aroonwithaview

With yet another election season of watching the United States stare into the abyss coming to a close, things seem more grim on the eve of the election than they were the last two times. The first time, you could have excused it as a risky gamble or protest. The second time, you may have believed that the fascist colors hadn’t crystallized. But this time, it is incredibly hard to comprehend why half the population of the nation that jumpstarted the democratic era is gleefully voting to end it. And that, I believe, is so much more terrifying precisely because of the lack of clarity in what is actually going on.

After the 2016 election, there was a plethora of articles diagnosing one disease or the other that had led to the Trump symptom. As the next few election cycles passed by, I believe most of them have been falsified, with the simple observation that there should have been at least a minor reduction in support over time if indeed the electorate was rational and sensible but aggrieved. But the disease continues to fester. Then must we give up our belief in the sensibility of the median American voter? After all, the gulf between the scope of what the world (and America) creates and achieves, versus what the median voter has the capacity to understand, has never been larger, and will only increase. Why should the mostly ignorant hold back the frontier of our possibilities? This is a tempting place to go to, and books like Against Democracy have reached there already, but that throws the baby out with the bathwater. How can it make sense to react to the destruction of democracy by destroying democracy?

So then what is the answer? I don’t know, but my sense is that we must accept that the median voter, and hence democracy, will only become more susceptible to damaging attacks, and start building stronger guardrails against it. The Acemoglu Nobel Prize has come at the right time; as old institutions wither, such as the separation of powers due to the partisan actions of the US Supreme Court, we must innovate new institutions that are tailored to the new reality we live in. The political fabric must become more flexible, allowing us to drape it more tightly when weaknesses arise. Unfortunately this is much easier said that done, especially in an old polity like the US, which can no longer function as an agile political startup. But that is the only hope.