4.06 | 11.15.20
Soonish's six-month detour into electoral politics finishes where it started, with a conversation with our favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio. We talked late on November 6—when it was already clear that Joseph R. Biden would win the presidential race, but before the networks had officially called it—and we explored what Biden's unexpectedly narrow win will mean for progress against the pandemic; for the fortunes of the progressive left; and for the future of democracy in the United States.
Turning Donald Trump out of office was an enormous and crucial accomplishment, and Biden voters should take a moment to celebrate. But Cascio argues that if Republicans retain control of the Senate (a matter that now hinges on a pair of ferociously contested runoff elections in Georgia), Biden's win will amount to, at most, an "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging" moment. It will give Biden and Harris the opportunity to tackle the biggest crises facing the country—the newly resurgent coronavirus pandemic and the economic havoc it's wrought. But it won't leave much room to pursue the structural reforms needed to tame white grievance, end minoritarian rule, and get government working again.
But there's always 2022. In other words, this election wasn't the beginning of the end of the long fight to save democracy and protect the rights of all citizens in this country. But it might be the end of the beginning.
Mentioned In This Episode
Star Wars: Return of the Jedi Special Edition (1997)
Unpeaceful Transition of Power (Soonish Season 4, Episode 2)
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible (Soonish Season 4, Episode 1)
Jamais Cascio’s website Open the Future
American Reckoning, Part 1 (Soonish Season 4, Episode 4)
American Reckoning, Part 2 (Soonish Season 4, Episode 5)
Peter Turchin’s Cliodynamics page
Big Brains from the University of Chicago Podcast Network
Raphael Warnock for U.S. Senate
Jaws: Amity Island Welcomes You (Iconography, September 29, 2020)
Additional Reading
Colin Woodard, How centuries-old regional differences explain the 2020 election, Portland Press-Herald, November 15, 2020
Helen Lewis, The anti-Trump Hangover is Here, The Atlantic, November 10, 2020
Evan Osnos, Pulling Our Politics Back from the Brink, The New Yorker, November 9, 2020
Adam Serwer, The Crisis of American Democracy Is Not Over, The Atlantic, November 8, 2020
Astead Herndon, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Biden’s Win, House Losses, and What’s Next for the Left, The New York Times, November 7, 2020
Chapter Guide
00:08 Soonish theme
00:22 We Did It!
01:32 Reality Sinks In
04:29 Re-introducing Jamais Cascio
05:28 Check-in
06:31 Setting the Scene
08:48 The Troubling News
10:19 The Depths of our Polarization
13:01 Perpetuating Dysfunction
17:01 Reviewing Wade’s Post-Election Scenarios
19:49 The Pandemic and Conspiracy Theories
24:57 Violence Against Democracy
27:38 The Weakness of Norms
30:51 Mid-roll Endorsement: Big Brains
31:49 What Next for the Progressive Left?
36:13 Polls Are Left-Wing Astrology
37:57 Cliodynamics
40:30 Back to BANI
45:34 Fighting Back Against Incomprehensibility
48:49 Final Thoughts: The Real Work Is Still Ahead
52:11 End Credits and Acknowledgements
53:00 “Jaws: Amity Island Welcomes You” from Iconography
Notes
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.
If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.
Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.
Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.
Full Transcript
Audio montage: We can have the future we want, but we have to work for it.
Wade Roush: You’re listening to Soonish. I’m Wade Roush.
So, we did it. We voted. We lived through four days when it seemed like the vote-counting would go on forever. And then just before noon on Saturday, November 7, the major news organizations called the presidential race for Joseph R. Biden.
I was in an Uber in stop-and-go traffic on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge just after the announcement. And there were drivers honking their horns, and people dancing on street corners, ringing cowbells, and generally whooping it up.
Later we all saw the videos of church bells ringing in Paris and crowds erupting in joy in cities around the world. Being a big science fiction nerd, I couldn’t help think back to those scenes in the special edition of Return of the Jedi when the second Death Star has exploded and it seems that the Emperor himself is dead. And we see people rioting and toppling statues and setting of fireworks on planets across the galaxy to celebrate their new freedom.
So, yeah, that Saturday was a day to feel relieved and soak up some good news for a change, at least if you were one of the 78 million people who voted for Biden.
But in the week since then, it’s been hard to know how to feel.
For one thing, there’s the reality that almost 73 million people voted for Donald Trump. That wasn’t enough to give him a shot at winning in the Electoral College. But it was enough to prove that Americans are still deeply split on almost every issue, from racial justice to climate to immigration to the role of government in controlling the coronavirus pandemic.
There was also the reality that this wasn’t the Blue Wave election that the pollsters predicted. Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives and they face an uphill battle in the Senate, where the two runoff elections in George will determine the balance of power.
And on top of all that, we’ve been watching Trump mount a final act of defiance and denial that would be comical if it weren’t so dangerous.
He’s been saying since 2016 that the only elections he respects are the ones where he wins, and throughout 2020 he’s been making the ludicrous argument that even in a pandemic year when tens of millions of people voted early or voted by mail, only the votes cast on Election Day should count.
So his refusal to concede may be ridiculous and contemptible, but isn’t exactly surprising. Very few Republican officials have dared to pop Trump’s bubble and recognize Biden’s win. But the reality is that the lawsuits alleging voting irregularities will fizzle out and that Trump faces mounting pressure even from inside his party to let the transition to a Biden Administration move ahead.
