The Path Forward

Trump rewrote the American story with his victory last night. We need to find a more compelling answer.

Photo by Karsten Würth on Unsplash

Kamala Harris is a hero. She ran a perfect campaign, embodied every attribute you want in a leader—strategic foresight, grace, class, humor, grit, humility—and it wasn’t enough. The cake was baked before she got into the race. While my voice will add little to the cacophony of think pieces that will run in the weeks to come, I want to record my reflections before reading any of those pieces.

I picked up two books on my way downstairs to write this piece: The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrove and Thinking in Systems by Meadows. I took Graeber’s introduction to anthropology course as an undergraduate right after he’d been denied tenure because of his anarchism and radical political views. He was an excellent professor, and while I followed the controversy, I had a hard time understanding his politics.

Now, having read his posthumously published opus, I understand him. His view of humanity was much broader and more informed than mine. The evidence shows that humans have experimented with a wide variety of living arrangements over the millennia, including non-hierarchical cities with no permanent bureaucracies and cyclical arrangements in which roles and social bonds vary with the seasons. Until reading his book, I only saw a narrow sliver of society's possibilities, rooted in the nation-state and global system of the past few centuries. Where I obsessed about how the knobs and dials of American democracy were working, Graeber was demonstrating that humans have thrived in social constructs well outside of anything I’d considered possible.

Donella Meadows was also a genius. She first gained renown–and opprobrium–for her contributions to The Limits to Growth. Published by the Club of Rome in 1972, the book used a system dynamics model to argue that continued resource use and population growth risked overshooting the ecological carrying capacity of our planet. This could lead, if corrective actions weren’t taken, to societal collapse by 2100 (Jared Diamond explored smaller examples of this phenomenon in his book Collapse). Today, we’ve crossed many of those planetary boundaries, and the risk of collapse, which was theoretical and built on modeling assumptions back in 1972, feels very real. 

Like Graeber, Meadows died young; Thinking in Systems was published posthumously. The entire book is great, but the section on leverage points, which she also published as an essay, is the smartest thing I’ve ever read about how to drive change. I return to it often. In it, she lists 12 Leverage Points, from least to most effective.

Most political debate and campaigning focuses on the 12th and least effective Leverage Point,  Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards). When Obama and Romney faced off in 2012, they were competing on these types of issues. That’s because the goals of the system, Leverage Point 3, were taken for granted: improving the lives of Americans, strengthening our democracy, and helping to lead and forge a world that brought about peace while protecting human rights.

This is the leverage point that Democrats focus on in our technocratic approach to governance. If we define and execute on an optimal set of policies, there is a belief that voters will reward us. If only it were that simple. 

One of the challenges of American democracy is that our electoral cycle operates on a faster cadence than does policy implementation. The positive transformation that the Inflation Reduction Act will have on our infrastructure will take decades to play out; it didn’t deliver change on a timescale that’s relevant for electoral politics. 

This gets to Leverage Point 9, the lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change. When the system changes more slowly than its leaders change, the attribution of “credit’ for positive changes is based on correlation, not causation. To take a recent and painful example, Trump benefited from the economic stewardship of Obama. His perceived ability to manage the economy effectively was a contributor to his victory yesterday. 

But it wasn’t the primary driver. What Trump has done most effectively is to change Leverage Point 3, or the goals of the system of American democracy. His goal is personal vengeance–and now he will have an opportunity to use the tremendous power of the US government to achieve it. His enemies are now the enemies of the people.

How the hell did we get here?

I think that Trump accomplished this transformation by changing Leverage Point 2–The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters–for American politics. As Meadows writes

The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions, constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works. These beliefs are unstated because it is unnecessary to state them–everyone already knows them. Money measures something real and has real meaning; therefore, people who are paid less are literally worth less. Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens. One can ‘own’ land. Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumbfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious.

The paradigm that died for me last night was that of American exceptionalism. To elect Trump once is a gamble; to re-elect him after an insurrection, a felony conviction, and rape makes him and all he represents—nativism, racism, ethnonationlism, authoritarianism—features of American political life. Yes, these strands have always existed in our country, but they were fringe ideas. The foregrounding of our national story was the belief articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” here in America. 

But does it, really? Was that just a story we told ourselves, a teleological belief that things are inexorably getting better? That our story, the American story, this great experiment in self-governance, was blessed by providence and guaranteed to move closer to justice with each generation as if the normal rules of societies and appeal of strongman politics couldn’t apply here? Was it all a dream? 

Trump won because he forged a new paradigm for America. One based on blood and soil, fear of immigrants and the enemies within, a zero sum world in which only the strong survive. One in which the Great Leader protects those who deserve his benevolence and punishes everyone else as the crowd cheers. A form of leadership that, according to Graeber’s read of the historical record, is just as common as those eras of self-governance cemented on an ethics of collaboration and respect for individual freedom. 

In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow make the case for “the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.” 

These three freedoms can light the path towards a new, and in many ways similarly old, paradigm to one Trump is peddling. Our power must come from our courage to move, our ability to disobey norms and orders that are not just, and most importantly our ability to create new social relationships. We need to create a new foundation for our society—a new way of understanding who we are and the future we want as Americans. We can—and must—reclaim the mantle of patriotism from the Trumpist view, but the old thinking that this can be done through policy arguments and rational debate around who the true heirs of the American Revolution that happened 250 years ago really are is outdated and ineffective. 

For me, new answers must come from what matters most deeply to each of us. For me, it all comes back to a desire to preserve and protect this magisterial planet for my children and the generations to come. My interest in climate started with the physical reality of pollution in Beijing, morphed into an academic interest and career in corporate sustainability, and is turning me into an aspiring naturalist. For the first time, I am looking forward to planting native species in my yard this weekend as a small manifestation of my belief that we have the power to shape new paradigms and a better future. 

Sitting in “the shack” in central Wisconsin, waking up at 3:30am for the joy of hearing the first birds greet the day, Aldo Leopold lived—and then wrote—contemporary American conservation into existence with the (also posthumous) publication of A Sand County Almanac in 1948. The language is crisp and evocative; it grabs me as a reader and humbles me as a writer. With the power of close observation, reflection, and language, he created a new paradigm. In reflecting on a plaque commemorating the extinction of the once ubiquitous passenger pigeons, he wrote:

Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring? …

For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks. The sportsman who shot the last pigeon thought only of his prowess. The sailor who clubbed the last auk thought of nothing at all. But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn the loss. Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact, rather than in Mr. DuPont’s nylons or Mr. Vannevar Bush’s bombs, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts.”

Let us mourn the loss of the paradigm that “it can’t happen here”, but only for a brief moment, because it happened and will continue to happen for at least the next four years, if not generations. The work begins now to ensure that we do not need to mourn the loss of the American experiment, and all the species that are sure to perish in an ever-warming climate, without action. 

To be numb and resigned to a Trumpist future is to cede the most important thing we have—our belief in a better future—to a small and petty man. That cannot be our lot. We are bigger than that. For if we summon all of our skills and talent, we can change the paradigm.