Why The United States Is At Risk Of Devolving Into An Autocratic Oligarchy
In 1829, an engineer named Francis Xaver Riepl and the Austrian banker Salomon von Rothschild decided that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was ready to enter the Railroad Era.
The two men went to the court of the Habsburg Emperor Francis I and requested permission and funds to build Austria’s first steam-powered railroad line.
But Francis was not blind.
His family dynasty had ruled large swaths of Europe and all of Austria for more than 550 years, and it hadn’t maintained its dominion for centuries by ignoring threats to its power.
The emperor knew exactly what was happening to the British monarchy and nobility as the industrial revolution overhauled Britain, and wanted no part of it.
In 1802, Francis had banned all new factory construction in Vienna. Imports of any new industrial machinery into the empire were verboten until 1811. The only railroad line he’d allowed moved freight with horse-drawn carriages and was incompatible with steam-powered trains.
And so, when Riepl and Rothschild came to him talking up the big opportunity in steam rail, Francis I turned the men down and sent them on their way.
With investments in steam-powered rail curtailed, factories discouraged, and imports of new industrial machinery stopped at the border, Austria-Hungary’s industrial revolution–and all of the innovation, bourgeois wealth, and diffusion of power that came with it–was smothered in its crib.
And for a while, the strategy worked.
Despite the complexities and tensions of ruling over a vast multi-ethnic empire while industrialization strengthened and enriched their neighbors to the North and West, the Habsburgs and the rest of the Austro-Hungarian nobility maintained their exclusive access to the empire’s wealth and power.
But then, on a mild and sunny Sunday in June of 1914, a 19-year-old Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip emptied his handgun into the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s car and set the whole world on fire.
Without an industrialized economy and all of the military advantages that came with it, Austria-Hungary took a back seat in the First World War.
The empire did what it could to support its German allies, sending money, supplies, and troops while the Germans did most of the arms manufacturing and other heavy lifting.
But when the Central Powers’ war efforts fell against the combined industrial engines of France, Britain, and the United States, the Habsburg Monarchy was kaput. At Versailles in 1919, the victorious Allies ended their six centuries of rule with the stroke of a pen.
And there wasn’t a damn thing the Habsburgs or their fellow nobles could do about it.
Why Nations Fail, And What It Means for the USA
In Why Nations Fail, 2012’s exploration of how and why empires and nations meet their ends, an economist named Daron Acemoglu and a political scientist named James Robinson make a simple, compelling argument:
Oligarchies tend to spiral into violence and collapse.
To demonstrate this concept, Acemoglu and Robinson take us on a guided tour of history’s numerous fallen empires and failed states.
We see many of them up close and in gory detail from the Western Roman Empire (fallen, 476 C.E.) and the Maya city-states of the Classical Era (collapsed, 810 C.E.) to China’s Ming and Qing Dynasties (done and gone in 1644 and 1911, respectively) and the Habsburg Monarchy (game over, 1919).
We get a look at the struggling states of Honduras, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo as they fail right now.
And while the details of these stories vary significantly, the broad strokes are almost always the same:
- A narrow elite leverages its wealth and power to establish institutions whose primary function is to preserve and enlarge that wealth and power while keeping it away from everyone else.
- The tremendous benefits derived from complete control over society’s institutions makes the opportunity to seize that control remarkably attractive. Coups, usurpations, and civil wars become ever-present risks as a result.
- Meanwhile, while technological innovation and economic growth can and does happen under those constraints, a radical new idea or technology eventually comes along that threatens to “disrupt” the extractive institutions and loosen the elite’s grip.
- Given the choice between accepting these disruptions and allowing their societies to reap the benefits or maintaining their own status, the elites choose their status.
- The disruptive innovations get snuffed out. Economic growth stalls and then reverses.
- The gangrenous rot at the core of the system spreads outward until it consumes the whole thing.
And right about there, the worst of the worst stuff begins.
That Time When Your Civilization Hits A Hard Ceiling And Falls Into Collapse
So why did I lead with all of this?
