By Tom Ruby and Scott Bethel
It seems to us that the United States is hurtling down a road that forks in the near distance into two roads. The fork on the left leads to civil war. The fork on the right leads to autocracy. We missed the exit for the pluralistic civil society that our constitution offers and that we have been moving towards with necessary course corrections since the country’s founding. The fork that lies ahead will destroy, at least temporarily the social and progress gains that have been made and are being made today. We urge leaders at all levels and in all segments of society, elected, civic, business, religious and military, to collectively pump the brakes, turn around from the fork ahead and take the missed offramp to progress.
Over the last decade we have seen a tremendous erosion of civic discourse resulting from the very progress in technology that was supposed to bring us together. Instead, that technology has Balkanized groups that at one time saw their citizenship as Americans as greater than their other interests. Today, the promise made by technology companies to forge identity across borders has been realized in peoples’ self-selection into groups whose common identity has become more important to the members than any state or country.
Before the days of social media, people knew what was going on in the world and country from a 30 minute newscast each night, of which 22 minutes was news. This was followed by a local hour that featured local news, weather and sports. People read local newspapers which spent time delving into issues of corruption, risks to public health and focusing on the issues that were special to that community. Community ties were the dominant ties when people lived their entire lives in a community or state. People have always held varying positions on a right-left scale, but they didn’t allow those positions to become so extreme that it affected relationships in small communities. That was how leaders on both the right and left could work together to better their communities.
Those days of deep personal friendships between colleagues of different political positions such as those between Justices Scalia-Ginsburg or Senators Simpson-Kennedy are long gone. Friendships across the aisle are almost impossible today, structurally and not only socially. Where once Congress members ate and drank with those of the opposite party, today are absent. “When [Senator Manchin] was asked earlier this month about the functionality of Congress, he chalked up the body’s poor legislative record to a few problems. The most important one, he said, was the fact that members don’t know one another outside of work.” That lack of interaction is increasingly driven by pressure.
With the advent of ubiquitous electronic media and especially social media, the line between news and opinion has not only eroded, but is now gone. There was a time when everyone, from assembly-line worker to state judge knew the difference between a news article, an editorial and an opinion column. Today, that delineation between news and opinion is gone and the outlet is all the evidence a person needs. “I heard it on Fox News.” “I saw it on MSNBC.” “I read it on Facebook.” “I’ve done the research. You should do the research.” The fact that the issue at hand could be opinion disguised as news is not relevant to consumers hungry for validation of their preconceptions, prejudices and conclusions.
The social media-enabled grouping by issue-validation led us to the inevitable and easily predicted trap of identitarian politics. Those on the left who push for the dignity of the marginalized ought to be praised. But when they started labeling the marginalized, they couldn’t see that the non-named might also want labels and that when everyone is labeled as something other than merely American, there can be little hope of unity. The liberal elite realize that they must either add identity letters to the growing acronym or else be called to answer for why they, as elites, decide who gets an identity and who doesn’t. By arguing for identities they naturally pit identities against one another in the zero sum game of limited resources and peoples’ bandwidth to care.
In today’s election campaign, Democrats are seeing the consequences of some of this identity politics blowback. Thomas Edsall, writing in the New York Times says:
“Latinos, who are key to the outcome in several crucial states — Arizona and Florida, for example — have shown less support for Biden than for past Democratic nominees. Many Hispanic voters seem resistant to any campaign that defines them broadly as “people of color.”
At some point, those who live in a diverse societal setting take for granted that identity-labeling and stereotyping are not ineffective and insulting, nor irrelevant. Yet, a large portion of the population see it differently. A close friend, who as a child watched his father be killed by a white man with a shotgun for simply being the descendant of slaves and having the temerity to own a barbershop in a small Kentucky city wrote to us
“I reject critical race theory and intersectionality…And since we are in an era of “self-identification,” I choose to simply call myself a “darker-skinned Christian…I only use dark skin to aid in picking me out of a lineup; nothing more, nothing less. The term African-American is too complicated now. It’s closer to a religion. Although BLM altered their web site to remove “upsetting the patriarchal family” as one of their goals, they are still a cult to me. Sorry, had to get that out.”
How does anyone in the elite have the right to tell this man, a retired military officer and airline pilot, a success story by any measure, that he is wrong or to make him accept a label for his own good. In any discussion aside from these remarks, he would be considered a member of the elite. But these words and his disdain for labels makes him anathema to both the left who he accuses and largely the right who would not simply allow him to succeed but want to hold him up as a model.
