.
So in this episode I want to talk about what’s broken in our Constitution and what a better design might look like.
But first I think we need to review all the givens. These are the things I talked about in Part 1 that are helping to make the election so tense, and they’re all things that we can’t change.
For instance, it’s a given that the country is becoming more ethnically diverse.
It’s a given that far more people live in cities than in rural areas.
It’s a given that Americans have widely varying views, in fact often diametrically opposing views, on questions like racial equality and gun rights and abortion rights and LGBTQ rights and the importance of individual liberty versus community and cooperation.
It’s a given that we’ve thoroughly sorted, both geographically into red and blue regions and ideologically into parties or tribes.
Now, one additional thing that is not a given, but is more like an open wound that we’ve allowed to fester, is that the economy isn’t working for everyone. As we talked about in Season Four, Episode Three, the forces of technological change and globalization have benefited people in cities much more than people in rural areas.
When you take that trends and add in a long history of generous tax breaks for the rich, what you get is unbelievable levels of inequality. 52 percent of all US income going to just the top 20 percent of households.
And these divides between the old economy and the new economy—between the rich and everyone else—make our political polarization far worse. They create an opening for authoritarian populist candidates who blame it all on immigrants and promise that they alone can fix it.
And the message works. In the 2016 election, 18 of the 20 poorest states, measured by median household income, voted for Trump. Nine of the 10 richest states voted for Clinton.
And over the last for years, the divides have only grown deeper.
Tara Westover is the author of the 2018 memoir Educated, about growing up in a family of Mormon survivalists in Idaho. She said in a recent interview that she thinks these levels of polarization lead to a kind of mutual incomprehension and lack of empathy. “That, I think, is the biggest threat to our country, more than any single issue or politician. It’s the fact that the left and the right, the elite and the non-elite, the urban and the rural—however you want to slice it up—they no longer see themselves reflected in the other person. They no longer interpret each other as having charitable intent.”
A people without empathy or charity for one another is a people primed for conflict.
And here’s another data point from David French. He’s a journalist and author with a background in civil liberties law who’s a former Republican but now calls himself a man without a party. He’s speaking here on the Ezra Klein podcast.
David French: I'm writing and podcasting from a very, very red part of Tennessee. If I had to identify what is the number one fear or one what is a central fear of conservatives in the United States, it is a fear of majoritarian tyranny that Democrats will take control, powered mainly by the hyper urban clusters on the coasts. They will use that majority to bulldoze through the Bill of Rights and to bulldoze away our life in our culture. And so there's a fear of majoritarian tyranny. But when I talk to my friends on the coasts, they say, well, wait a minute, I'm living under a minoritarian government right now, that the way the American federal constitutional system is set up, that a minority of Americans can dictate how I live.
Wade Roush: So, if you have two groups of people who live in separate regions and separate ideological bubbles, and each one is convinced that the other intends to bulldoze away their culture, can you really have a country? I’m not so sure, and French isn’t either.
David French: We are not just sort of drifting apart as a people. In many ways, we're almost sprinting apart as a people…And my simple proposition is you can't do that indefinitely. You cannot continue to move apart indefinitely and stay together as a country. There's not some sort of magic elixir that keeps America united.
Wade Roush: So what could keep America united? Or how can we at least put away the bulldozers? Well, here’s my list of requirements for a government that works better.
You know what, it’s not even a list. There’s only one thing on it. But it’s kind of a doozie.
I think the Number One thing people want is a government that’s effective, not caught up in constant partisan gridlock.
A government like that would just need some runway to experiment with new ways to provide things everybody wants and needs, like better education and job programs, healthcare, and maybe even a universal income, so that nobody feels economically left behind.
If everyone could operate at a more equal level or at least start out with an equal shot, it would take away one of the sources of resentment that leaders like Trump have been able to exploit. And it might finally allow us to come together to tackle the pressing problems our lawmakers have been hiding from all this time, like systemic racism and climate change.
But here’s the thing about effective government. You can’t get there as long as there’s a minority party with blocking power.
I talked in Part One about how conservative politicians have tried to stave off the effects of demographic change by perfecting the art of minority rule. They’ve used loopholes in the Constitution and our legal framework to repeatedly elect presidents the majority of voters don’t want and to pursue anti-democratic strategies like voter suppression and gerrymandering and loading up the courts with conservative judges.
