Looking Ahead to 2024

David Brooks pins our current social and political problems on Collapsing Levels of Trust in his recent column in The Atlantic. I think he gets most of his arguments right. Without evidence that people are in general trustworthy, individuals will tend to congregate with others in their tribes. The way this is playing out today is polarization toward the far left and the far right.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it in his recent book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times:

The far right dreams of a Golden Age that never was, and the far left dreams of a utopia that will never be.

It is not an unreasonable reading of 20th century history to say that when the extremes are emboldened in pursuit of these dreams, the result is violent and horrific. What are reasonable people supposed to do?

In brief, form a new tribe in the center. I am politically to the right of the center, but probably no more so than most of the people whom I call friends are to the left of center. If we chose to, we could waste a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, or other anti-social media arguing about whether the lunatics well to their left are worse than the lunatics well to my right. We would be making the problem worse, by acting like partisans and letting the extremists set the agenda for public discussion and civic life. And yet this is the pattern into which we have fallen. Instead, we could disavow them both. 

 

I would wager that a coalition that included them on its left flank and me on the right flank would constitute a majority and would enact sensible policies. Centrist parties are thought not to be possible in our Presidential system in part because the parties that start on the far left or far right will find it easy to encroach on the center without losing the support of their flanks. I understand this as an equilibrium result. Are we in or moving toward such an equilibrium? I see no evidence that the two major political parties are courting the political center by moving toward the center. So perhaps there is a window of opportunity during which this coalition could govern. In other countries, they would call this a unity government, and such governments typically get formed when the alternatives are pretty awful. I am surprised that 2019 was not awful enough to spark such an insurgency of the rational. I suspect 2020 is that awful but the timing relative the Presidential election is unfavorable.

 

The last link and the phrase it highlights are to a TEDx talk by my colleague Charlie Wheelan, who put forth a sensible platform in the Centrist Manifesto in 2013 and founded Unite America to try to get a pivotal centrist bloc in the Senate. The Achilles heel in that strategy turned out to be that it presumes a Congress that seeks to perform even its most basic Constitutional responsibilities. So, looking ahead to 2024, we should be thinking about a centrist ticket for the Presidency, composed initially of a bipartisan duo with a prudent and responsible platform that begins to address the many crises we have built for ourselves. If the ticket wins, then the party can immediately recruit Senators and Representatives from the political center for a majority in each House, leaving the two existing parties in the extremes. Addressing those crises, even if incrementally, is what will help rebuild trust in our public life.