These identities that people are defining for themselves are forming the basis for coalitions in a potential great divide in the US. In the mid-1800s, slave states and free states were easily divided by a Mason-Dixon Line, where one side clearly wanted to secede from the union while the other wanted to forcefully keep the secessionists in that union. Today, the divide in the US is not about seceding from the union or preserving it, but to separate one coalition of identities from another. We saw this in 2016 and it has only gotten worse in the intervening 4 years.
We wrote in the summer of 2016 that liberal democracy, meaning the form of government where people and politicians respect the outcomes of the democratic process, was under assault on all sides. In that article we said that the people had the right to be wrong, but that they would then have to live with consequences of their decisions. In the fall of 2016 we wrote about people moving apart politically and socially and being unwilling to open themselves to ideas and discussions from those with opposite points of view.
We also asked whether we have moved beyond the point of accepting evidence and being able to change our minds based on evidence. We now live at the beginning of an age in which people must go to great lengths to discern between real news and disinformation, especially deep-fake videos. We finished November 2019 with a call to take action now to stop the slide towards the unrest that was so evident then and has begun to manifest since then.
The point of linking back to these previous works is not to say, “Hey, look what we got right.” The point is to show a progression of predictable outcomes as they reach a crescendo at the November 2020 election. The progression is an increase towards the edges of extremity and also the intense increase in manufactured and manipulated “facts” and the tremendous negative impact that progression has on the national psyche.
Our warnings were not particularly bold. Lots of people were issuing similar warnings. But they were accurate and we are largely where we predicted we would be. We see today a natural outcome of those predictions exacerbated by four years of societal stress and uncertainty adding to the already deep well of distrust.
In his 2006 novel, Empire Orson Scott Card wrote of a situation in which the United States finds itself in a civil war that was not foreseen nor expected by the population who suddenly found themselves having to pick a side. This fictional divide was a result of a breakdown between left and right politics. In the Afterword to the book, every bit as captivating as the novel, but perhaps more relevant to policy-makers and the public, Card says:
“Because we haven’t had a civil war in the past fourteen decades, people think we can’t have one now. Where is the geographic clarity of the Mason-Dixon line? When you look at the red-state blue-state division in the past few elections, you get a false impression. The real division is urban, academic, and high-tech counties versus suburban, rural, and conservative Christian counties. How could such widely scattered “blue” centers and such centerless “red” populations ever act in concert?…It goes deeper than this, however. A good working definition of fanaticism is that you are so convinced of your views and policies that you are sure anyone who opposes them must either be stupid and deceived or have some ulterior motive. We are today a nation where almost everyone in the public eye displays fanaticism with every utterance.”
That was in 2006. Who can honestly say that he was incorrect and that we have not become even more divided since then? This divide is not merely urban and rural, it is today largely between elites and the rest of society. Elites are those who make decisions for the masses. While everyone has an uncle who who has great ideas for everything, elites are those who are listened to based on their positions, experience, contacts, proximity to power and regular platforms in mass media. Elites drive policy change. Unlike factory workers who are paid hourly based on specific repetitive tasks, or gig workers who are paid for each transaction, elites are paid far more money than laborers.
Furthermore, there is only a tenuous link between pay and outcomes, which makes non-elites distrust elites all the more. Elites, working in the intellectual and decision space work physically far less and earn far more than the vast majority of the population. This difference in pay and seeming difference between tangible production is what we contend is the greatest societal divide in the US and the West.
Elites on both sides of the political continuum and in all areas of life, despite some claims to the contrary, cannot, on average, fend off the claim that their general position is based more on disdain for those beneath them than any policy: those without advanced degrees, those who come from the laboring class, those who “cling to religion”, those who work in the service industry serving the elites in their social restaurant lifestyles.
Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times Opinion page spends a good bit of time on the weekly podcast, The Argument, almost certainly without awareness of her repetition, telling her fellow podcast discussants of all the potential policy outcomes she is “literally terrified of…” Non-elites don’t have the luxury of being terrified for 4 years. Non-elites live with what they must. Goldberg said early in the Covid pandemic that the thing she has missed the most since the pandemic began has been her lifestyle of eating out with her husband and friends in New York City. Non-elites (and probably many elites themselves) would recognize that there are few professions in which you make enough to support a lifestyle which revolves around eating out often in New York City all the while being “literally terrified” about everything that comes and goes outside the confines of Chez Comfort.
