The Secret Pod will be out in a bit. It’s also filled with my ennui. I’m sorry I can’t do better this week. But later in the weekend I’ll have a treat for you: Me, Sarah, and Sonny Bunch are doing a conversation about The Death of Stalin. Keep a look out for it under Bulwark+Takes.
Also, probably no newsletter Monday. —JVL
1. The Cascade
I feel like I’ve written the same piece every day for eight years two weeks: Look at this thing. It’s very bad.
I sense that many of you are frustrated by this repetition. I get it. I am frustrated, too.
If I had answers, I’d give them to you. If I had ideas, I’d share them. In this moment, I have neither. The only thing I can do—at least right now—is witness what we are seeing and try to understand what it means.
While not optimal, I believe this work is still somewhat constructive. But I understand if you disagree. Or if you simply can’t take it anymore.1
I hope that it won’t always be this way. But the reality is that it feels like things have shifted over the last couple weeks. Maybe you disagree. Or maybe you feel it, too.
Today I want to talk about an idea from a science-fiction novel that I fear might be applicable to where we are. It’s a high-concept piece about the nature of systems. Like everything else from the last two weeks, it’s not encouraging.
No hard feelings if you want to tap out of this one.
There are, broadly speaking, three kinds of systems: simple, complicated, and complex.
Here’s the easiest set of definitions:
A Simple system is one that has a single path to a single answer. If you want to get to the solution, there is one, and only one, way to do it.
A Complicated system is one that has multiple paths to a single answer. To get to the answer, you have multiple different choices you can make. However, there is only one correct solution.
A Complex system is one that has multiple paths to multiple answers.
But within the universe of complex systems there are gradations. There are “simple” complex systems and complex-complex systems.
James S. A. Corey plays with this idea in his sci-fi novel Caliban’s War. If you’ve made it this far, then I’m going to ask you to bear with me a bit longer while I set up the story.
In the book, humanity has created a colony on one of Jupiter’s moons, Ganymede. Caliban’s War is what we call “hard” science fiction, meaning that it spends a lot of energy describing how stuff in space would actually work. Corey imagines how just about every aspect of the Ganymede colony would function: administration and the rule of law, food generation, oxygen recycling. If you’re into this sort of thing, it’s great.
In Caliban’s War the colony on Ganymede suffers a natural disaster and many of the characters try to figure out how to respond to it; how to “fix” things and get back to “normal” on Ganymede.
But one character, a biologist named Prax, sees that Ganymede can’t be fixed, because of what he calls the cascade effect. He’s asked to explain what “the cascade” is. Prax says:
It’s the basic obstacle of artificial ecosystems. In a normal evolutionary environment, there’s enough diversity to cushion the system when something catastrophic happens. That’s nature. Catastrophic things happen all the time. But nothing we can build has the depth. One thing goes wrong, and there’s only a few compensatory pathways that can step in. They get overstressed. Fall out of balance. When the next one fails, there are even fewer paths, and then they’re more stressed. It’s a simple complex system. That’s the technical name for it. Because it’s simple, it’s prone to cascades, and because it’s complex, you can’t predict what’s going to fail. Or how. It’s computationally impossible. . . .
Ganymede’s dead. . . . The tunnels will probably survive, but the environmental and social structures are already broken. Even if we could somehow get the environmental systems back in place—and really, we can’t without a lot of work—how many people are going to stay here now? How many would be going to jail? Something’s going to fill the niche, but it won’t be what was here before. . . .
It’s all going to fall apart. The relief effort’s going to make the fall a little more graceful, maybe. But it’s too late.
“Liberal democracy” is an artificial ecosystem, a simple-complex system that does not arise from an evolutionary environment. Liberal democracy is created and imposed; it must be maintained through active tending.
You probably see where I’m going with this: Is it already too late?
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2. Tipping Points
While our system of liberalism is complex enough to withstand some shocks, it doesn’t have the depth to withstand a series of catastrophic events. There are, as Prax says, relatively few compensatory pathways.
If a dictator is elected president, Congress is supposed to compensate. That sort of worked for a bit. But then Congress got overstressed and failed. The courts were next up to compensate for the stresses the dictator was creating. They are already overburdened and seem likely to fail at some point in the next 39 months.
With each institutional failure, there are fewer mechanisms to return the system to balance.
Now consider all the pathways which are failing as a result of the stresses being applied:
Private enterprise
Military leadership, including the National Guard
The Fed
Academia
The CDC
Sure looks like the cascade to me.
