Bad habits die hard.

No one knows that more intimately than someone like me, a true 20th-century child who’s lived through and burnt out on 20th-century comforts: cheap stimulants and cheaper illusions, the cigarettes that made us feel like rebel poets and rockstars when we were really just practicing a bizarre ritual of slow-motion mass-marketed self-immolation. Alcohol convinced us we were escaping something, when we were really just dissolving our brains in a lukewarm puddle of forgetfulness. Like all bad habits, they became the invisible machinery of our lives, support beams holding up the structure of our shabby routines, so that breaking them feels less like progress or liberation and more like an act of full-blown self-demolition.

Like our old personal bad habits died hard, the United States is a nation that’s been running on bad habits for decades now. Like a guy whose nervous system is thoroughly burnt out, so he pumps it full of stimulants to make it through the day. Whether an individual or nation, whenever one gets caught in this trap, eventually, it has to come to a very ugly end. Entropy always wins.

The U.S., like the guy strung out on stimulants, is long overdue for a cultural reset. Every other country in the world had one in the 20th century. Two world wars made sure of it. But the U.S. never did, and it glaringly shows. It’s why so many of us feel like something is unmistakably off that we can’t quite put our finger on, as if we’re living in a museum exhibit of American Greatness curated by people who’ve never once stepped outside, who keep insisting the animatronic diorama is real life, and who genuinely look confused—hurt, even—when the machinery begins to smoke, exposing the ruse. 1 And, I think the U.S. reset will really be a global reset and the whole world order is about to change. This came, as most great ideas do, from a random, historically-inaccurate meme about Poland on Facebook. Naturally.

A Meme About Poland, or How to Warp History

Last night, I spotted the offending meme, an image that made me think the Cold War was still going on. More accurately, it reminded me that the Cold War is over for everyone in the world—except the United States. 2 It wasn’t the politics of the meme that vexed me, but that it was factually incorrect in a politically convenient way. In other words, it’s accidental propaganda, and I’m bothered more by the misrepresented history than the political messaging.

It purported to show the horrors of the impoverished life under socialism in Poland in the early 1981. It was being pushed by a large historical account to millions of people that was wrong on the facts, not the politics. This wasn’t how most people lived throughout Poland’s 20th-century history, but an outlier, a case of martial law in 1981 due to political turbulence. 3

The meme’s cardinal sin is the bad reductionism of oversimplification.

The whole thing was yet another regurgitated Cold War ghost story dressed up as internet history, because the real rationing of that kind in the socialist world happened during Stalin’s first five-year plan from 1928 to 1932, a short, brutal, economically disruptive experiment even the Russian Soviets dropped once they realized it was ruining their economic development. But try telling that to Americans raised on a diet of Cold War cartoons who still believe the USSR secretly survived inside a Matryoshka doll buried under every historical conversation about the period, or even the slightest criticism of capitalism (or imperialism). 4

The reality is, as usual, much more boring. Even the Stalin-era Soviets—hardly known for saying oops, my bad!—took one look at this failed policy and said, “Yes, well, never again.” But, today’s U.S. seems to believe that the entire history of every Eastern Bloc state was a history of rationing. 5 Our “bread and soup lines” pejoratives evince the embarrassing reality that we’ve simply not experienced what the rest of the world did in the 20th century and it shows. 6 Thus, the meme made clear that the historical world the U.S. is dwelling in, and the historical world the rest of the world is living in, are two completely different worlds.

A History of Major 20th-Century Resets

I’ve been reading a lot about the Eastern Bloc lately for obvious reasons. One, I just stepped foot in a still-living Socialist Republic for the very first time. The more important one is, my home country seems fast falling into something resembling totalitarian authoritarianism, and I want to know why.

One thing that’s become abundantly clear in my reading is that, for better or worse, the geopolitics of the 20th century forced pretty much everyone to endure a period of national redefinition, tremendous change that impacted everyone throughout their respective countries. “Resets,” I call them, a point where a nation has to redefine its national identity in order to survive. To understand that the U.S. never had its socio-political reset, it would help us to understand what a reset is. Again, history will be helpful. 7

Russia began its reset in 1905 when the tsarist order was challenged by a socialist revolution that upended millennia of hierarchy and attempted to build something radical from the ground up. This, of course, was brutally suppressed and would eventually turn into the 1917 revolution that turned into the other 1917 revolution that gave us Lenin, Trotsky, and eventually, Stalin who implemented the First Five-Year Plan which introduced rationing.