Being an elite is not a sin. Calling for non-elites to carry a burden that the elites themselves cannot feel, if not a sin, shows a shallowness of understanding. Elites can be questioned about how much they know about the lives and society of those who serve them, produce, package and deliver the food they eat, keep that water running, repair their elevators and keep their beautiful and culturally vibrant cities humming.
Non-elites have no time to be terrified of everything because they’re too busy existing in the world the elites created. This has manifested when commentators, politicians, and the elite say “we all have to make sacrifices for COVID.” That request for universal sacrifice is stunning given how great is the difference between the vehemence of elite demand for shut-down with the reality of what that sacrifice entails. It is easy to sacrifice when your livelihood and ability to pay bills and put food on the table is not dependent on your inability to make it to your favorite restaurant. Working people need work in order to survive. While the elite can work from home, a full economy shut down has been devastating on those who have to physically work in a specific place next to specific people performing specific tasks.
An old hand from DC and the White House across multiple administrations of different parties wrote us 4 years ago with a warning. He was concerned about the difference between what elites had sold the country on and the outcomes for which those very elites suffered no consequences:
1. The experts sold the heartland down the river. NAFTA, the WTO and globalization, we were told, would create winners and losers and we would have to take care of the losers through job retraining an other support. Except we didn’t.
2. The experts said technology would change our lives. It has. People quickly came to see the Internet and the Smart Phone as birthrights, though, not technological miracles capable of plugging them into global knowledge for free. Instead, heartland folk see guys driving Teslas in San Francisco while they can’t buy grandma a Chevy. They feel exploited and they’re sick of it.
3. The experts said we wouldn’t need pensions because we’d all get a 401(k) instead. Except that, the way it really works, is that 1 percent of the population got rich on hedge funds and complex derivatives and the rest of us got the bust of 2008, from which million of our workers have never recovered.
Bottom line: experts said globalization, technology and high finance would usher in a brave new world and lift all boats. It did – but only for the precious few who could figure out how to master the new world order. Guys who wanted to keep spending 30 hours a week watching the game never saw that the new competition was a kid in South Korea spending 14 hours a day in school.
Reading this old email today along with Orson Scott Card’s Afterword in 2006 shows that we should not be surprised at the societal divide today. The divide between those at the top who make policy and those who must continue their lives the best way they can and suffer the pandemic as they must.
What’s in store?
To say that we are concerned about the near future of our country is an understatement. Back in January, we wrote a piece with some specific predictions for 2030. We think those predictions are still sound, but we think some of them will accelerate. What we didn’t predict is that the 2020 Presidential election in the US might lead to one of two fantastical outcomes: civil war or autocracy. Yet that is increasingly the fork in the road the US seems to be barreling down at full speed. Millions have read or heard about Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning, which predicts upheaval in a generational cycle of history.
The number of podcasts discussing the potential outcomes of the upcoming Presidential election shows how deeply concerned the population is. Some, as we will shortly discuss, are preparing, if not outright hoping for, one or the other outcome.
Back in 2006, when nearly nobody predicted a split, Scott Card wrote,
“Can it lead to war?
Very simply, yes. The moment one group feels itself so aggrieved that it uses either its own weapons or the weapons of the state to “prevent” the other side from bringing about its supposed “evil” designs, then that other side will have no choice but to take up arms against them. Both sides will believe the other to be the instigator.
The vast majority of people will be horrified — but they will also be mobilized whether they like it or not.”
While the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle was an abject failure in self governance, or even understanding what said governance entailed, that was a side show compared to arson in government buildings. Today, you have leftists not merely symbolically throwing molotov cocktails at police. In Portland some tried to light a police building on fire and barricade the people inside.
“When you commit arson with an accelerant in an attempt to burn down a building that is occupied by people who you have intentionally trapped inside, you are not demonstrating, you are attempting to commit murder,” Mayor Ted Wheeler said, on August 6th.
These leftists see extrajudicial killings and imprisonment of minorities well out of proportion to their population. They truly believe that the police and government agencies willfully seek to oppress free peoples. They don’t consider who will get called when there is a fire or assault or robbery when the police are defunded. But worse than calling for defunding is actual shootings of police in their cars, or ambushes of police or lighting police stations on fire.