Trump does have one final gambit available before the Electoral College votes on December 14. That would be to try to persuade Republican legislatures in three or four states where Biden won the popular vote to appoint Trump electors instead.
That’s one of the nightmare scenarios I warned about in Season 4, Episode 2, back in June. But I honestly don’t think he’s got the moxie or the execution skills to try it. And it wouldn’t work anyway. The courts would block it, and Biden supporters would rise up in huge numbers.
So, come January 20th, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be inaugurated as the president and vice president of the United States. But even then, we won’t be out of the woods. It’s more like, we’ll finally be looking at the compass of reason and science to see which way is out.
Biden faces a pandemic that’s spreading faster than ever, an economy that’s shrunk by millions of jobs, a fragile Democratic coalition with a very fired-up left wing, and possibly a hostile and uncooperative Senate.
And then there’s Trump himself. Remember how we found out in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker that the Emperor was never really dead? Well, there’s nothing stop Trump from haunting us for the next four years, keeping his vise grip on the Republican base, and running again in 2024.
All of which is to say: I’m celebrating Biden’s win, but I’m not feeling super-optimistic about what’s coming.
I knew there would be one person who understands exactly how I feel. That’s my favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio, who lives in California and does foresight thinking and scenario planning work for clients like the Institute for the Future.
So I called up Jamais to talk it all through. And I found out that if anything, he was feeling even a little more worried than I was. That’s sort of his brand in the futurism business, as we learned in Season 4, Episode 1, when we talked about Jamais’ BANI framework for understanding our present moment. As you might remember, BANI stands for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible.
So I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise that at times I felt like I was trying to get Jamais to see the bright side.
I want to play our conversation for you, because it offers a nice look at the challenges in front of us. And just to frame this, Jamais and I were talking on Friday night, November 6, about 18 hours before the major news organizations finally called the race for Biden. At that point it looked like Trump had about 68 million votes to Biden’s 73 million.
Jamais Cascio: So.
Wade Roush: Hey, man, how are you doing? How are you holding up?
Jamais Cascio: I'm doing better than I was a couple of days ago, but at the same time, I have no illusions about what's really just happened. Assuming that there's no Electoral College shenanigans. I know that Don Jr. was calling for Republican legislatures to toss out Democratic electoral votes and just do Republicans. But that seems unlikely at this point. It seems like the Republican establishment has seen the writing on the wall. But even so, this is a stop digging election. So, you know, the old the old aphorism, if you're in a hole, stop digging. Well, for the next couple of years, that's about what we're going to get. We're going to stop digging. But as long as McConnell is in charge of the Senate, we're not going to see anything really substantive in terms of major new policies.
Wade Roush: We're going to dig into all that.
Jamais Cascio: Ok.
Wade Roush: Just to start by setting the scene, you and I are speaking, Jamais, at just past 5:00 Eastern Time on Friday, the 6th of November. At this moment, it looks like Donald Trump will not be able to overcome Joe Biden's lead in states like Pennsylvania and Nevada and Arizona. But those states have not been called yet. So if there's a headline right now, it's that Biden's in the lead and it looks like he'll be the next president of the United States. But we're not quite there yet. To make this conversation easier, let's go on the assumption that nothing drastic is going to change in the next hour or 10 hours or 24 hours. It does feel like we have successfully averted one possible future, right? The future where Donald Trump gets another four years in the White House to use the bully pulpit to stoke hatred and division and ignorance and to tear down democracy. And so for anyone who wants to see a future where we do start to come to grips with some of our most pressing problems, that's got to count for something. Right?
Jamais Cascio: One hopes. It's necessary, but not sufficient. And I think the as much as we talk about the bully pulpit as being an aspect of holding the White House I don't imagine that Donald J. Is going to be willing to be quiet on Twitter or Facebook or his myriad other platforms. In fact, without the responsibilities that he would of being a president to where he handle the responsibilities, he has plenty of time to just speak as much as he wants to a much larger audience than he had back in 2015, 2016. You're right, though, that that in order to get things done, that we need to get done for a a better future than the trajectory we've been on. This was this was necessary. I hope that within a few years we can get to a position where the tools are in place to actually make positive action and not simply, you know, as the aphorism goes, stop digging.
Wade Roush: Yeah, I felt like we had to start out in an optimistic place.
Jamais Cascio: Right. All right. You know, that's that's just not me.
Wade Roush: Well, we're going to get to plenty of the dark stuff. And to get right to it, I mean, the troubling news, one of the pieces of troubling news is that there was no blue wave. Democrats are going to keep control of the House, but they're going to they're not going to gain control of the Senate, it looks like, although that seems like it'll be up in the air for a little longer, depending on the outcome of those new runoff elections in Georgia and things like that. But, you know, it seems likely that Mitch McConnell will hold on to power in the Senate. During the last six years of the Obama administration. Basically just that's the that's the stalemate we had. So do you see any reason to believe that Mitch McConnell won't behave just the same way he did under Obama and try to block most of Biden's agenda?
Jamais Cascio: There's absolutely no incentive to do anything different. The only caveat I would add is that the 2022 senatorial races again look to be somewhat preferential towards Democrats. You know, Democrats should have a relatively good year. So there is a non-zero chance that a recalcitrant Senate could be seen as too much of an impediment. And you could start actually seeing people deciding to vote for Democrats in 2022 simply to get things moving again. So that's a consideration that McConnell will have. But by and large, he's demonstrated no, no willingness to do anything other than be a big bump in the road. And he enjoys that position. He is the most powerful person in Washington right now and he knows it.
