At the close of this election cycle I feel adrift and betrayed. I imagine many of you do to. I don't want to feel that way for four years. I dont want to just passively wait for salvation to come from somebody else. Instead, I feel that there are a lot of truths that I've learned from these last 16 months, but I do not see these truths represented clearly by any political platform. Also, I feel rudely awakened to the consequences of living in my little liberal leaning, intellectual bubble. Here's the arc of the United States 2016 political saga as I see it.
The problem here is that everyone is biased, and that even if you have honest intentions and try to tell it like it is, you will get it wrong. Maybe you wont get it wrong all the time, but you will definitely get stories wrong. Why? Because we're not omniscient for one, but realistically because no information source is perfect -- especially on a scale as big as the national stage. But that's okay if you are intellectually capable of acknowledging uncertainty -- but that is a hard thing for human brains to do.
I don't think our existing media outlets are capable of letting their audience understand what sort of uncertainty they are dealing with. Frankly, they are covering too grand and too abstract stories to offer meaningful insight and so our national politics unintentionally gets peppered with opinions, nor can it offer confirmable predictions or raw facts.
Most importantly, this lack of understanding about uncertainty leads to false knowledge -- both within the media producers as well as the consumers. As George Bernard Shaw said: "Beware of false knowledge, it is more dangerous than ignorance".
I believe that the essential contract that America offers is that here, you are given:
- Freedom from tyranny in all its forms
- The opportunity to thrive if you work hard
- The responsibility of being able to speak whatever is on your mind
I don't believe that any existing party platform really has an agenda that offers to fulfill this contract.
But I don't think any of us have come to grips with the real causes
When I was looking a the electoral maps while election results were coming in, I was struck by how tightly correlated red vs blue election districts were with rural vs. urban living. Many smart people have written many smart things on this topic, but not many people talk about how dangerous this is in terms of long term political health. Rural and urban living are treated as two separate worlds, and that is wrong.
I believe the principle cancer that's feeding this division is the rise of mega cities. Mega cities concentrate demographics that can thrive in the environment that those place offer. Mega cities offer specialist jobs, specialist jobs most often require high education and need large amounts of investment. This means that wealth gets concentrated. Wealth gets concentrated in places that specialists live. That concentrated wealth is unhealthy for many reasons -- not just because it means that those at the top have staggering amounts of wealth. It also means:
- Living is ridiculously expensive for those that are unfortunate enough to live in those cities and aren't one of the specialists
- Cities become a physical manifestation of have vs have not for those that don't participate in their economies. Regardless of how true it is on a per-capita basis, it sure looks like cities are getting all the attention.
But, cities are naturally efficient and can be happy places to live. Only within cities can any sort of specialist industry thrive. The political issue is that they need to be small enough that local rural-urban communities can form. Rural America and Urban America need to feel like they are on the same team. You can't solve that on a national scale, you have to solve it on a county scale -- just solve it county by county, all across America. Main streets are dead or dying. They need to come back. I think a large part of the blame lies at the feet of NYC, LA, Atlanta, (insert big city here) for taking and concentrating all the innovation capital. We need to actively work on making every community a center for innovation.
The week before the election, the Dalai Llama wrote an editorial in the New York Times which really struck me called Behind Our Anxiety, the Fear of Being Unneeded. In it, he remarked on the diminishing personal responsibility that so many of us seem to be affected by. There are many lessons to learn from this observation, but I think one of the most important of those lessons has to do with politics. Global politics is a game of elites and should be minimized. Local politics that push the entire community to participate need to be emphasized and brought to the forefront of the American citizen's attention. This would require a change in our media, our political parties, and our geographical distribution of wealth and business. Rocking the boat on any one of these topics would be difficult, all three is much more so. Personally, I don't have all the ideas yet, but I believe the most important topic to cover is how to get smaller cities thriving in every state. Small cities need to be where the majority of the wealth, culture, an population of America starts to grow. This has to happen because fundamentally we need political and economic systems that allow people to operate as communities with mutual ties. I believe a small city is the largest size community that can maintain this cohesion. Cities are necessary in order to grow specialist businesses, such as local industrial, arts, and media ventures.
I believe that many of the negative symptoms of our current political climate were related to the lessening role of the local civic community in people's lives. Local politics are good. Local red vs blue divisions are good. When people fight about ideals on a local scale, they have the freedom to try potentially risky political strategies to a much greater degree than we can on a national scale. That also allows the nation to learn what does and doesn't work. When we learn locally, we can share that information globally. If community politics are incentivized to thrive and experiment, then everyone can participate and really have their voice heard. This is in contrast with performing political experiments on the national scale, where we just endanger our entire future as a nation.
So, please look around you. Remember where you are from. Think about the small towns and cities that you know. Try to bring business and community back to those cities. Nationally, think about how we can reduce our reliance on having a well-functioning and perfect federal government. Instead think of ways that we can structure federal government to give the power back to the local scale. If anything, federal government programs should encourage political and business innovation on the local scale. Any government program, or business that corrupts our local civic communities needs to be actively fought. Monopolies are too risky, whatever their form, for the continued health of our nation.
Do not mistake what I'm saying for libertarianism, for I am mostly a progressive. But I believe that such politics should be kept at a local scale. Progressives, centrists, conservatives should fight it out and argue passionately about their beliefs. They should just do it at a local scale, where everyone has skin in the game.
So, in closing, bring politics to the local level. There we all can participate and we cannot hide behind our abstract ideals. Locally, when we argue, we argue with our neighbors and are incentivised to try to understand them, because we will have to live with them tomorrow. Only once we are forced to act locally politically can we globally thrive politically. Because only then can we start learning from our local experience base. Only then can red vs blue have a real political discussion. Only then will America stop blaming others for our problems, because only then will we realize it's our responsibility to fix our own problems -- however difficult they may be.