Here are my thoughts on the US election, and on the challenges it presents us, in four parts.
1. The informational catastrophe, and the sadness of it
For all the reasons to be dismayed about these elections, there’s one that saddens me most. It’s that all the people (me among them) who’ve given their professional lives to elucidating and communicating the state of the world — the climate and ecological crises, the pressures these crises will put on human and nonhuman populations, and the things we should do now to mitigate the coming suffering — have failed to communicate these things to the majority of our compatriots. (See the comments to this post here for an inkling of that.)
This is an informational failure, maybe even an informational disaster. That makes it potentially a societal disaster, since any society that doesn’t base its decisions on real information about its environment will not survive for very long. Authoritarian, elite-driven societies can succeed for a little while if the elites who decide things work from a genuine understanding of environmental realities. Ultimately, they tend to fail because elites become more interested in maintaining their own status, so the polities fall apart and the masses abandon them (with more or less bloodshed; cf. the Roman empire, the Classic Mayan city-states, or any number of others).
Democratic societies (and the US pretends to be one of those) can succeed better, but only if the people — the demos — either has access to accurate environmental information or at least doesn’t get things completely backwards. American society has now become one of the latter, an ostensibly democratic one that lacks the information it needs to survive. It’s not that the information isn’t there; it’s that it doesn’t get to “the people” who decide things. And as goes America, so (very often) goes much of the world.
But things are more complicated than that. So let’s get into the details.
2. The larger context
For all the second-guessing going on among Democrats about how and why they lost the election, I don’t think the reason is actually that complicated. Yes, as Bernie and other folks on the left have been arguing, they failed to energize the working class. But it’s not because they didn’t try — Biden was the most pro working class president in decades. At the same time, it’s true that cozying up to the Cheneys, as part of a centrist “grand coalition,” did them no favors in attracting voters skeptical of the political establishment. So the message was mixed.
But there’s a bigger picture we need to keep in mind, which has shaped how the Democrats’ message gets interpreted, and the fact that the message might not get out far enough. (I’ve written about that bigger picture before; see here, here, here, and here.) To put it simply, there are two overarching trends that are primarily responsible for where the U.S. is as a country, and for similar situations elsewhere.
The first is that the neoliberal economic policies of the last fifty years have led to a deepening of the gap between global economic “winners” and “losers,” and to a simultaneous growing awareness of that gap as the world becomes a single economy and a single mediasphere. The Democrats weren’t originally responsible for those policies (the Reagan Republicans were), but they took them up with a bit too much enthusiasm during the Clinton years and never quite shed them with the clarity it called for. But it’s not about the Democrats; it’s about the sense many people have of being “left behind,” and the resentment that breeds or at least makes available for politicians to tap into.
The second overarching trend is that the deregulation of media industries, accompanied by the rapid and largely unmanaged proliferation of powerful new digital media, have facilitated the loss of a viable consensus on what constitutes reality, with the result that the potentially unified mediasphere has in fact become multiple, relatively autonomous “media ecosystems.” These are easily manipulated by those who benefit from sowing mistrust, and in a world in which the grounds for collective trust are disappearing, those forces only grow in strength.
To all of that we can add, as a third trend, the weakening of public education in the U.S. (from elementary through to higher ed), which is a result of both of the above trends and of a long tradition of Americans not wanting to pay taxes that would support the “common good.”
As a result, within our media ecosystems, genuine information becomes lost in a din of image-borne claims, counter-claims, and identity projects of the left and (especially) of the right. (The triumph of Trumpism can hardly be understood without understanding the role of right-wing identity politics, including the rise of white nationalism, Christian nationalism, and reactionary masculinism — in the face of a dearth of positive masculine role models on the left.)
It’s gotten to the point that we now have what historian Heather Cox Richardson calls “a propaganda ecosystem that has people angry at things that are not real.” (Too bad Richardson wasn’t made the Biden admin’s communication chief, as she is a great communicator.) As The New Republic‘s Michael Tomasky wrote on Friday, what’s new, and what liberals don’t really see or understand, is that
the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
I’ve struggled to come up with a term for this problem. It’s not “the media” that is at fault (as a lot of people want to say); the media are diverse and include a lot of good professional journalists doing excellent work. It’s also not exactly disinformation per se. It’s the specific “propaganda ecosystem” that’s been built through very specific efforts by specific people implementing specific policies enabling the rule of disinformation. And social media — underregulated as they are — have turbocharged all of it. It’s become a kind of “dysmedia” or “malmedia,” a sickness that’s taken over much of our information ecology.
The result of these policies and these technological developments is that what is real — key empirical facts about the state of the world — no longer constitutes the center around which we develop alternative political responses. Today those empirical facts, for any educated and scientifically literate person, would have to include the science (and social science) of climate change and how it is and will be affecting economics and politics, leading to greater instability in living conditions, more competition and conflict over land, water, and other resources, and growing and powerful migration crises. There is a “reality-based” community that knows these things, reads and communicates about them through their work, and through education, professional journalism, and the communication of science and scholarship. But that community lives in as much of a bubble as everyone else.
If those facts would be the core of our political conversations, then the responses offered by the Trumps of the world would be seen for what they are: heads-in-the-sand non-responses at best, and destructive last-minute sprees of fascist-survivalist hoarding at worst (with billionaires leading the way, and little bits presumably trickling down to their followers). That they aren’t seen that way reflects the failure of our educational, media, and political institutions.
