A Third Way Forward for America?
A moonshot to break out of the quagmire of culture war: Bridge Pledge.
Ruminations is a blog exploring the intersections of art, technology, politics, and life, offering diverse, thought-provoking, and often fun perspectives on culture, media, and the pursuit of excellence.
My best friend’s mother used to have a twist on the familiar anecdote about “Shooting for the Moon.” You know how it usually goes, but here’s how she told it:
“Better to shoot for the moon and land among the stars than aim for a pile of sh*t and hit it dead on.”
I think about that when I think about this election. Our choice is now between an aspiring dictator seeking retribution and, as is clear after the debate, someone who “is not that.”
That’s shooting for a pile. We have to start doing better, and I will tell you how I think we can. I want to begin with some quick opinions on how we’ve found ourselves embroiled in today’s endless culture war and also why I believe the former President has done so well with his followers.
Finally, I want to share a breakthrough third way, a way for us to break out of this quagmire in which one side wins only if the other is obliterated.
A quick aside: I admire Joe Biden, who I see as a decent man and a good President. Even many folks who disagree with the party agree about Joe. But I do think he needs to step down at this time in favor of someone with the vigor needed to defeat his opponent.
How did we get where we are?
There are probably hundreds of factors in play, but I will cite three that are at the intersection of math, media, and technology: The Math of the Electoral College, the Over-Consolidation of Mass Media, and the Economics of Social Media.
The Math of the Electoral College
Yes, the Electoral College is an easy foil for attack, but allow me to speak about it somewhat clinically for a minute. The Electoral College was established in the Constitution essentially to protect the government from the potential “tyranny of the masses” (among even more controversial and heinous reasons). Its winner-takes-all structure means the candidate who wins a state gets all its electoral votes, reducing each state’s vote to a binary “yes/no” outcome.
According to a political theory known as Duverger’s Law, this type of binary electoral system almost always leads to the emergence of a Two-Party System, which turns out to be the most mathematically efficient way to sort competing perspectives and maximize results in such systems. This explains why U.S. elections almost always feature two major choices backed by two parties, and why countries without an Electoral College are more likely to have multi-party systems.
The Electoral College isn’t going anywhere any time soon, and being limited to a “Yes/No” binary choice isn’t either.
Over-Consolidation of Mass Media
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a type of journalism that peddled sensationalism over facts called “Yellow Journalism” thrived under an oligarchy of media moguls like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. After the influence of this Yellow Journalism helped spark the Spanish-American War, regulations were put in place to prevent similar abuses in the emerging technologies of radio and television.
These rules limited media ownership and required balanced coverage, eventually making distributed media a strong check on government power, as seen when the Watergate scandal led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
However, these regulations were dismantled during the Reagan and Clinton administrations, leading to a massive re-consolidation of media ownership. This resulted in the rise of monolithic news giants like Fox News and CNN, with most major media outlets again controlled by an oligarchy of billionaires.
This deregulated over-consolidation has led us back to a focus on sensationalism over facts.
Sensationalist media (ex. Fox News and the like) isn’t going away any time soon.
The Economics of Social Media
Social Media started out as a pretty cool thing, didn’t it? It was great connecting with old friends from high school, all of your cousins, and everyone you ever worked with and liked and staying in touch with their lives through posts and shares.
However, as social media platforms sought higher and higher revenues, they discovered that fear and anger generated much more engagement than joy and happiness. To maximize profits, social media began promoting content that evoked negative emotions. Gradually, like frogs in slowly heated water, we found ourselves boiling in a pot of negativity without even realizing it.
I do have one friend who called it from the jump, I’ll probably feature his insight in a pod or similar one day…
So there you have it. We have an age-old factor: two political parties fighting a binary winner-take-all battle, conducted super efficiently over a more modern factor: monolithic sensationalist media channels, turbo-charged by a relatively recent factor: the fear and anger of social media.
Identifying how “best” to stir up fear and anger remains. For that, we turn to the nation’s Achilles heel: a 250+ year struggle to try to live up to our ideals of an entirely equal society. We fight incessantly about how to advance further towards this ideal or whether we’ve reached it.
All this leads us to today’s Circus, known as the Culture War, where winning is defined by demonizing the other side into oblivion.
Winning nothing, really.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia brilliantly exploited America’s Achilles heel in the 2016 election by flooding Social Media platforms with posts from fake users expressing inflammatory sentiments—masquerading both as White and Black users. We ate it up.
The Ringmaster
One of the masters of recognizing the above factors and the opportunities therein is Mr. Donald J. Trump. You have to give the devil his due. He’s no dummy. He may be one of the most talented political operators the world has ever known.
The former President employs strategies and tactics that resonate, coalesce, and motivate a vast number of Americans. He boils down complex topics to simple catchphrases. He creates common foes to unite. He induces his audience to believe they will improve their societal and economic status by following him. These are classic features of leadership.
Point of note: “Leadership” does not necessarily equal “Virtue”.
Understand a person who understands all of the above intrinsically, combine that with understanding his pedigree and his mythology—crafted over the years through self-named casinos, opulent skyscrapers, and golf courses—throw in his wildly popular reality TV show “The Apprentice,” and you should be able to understand why this modern-day P.T. Barnum is likely to be successful in his quest to be elected to the Presidency again.