Because unlike the technologists who believe that accelerating innovation, social progress, and even widespread abundance are the inevitable destiny of humankind, I am not an unmitigated, Pollyanna-style optimist.
I am an optimist, yes: I’m writing this essay because I know that humankind has the potential to achieve extraordinary things, and that the core technologies necessary to create material and possibly even emotional and spiritual abundance for the entire world are not far from our grasp.
But I also know enough history to know that, in any given civilization, technological innovation is not an immutable force.
In fact, in MOST societies throughout history, whenever new ideas or technologies came along that threatened the status, wealth, and power of the elite AND that elite had the wherewithal to crush them, they often have.
While the long-term thrust of history does seem to drive innovation and social cohesion forward, sometimes that thrust zigs just when you were sure it would zag.
On more than a few occasions, centuries-long advances in social complexity and expansion in the geographic reach of cooperation have come to abrupt, brutal ends.
The Stanford archaeologist turned meta-historian Ian Morris calls these moments in history “Hard Ceilings”: those times when a civilization reaches the limits of its own contradictions and falls into collapse.
And as Morris documents so vividly in his 2011 book Why The West Rules–For Now: the years, decades, centuries, and (in the case of Western Rome) millennium that follow a civilization’s run-in with a “Hard Ceiling” are not pretty.
Think:
- The collapse of central authority
- Civil wars
- Famines
- Abandoned cities
- The rise of warlordism
- An unending cycle of murder-rape-and-pillage raids from rival warlord factions and unaffiliated marauders from the badlands.
Morris, like Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs, and Steel fame, believes that the periodic rises and falls of civilizations and nations are mostly about geography.
In their “Geography Is Destiny” view of human history, the longevity of a given civilization or nation is closely correlated with the geographic accident of its birth.
In other words, the societies that arose in areas with defensible natural borders (like oceans and tall mountains) and stable climates friendly to domesticated plants and animals were more likely to survive and expand than those without those things.
Acemoglu and Robinson disagree, and in Why Nations Fail, they attack the “Geography Is Destiny” argument head-on.
In their telling, the nature of a society’s economic and political institutions has dramatically more impact on its eventual outcome than its place on a map.
As the two co-authors take meticulous pains to demonstrate, oligarchies can rise pretty much anywhere. And wherever and whenever they do, the extractive institutions they create to enrich and entrench themselves eventually lead their societies into conflict, stagnation, decline, and collapse.
Wherever you end up on the “geography vs institutions” debate, the general point is the same: every so often, the forces of technological innovation and social cohesion collide into hard ceilings of systemic corruption and polarization.
Sometimes in history–like the Allied victory in World War II–momentum and luck were enough to break through. Other times, though, the hard ceiling holds firm, and things fall apart.
Ok. But what does all this have to do with America now?
I’m glad you asked.
In the next essay in this three-part series, I’ll explain exactly what “hard ceilings” and the collapse-happy nature of oligarchic institutions have to do with the United States in 2017.
But to do this properly, we first need to pull back and look at three major, loosely-interconnected mega-trends that have been in various stages of development over the last 20-odd years.
The three trends in question:
- The explosion of online data
- The recent “re-discoveries” in machine learning.
- The erosion of legal and institutional safeguards against autocracy since September 11, 2001
On their own, these three megatrends don’t automatically transform the United States from a flawed but promising Republic where technological innovation and creative destruction flourish into a repressive oligarchy that eventually stagnates and collapses.
But when they intersect with the Presidential election of a thin-skinned “billionaire” with autocratic tendencies and zero respect for America’s democratic institutions and norms, the risks to the persistence of the American democratic experiment suddenly become quite stark.
Let’s dig in:
Megatrend 1: The Digital Data Explosion
The explosion of digital data is actually three smaller trends rolling up into one big one:
- The exponential decline in the price of digital storage. Between 1980 and 2016, the average cost of storage for 1 GB of data has declined from $437,500 to $0.019.