On the right, many are not content to support the police and government. Calls for like-minded people to move to the American Redoubt have been ongoing for more than a decade, but people are actually moving there for that specific reason. It was from this region, specifically Idaho, that supporters of President Trump gathered for a cruise rally in Portland at which one of their members was shot and killed by a leftist gunman. Furthermore, many on the left and right are deeply concerned about the increasing frequency of heavily armed and militarily dressed militias showing up to oppose protesters, whether peaceful or not (read here, here and here). It is inconceivable that as more heavily armed militias show up to more protests, violence won’t become a serious issue.
Who can conceive of a situation in which heavily armed Black militia-members showed up in numbers that doesn’t engender a strong police response at the very least? Yet the armed White militia garner support from police. Why do protesters of any kind need to be armed to stand in front of others? When did this become acceptable in our country? Is it conceivable that such shows of force won’t eventually result in some violence as has already happened in Kenosha.
How could the US proceed down the path to a civil war when there isn’t a discernible north south divide any longer as there was in the country’s history? The US has already seen a demographic migration called The Big Sort. The advent and proliferation of technology has made it possible to live near people who think like you. This allows people to live near those with whom they are deeply connected. This empirically results in homogeneous neighborhoods and enclaves that are internally politically like-minded. On average localities are becoming more ideologically homogeneous, but most states are purple to large degrees on the aggregate. That is what makes the civil war scenario most concerning.
If the divide was as simple as half the states or even some number wanting out, most likely there would at the least be a genuine political discussion within the rest of the remaining states to say “good riddance.” But that neat division is not the reality. The Big Sort did not neatly separate the states. It neatly sorted liberal and conservatives within the states. If the civil war ever comes, it will look worse than the Fall of Yugoslavia (good book, by the way). In the Balkans, Serbs, Croats and Bosnians ethnically cleansed their regions and those driven out sorted to other areas of their own ethnicity. In the US, should a right-left civil war break out, there is not a natural homeland for either side to call their own, although that would fairly quickly become evident. And lest you think that such states are clearly and forever conservative and liberal, look at what is happening in Idaho and Texas where net incoming migration is so blue that those once solidly red states are now turning purple.
The other fork in this road takes us towards autocracy. This has been a slow and steady march. Insidious, meaning that we hardly recognize what is happening. While Arthur Schlessinger wrote of the Imperial Presidency, it has been strengthened since his book by both Republican and Democrat office holders. Every time Congress cedes authority to the bureaucracy in making rules instead of Congress passing laws, unelected officials beholden to the President for appointment or others in the bureaucracy for advancement become more powerful. When Congress went to a 3-day work week, they gave up the ability to conduct meaningful oversight of the Executive, a key function of the first branch of government.
President Bush, driven by a new kind of warfare (cyber) and terrorist attacks (9/11) expanded the President’s power with state surveillance, which his successor continued and expanded. President Obama broadened Presidential power with targeted prosecutions of journalists for publishing leaks of information while ostensibly supporting free press. President Trump has fired inspectors general of 5 departments or agencies in a 6 week period, all of whom were investigating their own organizations as required by law. Furthermore, President Trump has openly and repeatedly called into question democratic institutions of this country from courts, to elections, to bureaucrats (both those he appointed and those in place when he arrived) executing the country’s laws.
No President wants to be hamstrung. Presidents of all parties have issued executive orders to work around the law-making process of Congress. It is not reasonable for a President to have to continually and politely ask Congress to get to work when their own institution has evolved from law-making and oversight to a cycle dominated by campaigning for re-election and dependency on donors and lobbyists to whom they must be beholden. Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist #70 for a vigorous and decisive President to lead the country. But he also assumed the President would abide by the norms and laws of the country. And now President Trump is deliberately and repeatedly calling into question the validity of the upcoming election and has threatened to not concede should he lose and potentially bypass the election results by naming alternative electors in specific states that vote against him.
Some wave away any possibility that a defeated president could remain in office by pointing out that the Secret Service would escort him out of office at noon on Jan 20th. But we have never had a candidate who would not at some point concede, whether after court decision or House of Representative vote. We’ve never had a candidate say that any outcome aside from his victory would be illegitimate. Russia’s desire for Americans to lose trust in their own electoral outcomes has nearly come to pass.
