Next?
(a work in progress)
Thinking about what comes next, after this painful and sordid Presidential election. Even if Clinton wins, we’ve crossed a line. A sizable percentage of our population no longer sees the bedrock importance of decency, facts, and democracy as the foundation of a healthy society. Some are just cynical exploiters and propagandists, but that shouldn’t absolve them morally; if anything it makes them worse. Others, perhaps less blameworthy, have fallen into moral relativism, struck dumb and impotent by the torrent of disinformation. Without trust and a common language, we have nothing to stand on. And that truly scares me, for the sake of my children.
This was the path that Gingrich, and Atwater, and Luntz, and Cheney, and Ailes, and all the others deliberately sent us down the past quarter-century. It’s a strategy that stands in radical opposition to the American idea, and I hate them for it.
Yet my hate will do nothing to undo the far greater hate they unleashed. I hate what they’ve done not because I hate their views — on those, for the most part, we simply disagree. No, I hate it because I love America. I love its freedom, its diversity, its openness to risk, and its propensity for dramatic bends toward justice like we’ve seen over marriage equality.
So how do we ever get that back? How to we rebuild trust that facts are facts, that politics is not total war, and that effective government is essential to a more perfect union?
Perhaps I should re-read The Metaphysical Club or other intellectual histories of post-catastrophic period. Then too, leaders had to struggle for a new political language that didn’t plunge society into the abyss. But we’ve never experienced this kind of epistemic crisis when the whole world—literally billions and billions of us—were so radically interconnected through digital communications.
Perhaps there is something of an answer in our newfound worship of data. Not in the thin libertarian strand of the Silicon Valley ideology, which fetishizes math but ignores context. The most subversive and probably most enduring thing the Obama Administration has done is to inject technological code deep into the heart of legal code; to seed government with data and data science. In the next decade, that transfusion will either fail to take hold, or it may spread outward to dominate our political discourse, and further from there. Our potential—the world’s potential—is so great. But so is the danger.
Will this be the age of data pragmatism? Or just the decline of the American empire and the seventy years of immense progress in human well-being (for all the failures) that it safeguarded?