Wade Roush: Yeah, and well, and there's an even bigger story here, really, which is that while Biden got more votes in this election than any Democrat in a long time, and while his majority is going to be larger than the one that Hillary Clinton won in 2016, there's still this brutal truth. You know, that after four years of Trump's lies and racism and cruelty and grift and almost a quarter of a million deaths in the pandemic, he still got almost 70 million votes
Jamais Cascio: Right. 68 Million,
Wade Roush: OK, so what do you ....
Jamais Cascio: yeah, 68 million plus people in the United States saying last four years, give me more. That's disgusting, frankly, to be completely blunt about it. I've moved on to the contempt stage of a broken relationship, you know, the old the old line that for a lot of psychologists and family therapists, the number one sign of that a divorce is inevitable is the feeling of contempt among one or both of the partners. And I'm I'm fully there in the contempt. You know, anyone who looked at the last four years and said, this is this is the pathway to the future that I want is not someone that I think is not something I want in my life.
Jamais Cascio: I'm fortunate in that I live in California, in the Bay Area, so I don't encounter too many of those. I've been very fortunate in that my family is not like that. But I think that we this is in many ways the indication of a much greater challenge to the to the ongoing legitimacy of the United States of America. There was that kind of weak but present hope that we would see a repudiation and actually demonstrate that, yeah, there is an America that's worth fighting for. But it's really hard to make that argument now really hard and yeah, I one thing I put out on Twitter the day after the election was we get the future we deserve. And that's the direction we're headed.
Wade Roush: It does feel like we're certainly no closer now than we were before the election to resolving the fundamental underlying problem. Right, which is just the deep, seemingly irreversible polarization where between the red states and blue states are between the, you know, the...
Jamais Cascio: Urban and rural.
Wade Roush: The red countryside and the blue cities. Right. Right. And that no matter what leadership we get, it seems like exactly half of the population is so deeply resentful that they're on the edge of taking up arms.
Jamais Cascio: Right.
Wade Roush: So not only does our political system seem to be unable to resolve, that situation is starting to feel like it's almost built to perpetuate that that situation.
Jamais Cascio: It is.
Wade Roush: And....
Jamais Cascio: No, I mean, it is. If you look at the nature of the Electoral College and just the way so much of looking at just the size of the House of Representatives, it was it was it's stuck at where it was 100 years ago roughly. It hasn't grown as populations in different states have grown, should have more than twice and twice the number of congresspeople from California than we have. Simply if we keep the same balance that we had 100 years ago and, you know, we have a strong our system is strongly preference towards small states and rural areas. And right now, the for a variety of, I think, arguably technological reasons, we have an incredible split cultural split between the rural and the urban areas. And I say cultural and I say technological reasons, because I think that social media has been the the burr under the saddle has been the the element that has been had that has fundamentally transformed the nature of politics, the United States and more likely globally.
Wade Roush: And made it even more intractable.
Jamais Cascio: Yes. Makes it more intractable, makes it makes it easier to find things that you agree with than to find things that make you think and that that's not a partisan thing. That that's, I think, true across the spectrum. But where you where we sit now, we have one side of a partisan divide that seems to be that seems to have embraced conspiracy theory, embraced antiscience, and embraced a belief that not only does the other side, not only the other side wrong, the other side is fully and entirely illegitimate and evil. I mean, there's a difference between thinking someone is wrong and thinking someone is evil, and you look at the the QAnon pages, you look at the the some of the folks who just been elected to Congress, and they are very clear that they see Democrats as evil and not simply wrong.
Wade Roush: And it's easier to organize around that viewpoint and to create a self-reinforcing culture thanks to social media.
Jamais Cascio: Yes. Now, you know, I know you and I have both been on the Internet since, you know, since we were young. I think you agree with me in saying that one of the one of the things that we look forward to in the early in the early days of the Internet, early days of Internet culture was recognition that the Internet gives voice to everyone, that suddenly marginalized communities who felt isolated and oppressed at home could could speak up and find people, find others around the world who believe like them, who live like them, and could create these new communities for the for the marginalized. And we kind of forgot that some groups are marginalized for a reason. That there's some groups that kind of need to be oppressed, we don't need to have neo-Nazi voices, but the same technologies that made it possible for transgender communities around the world, for LGBTQ communities around the world more generally, also make it possible for neo-Nazi and white supremacist and nationalist groups around the world to come together, but that.
Wade Roush: We were better off when they were more fragmented.
Jamais Cascio: We were. At the same time, I would not sacrifice the freedoms that that have been gained by the LGBTQ and a variety of other groups. It's in to have prevented the neo-Nazis and such from organizing. But we've got to recognize that there was a cost to the to these technologies of freedom.
Wade Roush: So I don't know, Jamais, if you had a chance to listen to my most recent two episodes, but I spent probably 16,000 words and an hour and a half going through a bunch of different scenarios and taking my cue from people like you, scenario planners and futurists and trying to lay out some potential scenarios for after the election. And the first one is one I think that we're thankfully going to avert. And that was what I called Trumpocracy, basically just a continuation. The third one was called the new New Deal, and that was a scenario where Biden won the White House and Democrats won the Senate. And there was now space for something like unified government and movement forward on on government programs and maybe even good government reforms like things we desperately need to do, like abolishing the Electoral College and restoring the Voting Rights Act, you know, overturning Citizens United, things that are gumming up our democratic system and things that now will be nearly impossible. Right. So that's not the scenario we ended up with.