That’s not just unfair, it’s also unwise, because it threatens to leave liberals so frustrated that they’re strongly tempted to reach for the same responses like packing the courts in the other direction.
So, how do you create political conditions where Republicans don’t feel like they have to be the anti-government party?
How do you open up room for Democrats to enact some of the social reforms they want without making Republicans feel like their way of life is under siege?
I think it all comes to down to one idea. And here I’m going to use the words of a Polish-born political scientist named Adam Przeworksi, who focuses on the process of government reform in Eastern Europe and Latin America.
Przeworski says that to build a working democracy, you have to create a situation where everyone believes that, quote, “their future will be better if they continue to follow the rules of the democratic game: Either they must have a fair chance to win or they must believe that losing will not be that bad.”
To put it in Apollo 13 terms: People don’t have to agree all the time on which direction the spacecraft should go. But they do have to believe that they’ll get their turn in the pilot seat and that it’s better to keep the ship intact than to blow it up.
So here’s what’ll happen in the rest of the show. I’m going to put on my futurist hat and outline the four post-election scenarios that I think are most likely, plus one additional scenario that’s less likely but would be really interesting.
These aren’t predictions. They’re just possibilities.
And it’s fun to game things out this way. But the point of this whole exercise is to see if there’s a realistic path toward a Pzeworski world, where everyone has a fair chance to win, and everyone feels like the game is still worth playing. If so, then maybe we should try going down that path.
So here we go.
The first scenario is one that I have to mention for the sake of completeness, though I can’t bear to dwell on it. I’m calling Trumpocracy. This is the case where Trump gets a second term in office.
He probably can’t do that by winning the popular vote in November. But he could still manage a clean win in the Electoral College. If you think that’s impossible given that Joe Biden seems to be way ahead in the polls, well, let me remind you that Hillary Clinton had an even bigger lead at this point in the race in 2016.
And there’s always the possibility that Trump’s threats to stop the counting of mail-in ballots will work, that hundreds of thousands of ballots will be disqualified, and that Congress or the Supreme Court will once again hand a close election to the loser of the popular vote.
Of course in this case mass protests would spring up in November and would probably persist into January. Angry progressives would mobilize at every step to try to register their opposition. But we’ve seen over and over lately, from the Kavanaugh hearings to the impeachment, how little that anger amounts to in the face of a Republican political machine that’s dead set on pushing through its agenda.
After the inauguration the protests would probably settle down into a long-term civil resistance movement focused on checking Trump’s excesses. The goal would be to keep democracy on life support while the president and his enablers double down on all their previous efforts, from dismantling the regulatory state to closing down immigration to restricting women’s rights to control their own bodies to strengthening a police state that protects white privilege.
There are ways for resistance factions to be effective in these dire situations, and researchers like Erica Chenoweth spell out many of them in their writings. But they do require a great deal of planning, discipline, and stamina.
So, that’s Scenario One.
Scenario Number Two is much less grim from my perspective but it’s still not all that thrilling. I’m calling it Biden Our Time.
This is a future where Joe Biden wins the White House, but not by much, and where Republicans keep control of the Senate.
In a case like this the nation would be tired out from all of the chaos of 2020, Biden wouldn’t have a big mandate or a lot of political capital to spend, and all of his instincts would guide him toward modest attempts at compromise.
But in divided government with Mitch McConnell still in power, and with a 6 to 3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Biden would accomplish very little.
He’d be lucky just to end the pandemic and bring back the economy. All of our real problems would just get kicked down the road to 2024, when we might in essence have a reply of the 2020 election, just with different names on the ballot. Say, Kamala Harris versus Tom Cotton or Tucker Carlson.
Now, Scenario Two is a little sad, but it might actually be the most likely, so we should probably be ready for it.
Scenario Three is much more exciting, but it also has some built-in dangers. I’m calling it The New New Deal.
In this scenario voters clearly repudiate Trump and give Biden a clear majority in the popular vote and Electoral College. Democrats hold on to the House and also win enough Senate seats to make Chuck Schumer the new majority leader.