- Offline activities moving online. Instead of visiting the library or consulting a book on our shelf, we Google it. When we need to buy a physical product, we head to Amazon. To communicate with our loved ones, it’s email, Skype, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, or SMS. When we need entertainment, we Netflix and chill.
- The explosive growth in the size of our digital footprints. As we conduct more of our daily lives online, we leave large and ever-growing digital trails of our personal preferences, political views, psychological states, and communication patterns behind, stored across a variety of servers for indefinite periods of time.
In The Search, John Battelle’s 2005 book on Google and internet search technology, Battelle observed these trends and coined the term “database of intentions” to describe the result.
While Battelle primarily focused on the lucrative commercial applications of these datasets, their monetization potential is less relevant to this essay than what they offer to the various security agencies who are now reporting to President Donald Trump and the people he appoints.
Of course, for humans (even large, well-funded teams of them) extracting actionable insights from these massive volumes of data would be like trying to find a specific drop of water in an oncoming tsunami.
But in the last few years, the challenges of transforming oceans of data into actionable information have been turned on their heads. This dovetails nicely into megatrend #2:
Megatrend 2: The rise of the machines
No, I’m not talking about a conscious, self-improving supercomputer going Skynet and sending androids with evil metallic grins and laser guns to hunt down the last pockets of human resistance across a charred landscape of skulls.
I’m talking about machine learning.
While many of the latest “breakthroughs” in machine learning are actually implementations of decades-old ideas made relevant by the appearance of internet-scale datasets, computers are now getting better and better at recognizing and acting on patterns in massive volumes of digitized data.
And though I’m skeptical of arguments that this direction will lead to the Skynet scenario anytime soon, this trend does have troubling implications for the near-future of the American democratic experiment.
Because as the mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil elucidates in her essential book Weapons of Math Destruction, machine learning algorithms are not neutral.
Indeed, the actionable insights surfaced in any given dataset by a given set of machine learning algorithms reflect the historical biases built into the data and the interests and agendas of the people who programmed them.
To make this concrete, let’s consider Facebook.
Over the last 10 years, the $385B social networking giant has amassed the largest database of individual preferences, tastes, and behaviors in the history of civilization.
This database contains a list of your friends and quasi-friends. It stores every photograph and article you’ve ever shared, clicked, commented on, or “liked.” It stores the text of those comments. It tracks which Facebook Groups you’ve joined, which ones you’ve left, and which ones you’re most active in.
Thanks to the increasing sophistication of facial recognition technology, it also has a fairly good idea of who shows up in every photograph you share, whether they’ve been manually “tagged” or not.
And over the last few years, Facebook has augmented its own natively-collected data on its users with “offline behavior” data purchased from consumer data warehouses like Datalogix, Experian, and Acxiom.
When Facebook’s developers design, implement, and iterate on the algorithms Facebook runs against this data, their agenda is clear: incentivize more sharing, keep Facebook’s 1.79 billion active users engaged, and ensure the advertising dough keeps rolling in.
But now let’s do a thought experiment: let’s take that same dataset and change the agenda.
Instead of targeting ads and fostering engagement, let’s pretend your goals also include identifying potential dissidents, tracking the evolution of their psychological states, and monitoring their communication patterns. For good measure, let’s say you also want to manipulate popular sentiment at scale.
You’d use the exact same datasets, apply similarly-designed algorithms and machine learning techniques, and yield utterly different results.
The central concept here is that it is now theoretically possible to mine online behaviors to identify people and groups who are unhappy with the systems that govern their lives and even determine who may eventually resist or become a threat to those systems.
In a society that (generally) respects the freedom the press, (usually) values the right to dissent, and (mostly) protects its citizens against unlawful search and seizure, the power to identify potential dissidents via their digital footprints is not something to celebrate, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to a repressive oligarchy.
After all, we have plenty of legal and institutional protections against those kinds of abuses, right? Well, look at that: a perfect transition to megatrend 3.