Focusing on the Circus
However, at the end of the day, whether this particular Ringmaster succeeds or fails in his quest, another Ringmaster is bound to emerge and lead the Circus after that.
We need to do something about the Circus itself. Without a legion of underlings incentivized to do the Ringleader’s bidding, the Ringleader is powerless.
If we really want to effect change in this nation and world and start taking some moonshots like really addressing Climate Change, or doing something about this growing sad army we see under highway interchanges and city streets called people without housing, or even meeting the coming challenges presented by more and more intelligent machines, we’ve got to find a way to end the circus-like culture wars that lead to nowhere and create an environment where we can actually engage respectfully and address the places we fall short as a nation.
Only then will new leaders emerge with authentic ideas that outweigh the false shortcuts, false enemies, and false diversions of Circus Ringleaders.
So how do we get there?
I hope I convinced you above that the two-party system probably isn’t going away. The two “Ways” of Progressive thought (today’s Democratic party) and Conservative thought (today’s Republican party) are probably here to stay.
When I speak of a “Third Way,” I’m not speaking about a Third Party.
Introducing a Third Way: “Bridge Pledge”
Initially, when I set out to compose this Ruminations article, my intention was to culminate this post in a shout-out—no, a plea for a new leader to rise up and lead us out of this mess.
Then, an old friend who had been living overseas in Singapore and Europe suddenly came up to provide leadership in a way very different from what I had in mind.
That friend, Brad Porteus, sent me a note telling me that after 14 years working abroad, he had abruptly moved back to the States. Instead of inviting me out for a beer to reconnect, he invited me out for a walk. (How international, I thought.)
So we caught up, walking the beautiful countryside of the Bay Area foothills.
In thinking about this article, I made a plea for Brad to consider taking up this leadership mantle (I think he’d be great, by the way).
He laughed and dismissed it as a crazy endeavor that he would never volunteer for.
But he then laid on me something that hit me hard as a thing that could actually work. He said—“We’re so divided. Our government is paralyzed and has been held hostage by crazies who survive and thrive in creating chaos.”
“What if, instead of voting for candidates based on their party affiliation and ideological beliefs, we chose representatives based on their abilities to collaborate and solve problems for our common interests?”
Me: “Tell me more.”
Brad: “Yes. Think of it as “Rotten Tomatoes” for politicians. We conduct a data-intensive assessment of our representatives at every level. Their voting records, their pronouncements, everything.”
“Then we assign them a grade: A through F, according to how reasonable they were in their willingness to work with others across the aisle and up and down levels. How reasonable they were in their voting.”
“This is not to say that we are assessing how “centrist” they were. We’re not looking to highlight that. We think a spirited difference in perspectives and ideologies is vital to a healthy democracy. What we want to know and rate, is how much each representative can listen to the other side and work with them to bring common sense results that help people at the end of the day.”
Me: “Oh—you’re not looking for Mr. In-between—you’re looking for someone who can disagree vehemently with someone on tax cuts but is willing to listen and work with them on foreign policy, for example.”
Brad: “Exactly. These people, we call “Bridgers.” We’ll make the assessments and publish the scores for all to see.”
“The other half of the equation are people we call “Pledgers.” People like you and me. Pledgers agree, pledge, and vote for representatives who score highly as Bridgers—regardless of party.”
Me: “Hmmm. I guess I pretty much vote the Democratic party line each election. That may be hard to do.”
Brad: “Hey—if you like things the way they are today, go right ahead with that.”
That was when I realized that this kind of thinking is required to actually dismantle the Circus.
Our currency is our vote, and our vote is our power. With just a small percentage of people voting this way, we could change the incentives leading to the Circus. If it can be based on an impartial, data-centric, transparent analysis like Bridge Pledge portends to be, it can work.
Earlier, I asserted that the political quagmire the nation finds itself in is due to factors of math, media, and technology. It is fitting that an approach based on math, media, and technology might provide a solution.
I believe the Bridge Pledge is a Third Way to move America forward and change the game. I’m willing to take a personal moonshot and become a Pledger.
Because I don’t want my kids, future grandkids, and great-grands to think I was OK shooting for a pile.
Check out my man Brad’s vision in his own words. I hope you will agree and join in as a Pledger (or a Bridger)!
Ron Cadet, VP of User Interface and Experience at Brainscape, specializes in crafting exceptional user experiences across both the engineering and media domains. Highlights of Ron’s diverse career include programming top-rated online radio for MTV Networks, designing patented UI frameworks for View, and engineering innovative flashcard learning apps for Brainscape, each adhering to an underlying principle — “Build user experiences on purposes people believe in, solutions that advance these purposes, and interfaces that enable people to apply the solutions. These user experiences may not only elevate the human experience but might also redefine it.”
Ron spends his Sundays writing about the pursuit of exceptional user experiences through UI/UX design and engineering in “Frames,” general life and work principles in “The Blueprint,” and human interest topics in “Ruminations.” He also co-hosts a variety of pods with “The New Obsidian.”