In this scenario two big things could happen. First, Democrats would have a mandate not just to end the pandemic, and not just to rebuild all the agencies and restore all the international alliances that Trump has tried to destroy, but also to create some ambitious programs for getting people back to work and tackling real problems like climate change. Biden has said he doesn’t support the Green New Deal, but honestly, his plan to create manufacturing jobs in the green energy sector could accomplish a lot of the same things.
And here’s the second thing. If Trump were out of the picture and Republicans were temporarily banished from power, the party might have an incentive to rethink its goals and their strategy.
Here I’m going to bring back my guest from Season Four, Episode Three, University of Chicago political scientists Will Howell. He’s the co-author of a new book called Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy. And I want to play a part of our conversation that didn’t make it into that earlier episode.
Wade Roush: It seems to me like an essential part of the work of restoring democracy is going to be for folks on the right to find some way of resurrecting the Republican Party in a healthier form such that Republicans don't have to rely on populist appeals to get elected. It’s hard to see who’s going to come along and reinvent the Republican Party, but we need a strong center-right party and reinventing it is going to be part of the work here.
Will Howell: Yes, we need a strong center-right party in that -- I guess what I would say what, what I mean by that is that it's a party that is willing to negotiate and to bargain and to compromise that has was perfectly willing to articulate different views, both about the purposes of government and about what kinds of policies that government ought to support. But that is not intent at every turn, at de-legitimizing government, not at every turn intent upon just sort of blocking and undermining and minimizing government. And so this is a profound challenge. What will it take to resurrect the Republican Party into a more constructive, engaging kind of force in American politics? Well, that's what the work that the never-Trumpers are undertaking. This is precisely what they see as the kind of the imperative of kind of partisan rejuvenation for their camp. But there aren’t, right now, signs that they’re succeeding.
Wade Roush: So if you’re a Democrat, there’s a lot to like about this scenario. Under a unified government, a President Biden would have at least two years before the midterm election, to prove that government can be effective. And he’d like nothing more than to have some real partners to work with across the aisle.
But there’s one big thing I worry about in this scenario. In a word: Temptation.
There are some structural reforms that Democrats absolutely should undertake, like abolishing the filibuster, restoring the Voting Rights Act, overturning Citizens United, and working with states to fix the Congressional redistricting process to reduce gerrymandering.
But there are other reforms that might cause too much blowback.
For example, after the trauma of losing the Supreme Court seat that Barack Obama would have given to Merrick Garland, and after watching Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett ascend to the court, Democrats would naturally be tempted to pack the court with a few more liberal justices just to rebalance things. And to reinforce the new blue-state advantage in the Senate, they might be tempted to invite the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to join the Union.
You can argue that some of those changes would be good for the country, especially if you’re from a place like California where it seems like single-party rule by Democrats is working pretty well right now.
But look, as much as I might personally enjoy this fantasy scenario, it could very easily devolve into the same kind of drive to domination that I’m so angry about when I see it happening on the Republican side in Washington.
Republicans would cry foul and they’d be right, because adding states and packing the court could take away their fair chance to win. This strategy wouldn’t address the root causes of polarization and the winner-take-all tendencies of today’s government structures. It would just make them worse.
In the end it would probably just give far-right Republicans the ammunition they need to come roaring back in 2022 or 2024, the same way they did in 1938 after Americans grew disillusioned with the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing plan.
So that brings us to Scenario Four. I’m calling this one The Bonds of our Disaffection. It’s a little scary but it doesn’t have to be terrifying.
It’s a future where Americans decide that this long and rancorous marriage between the red states and the blue states, between the coasts and the heartland, just isn’t working, and that for everyone’s sanity we need to try something like a separation or even a divorce.
That doesn’t necessarily mean secession. There’s a soft version of this scenario where we return to a more federalist structure that gives much more power to the states. Under a system like that we’d all still be bound to a basic set of commitments like the Bill of Rights. But beyond that each state would be able to set its own social and economic policy agenda, free of interference from the national government.
David French: We've got to find a way for California to be California and Tennessee to be Tennessee.
Wade Roush: That’s David French again, talking with Ezra Klein about his new book Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.
David French: I think a healthy federalism is one that allows different states to govern according to their values, on economic policy, on welfare policy, on, in many ways climate policy…but we're all in the same boat and have the same benefits of the Bill of Rights, this fundamental social compact.