Wade Roush: My second scenario was the one that I think we're getting, and that's I called it Biden Our Time. A little bit of a pun there. All right. And it's one where Biden wins narrowly in the presidential race. But Republicans hold on to the Senate, and that's exactly what we're getting. And in that case, it felt to me like the most we could hope for would be to to put an end to the pandemic and maybe get the economy back on its feet, because that's those are things everyone wants. And I felt like that was probably the most likely outcome. And it turns out I was right. Yep. But at the same time, it felt like it felt like there was still some hope that maybe maybe scenario three, the new New Deal was genuinely possible. So I feeling this mix of gratitude and disappointment. So should I just suck it up and be glad that Biden won or should I still be disappointed that we didn't get this unified government scenario that felt more promising just a week ago? Was I being super naive?
Jamais Cascio: Naive? Yeah, yeah, actually, yes, because I think I was as well, I was as well. The fact that we had 68 plus million people vote for four more years, what we just had, that is such an overwhelming indicator of of fundamental problems within this nation state. And if we had recognized the existence of this trumpet's polity this large, I don't think we would have even considered the possibility of taking the Senate. Now, if you want to if you want to get a little bit of hope, well, maybe we get to take the Senate in 2022. Cross your fingers. But I think you're right with this scenario, with the one with one big caveat, and that is I think we're going to be seeing a period in the pandemic that is beyond anything that we've experienced so far. I just look at those those numbers of new infections, 100,000, 120,000 the other day. We're basically we're hitting 100,000 plus every day now and realizing that means in a couple of weeks, you know, around Thanksgiving in the US that we start seeing the infections take hold. The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas in the United States is very likely going to be an incredibly dark period. Family members will die. All around the country, just as we're getting and if we if people decide to get together for Thanksgiving, that makes it all the worse. And I'm just I'm thinking about this period leading up to the inauguration of just everything falling apart and with with regards to the pandemic. This is what Biden has in store for him. It's not just trying to recover from what Trump has done, it's trying to recover from the aftermath of what Trump has done, the legacy forces that no Trump decision today could reverse. That no presidential decision today could reverse. We've committed to probably at least 50,000 more deaths, maybe, I mean, it's really hard to estimate because many in some cases, the actual death rate seems to be declining and there's some real promising treatments out there. But at the same time, the let's call it another several hundred thousand people suffering. At least several hundred thousand, maybe we're looking at a million more people being infected. You know, I know it's hard to really get wrap your mind around the numbers that we may be seeing very soon.
Wade Roush: Well, and also, it feels like we're in for a fundamental political clash over the measures everyone knows are necessary, about the measures that 50 percent of the population will resist to the death, right? A lockdown will be necessary. And yet we seem to have drawn the battle lines over that. So we won't be getting a lockdown in the places we need it most.
Jamais Cascio: Right. And if the fatalities, or at least the serious infections and illnesses hit so hard in those places. How will they respond? One, I think legitimate fear that I have is that it will be seen, as you know, from the QAnon conspiracy perspective of this was done to us because we voted for Trump and not in Biden. This is the Democrats getting the revenge and infecting us. That's ridiculous. Can you can you say that that kind of belief wouldn't happen?
Wade Roush: No, unfortunately I can't. And just hearing you talk that way is feels it's chilling to even entertain that idea, but sadly plausible. I hadn't even thought through this the scenario you're laying out, where not only is Biden in a somewhat handicapped position having to deal with McConnell, but the overall economic and public health situation is even more dire than what Biden and Obama faced coming into office in 2008,
Jamais Cascio: Yes.
Wade Roush: And that they're going to be that the Biden administration will be completely wrapped up for the maybe the first half year, at least just trying to save people's lives, prevent an even worse pandemic, and maybe if we're lucky, start to get the economy running again. But that that's going to be a full time obsession.
Jamais Cascio: Right. Plus, trying to reverse so many of the cruel policies that the the Trump administration put in around round immigration, for example, or the, you know, objectively monstrous policies around opening up public land for oil drilling. And and mining exploration and just.
Wade Roush: Sure, there's things, unfortunately, as horrible as it is to say, those things feel like nice-to have-things now. Yes, set free the kids who are still in cages on the border. Of course. But at this point, it feels like we would just be lucky to start to get a handle on the pandemic. And that in itself is going to be a political miracle.
Jamais Cascio: And the more that I think about it, the more I think it's likely that there will be a significant subset of the population that will take all of the ongoing problems that the Biden administration will have, things that are out completely outside of its control, will take those as being indicators of a larger forces at work that are directly attacking parts of the American populace. The QAnon syndrome, may be even stronger in 2021 than it was in 2020, because now they don't have to answer the question of why hasn't Trump actually done anything that Q said he was going to do? Now, it's basically unrestrained id,r because there's no no way to indicate no way to show that actually know this person, this or this team of people claiming to be Q. They've been lying to you because it's now just it's there's ongoing knife fight with the deep state.
