Three Political Frames to Save Your Mind

Time, Games, and Warfare

We really are in the thick of it these days!

For sure, there’s storms storming and bombs dropping and fires burning from the Carolinas to Lebanon to Katmandu.

But also:

the epistemic cracks that ruptured any shared reality during Covid are widening even further under all this renewed pressure. (and pending elections)

Back in the heady “two jabs and we’re free at last!” summer of ‘21, we all agreed to back away from the deep weirdness of watching friends slowly (or rapidly) become unhinged in the pressure cooker of lockdowns.

We booked flights and danced outside at festivals. We engaged in revenge travel and impulse buys. We all happily agreed to put that whack-ass moment, from #MeToo and #takeaknee to #wherewego1wegoall and #thestormiscoming behind us.

But none of it actually brought us back to zero,zero on the gridwork of a consensus reality map.

Now, it seems that all sorts of folks who held firm(ish) through that epistemic washing machine are coming unglued now.

Blame it on Elon.

And RFK.

And maybe Russell Brand.

They’ve all switched teams late in the seventh inning.

For anyone who was cueing off them and their “sense-making” prowess, there’s some serious cognitive dissonance adjusting to these recent pivots.

Either I keep stanning for my man, or I conclude they too must’ve jumped the shark.

But then I’d be left in NoMan’s land. Raked in the crossfire of the culture wars. So it’s sorely tempting to follow them across to (former) enemy lines and hunker down.

Nevermind the mindfuck.

There may be no atheists in fox holes, but there aren’t many rationalists either.

Verbatim quotes I’ve heard in the past month:

“I mean, if you back out that whole Jan.6 thing, were DJTs policies really that much different than Biden’s?”

or

“We’re on the verge of WWIII, and I know one thing for certain, Harris is a classic war-mongering Democrat that will push us to the brink. I’m gonna hold my nose and. vote for Trump because I don’t want my daughter to grow up in a war zone.”

or

“ If Twitter, Telegram and Truth social get shut down we’re going to descend into a totalitarian New World Order surveillance state run by Klaus Schwab. I’m fighting for my sovereignty and the right to speak my truth!!! #1A #2A”

(as Elon recently put it, we need the 2A Second Amendment right to bear arms to defend our 1A First Amendment Freedom of Speech).

It’s all very Dirty Harry Cos Play.

And getting rather garbled.

I mean, you might be tracking any of those sentiments yourself, and we’re all free to conclude whatever we want about the merits of the various arguments.

There’s 100% important points to be interrogated on the US role in the world, civil liberties and censorship, migrant crises, social justice, traditional values, and the razor wire between political evolution and revolution.

But how we’re contemplating them, the utterly facile ways they’re being framed on our newsfeeds, and the ambivalent, wildly under-informed conclusions we’re drawing about decisions with history making impacts…

Well, that’s what the kids on the Toks call…#problematic.

Tech-bro libertarianism (and messianic AI utopianism), self-aggrandizing Minutemen-and-Muskets Revolutionaries and fervent Christian Identity Seven Mountain Mandaters…

It’s no wonder most of us feel marooned in the middle.

Where’s Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley when you need ‘em?

(pic from their famous televised Left/Right debate during the tumultuous political conventions of 1968. Go back and watch it. The civility and erudition are almost shocking)

If I had to put my money on it today, I’d wager that Harris squeaks the popular vote and DJT takes the electoral.

(this is not a profound prediction. No Republican has won the popular vote since W in ‘04, twenty years ago. If you back out his second term win over Kerry, but after Gore won the popular vote in ‘00, you’d have to go back to his daddy, GHW Bush in 1988 for a double double popular/electoral sweep for a conservative.)

It’s no wonder that Republicans are all about voter restrictions and gerrymandering these days. They haven’t enjoyed majority backing in decades.

But all that is neither here nor there for the couple of points I wanted to share today!

(I mean, they are. This is our current shitshow and I wanted to share a couple few high level frames that can hopefully add to our collective political literacy. I’ll try and come back to the policy points in more detail before the election)

First is the time signature of Progressivism vs. Conservatism and how tracking it can help you make your own decision about who aligns with your own.

Second is the false-equivalence of the political debate and how to spot the massively uneven stakes.

Thing One: Time

This one’s super easy to spot, right down to the campaign slogans.

Conservatism, ipso facto, is looking to conserve values of the past. It is retrospective, and favors an idealized version of bygone days (think Leave it to Beaver, white Christian Pleasantville America).

It never happened so tidily, but that doesn’t mean they can’t nostalgia it into existence.