Megatrend 3: The erosion of legal and institutional safeguards against autocratic abuses since September 11, 2001
While the digital data explosion and machine learning breakthroughs were mostly happening on their own accord, another, more “directed” form of evolution was taking place.
This one arose in a darker context: the collapse of the Twin Towers and the creation of a big smoking hole on the western side of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
It’s important to note here that I don’t believe the 9/11 conspiracy theories.
While the Operation Northwoods proposal in 1962 does suggest that the US military was once open to the idea of staging attacks on American soil to rally support for military action, there is zero credible evidence that 9/11 was an inside job and plenty of credible evidence that it was not.
And I’m even willing to give the leaders of The US national security apparatus and the people who carried out their wishes a small amount of the benefit of the doubt:
The waterboarding torture, the “extraordinary rendition”, the Dark Sites in less torture-averse states, the creation of Gitmo, the warrantless wiretaps and dragnet-style metadata collection…even the dubious legal interpretations crafted to give cover to all of it…
Despite the violations of human rights, democratic principles, and disregard for international laws that all of this required, I’m willing to accept that they did these things because they believed them necessary to protect their country’s security, the lives of their fellow citizens and, through some some perverse logic, the American Way Of Life.
And let’s be clear: in the fast-approaching age where the material and expertise necessary to fashion dirty bombs, genetically-engineered pathogens, and maybe even nuclear weapons threatens to diffuse to small groups of super-angry ideologues, creating “Total Information Awareness” seems like a logical move.
After all, compared to the political and logistical mega-challenges of winning hearts and minds throughout a multi-polar world, building the surveillance state is the simpler option by far.
Really smart engineers can spec out solutions to the technological challenges, the Federal Government can afford to throw billions of dollars at the problem, and most of the rest of the obstacles in the way are much more clearly defined.
And so when, on September 11, 2001, a handful of radicalized young men from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and The UAE hijacked 4 commercial airliners full of civilians and crashed three of them into beacons of American power, building the legal and technological infrastructure necessary to predict and preempt these sorts of asymmetric threats must have seemed like exactly the right idea.
A little over a month after that shitstorm of a day, the USA Patriot Act of 2001 had passed the Senate 98–1 (with one abstention) and the House 357–66. With it, the legal safeguards against repressive oligarchy in United States took their first big hit.
While the efforts of civil-liberties advocates like the ACLU and the EFF brought back some of those legal safeguards over the next few years, they didn’t seem to have much effect on the huge expansion of America’s intelligence infrastructure.
In the 12 years between 1998 and 2010 (when non-classified intelligence spending peaked), the non-classified parts of the US Intelligence budget grew by 300%–from $27.7 billion in 1998 to $80.1 billion in 2010.
As the Washington Post reported in its epic piece on the rise of “Top Secret America,” the decade between 9/11/2001 and 2011 saw the Defense Intelligence Agency grow from 7,500 employees to 16,500, the NSA’s budget double, and the number of FBI task forces focused on terrorism more than triple from 35 to 106.
Meanwhile, the technological infrastructure for mass electronic surveillance ramped up along with it. The disclosures by Edward Snowden in the summer of 2013 made some of the extent of this infrastructure visible to the public for the first time.
Snowden’s leaks showed us that, despite the Agency’s previous claims to the contrary, the NSA had spent the years since 9/11 vacuuming up gigantic quantities of data on the communication patterns and online behaviors of American citizens.
Moreover, before the backlash from Snowden’s revelations curtailed some of the Agency’s biggest ambitions, the NSA’s plan was to “acquire the capabilities to gather intelligence on anyone, anytime, anywhere.”
Again, let’s reiterate: When facing a near-future world where a small group of well-funded radicals with apocalyptic intentions could potentially release a genetically-engineered uber-pathogen into crowded airports and rush-hour subways, developing the capabilities for complete and total surveillance is not a crazy thing to do.
But of course, once you’ve developed and deployed those capabilities, the main things preventing their use and abuse for autocratic purposes are legal restraints, democratic institutions, political norms, and an Executive Branch that respects all of those things.