President Trump’s first election victory came about largely because voters were fed up with elites and dysfunction and wanted to change up the system. That accounted for the proportion of the democratic voters who pulled for Trump rather than cement a Clinton dynasty on their own side. But when people are fed up with ineptitude, fraud, waste and abuse, and political leaders totally ignoring the people, they can elect a populist, even one who tends to authoritarianism. And with each violent demonstration, killing of police officers in their cars, destruction of businesses and property, that segment of the population feels more powerless and sets the stage for an even more authoritarian leader to bring back Order. The nightmare scenarios of this election are really nightmares.
Should Joe Biden win, he will not reverse the slide to authoritarianism. At best, he will slow it down. At worse, he will be pushed by his left wing to cement power in their hands. If President Trump wins he has repeatedly spoken of serving more than two terms, whether by popular acclaim or negotiation.
But before discussing the likelihood of a possible third term, we can reasonably expect a second term to be marked by more firings of experts in key positions of the bureaucracy to be replaced by loyalists, whether competent or not. We predict a more targeted use of federal resources in specific states, both as a reward for supporters and punishment of opponents. We predict a continuation of pullback from foreign alliances with the attendant consequences loss of military access and increase in Russian and Chinese influence in countries we leave. We predict more business to be funneled into the Trump family business as well as those of supporters. We predict legal action by the Justice Department against whistleblowers and the media with claims that this is merely a continuation of Obama-era decisions.
Given what we have seen so far, we can expect full scale demonstrations turning into riots when the left protests these moves and Federal officers are deployed to Democratic cities to respond. We can expect Republican members of Congress from Red states to pledge full support, while those from blue states will be villified by the President if they don’t toe the line. The military will become, despite the leadership’s best attempts, more politically divided with calls by the President to support him or else firing Chiefs of Staff of the Services.
These predictions are worst case and are not something we ever hope comes to fruition. God help us all if they do. But these are the very problems that await us down the road of autocracy. The issues that await down the civil war path are no more palatable. So what can we do? What must we do to stop ahead of the fork in the road and turn this train around?
What we need to avoid civil war and autocracy
First and foremost the US must return to the social compact of communitarian good. We have to come to realize that love is willing the good of the other as other. We are a nation of immigrants. Everyone whose family left a home to come to the US had to give up a life for the chance at something better. When we can appreciate the sacrifice that people are trying to make today in the same light as we or our predecessors made, then we can feel less threatened by others. When we look around and see for ourselves that the crime rate has continued to drop for over a decade, that foreign rapists are not invading the suburbs, that even people of other parties want their kids to grow up safely and want the same out of life as we so, then we can break through barriers.
But even if that social change is not immediately possible, other structural changes are. We need to forever do way with offices for life. All offices, from elected, to appointed, to civil servant ought to have a term limit. No longer should senators serve 30 years. We propose US Representatives be limited to 6 two-year terms. Senators to two six-year terms. Judges ought to serve a single 18 year term so that each president nominates judges every two years. Civil servants, who today hold tremendous power despite being unelected, ought to be made to rotate out of a position after 6 years and either into a new position or else out of service for the same reason that we do not allow military commanders to remain in command for more than a short, fixed period. Civil service overhaul is overdue. Career bureaucrats need a new, effects-based standard for continued employment.
We need a robust rehiring of ombudsmen at all media, print, digital or visual to exercise independent investigation and oversight of reporting. We need ombudsmen to regain trust in our news. It is natural for outlets to be left, right, or centrist. It is important for media to be accountable for reporting falsehoods and to have their reporting questioned as truthful.
This applies also to social media. Facebook and Twitter are platforms for information. Information posted there is not legitimate simply for being posted there. The content itself must be clearly delineated as reporting, or opinion or editorial.
Finally, we need a strong program of rooting out foreign interference in all elements of American society. We need strong alerting systems to warn of attempted social engineering, of detection of an outside entity with malign intentions to be developed, tested and institutionalized. We do not call for legislatively banning these activities, but that they be clear about who they are and what they’re trying to do. We’re not calling for the New Republic to become centrist. We’re not calling for Fox News to hire liberals. We are calling for a clear delineation of news, opinion and editorial. If someone wants to exercise their right of free speech and association in extremist groups, that is their right. But just like health warnings on cigarettes, we must warn citizens when socially engineering trolls attempt to dupe people into believing that what they are reading is news when it is packaged as such but is really made up and specifically targeted to reduce trust in society.
The United States is at a precipice. We do not believe this is an overstatement. We also realize this is not something that can be fixed quickly or by a single leader, no matter how charismatic, or even effective. We need a societal reset if our great national experiment is to survive another 250 years.
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