Theirs is a Perfect Past, opposed to a Fearful Future (of gay luxury space communism run by Mexican drag queens).

The slogan, Make America Great Again, makes this time signature explicit.

We were in the Land of Milk and Honey where men were men and backyard BBQ’d, and women wore Lily Pulitzer sundresses and Jesus dropkicked us all through the goalpost of love.

In overtime at the Superbowl! With Billy Ray Cyrus playing halftime So. FUCKIN’ AWESOME!

(and we need to retreat back there again, even if we have to shred the Constitution to get there).

Perfect Past. Fearful Future.

Progressives, on the other hand (and as their name implies) want to progress and move forwards in time. They fixate on the Painful Past of racism, sexism, and all the -isms. Understandably traumatizing.

As Harris/Walz signs in your neighborhood insist “We’re not going back!”

Where are they going? Into a Fantastic Future where we flourish in a godless, genderless world full of Zoom pronoun pronouncements (gotta love ‘em), trigger warnings, safe spaces and equitable outcomes.

Painful Past. Fantastic Future.

And they don’t care if they have to cut down all of the tallest poppies to bonsai the citizenry into compliance.

Taken to their extremes, Charismatic Conservatism descends into Fascism. (and I mean that historically, not pejoratively. Fasces from the Roman bundle of rods that a ruling general carried. Characterized by suppression of the individual in favor of the collective, a moral judgment against a tainted present and desire to return to an idealized past, all organized around a charismatic authoritarian leader).

(ahem)

Taken to its extreme, Progressivism descends into socialist Utopianism. Where the ends (getting us to Paradise) justifies the means. Pol Pot, Che, Stalin, Mao et al.

Slippery slopes leading us to ditches on both sides.

And really, we should be leery of both extremes because at their core, they share deeper alignment than either would admit.

Thing Two: Game Theory

They are both Finite Games of Us vs. Them, Win vs. Lose. Different team uniforms, to be sure. But playing the same game, just as surely.

And at this late date in history, any movements that leave us squabbling with each other instead of collaborating creatively and compassionately will be death sentences for all of us.

So what’s the alternative?

The Infinite Game which is All of Us, or none of us.

Where the goal isn’t to decisively win the game, it’s to keep expanding and extending the Game so more people can play for as long as possible.

Sounds kinda familiar, doesn’t it?

Almost like the French Enlightenment. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

and the Founding Fathers, and their City on a Hill/American Experiment

Lincoln at Gettysburg and those Better Angels of Our Nature

MLK “I have a dream that one day this check will not be returned marked insufficient funds…”

It’s a beautiful, terribly fragile concept.

We can either conclude our stumbling, bumbling efforts towards the Infinite Game have been so fatally flawed that we should burn the whole thing to the ground in favor of our own pet project (either SJW or MAGA).

Or we can dust off these first few rounds since 1776 and debrief our lessons learned

Fess up to our mistakes and make right with those who’ve been most harmed, and double down on the forever project.

It’s tempting just to think that this debate between the Finite Game options (win/lose, us/them) vs. the Infinite Game is how democracy gets done, and may the best meme win.

They’re sorting it out on Twitter aren’t they?

But really it’s asymmetrical warfare.

After oxytocin bonds mother to child and kith to kin, we’re hardwired to protect our own and other the Other.

Tribalism (finite game) is Destiny.

Humanism (infinite game) is optional.

Robespierre justified his bloody reign of terror in the French Revolution quipping “to make an omelette you’ve got to break a few eggs.”

That’s the finite game. It’s got evolution and entropy on its side. All you gotta do is crack some shells skulls.

But the Infinite Game? Where we overcome our tribal conditioning and desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain–into something nobler and more compassionate?

That’s like trying to put Humpty Dumpty together with tweezers and super glue.

It’s also why we’ve needed periodic reminders, from the likes of Lincoln, Marley, Mandela, King, etc.

Absent inspiring leadership, we regress under stress.

And while I’m of neither party nor clique, there is a choice around the world this year, as more than half of the world’s population votes in pivotal elections.

Finite Tribalism or Infinite Humanism.

Can we keep the best of the past without mythologizing it?

Can we steer bravely into an uncertain future without idealizing it?

Can we spot finite tribalism when we see it?

Can we take a stand for humanism cuz we so desperately need it?

We need to shake off any complacency that this is how democracy gets done and “may the best meme win.”

We need to realize that if we blow it this time, we may not get another chance to play the Infinite Game, for like, forever.

“A republic, old Benny Boy cautioned, “if we can keep it.”