Wade Roush: Well, if we're going to talk about that kind of insanity, we might as well touch on a scenario that I hadn't brought up. But what about the much nearer term? I mean, we could find out as soon as tonight or this weekend that— the major news organizations could decide to go ahead and call the election for Biden. I've been worrying about what happens right after that. We haven't seen—thankfully, we haven't seen much violence this week, neither at the polls themselves nor at the ballot counting locations. There have been minor skirmishes. There hasn't been the kind of like utter civil meltdown that some people feared, partly because while Trump has certainly spouted lies all week long, he hasn't called for the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Boogaloo people to mobilize the way some people feared he would. But I'm still worried about what might happen when those 68 million people find out that their dear leader has not been re-elected?
Jamais Cascio: Well, you know, maybe maybe Donald himself hasn't come out and said, you know, “Stop standing by and now act,” r to the to the brownshirts. But I don't know. Did you see Steve Bannon, the interview with Steve Bannon just yesterday where he called explicitly for a violent uprising?
Wade Roush: I didn't see it. Is that why he's getting banned on Twitter today?
Jamais Cascio: Yes, it is. OK. You had Newt Gingrich calling for Republican led state legislatures to to reject Democratic electors and put put in Republican electors no matter what the states voted for. I mean, these are not marginal voices. These are people with some level of institutional legitimacy or at least historically in the case of Gingrich.
Wade Roush: So there's still the possibility in this interregnum between now and January 20th for all sorts of shenanigans and high jinks.
Jamais Cascio: Yeah, yeah. You know, I actually, as you say that I realized I've been using the terms shenanigans and high jinks myself, and that's just, that's almost cruelly understated.
Wade Roush: It’s trivializing it.
Jamais Cascio: It is. And these are not shenanigans. These are attempted coups. These are violence, violence against democracy. My gut is that it's unlikely that it's going to get big enough to pose a real threat to the nation state. But it's something as we as with so many of these scenarios, you can't rule it out, not at this point in our history. You said something earlier that really resonates, that we're in in a period where norms are being are being rejected and what we've discovered under Trump is that so much of our state apparatus, so much of how our government operates, has been based on essentially the gentlemen's agreement not to cross the yellow line in the middle of the road. So much has been based on, you know, we'll we'll do this because that's the right thing to do. And what we found, what many people have discovered is that, hey, if we ignore this this norm, nothing happens. There is no accountability, no punishment, nothing more than, certainly, sternly written editorials in The Washington Post. And one of the things that it is that it has made me very conscious of is to be looking for where are the other places in our social infrastructure where, where good behavior is based on norms, not on rules. I used the example a moment ago of, you know, driving on the correct side of the yellow line, the middle of the road. And think about that for a second. What we have managed to accomplish in the in this society of allowing people to drive multi- ton death machines at each other at incredible speeds. And, you know, I know that that yellow line, that's what keeps you from hitting me and keeps me from hitting you. No, it's the agreement that we're going to drive correctly. And I just really worry about what happens to a society when we recognize that norms are unenforceable, that norms have no teeth.
Wade Roush : Yeah, well, OK, one maybe grounds for hope is that so far the courts don't seem to have been playing along with Trump's gambits, his legal gambits. Of course, their role is to enforce rules, actual laws, not norms.
Jamais Cascio: So we'll see what happens as this escalates. You know, you have three Trump appo rintees on the on the Supreme Court bench now, two of whom are dubiously qualified. I think the first guy that I'm blanking on his name, the one
Wade Roush: Gorsuch.
Jamais Cascio: Yeah, I think he arguably was it, although someone I would disagree with not inappropriate as a nominee. Kavanaugh, the gentleman who likes beer, and Amy Barrett, who has been a judge for all of three years before this appointment. The interesting question then is, do they see that they owe something to the administration or do they see that now, having been given the cynosure now having now having the seat? There's nothing that can be done and they own nothing. Because what are you going to do about it and basically flip flipping the story of ignoring ignoring the norms, you know,
Wade Roush: Or taking it to extreme deciding they can afford to ignore the norms themselves.
Jamais Cascio: Exactly.
Wade Roush: And institutionalize norm-breaking at the very highest level. Institutionalized norm-breaking. And that's like an oxymoron of the day, sorry.
Jamais Cascio: No, but think about that. So there is your description of 2020.
Wade Roush: Ok.
Wade Roush: Let’s take a quick break before we get back to the second half of my conversation with Jamais Cascio.
If you’re getting a lot out of the complex ideas and questions we delve into on this show, there’s another podcast I’ve been listening to that you should definitely check out. It’s called Big Brains, from the University of Chicago. And it brings you engaging interviews with researchers at UChicago who are doing breakthrough research and reshaping our world.
This season Big Brains has been covering the big issues like the coronavirus and police reform and the election, but they’ve also featured people working on world-changing technology and science, like the quantum internet and the hunt for alien life on exoplanets.
Change how you see the world through research and keep up with the latest academic thinking with Big Brains. It’s part of the University of Chicago Podcast network.
Now back to the show.
Wade Roush: All right. Let's step back. Let's assume we survive the interregnum.
Jamais Cascio: I'm sorry. I shouldn't laugh.
