Not all themes shaping the election are stated outright and obvious. For various reasons, we have to also read between the lines. Here’s my list of top underlying themes of this election:

Whataboutism and Civic Trust

All the lying.

The New Gilded Age

In America, the lower and middle classes have been heavily under siege for the past four decades. The financialization of everything is the Midas touch.

Unequal in Inequality

We are living in an era of vast and still-growing inequality. The dream of a robust middle class with healthcare, job security, and creature comforts is being ransacked on many sides by many social and economic forces. But inequality alone is not enough to cause a major social upheaval. Life is still comfortable-enough.

Poverty and Privatization

Philanthropy is helpful, but the United States did not build interstate highways through volunteers and donations, and we can’t build a national preschool program or a national drug recovery program with private money. We need the government to step up and jump-start nationwide programs in early childhood education, job retraining, drug treatment and more. See: Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn from Who Killed the Knapp Family?

Happy and Not Dead Yet

As humans, we are lucky to be happy. Such a broad term, yet we know what it means: contented in body and soul, at ease, even experiencing pleasure. If we are happy most of the time, we consider ourselves lucky. Life is good. But there is much to be unhappy about. We are surrounded by human and non-human suffering. Sometimes we are faced with it, and other times it is hidden from us. The news media often brings it to our attention. How does it change us? Can we still be happy when we are aware of problems that plague others? Can we be happy when we believe the future of the world to be imperiled?

A Pathology of Unexamined Cynicism

We talk a lot about White Nationalism and its political consequences. I think it’s interesting to think of a politico-philosophical mindset that goes hand-in-hand with such views, one that I would characterize as a pathological mindset – or, Unexamined Cynicism. This mindset leads to political action (or inaction) and other behaviors that often manifest as politically and socially problematic. Most importantly, it can lead to prejudice and the enactment of prejudice in the public sphere.

A Temperature Change (Take the Money Back!)

Over the next few hundred years, the world will warm up. According to Peter Brennan, author of The Ends of the World, while temperatures and sea waters will rise this century, it may take a millennia for truly catastrophic geological events to unfold. Hey, good news: that means we may have enough time and technical mastery to bring about the twin goals of economic equality and of geo-engineering!

Good luck, America. Vote Blue.

Love this simple break-down from Business Insider:

Meritocracy is a popular nonfiction topic these days, with Sandel’s book published on the heels of Markovits’ 2019’s “The Meritocracy Trap“. Indeed the backlash against so-called elitism gives us a lot to think about.

Reflecting on meritocracy in general (and technocracy in particular), I am reminded of Churchill’s remark that “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”

Sandel outlines some really damning outcomes of the rise of meritocracy and the “rhetoric of rising” in the U.S. For me, foremost on the list is the rising fiscal inequality that benefits from our broad acceptance of meritocracy, and acquiescence to all its forms (e.g., across diverse domains). High academic achievement, he argues, has become a basis of meritocratic hubris. Having rooted itself in our schools and universities, this by-product of education has been cashed out as an all-encompassing ticket to wealth accumulation.

The singularly-American obsession with self-made wealth has fused with academic achievement. This has led to a broad deterioration of our mid-20th century, quasi-egalitarian social fabric – the weakening of our ability to communally value goods that exist apart from academic achievement. But what, we might ask, are those?

Academic achievement has become expansive in an interesting (if confounding) way. Reading, writing, and arithmetic have been foundational to public education for about 150 years. And one might add religion. But the study and practice of the visual arts, music, and athletics have all come under the umbrella of formal education as well, to say nothing of the social sciences and related humanities sub-disciplines. Colleges and universities have become all-encompassing amalgams of evaluation and accreditation. Almost anything humans celebrate as worth doing has been incorporated into the curriculum.

And so, education has become a proxy and a symbol for doing anything seriously. The obvious cause of this is that we are taking our activities seriously: discussing, researching, evaluating, and sharing our actions and beliefs in every domain we can. On the face of it, this seems like a wonderful trend. But Sandel and others have revealed the folly of this path: negative feedback loops. A resentful underclass. A self-assured-yet-neurotic elite. And growing inequality.

What kind of correctives can allow us to keep the benefits of comprehensive education but mitigate the negative outcomes?

As Sandel notes, the so-called liberal elite have promoted the solution of more education for half a century. Higher education for all. Lifelong training (and retraining). Career pathways. But he suggests this path has deepened political divisions by doubling-down on education without improving social and economic outcomes for most. The political and economic problems of the present therefore point us to wealth redistribution as a solution. Notably, the solution of taxing the rich and creating educational opportunities for the poor fits this model perfectly.

If increasing educational opportunities for all is a minimal approach, then the fantasy of a social state is the strong one. But the solution of taxing the rich so as to entirely remove economic inequality clearly collides with our collective “dream” of self-reliance, to say nothing of our collective fantasies about capitalism. This tension arguably forms one of the deepest divisions between “conservative” and “liberal” approaches to governance.

What else can be done? What about the possibilities for reengineering education itself?

There are many visions of education that do not reify the value of grades and ranked outcomes – those special distillations of education that are bound up in capitalist fantasies of competition and financial success. Can we build a new foundation of collaborative action? Can we be guided by vision of collective success and shared outcomes?

To do so would be to embark on a mission to simultaneously recreate constraints for capitalism that betray our shared values that led us to educational excellence in the first place: curiosity, discovery, and knowledge. To do so would be to exit the casino and join cooperative projects. This is happening all around us, of course – the future that’s here, but unequally distributed. If it’s happening both with and without education, how can we shine a stronger light on it? Can we trace it as a solution to our meritocratic ills?

To take this path is a leap of faith. Choosing collective outcomes over individual ones. This chafes with our current capitalist optimism. It presents us with an even greater reckoning:

Can we live under the tyranny of shared endeavors, but still experience freedom as the well-educated wealthy elite now ostensibly enjoy? How long will it take us to reimagine so-called freedom as such?

They Russian army was sent to the Ukraine boarder on false pretenses of military drills. The soldiers are young. Then they were sent into battle their close neighbors by a man who sits at long tables.

What if Russia’s war on Ukraine was ended by Russian soldiers?

Are Russians sufficiently networked by technology and social media for the soldiers on the front lines to hear the anti-war sentiment of the Russian people? Would they dare turn against Putin and propel Russia’s government in a new direction?

It’s something to hope for in an otherwise bleak moment.

As Naomi Klein eloquently states in her book The Shock Doctrine, social and political instability has been used to push anti-government agendas. This has been very bad for liberal democracy in America, especially during the past 40 years. Now, with a global pandemic surging in America, related economic strife, heightened partisan rancor, and an upcoming election that is bound to test our trust of democratic systems, will instability develop into a breakdown of democratic systems? (And would this be the culmination of 40 years of Neoliberalism or the end thereof?)

Discussions about a “Second Civil War” are alarming (to say the least), and appear to be predominantly emanating from so-called “right-wing Bugaboo” movement, fueled by grassroots Qanon conspiracy pushers, big media like Fox News, and the Republican Administration’s blatant promotion of militarism and white, patriarchal nationalism. Add to this America’s nearly 400,000,000 guns in the hands of its citizens, and the idea of “war” suddenly seems more concrete than merely rhetorical.

But is it enough to break down American democracy to the point of irreparable procedural damage?

Check out Anand Giridharadas’ latest book review in the Times for a great reflection on the hard work on questioning one’s own assumptions.

Just another New York Times’ hit piece writing itself… May we all soon look back with grim despair at this dark chapter in American politics?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/us/politics/trump-baltimore.html