It doesn’t take a political genius — whose ranks seem to have risen lately, based on last week’s highly confident post-election numbers — to see that many, many Americans voted to blow up the system. Donald Trump, if nothing else, embodies a belief that the way America is run is fundamentally broken and needs to be overhauled from top to bottom.
More than any policy specifics on taxes or immigration or foreign policy, I have been receptive since November 5. Take a wrecking ball for everything.
But the sentiment and anger that feeds them runs deeper than just Trump voters. One piece of news that caught my eye this week is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Asking her Instagram followers why Some of her constituents voted for both her and Trump.
What I see in these answers is that frustration with the system is not something that can be attributed to just one party or the other, even if it is currently concentrated in the GOP. The AOC and President-elect Trump are about as far from an avowed leftist as two American politicians can be, but a large portion of their supporters are united in anger at the way things are going and a thirst for some kind of radical change.
I understand them. In the nearly 25 years I’ve been a professional journalist, I’ve seen a catastrophic overreaction to 9/11 that led to a two-decade war on terror; thousands of dead American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; And a Middle East that remains chaotic. I saw the Great Recession of 2008 and the years of economic distress that followed.
I have seen a failure to prepare for a major pandemic A lot of people saw that comingAnd I see failure to learn from it in a way that prepares us for the next one. I’ve seen political obstacles make it difficult for economic and technological advances that can meaningfully improve people’s lives. And I’ve seen very few people in power take responsibility for that failure.
Depending on where you fall on the political spectrum, you can undoubtedly add your own points to this list. I can believe, as I have written time and time again, that human life has improved immeasurably in the long run, and I can trust that better days are finally ahead of us. Yet I still understand why voters on both the right and the left would look at the ruins of the past 20 years and pull a lever for radical change, consequences be damned.
Here, however, is a radical change. It is, as our more numerate readers can tell, a “high-difference strategy,” meaning that the range of possible outcomes is far greater than what we might expect from more incremental, in-system changes.
Perhaps we’ve nailed the jackpot and managed to strike political choices that could truly create something meaningfully better out of a broken system. But just as likely—perhaps if you know anything about political revolutions in recent history—would that radical change make us worse off, and it would turn out that the system that so many people have come to hate was actually our end against something much, much worse. Line of defense.
The night is dark and full of terror
If you’re like many voters who think things can’t possibly get any worse, I have some reading for you.
Less than a week before the election, dot-head at the RAND Corporation published a report of 237 pages On Global Catastrophic Risk Assessment. (I didn’t say it would be light reading.)
A response to the report 2022 Global Catastrophic Risk Management ActThat required the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assess truly significant risks to human survival and develop and validate a strategy to protect the civilian population in the face of those risks. If the ultimate purpose of government is to keep us safe in a dangerous world, then that law encourages the US government to anticipate and prepare for the most dangerous risks.
The RAND report divides catastrophic risk into six major possibilities: asteroid and comet impacts; supervolcano; major epidemics (both natural and man-made); rapid and severe climate change; nuclear collision; And, of course, artificial intelligence. (I’d call them the Sinister Six, but I doubt that would ship Marvel’s trademark office calling.)
The report notes that what these six have in common is that they “could significantly damage or set back human civilization worldwide … or even cause human extinction.”
It’s important to pause for a moment to consider what this actually means. We just finished an election in which the majority of Americans indicated They are very unhappy with the way things are going. They are mad about high prices, mad about immigration, mad about Joe Biden or mad about Donald Trump.
Despite all the outrage, however, these are fairly normal things to be angry about, normal political and economic problems to endure. Thinking about catastrophic risks helps put them in some perspective. A nuclear war – a possibility that is much more likely now than it has been for decades – could kill millions of people and devastate the planet in a way that the living would envy the dead.
We already know from Covid the damage a pandemic can do with a relatively low death rate; Something more dire, especially if it’s engineered, can resemble something out of dystopian fiction—except the prospect is very real. The risks of out-of-control powerful artificial intelligence are almost entirely unknown, but we’d be foolish to completely dismiss dire warnings from people in the field.
And with the exception of asteroids and comets — where real, intelligent space policy has helped us better understand the threat and even develop countermeasures — the RAND report judges that the threat from all of these hazards is either stable or increasing. (Supervolcanoes, a risk that remains unchanged, are largely beyond human prediction or control, but fortunately we know enough to judge that the likelihood is very, very low.)
System matters
So why are the risks of nuclear conflict, major pandemics, extreme climate change and artificial intelligence increasing? Due to human decisions, otherwise known as policies.
Will we act like climate change is the catastrophic threat so many of us believe it to be and engineer our societies and economies to mitigate and adapt to it? Will we reverse the collapse of the global arms control treaty and return from the brink of nuclear conflict? Will we really learn from Covid and strengthen the policies and uncover the science to stop the next pandemic, where it comes from? Will we do something about AI – and can we?
The answers are not simple, and no political party or candidate has a monopoly on all the best ways to deal with catastrophic risk. Reducing the risk of extreme climate change might mean getting serious about the consequences of what we eat and what we drive, which is sure to anger Republicans — but it might also mean stopping the rapid energy development and housing construction that often happens. Defended by the Democrats. Mitigating the danger of future pandemics may require protecting global health systems, but it may also demand cutting red tape that often stifles science.
After all, it will demand dedication and professionalism in a country we choose to lead us; Men and women who have the skills and understanding to know when caution is needed and when action is inevitable. And from us, it will demand intelligence to recognize what we need to be protected from.
The system has failed us. But there are far worse things than the failure we have experienced. As we move down the twenty-first century into what is becoming the most existentially dangerous human race has ever faced, we should temper the pull of radical change with an awareness of what can go wrong if we drag away what we’ve built.