Wade Roush: Well, no, it's okay. Laughter is essential. I wanted to ask you how you think about the future of the progressive movement. What is the left to do now? Because I feel like Biden to some extent owes his victory to the mobilization of votes to get out the vote effort that people like Stacey Abrams have led in Georgia. It's they did an amazing job. And without the generosity and vision and sort of patience, I think, of the of the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party without their forbearance, I don't think Biden could have gotten this far. And those people are going to feel like they're owed something. So how do progressive groups handle this moment? So they're going to be tempted to immediately apply tons of pressure to Nancy Pelosi and to Joe Biden and to try to make sure that goals like police reform and a higher minimum wage and instituting some kind of public option in health care and taking some kind of action on climate, that those goals actually get pursued. But then centrists are going to be saying, wait a minute, we've got to deal with Mitch McConnell. It's going to be hard enough just trying to get anything through the Senate. Why don't you guys just back off for now?
Jamais Cascio: That punching left has already started. I am so even with people that I'm friendly with who are saying who are basically blaming the leftish part of the Democratic Party for the, you know, the actually serious decline in numbers in the House of Representatives and the inability to capture the Senate, saying that it was because of all this this identity politics talk or the, you know, defunding police or socialism. All of these really leftish things are why we didn't win more or why we lost in the places that we lost. So that, like I said, the punching left has already started. And maybe it's to get a jump on, you know, push new push, starting to push back against the pressure from the left before the pressure from the left actually gets going. I would like to see that kind of pressure happening. But in every case, what you know, what you know, whether we're talking about climate or whether we're talking about police reform or myriad other issues that need to be addressed, how do you make it happen in the structure of the current political system? Especially when the tools of enforcement at local levels are largely in the hands of the side, that has just lost a lot of power. But still have their clubs and guns.
Wade Roush: To go back to this question about what the left does now, though, I mean, the side of progressive, left-leaning, liberal, Democratic, right-thinking people, demographically, things should be much more favorable for the left in 20 or 25 years. We have to get from here to there and we need there to be a progressive left, some in some form, so that when demographics finally come around, there's still some leadership. Right. We need AOC to be around in 2045 so she can't be sidelined. Now, not to put this all on her, but she's just an example. Right.
Jamais Cascio: But she's a damn good example. I would vote for her for a president in a hot second. Right. Which I can't yet because she's not old enough.
Wade Roush: Right, exactly. But I'm just I'm just thinking out loud about how the movement should position itself for the next two or four years, such that there is still the potential for movement, for leaders to get things done, to be perceived to be getting things done, to win reelection, to hold on to power so that when they finally do have some real power, they are still around.
Jamais Cascio: Well. Be the Bolsheviks among the Mensheviks? Basically you're the minority, they're going to be minority within the Democrats for a couple of a couple of terms, but as the demographics change, that that position will grow. I do believe that as the impacts of climate disruption start to hit us, you know, cataclysmically there will be a rush to embrace policies that once would have been unthinkable. I do think that there will be pressure for policies that have been described as left, but will in fewer years than than we might think will be seen as survival.
Wade Roush: Okay, good point. Switching topics again, because I want to get through a few more questions with you, it looks at this point as if the pollsters, the poll aggregators and the election forecasters were wrong. Again, you know, people like Nate Silver built their reputation on how right they were in 2008 and 2012. And but now two elections in a row, they've been way off. I mean, they correctly anticipated that Biden would win, but they were wrong about almost everything else. No blue wave. So it feels like polling is broken. And I wonder what relevance that that may have to to folks like yourself, foresight thinkers, political forecasters. If the craft of polling is broken and it is impossible to get an accurate read of what the population is thinking, doesn't that make planning and futurism and any kind of organizing a lot harder?
Jamais Cascio: I don't know a single futurist who relies on polls. Polls are, what did I say, left wing astrology right now. But, you know, polls are not part of the futurist toolkit because part of what we're trying to do in this, you know, in this particular field is try to understand the underlying systems at play. You know, what are the you know, not so much. What's the transient reaction to a phone call, but what is the relationship between, you know, around demographics, around income inequality? How do those kind, those deep forces, how do they lead to certain outcomes? And there's a range to whether of how quantitative you want to be about it. I really approach it from a narrative perspective, you know, what's the story being told? But there's this whole group of people who do clioynamics have. Are you familiar with that?
Wade Roush: No.
Jamais Cascio: Oh, you need to be. You need to be. These are people who have a basically are have invented proto psychohistory
Wade Roush: Hari Seldon stuff.
Jamais Cascio: Exactly.
Wade Roush: From the Foundation trilogy. Okay.
Jamais Cascio: Exactly. People have who have developed. Mathematical formulas that do a actually surprisingly decent job of. Predicting onsets of violence, of social violence in particular, so it's clear, dynamic, C-L-I-O.
Wade Roush: OK, I just looked it up. Wikipedia calls it a transdisciplinary area of research that integrates cultural evolution, economic history, macro sociology and the mathematical model modeling of historical processes. It treats history of science.
Jamais Cascio: It tries to at least and some of the some of what I've seen has been very compelling. There are a number of cliodynamics authors who were writing about the 2020 crisis seven or eight years ago. And being really spot on with the ways in which the crisis would manifest, you know, and one of them was has written that the markers of political dissolution and violence in the United States in 2020 are nearly as great as they were in 1860. It's it's very close and so.
Wade Roush: That comports with what I'm seeing, for sure.