Let’s go through these now:
The NDAA For Fiscal Year 2012 gives the Executive Branch legal authority to detain American citizens indefinitely
The 5th Amendment of the Constitution promises US Citizens that “no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
But almost exactly five years ago, both branches of Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2012. Nestled among the bill’s more than 230,000 words was Section 1021.
The relevant section reads as follows:
Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107–40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.
(b) Covered Persons. — A covered person under this section is any person as follows: (1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks. (2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.
© Disposition Under Law of War. — The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following:(1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.
As Anthony Romero at the ACLU vociferously pointed out at the time, this clause gives the military (and by extension, the Executive Branch) near-blanket authority to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial for committing “a belligerent act” or supporting people who do.
Though President Obama initially promised to veto the bill if it included this section, he signed it 16 days after it passed both houses of Congress. Section 1021 remained intact.
The same day, Obama issued a signing statement critiquing many parts of the bill he’d just signed and promising that “my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.”
For good measure, he added that “I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation.”
Unfortunately for the future of the American Democratic Experiment, that signing statement has zero power over the actions of any of his successors.
And so, thanks in part to Obama’s decision not to veto that year’s NDAA, the power to detain American citizens indefinitely without trial is there for any subsequent President to use and abuse.
And, of course, we have no guarantee that any given successor will share Obama’s sentiments about our Nation’s most important traditions and values.
The internet and social media have disintermediated democracy’s traditional gatekeepers
For all of the traditional media’s flaws and contradictions (and they are legion), its role as the “fourth estate” of the American Republic has historically been essential to protecting that Republic against government over-reaches and the oligarchic impulses of some of the elite.
Sure, publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post often do things that open them up to accusations of “liberal bias.” And even though the disparagement of the “mainstream media” tends to originate from people whose status, wealth, and power are threatened by its existence, the accusations sometimes have merit.
But whether this disparagement arises from valid concerns or cynical calculations, it obscures the central role the traditional media has played in keeping the country’s political and economic elite from excessively abusing their power.
Without a strong independent media, we might never know that:
- Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson lied every day to Congress and the American public about the dire strategic situation in Vietnam.
- The Nixon Administration broke into the DNC’s office at Watergate and subsequently tried to cover it up.
- Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and the rest of the big tobacco companies systematically concealed evidence and campaigned against the science that tobacco caused cancer–all while adding ingredients to their cigarettes to make them more addictive.
- General Motors, DuPont, and Standard Oil pumped lead into the atmosphere (via leaded gasoline in cars), claimed that the lead showing up in human bodies was “natural,” and then waged a publicity war against the scientist who pointed out their bullshit.
- The Bush Administration tortured suspected terrorists for intelligence purposes.
- American soldiers abused prisoners of war at Abu-Ghraib.
- The NSA built a massive data-vacuum and pointed it at American citizens.
- The Obama Administration cracked down hard on whistleblowers and came pretty close to jailing journalists who published leaked information for refusing to reveal their sources.
Yes, it’s likely true that shining a big spotlight on these sorts of things has helped foster the American public’s distrust of its government, complicated the military’s efforts to hamper and defeat our enemies, and damaged some of our keystone corporations.
But consider what our society would look like if the leaders of our government and our biggest corporations could operate without the risk that their destructive mistakes, misdeeds, lies, abuses, and even crimes might eventually find their way onto the pages of The Washington Post.
It is no coincidence that when Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan started centralizing their power, they moved quickly to gut the independent press, put television stations under state control, and arrest, intimidate, and/or murder journalists who defied them.
For powerful people without personality disorders, the existence of a strong independent media acts as a significant counterweight to the ever-present incentives they have to abuse their power in shady, even terrible ways.
But unfortunately for the future of America’s democracy, the internet’s extraordinary capacity to obliterate middlemen has taken a massive toll on its traditional media.
In 2005, the newspaper and magazine industry’s total ad revenues peaked at $49.4 billion dollars. But just two year later, the twin forces of the subprime mortgage crisis and the long-in-coming “shift to digital” got together and ran a sword through that industry’s heart.