Wade Roush: To take just one hypothetical example, this kind of federalism would open up room for California to set up a single-payer healthcare plan and then ask for a waiver from the federal government so the state could keep the money that Californians would normally pay into the federal Medicare program.
In our current moment of Republican domination in Washington there’s no way California would actually get that waiver, since conservatives would see the creation of a single-payer plan as a big win for progressives.
But French says that’s exactly the kind of issue where American’s different political and regional tribes should stop trying to impose their will on each other. And if they could just stop, he thinks it would deescalate national politics and dial back the pervasive fear of tyranny by the majority or the minority.
So, stronger federalism would help satisfy the condition Przeworski laid out that everyone in a democracy should feel like they have a fair chance to win.
But I’m not so sure that we can get there from here. Partly because we don’t even agree on the fundamental social compact, that is, the universal rights every state would be obliged to respect.
We pay a lot of lip service to the Bill of Rights, but the fact is that there’s at least one amendment hiding in there, the 2nd, that a lot of folks would love to see repealed. If you’re going to let California lawmakers govern according to California values, does that mean they should be allowed to ban guns? Or are they forever hostage to Tennessee when it comes to gun laws? What about issues that cut the other way, like abortion?
You can see the problems. That’s why there’s another version of Scenario Four that looks more like outright secession, or a breakup of the US into two or more separate nations.
You don’t have to look very far these days for people advocating a breakup. Here’s a passage written in 2018 by Bernard Harcourt, a professor of law and political science at Columbia University.
“There comes a time when mature adults must decide to govern themselves and not others….After more than 200 years of productive experimentation, the country today is fundamentally divided over foundational human values and basic visions for society. Those divisions have become too profound to ignore or to reconcile...It is time for the citizens of the United States to sort themselves into two or more sovereign states based on popular referenda. The new sovereign states could include…New England, the Republic of Texas, the Republic of California, the Southern Confederated States, the American Heartland, Native Lands, among other sovereignties.”
Then there’s Colin Woodard, a journalist based in Maine, who’s famous for his 2011 book American Nations. Woodard sees the continental United States as a patchwork of rival regional cultures, or what he calls nations, that trace their origins back to the way Europeans settled the continent in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
Woodard speculates that perhaps these nations will
“come to agree that the status quo isn’t serving anyone well. A time might come when the only issue on which the nations find common ground is the need to free themselves from one another’s veto power.”
And it's not just scholars and writers talking about breakup. There are small but active secessionist groups in states such as Vermont Texas, California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii.
What would secession look like in modern times? It could start any number of ways, but it’s important to note that nobody’s saying it should be accomplished through a second civil war. At least, nobody’s saying outside of the extremist movements we talked about in Part 1. Instead, a peaceful breakup might look a lot like Brexit in the UK, where the main challenge is figuring out what the post-Brexit borders and business relationships between Britain and the EU will look like.
Here’s something from a piece in Tablet Magazine by Duncan Moench, a journalist who teaches at Arizona State University.
“We need to end the ‘United States’ and start an American Union—a coalition of independent nation-states with close trade ties, freedom of movement and employment across borders, and provisions for common defense, but independence outside that. Californians should no more seek to control the social policies of Georgia than they should those of Indonesia.”
It might take a while to figure out tricky stuff like how to apportion the $27 trillion national debt, and who controls the nation’s arsenal of 5,800 nuclear warheads. But at least California and Tennessee could stop having to pretend they get along.
So those are the four scenarios I can see playing out over the next decade.
Number one, a Trump win that turns into a battle to forestall the complete collapse of democracy.
Number two, a weak Biden win that turns into four more years of gridlock.
Number three, a big Biden win that’s energizing for Democrats but so alarming for Republicans that there’s a backlash in the next election and we stay stuck in a doom loop.
And Number four, a secession or breakup scenario that would mean the end of the United States as we know it but would, on the bright side, deescalate politics by bringing it down to the state or regional level.
Now maybe at this point you’re saying, “Wait a minute, Wade, where are the optimistic scenarios? Aren’t you the guy who keeps saying you’re a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist?”
Well, I’m sorry, but those are the optimistic scenarios.
