On the election: the vision problem goes deeper than you think
Lots of people are on Harris for not presenting a vision beyond “Trump is bad”. For not naming villains and having a story of defeating them; like billionaires are the villains and we will defeat them with regulation and taxes.
According to this narrative Trump named immigrants and global trade as the villains and will defeat them with deportation and tariffs. But this narrative doesn’t make any sense.
First Harris named Trump as the villain and had a story of defeating him at the ballot box. Second naming the billionaires behind Trump just begs the question of who is behind those billionaires. It’s not like Elon Musk can, by himself, affect any change. Musk only has as much power as Americans give him and so Harris would end up having to name ignorant voters as the real villains — deplorables if you will and we’ve been down that road.
In reality neither Trump nor Harris has any positive vision for America. It’s all along the lines of X is bad and we will stop X. Sure but after you stop X how do you expect people to live?
For Harris the answer is much the way we have been and for Trump the voter is expected to fill in the vision on his own. For instance if you are a Christian nationalist then you can believe that stopping immigrants and global trade will return us to some sort of theocracy (which we never were anyway but that’s beside the point).
This vision problem is rampant across all current human endeavor. In medicine X = dying but what happens after we live longer? Do we start a new family at fifty or is parenting not really an experience you want to repeat again from scratch?
For the tech industry X = manualish labor but again to what end? After manualish labor is gone what do people do?
Elon Musk’s Martian city idea does count as a vision, but it’s a vision so stupid that it’s difficult to even say out loud:
Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he now expects one million people to be living there in about 20 years.
The only conceivable upside is that maybe the one million people could include as many billionaires as possible. If so Martian immigration could truly include the worst of the worst and so put 140 million miles between us and them.
Sure perhaps Musk’s new alliance with Trump will have the government further backing SpaceX, but there is definitely not any voter mandate for this vision the way there maybe was for going to the moon.
The Senate Democrats have X = inequality and pollution:
From workers’ rights to protecting the environment, equal pay to fighting the special interests, Democrats believe we can and should make life better for families across our nation.
That’s again not a vision. How would we live in an equal world? Currently, in our pseudo meritocracy, the moment anyone achieves anything they expect to be rewarded and so make the world less equal.
Harmony with the environment seems like a James Cameron’s Avatar vision until you dig into it. Currently we don’t have a world government or an earth god that you can talk to by plugging into a tree, and fixing the environment requires enforcing global regulations.
Now if Senate Democrats said we are fighting for a world government capable of enforcing global regulations, that would be a vision.
What can we say about this election then? Well one advantage of America stuck in stasis is that I can go back to a blog I wrote 15 years ago looking for an answer:
Predictably Irrational describes experiments that show humans will uncontrollably fight to have all options open even at the cost of losing the entire game.
What we can say about the election is that we are all conservative in the sense of refusing to decide on a vision. Just that conservatives come in two flavors now — status quo and regressive.