The hemorrhaging commenced immediately, and hasn’t really stopped: Between 2007–2014, newspaper and magazine ad revenues collapsed from their 2005 high of $49.4B to $19.9B–a decline of around 60%.
In cities and towns throughout the country, small and mid-sized news outlets withered and died. Wave after wave of consolidation swept up most of what was left.
The surviving publications saw their newsrooms shrink precipitously. Whole bureaus closed down. For print journalists, large-scale layoffs and “buyouts” of long-standing contracts became the norm.
Between 2006 and 2014, the number of people employed in American newsrooms fell from 55,000 to 32,900.
By the time Donald Trump got on stage to declare that Mexican immigrants were rapists and that he, Donald Trump, was running for President of The United States, the traditional media was already kneeling in a pool of its own blood.
And with Facebook becoming a primary source of news for 62% of Americans and Twitter providing a platform that amplifies and rewards outlandish controversy and abuse, the gun was loaded and pointed at its head.
All it took was Donald Trump’s tweets, Cambridge Analytica’s brilliant use of Facebook’s “dark post” ads and the efforts of alt-right trolls, fake news profiteers, and Russian propagandists to pull the trigger.
“Tribal reality” is real, and it may be getting worse.
“But wait,” you might push back. “Sure, the traditional media’s profits, stature, and relevance have declined towards collapse, but access to information is more abundant than ever!”
And this is true: if you believe that free, democratized access to the consumption and creation of information is a desirable ideal (and I generally do), we are living in a paradise–a veritable “golden age of getting information.”
But of course, not all of that abundant information is accurate, and some of is full of outright distortions and lies. As the raging controversy around “fake news” has shown us, propaganda is information, too, and social media is awash in it.
And here’s the unfortunate truth: in varying degree, ALL of us–rural Americans with high school educations and urban Americans with statistics PhDs alike–tend to be more accepting of information that aligns with our pre-existing beliefs and resistant to information that challenges them.
This fundamental weakness in human cognition combines with the echo chamber filter bubble of social media to present a large target surface for hucksters and propagandists alike to exploit.
And exploit it they have.
While the “Tribal Reality” that results is not a new development (just look at this 2004 survey on The Separate Realities Of Bush and Kerry Supporters), the golden age of getting information is also the golden age of spreading misinformation and “alternative facts.”
America’s long-standing political norms are falling down
With the growing sophistication of digital surveillance, an executive branch empowered to detain American citizens indefinitely, and a weakening independent media, America’s political norms provide the strongest remaining bulwarks against repression and autocracy.
According to these norms, which have remained mostly intact since the founding of the nation:
- The political party that loses an election transfers power peacefully and with dignity.
- Winning and losing parties alike acknowledge the legitimacy of their rivals, despite strong ideological and policy differences.
- The winning party does not leverage its powers to lock its rivals out of power. This applies literally (the winners don’t round up the losers and throw them in jail) and figuratively (winners don’t change the laws and legislative procedures to prevent losers from becoming winners again in the future).
- The executive gets to appoint people to fill vacancies throughout the judicial branch from the lowest Federal courts to the Supreme Court.
- Lawmakers, cabinet appointees, and the President take reasonable measures to avoid creating blatant conflicts between their financial and business interests and the interests of the Nation as a whole.
While many of the critical norms that protect American democracy against the tides of repressive autocracy aren’t formally spelled out in its laws, the notion that there are “some things you just don’t do” has provided an informal check on excessive abuses of power for most of this country’s history.
But over the last 8 years, those norms have taken increasingly severe beatings.
- The “birther” movement that loudly doubted President Obama’s citizenship and the Republican Leadership’s refusal to condemn it.
- Senate Democrats’ use of the “Nuclear Option,” eliminating the Filibuster for cabinet appointees in July 2013.