The really horrible futures are the ones where the election spirals downward into violence and bloodshed and civil war. But I spent all of Part One explaining how we can avoid that.
So here in Part Two I’m trying to be realistic about what might happen after the election, and I’m sorry but 2020 has made it a little difficult to stay cheerful.
That said, I do have one more scenario up my sleeve. You didn’t think I was going to leave you in complete despair, did you?
Scenario Five is called Micro-democracy. And it may sound a little bit science fictional. But that’s because the idea comes from Malka Older, who’s the leading writer today using speculative fiction to investigate problems in political science and governance.
We first met Malka back in Season Three, Episode 8, about election security and the idea of voting from our smartphones. She’s a sociologist and a humanitarian aid worker, and most importantly for our purposes she’s the author of a well known trilogy of science fiction novels that she launched in 2014 called Infomocracy, Null States, and State Tectonics.
Together the trilogy is known as the Centenal Cycle. That’s Centenal spelled C E N T E N A L. It’s a word that Malka coined to help describe the political units that people in a world of micro-democracies.
Malka Older: It's set about 60 years in the future. And I talk about a future in which the whole world order has shifted. It's no longer nation states, with a few exceptions. It's these jurisdictions called Centenals, which are made [00:08:00] up of 100,000 people roughly. And so they can be geographically quite large or very small in each of those can vote for any government that they want out of all the governments that exist in the world at that time, which is about 2000. So you're kind of tied to this, the geography of those hundred thousand people. But beyond that…you can vote for a government that is headquartered on the other side of the world or for which all your core constituents will be in other places. It kind of takes away the geographic link with politics. And voting is extremely easy and allowed for everyone. Voting is done on personal devices. And the other key factor of this is this big international bureaucracy, which you can think of as sort of a combination of the U.N. and Google, which is entirely dedicated to information management and exists basically on the principle that you can not have a functioning democracy, a properly functioning democracy without access to good information.
Wade Roush: All the action in Infomocracy and the other books is about how life actually works or doesn’t work in a world where governments are digitally distributed and every local jurisdiction can vote every so often on which one they want to belong to. So, for example, if the people of future East Harlem in New York City decide they’re tired of being represented by the government called LaRaza, they can vote to join ElNuevaPRI.
The average congressional district in today’s United States has about 750,000 people. Malka’s Centenals are much smaller than that, which means governments have to work harder to keep every constituent happy, or they lose that district in the next election. And there’s open immigration between centenals, so if people don’t like their centenal, they can easily move to a different one—a process that Malka calls “mandergerrying.”
So one big advantage of micro-democracy is that it meets the Przeworksi test. Everybody has a fair chance to win, and no group can end up feeling permanently oppressed by some other group.
Cool right? But could it really happen? Well, Malka says she wrote the books partly because she wanted to get people thinking about why we have the political arrangements that we do.
Malka Older: It's so easy for us to become complacent and it's so easy for us to believe that things are the way they are because that's how they have to be. And there's no other way to do it. Right. And so, you know, I really wanted to put up this alternative that despite occurring in the future and despite some cool technology that's in there, you know, the systems that I talk about are entirely possible. Now, the thing that stands in our way is political will and the difficulty of change. And so, you know, I want people to look at them. Why don't we, you know, have polities that are separated geographically? Because actually, we already do. You know, we have Alaska not too far away. And that works perfectly well not being geographically attached. Why couldn't we have, you know, a blue United States and a red United States and they can live cheek by jowl and just have different policies that are implemented in their territories, for example? You know, I just want people to really think about how important the processes that we choose for our governments are. It's not just the people, it's it's about the process.
Wade Roush: So all of that was from an interview I did with Malka back in 2019. This month I called her up again to ask whether she had any thoughts about whether the message of the Centenal books has grown more relevant this year, and about how we might transition from our current system to something like micro-democracy.
Malka Older: So much can happen. And I had about 60 years of a window there. So much can happen in that that we do not expect 60 years ago, who would have imagined the Internet and its impact on the world today? Just to take one example. We can even say eight months ago, who would have imagined and leave it there. So now, at this point I feel like with some of the things that have happened and some of those big economic and geopolitical shocks that I kind of had in there, is something happened to make this you know, people move this way. Some of those have happened. And it's not quite enough yet. We're not quite there yet. But to me, it looks much more plausible that in the next 50 years or less that we could do some some of these radical changes.