Jamais Cascio: Yeah, right. That's one of the things that's been so compelling to me about it, is that the conclusions that they've reached from the from the analysis several years ago actually maps very well to what I've observed on my own. The point being that polls are not part of that. And so the failure of polling is, it's an interesting sociological question. Is this because of, I don't like the term "Shy Trump voters" because that sort of has this giggly, bashful aspect to it. Maybe embarrassed or intentionally deceptive, protective. And I think that's what we're seeing is a is a development along those lines, people who see a way to protect themselves socially, politically, locally by lying.
Wade Roush: And maybe also a way to screw the liberal coastal elite who run polling organizations.
Jamais Cascio: Oh, no doubt. No doubt. Make, you know, make liberals cry.
Wade Roush: The last time we talked, it was back in April. A lot has happened since then, but the pandemic has certainly not gone away.
Jamais Cascio: That was like eight or nine years ago, right?
Wade Roush: Yeah, exactly. It feels that way. I want to go back to the formulation, to the framework you offered then. You were trying to make sense of the uniquely sort of disorienting nature of the current moment, that went beyond what previous futurists had described as volatile, uncertain, chaotic, ambiguous.
Jamais Cascio: Complex and ambiguous.
Wade Roush: Complex. That's right. And you came up with this awesome formulation that I really love, which was BANI, which stands for Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear and Incomprehensible. And I loved that framework. And it helped me to understand a lot of what happened this year, for example, the way our institutions failed to really come to grips with the pandemic. You know, we had under invested for so long in public health that when it became a real emergency, big parts of our medical infrastructure were were so brittle that they were just on their were unable to cope with the emergency, so we had to go into lockdown mode just to keep the hospital system from collapsing. So okay, the B for brittle sounded quite accurate. I felt so personally offended, offended by the I, the incomprehensible part, That I feel like I spent a bunch of the year just trying to, like, beat back the incomprehensibility and to do my own little part to make things more comprehensible.
Jamais Cascio: Okay, thank you.
Wade Roush: But I, I could do absolutely nothing about the anxiety. My own anxiety only kept going up and up and up. So I feel like overall the framework has only become more powerful as a lens. I just wondered how you were feeling about it at this point.
Jamais Cascio: Is Cassandra-esque a useful adjective?
Wade Roush: When Cassandra gets to say, I told you so?
Jamais Cascio: Yeah, yeah. You didn't listen to me. No. I have noticed with increasing frequency the use of the of the term brittle and brittleness in the discourse, not just around politics, but everything from machine learning to climate systems. You know, the idea that that's just that we're seeing an explosion of brittle systems seems to resonate right now. You know, certainly what we talked about earlier in terms of norms, norms turned out to be a brittle system. You know, things something we thought was strong, looked strong, acted strong until it was broken and we saw how quickly and fully it could be shattered. The incomprehensibility aspect, I think that one's easy, it sometimes feels like it's easy to wave it away, but I think, one, it is a recurring element. We may not articulate it as incomprehensible, but we certainly there's a lot of asking why the hell did that just happen? You know, it makes no sense and maybe senselessness is a better term than incomprehensible, but.
Wade Roush: I'm not trying to argue with...It's a great diagnosis. I'm just angry about it and I've been trying to fix it
Jamais Cascio: But there's no fixing it. And, you know, I jumped on the fact that on your use of chaos, chaotic instead of complex for VUCA. It's because what BANI describes as a chaotic system and one of the elements of a chaotic system is is, you know, literal and unpredictability. Incomprehensibility, in other words. And. What that means to me is that my job is both impossible and guaranteed. Guaranteed, because a lot of people are feeling like they have no handle, a lot of organizations feel like they have no handle on what's going on at present and how that will lead to different futures. And in fact, a lot of the organizations I work with are seeing more more work now than they have in years simply because there's just no we have no ability to no handles, no mechanism for grasping on to an understanding of the mechanisms at play. But it's also impossible because I'm hit by the same issues as everybody. B eing surprised by things that that appear out of the blue. By the unexpected baseball hitting the back of my head, you know, where the hell did that come from?
Wade Roush: Right. So scholars and journalists and writers can only go so far to help people understand the situation when there are still baseballs raining randomly from the sky.
Jamais Cascio: Exactly. And it's at a certain level for me it's fun. But in a really twisted definition of fun, it is something that I feel like I can contribute to, you know, contribute to our ability to wrestle with these, to grapple with this. It feels like it's something that I have unusual insights about and that makes it worth doing. But at the same time, I recognize that I'm you know, I'm trying to hold back the tide along with everybody else.
Wade Roush: Well, this is interesting. I feel like part of the reason we are in a BANI regime is that Trump and his hordes of flying monkeys have been deliberately spreading misinformation and disinformation and fomenting chaos and inviting disruption. So they're deliberately trying to to increase the incomprehensibility factor. And that really offends me deeply as a journalist. And I feel like it's my duty to fight back against it. And I feel like I've spent a lot of this year trying to do that and trying to make things a little more comprehensible and trying to trying to build a story, trying to create a narrative that helps people get situated better and understand why things are happening the way they're happening. rYes, baseballs still fall from the sky. But I feel like if you can provide that narrative for people, it's that's an important service. It's part of what journalists do. It's part of what futurists do. And I feel like in some small way, the more we do that, the more we're fighting against the incomprehensibility. And maybe that with Trump now apparently leaving office, you know, we have a more room to fight that battle. And I feel like we should count today as something of a victory. That's all I'm saying.
Jamais Cascio: No, you're right. You're right.
Wade Roush: Because I feel like what you're saying is important.