3. No common sense, no common world
In a word, if there was ever a “common world” — a world unified by a recognizable “common sense” that the majority of humanity agreed to (and we can debate whether there has been such as world) — today there clearly isn’t. And today it matters more than ever.
Alfred North Whitehead considered the discrediting of common sense to be a problem — in Isabelle Stengers’ words, even a “mortal” if not “fatal weakness of the modern world.” The task of philosophy, for Whitehead, was to “weld” together “imagination and common sense.” As Stengers writes in Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse, common sense “is not only constraint but also a wager,” the wager that a common world can be built even when it appears to be at greatest risk of disappearing.
One challenge today is that this “common reality” relies on scientists who study the larger biogeochemical systems of the Earth using an array of sophisticated tools — from deep-earth core sampling and earth-orbiting satellites to complex measurements and publications in specialized journals — that may be tremendously robust in their endlessly iterated complexity, but are mostly out of the range of what is “commonly sensible” to most people. We rely on experts to tell us what’s what, and in challenging times, experts can be ignored and even targeted by malinforming political entrepreneurs.
For those of us who understand those tools and the social realities they’re built on (such as the international academic institutions some of us are part of), the challenge becomes how to communicate the realities they tell us about in a way that reaches people outside of our own reality bubbles. The latter can only be done through a compassionate understanding of where those people are at and what matters to them.
The challenge, to put it perhaps a little too earnestly, is to reassert and effectively resuscitate two things. The first is Truth (and why not capitalize the word?), by which I mean an accurate understanding of the world, including the messy complexity of humanity’s dependence on a destabilized and rapidly transforming natural world. The second is Love, which is as good a word as any for the compassionate understanding of the real needs of the people we are trying to reach, without whom no viable collective action is possible.
The danger is that we may stick to our Truth (because we can’t help knowing what we know) but give up on the Love, and so we’ll sink into a cynical end-times posture that echoes the end-times already on offer in some of those other mediaspheres.
To not give up on humanity, and to work toward rebuilding a common-sense world, remains a choice. It may be the only viable one. Without it, we may as well sing along with Ivor Cutler (see video above) and fluff our brains out on the table with a fork.
4. A place for faith?
Events like this last election present challenges to our faith — faith in humanity, faith in democracy, faith in whatever larger things there may be to speak of.
I’ve written before of my own faith (see here or the latter parts of Shadowing the Anthropocene), which is a faith not in humanity (though I do have faith in a common humanity, a common goodness, just not in humanity as a grand project) nor in a god who will save us (as Heidegger thought we needed, once he realized that neither Hitler nor his own philosophy would save him). It’s not necessarily a faith in democracy either, though I still believe that with the right conditions — good education and information being two of them — democracy is a far more humanly respectful and dignified way to organize society than any of its alternatives.
My faith is in a universe that produces “Niagaras of beauty,” in Terrence McKenna’s words, and that will continue to produce them irrespective of where we happen to be in our awareness of them. (There’s an experiential core to that faith that we need not get into right now.) To be in the presence of such a universe, and especially to be part of it, and occasionally conscious of that, is to be convinced there is more to life than what we ourselves might conceive of on an average day.
That faith occasionally gives me insights into beautiful things we can do for each other, with each other, and with the life around us. It also gives me a sense of a standard by which we can judge both the politics and the technological achievements of our time. Some of us had thought social media, for instance, would be a game-changer; we now know we were completely wrong. Or at least that its game-changing nature has sooner brought about the opposite of what we had hoped: that it has come to distract, disinform, and exhaust us even more than twentieth-century media (like television) already did to us.
That doesn’t mean that I’m ready to give up on technology — I think it can and should be reined in so as to help the common good. But my faith is reinvigorated more when I see people doing things that social media are completely oblivious to: like growing vegetables to share with neighbors, designing local, permaculturally attuned food systems, working to re-establish the kinds of layered ecological relationships we’ll need once the industrial food system begins to more manifestly fail us (as it will), and reinvigorating community mutual aid networks in the wake of the kinds of environmental disasters — wildfires, hurricanes, industrial accidents, and so on — that more and more of us are facing today and will face in the years to come.
Working at those levels feels real in a way that social media, for all the sense of solidarity they might sometimes give us, does not. And there’s something to be said for the faith in a reality that is tangible in one’s everyday sense-world — a common sense-world that can be built with the work of one’s hands and the gifts of one’s labor. The Trumps of the world won’t take that away from us.
I mentioned earlier the elite systems of rule that collapse when elites pay more attention to their own needs than the needs of the people they rule over. The Trumps, Musks, Thiels, and Bezoses will fall, just as every Chinese empire of the past (among others) has fallen. That Chinese civilization is still with us — Confucius and Laozi are still read and long-time traditions of respect for others are still practiced — is a testament to those who maintain cultural and intellectual traditions outside of systems of rule. That’s also something we can hope to maintain despite whatever crashes may be ahead.
Faith in one’s efforts despite setbacks is a piece of the larger faith that can keep us going. Reinvigorating that faith, through whatever means works for us, may be what some of us need right now, and that’s okay.
We’ll have times to get together and help each other; that can be guaranteed.