Wade Roush: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, because I feel like there are all sorts of structural flaws that were becoming more acutely aware of right now in the way, for example, we run elections, but it's really much deeper than that has to do with how you respect the rights of a majority and a minority, how you make sure that everyone feels safe in a democracy, where it's acceptable for one side or the other to be on the losing side and it doesn’t feel like an existential threat.
Malka Older: Yeah, I think thoughts on a lot of these and more. You know, I think that in addition to making sure the minority doesn't take over, we have to make sure that the majority does not oppress minorities using their democratic power. And there are a lot of others as well. Democracy has so much potential that we are not touching.
Wade Roush: Yeah. So let's talk about that. So do you have some ideas about ways we could begin experimenting?
Malka Older: Yeah, and there's actually a lot of experimentation going on now, both around the world in different places and even in the United States, but mostly at a local level. So one example that's kind of a simple a simple thing and clear and that seems to be happening, I think, relatively fast is the shift from the shift in voting to rank choice voting. So we're seeing a lot of places and it started with like municipalities and it's moved up to some state level races. And I believe there's some states that are doing rank choice voting in this coming presidential election. And that's a huge difference and makes a lot more sense for a lot of reasons and is maybe one of the simpler, easier to understand shifts that we could make.
Wade Roush: Just a quick explanation: Ranked choice voting is a system where voters list their favorite candidates in order of preference. Basically it means that if your first-choice candidate doesn’t win, your vote can get redistributed to your second-choice candidate. One advantage is that you can express a preference for somebody who’s unlikely to win, say a third-party candidate in a Presidential election, without necessarily hurting the mainstream candidate who would be your second choice.
Malka Older: So allowing people to express the one they really want, but letting them put a second choice so that…people aren't playing these games with strategic voting, I mean, that's pretty clearly more Democratic.
Wade Roush: Like if all the people who voted for the Green Party candidate in 2016 had said they wanted Hillary Clinton as their second choice, maybe she would have gotten over the top in a couple of places.
Malka Older: It would have made a pretty big difference, I think.
Wade Roush: Yeah, I'm sure you're aware of the national popular vote Interstate Compact. So you would wait to see what was the outcome of the popular vote nationwide and then in Nevada or Maine or Michigan or wherever, you would just say, OK, we're we're delegating all of our electors to that person…And if every state decide that they're going to do it this way, that would be the equivalent of abolishing the Electoral College. So that's a kludge. Right. But it's maybe a way forward.
Malka Older: Yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, I think all of this kind of points to the other question you had, which is how do we get to something like micro-democracy or how do we have some of the more radical changes? And one of the ways that we can see that is the fact that localities, particularly cities, but also sometimes smaller localities, are taking the lead on a lot of really interesting stuff, both on the policy level and on the process level. That is what federalism was designed to do, and micro-democracy is in a way a kind of extreme form of federalism, sort of. And as we see that, that people from localities are taking the lead on some of these things. And there are things like ICLEI, which is the organization of mayors and local leaders, which develops policies and try to try to push things like responding to climate change. You know, it may come to a point where the nation state level, the central government level is just not so relevant anymore.
Wade Roush: Any last words that can leave us in a more hopeful place?
Malka Older: I think that there are reasons that we chose democracy and those reasons are still good, and I think that we have the potential to make our democracy better in a lot of different ways from experimenting with the processes to improving education and also figuring out our media environment so that it's not dominated by certain large companies that have an interest in pushing things into certain ways. And I think that there are a lot of different possibilities. It is not a straight path and it hasn't been getting to where we are now. But we should we have a lot of things that we can try and we should be trying them.
Wade Roush: It was great talking with Malka, because she really is a long-term optimist about our ability to keep experimenting with democracy. For her, optimism doesn’t mean downplaying the hard realities. It’s just that she doesn’t think pessimism is very useful. It doesn’t build anything.
For me, well, to be honest, the harder I’ve tried to understand how our political landscape is changing, the more my own optimism has been tested.
The truth is, we’re living through a time like none of us have ever experienced.