My deepest fear is that we are close to a tipping point where even if a significant majority of Americans decide that they want to change course, they won’t be able to.2 The cascade will have doomed liberal democracy.
Something will fill the niche of “America,” but as Prax puts it, it won’t be what was here before.
Maybe this diagnosis is wrong. Maybe there is no tipping point. Or maybe there is a tipping point but we’re far from it.
Or maybe I’m fundamentally mistaken and liberal democracy is complex-complex system is more evolutionarily adaptable than I give it credit for being.
I’d like you to talk about all of this in the comments over the weekend. And if you’re new here, this is an invitation to join a community where we try to think through ideas, together.
3. Feel-Good Story
The inspiring hockey movie that wasn’t:
David Ayres was hitting the lowest point of his life—the lowest point, really, of any life. Having endured a kidney transplant and all the medical issues that come with it at 27, he was, several years later, feeling he had no reason to live, nothing motivating him to even get out of bed in the morning.
Ayres had once been a promising hockey goalie. But the medical issues ended all that without even a whiff of the minors, and now the Ontario native, living on added but borrowed time, wondered why he should even go on. He met with a friend and explained his situation; she encouraged him to get help and maybe even a job in a rink? He had long been versed in matters of ice maintenance. This way, he could be around the game he loved and perhaps even get in a little scrimmaging on the side. He took a job as an equipment and operations person, ending up at a rink in Calgary.
So began a journey that would bring the workaday maintenance man from a modest Toronto suburb back from the brink—and, eventually, to a place where he became the oldest goalie to win an NHL regular-season game, the only goalie to come out of the stands to win an NHL game, and one of the most unusual folk heroes modern sports has ever known.
Along the way Ayres has also become both a Hollywood cautionary tale and an inspirational example, a man once brought aboard by Disney and CAA who nonetheless demonstrates (he hopes) the power of going your own indie way. And has done so with the kind of diffidence that can only come from a lifetime in the sports backwater.
“I have to admit I didn’t imagine a lot of it playing out this way,” Ayres says with an everyman shrug, “I just wanted to be on the ice.” He just didn’t realize how slippery that would make things.
If you want a roundup of some recent good stories—albeit small ones—Mona Charen has the piece for you. But I confess I find these positive datapoints underwhelming.
Mind you, I’m not convinced that more than a small majority will want to return to liberalism. It is my tentative believe that somewhere between 35 percent and 45 percent of the country now affirmatively craves post-liberalism.
Here's my black pill of hope, JVL.
Yes. I thoroughly believe that 45% of the country's voting population, right now, affirmatively wants postliberalism. I certainly believe that anyone identifying as a Republican right now would far prefer a system of authoritarianism to a system of democracy. Trump has identified as an authoritarian.
But that's because liberals have spent the last decade - longer, in my opinion - rewarding them for their authoritarianism.
I've said it so many times; Biden's response to an overwhelming authoritarian threat coming to the right was to moderate politically and to attempt to enrich the states that had voted for the authoritarian. It was hoped that we could bribe Trump's voters out of supporting Trump. If we had tried to bribe Trump himself, we would have easily seen this for what it was - appeasement. And appeasement never appeases fascists.
What people have discovered over the last decade is that liberalism saw itself as a referee and not a player. It assumed that history was over, that everyone had decided that democracy and not authoritarianism was how people were going to run the world, and all we had to do was ease everyone into democracy and they would just abandon authoritarianism.
That is not true. There are authoritarians in the world. They must be fought.
It is our duty to make life as awful as possible for every authoritarian in the world, because every authoritarian in the world understands that their goal is to make like as awful as possible for us. No more protecting Trump voters from the consequences of their actions; no more putting guardrails in between them and what they want.
If vaccine-preventable disease kills half the children in a red state, that's sad. Those who survive to be 18 are invited to migrate to blue states and get their shots. But we won't do anything to prevent it anymore. Because these are the consequences of their own actions, and it is time for them to experience them.
They have learned that, by trying to stab themselves in the forehead, we will throw our hand in front of the knife to try to protect them. And they like us getting stabbed in the hand, so they continue to stab themselves in the forehead. Let's see what happens if we stop.
There's an old adage that is like a corollary of Murphy's Law: "Fools can overcome any fool-proof system"
We have now reached a point where we have quite possibly crossed the Event Horizon of Foolishness and overcome the genius of the Constitution with our collective idiocy.
Capitalism and democratic governance go hand in hand. One cannot live without the other. There is simply no way for our democratic government to survive with the Gini co-efficient trending the way it has trended the past several decades.
We need another FDR level colossus to save democratic capitalism again, or its game over for our Constitutional order.