Jamais Cascio: Well, thank you.
Wade Roush: And what futurists do is important. And and it felt like you were the perfect person to talk to on this day of all days when by the end of the day, we'll know who the next president is going to be and that little element of uncertainty and incomprehensibility and anxiety and will have been removed. And I'm going to try and take that as a win, at least for today.
Jamais Cascio: No, and thank you. Thank you. I in the work that I do, it's so. Seductive to get drawn into the. Into this, the sense of senselessness, it's easy to think that it's easy to feel that it's nothing but chaos in front of us. And so it's actually a very useful and very helpful to get the occasional reminder that. The work that I do, the work that we do. That attempts to create meaning out of chaos. Can work. Can help, can give some people hope.
Wade Roush: It can, and I feel like we're doing a little bit of a mutual admiration society right now, but it's necessary. This is hard work and it is lonely work. Yeah. And whatever we can do to support each other, I think is very important. And so, Jamais Cascio, thanks again for spending so much time talking with me. And I hope we don't have to do this again too soon. I hope there are no emergencies that make us have another conversation very soon about the future of the country. But whenever we do, it's always enlightening. So thank you.
Jamais Cascio: Thank you. I always enjoy these conversations and I look forward with trepidation to the next one.
Wade Roush: All right, thanks and good luck. And hang in there.
Jamais Cascio: You too.
Wade Roush: So that was my conversation with Jamais. And before I sign off I just want to share a final thoughts about the election and try to wrap up everything we’ve been talking about in this season of the show.
Obviously it’s a huge relief that Biden won. The alternative would have been devastating.
But if you're someone who cares about the long-term stability of democracy in the United States — if you're tired of worrying that the culture war between red America and blue America will boil over into a civil war, and you'd like politicians to go back to handling the everyday problems of government — then you can't relax now.
Ousting Trump was just the first step. As Jamais put it, it was a necessary but not sufficient condition for change.
Already we’re seeing political organizing and media chatter turning to the runoffs in Georgia. But even if Democrats were to gain control of the Senate, it still wouldn’t finish the job. The real problem as I see it is that we spend all our time fighting for control of a system that's built to fail. Our outdated constitutional architecture and our rickety election procedures make us into our own worst enemies.
We’re a divided and polarized nation, but that in itself shouldn't be a problem. There are always fault lines in the electorate.
If our politics were functioning normally, we'd be able to end the pandemic, restore the economy, and continue the push for greater equality for people of all ethnicities and identities while at the same time addressing the grievances of rural, white, less-educated voters who feel economically short-changed and demographically cornered.
But politics aren't functioning normally. The Republican party has discovered an apparently inexhaustible fuel source in the form of white grievance.
And that party is able to exploit flaws in the way the Constitution apportions power—from the design of Congress to the Electoral College and the redistricting process—to exercise minority control.
The GOP uses this control to hobble government and ensure that real solutions never arrive, the better to stoke anger and resentment.
It's government by cynicism. And while it's deplorable in the true sense of the word, it will remain an effective strategy until the nation gathers the courage to modernize its laws and institutions.
We need to expand Congress and reform the Senate to make it less vulnerable to a takeover by a minority of voters. We need to end the filibuster and abandon the Electoral College. We need to put congressional redistricting in the hands of citizen commissions. We need to stop pretending that corporate speech is free speech. We need to restore the Voting Rights Act and reinstitute controls on the former slave states that are still looking for every opportunity to keep black people from voting.
These kinds of "Good government" reforms don't usually make for a snazzy or compelling campaign platform. And unless there’s a miracle in Georgia and Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff win their Senate runoffs in January, the Biden administration won’t be able to pursue them anyway.
But what I argued before the election, in our two-part American Reckoning episode, is that our politics will remain in a bitter and dangerous deadlock unless we pursue fundamental changes that give everyone a fair chance to win and a valid reason to keep playing the game. And that’s just as true after the election.
Winning the White House wasn't enough. The real work is still ahead of us.
Soonish is written and produced by me, Wade Roush. Our theme music is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music in this episode is from Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.
You can follow Soonish on Twitter at soonishpodcast. At our website, soonishpodcast.org, you can find the show notes and a transcript for this episode.
Soonish is an independent podcast supported in part by you, the listeners. It costs real money to make the show and donations help to cover costs like audio gear, software subscriptions, and music licensing. So if you’d like help keep the show going, please go to Patreon.com/soonish. And check out the thank-you rewards we offer at every level, including the new Soonish mug with the Season 4 logo and motto.
Soonish is one of 10 indie podcasts that have banded together to form the Hub & Spoke audio collective. And this week I want to tell you about an wickedly fun episode from the Hub & Spoke show Iconography, from producer Charles Gustine.
Iconography is all about the icons that define our sense of place. And in his most newest episode, Charles visits one iconic place that’s completely fictional but has intimate ties to the real world. And that’s Amity Island, the setting for Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1975 movie Jaws.
[excerpt from “Jaws: Amity Island Welcomes You”]
If you want to learn why it really matters that Jaws was shot on Martha’s Vineyard and NOT Long Island, then you need to go to iconographypodcast.com and hear the whole episode. And of course you can check out all the other Hub & Spoke shows at hubspokeaudio.org.
That’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening and stay safe out there. Barring emergencies, I’ll be back with my next episode sometime after the election. But either way, you’ll hear from me again…soonish.