A blogger I like named Adam Elkus described it as “the omni-crisis,” when we have an unpopular and incompetent president, a raging pandemic, an escalating series of fires and storms and floods, protests against police brutality that only seem to provoke more police brutality, and now the threat of a contested election. All at once.
My guest in Season Four, Episode One, futurist Jamais Cascio, had to come up with a new term just to describe the moment. He called it BANI, for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible.
I started this project thinking that if I could just get my head around the origins of the omni-crisis, maybe it would soothe my own anxiety. And I guess it has, in the sense that I have a little bit better understanding now of the forces that are pulling us apart as a country. So if those forces eventually succeed, at least I won’t be surprised.
Abraham Lincoln was right when he said in 1858 that a house divided against itself cannot stand. In that same speech he said, “I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.”
The problem now is that there’s no obvious way to put our house back together. Especially at a moment when there’s a would-be arsonist in the basement.
On election night we’ll see if Trump follows through on his threats to ignore the election results. And as I spelled out in Part One, I think there are ways for all of us to get through that kind of crisis without violence.
But let’s say we do get to the other side. I still don’t see candidates from either party talking about the things we would need to do to change the rules of national politics, so that everybody has a fair chance to win and everyone wants to keep playing.
That’s why I think the solutions are going to have to come from the bottom up. From mayors and local leaders. From the people in offices and factories and farms and schools who actually make the economy go and who have a pretty good idea of what they’d like government to do for them.
And also from inventive people like the NASA engineers in Houston who used duct tape, towels, index cards, and spacesuit parts to fashion a plan for an air scrubber that saved the Apollo 13 crew from carbon dioxide poisoning.
You know, the amazing thing about the Apollo 13 mission is not just that the astronauts got back to Earth safely. It’s that NASA did a thorough accident investigation, fixed the wiring problem that led to the oxygen tank explosion, and sent Apollo 14 back to the Moon, all in just 10 months. That’s why historians today call the Apollo 13 mission a “successful failure.”
We’re still the same country that did that. To convert our own failures into successes, I think we just need to look around and remember what we’ve got on the spacecraft that’s good.
[musical interlude]
Wade Roush: Soonish is written and produced by me, Wade Roush. Our theme music is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music in this episode is from Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.
You can follow Soonish on Twitter at soonishpodcast. At our website, soonishpodcast.org, you can find the show notes and a transcript for this episode.
As a bonus I’ve also put together a feature on the website called the Soonish Save-the-Future Kit. It’s a playlist of all our political-futurism episodes along with a collection of resources that can help you be a more informed and prepared citizen as we enter this perilous election season. You can find all that right on the front page at soonishpodcast.org.
And I’ll be publishing The Great American Reckoning in essay form on Medium with lots of links out to my sources and the literature on elections and political polarization, so please go look for that.
Soonish is an independent podcast supported in part by you, the listeners. If you’d like to contribute, please go to Patreon.com/soonish and check out the cool thank-you rewards we offer at every level. Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this ship going!
Soonish is one of 10 indie podcasts that banded together over the last three years to form the Hub & Spoke audio collective. And this week I want to tell you about a fun new episode of our sister Hub & Spoke show, The Lonely Palette from art historian Tamar Avishai.
It’s all about Claes Oldenburg’s 1964 sculpture “Giant Toothpaste Tube” and why this particular piece reminds us the distance between the objects in a museum and the objects in our medicine cabinets can be smaller than we might think.
Tamar Avishai: You've wound your way through rooms of Monets and Cezannes, Pollocks and Rothkos, and all of a sudden you turn a corner, and right in the middle of the white-walled gallery, probably on a raised platform, there's a hamburger or a tube of lipstick or here a half squeeze toothpaste tube. And first, you think almost unconsciously, hey, I have that at home. And then you think, well, wait, why is it here supersized in a museum? Didn't I come to the museum to transcend that stuff? And just by asking that you've asked a mouthful and inadvertently tapped into a circle that so much of 20th century art tried to square.
You can find that episode and the entire run of The Lonely Palette at thelonelypalette.com. And you can check out all the other Hub & Spoke shows at hubspokeaudio.org.
That’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening and stay safe out there. Barring emergencies, I’ll be back with my next episode sometime after the election. But either way, you’ll hear from me again…soonish.