- The REDMAP partisan gerrymandering strategy that redrew state voting districts so radically that the party that won 1.4 million more votes in the 2012 House elections ended up with 33 fewer seats.
- The Voter ID laws passed by Republican statehouses since the Supreme Court overturned the Voting Rights Act. These laws were passed ostensibly to eliminate “voter fraud” but served in practice to suppress Democratic votes.
- Senate Republicans’ decision to block Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland throughout 2016.
- A Presidential nominee expressing unwillingness to accept the outcome of the election unless he won it.
- North Carolina’s Republican-controlled state senate and house passing last-minute laws after the November election to strip the newly-elected Democratic Governor of power.
(While you may look at this list and conclude that I’m singling out the GOP for violations of America’s governing norms, it’s worth considering the possibility that it’s actually the GOP doing or abetting most of the violating).
So if you were counting on America’s legal and institutional safeguards to protect our democratic principles and our Republic against autocratic incursions, you may want to start working on Plan B.
What happens when these megatrends intersect with President Trump?
So here we are today, conducting large swaths of our lives online, developing increasingly-sophisticated machine learning technology, and implementing the technological and physical infrastructure necessary for pervasive surveillance.
Over the last 16 years, we’ve reduced our legal safeguards against autocracy, watched our traditional news sources grow weaker and less relevant, and steadily bulldozed our governing norms.
Again, each of these trends on their own don’t automatically pose a clear and present danger to our democracy and the American Experiment. Even together, they don’t necessarily transform the United States into a repressive oligarchy.
But again, when they intersect with the election of a thin-skinned “billionaire” with a huge yet fragile ego, a complete inability to internalize inconvenient facts, and an authoritarian disposition to our country’s highest office, the situation suddenly becomes dramatically more dire.
Within one week of President Trump’s inauguration, the intensity of the risks facing our nation’s core founding values, our most vulnerable populations, and perhaps even our rights themselves became abundantly clear.
Unless you’ve lost your moral compass, are planning to die on Mars, or dream of seafaring nations composed of floating plastic modules, you are fully aware of how dark things got in the first week.
You know that the President spent his first days in office throwing tantrums about the puny size of his inauguration crowd, repeating blatant lies about millions of fraudulent votes, declaring war on the traditional media, and signing executive orders to build a border wall, ban refugees, and stop immigration from a range of Muslim-majority countries.
You know that he’s rattled sabers at China and threatened trade wars around the globe.
You know that he’s pushed the Director Of National Intelligence and the top Military Brass off of the National Security Council and replaced them with a far-right-wing white nationalist who believes in the inevitability of a “very brutal and bloody conflict” against “Islamic Fascism” and whose stated goal is to “bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
You know that agents from the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency deported refugees, stopped legal immigrants from entering, and defied Federal court orders against doing these things.
What none of us yet know is how dark it will get.
We don’t know exactly what President Trump and Steve Bannon will do as Trump’s already-historically-low popularity rankings continue to tank, as the White House loses allies in the Republican Congress, and as their tactics alienate the rank-and-file civil servants who staff the Federal Government.
But we do know that there is a well-established playbook for would-be autocrats seeking to centralize absolute power and dismantle the resistance. Putin followed this playbook closely when he took over from Boris Yeltsin in 1999. Last year, Erdoğan’s crackdown in Turkey was a textbook case.
So where do things go from here? I’m guessing it’ll be one of two ways.
Specifically, a number of roads lead to the future, but all of them lead in one of two different directions.
Some of these roads are brightly lit and lead to a world of abundance, self-determination, and peace. Others are dark, full of scarcity, totalitarianism, and war, and end with the hollowed-out remains of global civilization.
I’ll explore these two alternative trajectories in the next two essays in this series–a tale of two futures, part II and III. But for now, let’s all think hard about the kind future we’d prefer to live in, and what we’re prepared to do and to give to bring this future about.
Because the darkness is gathering, and we can stop it. Its fundamental ignorance, denial of facts, and contradictions leave it full of holes.
The solution is simple, but not easy: the willful, persistent application of light.