We’ve come full circle.

While much blood was shed, the Bolsheviks ripped down an empire that stood for centuries, replacing it with a revolutionary movement that reorganized everything from land ownership to literacy and the meaning of labor itself, challenging defectors just as ruthlessly as the tsarist regime before it had done. It wasn’t an election cycle or policy shift, it was a total transformation of the social organism of the country, a forced rebirth of a civilization that was still running on the fumes of centuries-old feudalism.

China underwent four resets. The first was the Century of Humiliation as China lived fractured under the ruling iron fist of British colonialism. Next up, Imperial Japan invaded and took swathes of the territory, raping women, destroying or seizing property, and generally causing havoc. Their British overlords seemed incapable or unwilling to help much. During and after WWII, there was the Chinese Communist revolution ending in 1949, which was a response to the Century of Humiliation, and then the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, a self-inflicted political earthquake that tore apart its old, ossified systems, purged bureaucracies, attacked ideology, and re-educated itself in a frenzy of ideological purification that, for all its chaos and cruelty, left behind a fundamentally changed nation.

North Korea similarly experienced several resets, under Japanese occupation, another under Soviet liberation, another during the Korean War (which also caused South Korea to have a national reset), then another under Kim Il-Sung’s juche ideology, each compacting the new national identity tighter. 8

Vietnam reset itself through anticolonial war—first against Japan, then against Britain, then against France, then against the United States, then against Cambodia, then against China—years of struggle that torched the old colonial structures that had caused the country unimaginable loss and pain since the late-19th century. In related news, Vietnam gets the award for the most badass human beings on planet earth, and it’s not even close.

But it wasn’t just Eastern countries experiencing this. As Vietnam cast off the yoke of its French oppressors, France had to deal with its own redefining of society, especially after the humiliating defeat in WWII to the Germans. France might’ve been able to save face had it been able to save its colonies, especially the profitable colonies in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), but the Vietnamese had other ideas and, when France lost handily at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, it was clear its days as a globe-spanning empire were over.

Britain underwent a reset more quietly but no less radically, shedding its global empire piece by piece throughout the 20th century, often willingly, like imperial death by a thousand tiny national self-amputations. Let’s not forget, Nazi Germany’s bombing of London made England start asking very sobering questions about whether their colonies were more important than the defense of their island. Hard to control half the globe when being bombed round-the-clock in The Blitz at home. Then they stumbled into Brexit, which looks suspiciously like post-acute imperial withdrawal syndrome.

Germany experienced an extremely violent reset on par with Vietnam. Defeat, occupation, denazification, division, reconstruction, reunification—each a complete redefinition of what it meant to be German, until the country that emerged in the late-20th century bore almost no resemblance to the one that marched into Poland in 1939. They offer us a reminder that your past must be confronted directly, not stuffed in a drawer.

Everyone reset, whole nations transformed, and all confronted the ugly specter of their own past, broke with it, and reentered the world as something new—everyone except the United States. 9

United States, Exceptionalism’s Wayward Children

The U.S. simply kept going, as if the fall of the Berlin Wall was the final scene in a monotone, late-night, YouTube history documentary and the credits would just roll on forever. We even wrote books about it. Fukuyama’s End of History wasn’t really a clever argument about liberal democracy, but an accidentally binding sentence condemning the U.S. to live in an inescapable 20th-century doomloop that would only get weirder and weirder as it refused to wake up from our surreal dream.

U.S. business leaders, politicians, and policymakers kept repeating Cold War gospels as if the war hadn’t ended and they’ve been doing it for so long, that it’s lasted all the way up until last night when I encountered the meme about Poland. They repeat their comforting slogans about free markets, global leadership, America Number One, typical unipolar world stuff, long after the world beneath their feet and to their outside had shifted. They still parrot the Cold War catechism today warning about radical leftists—in other words, still seeing Soviet shadows behind every minor discomfort or disagreement.

A very little-known fact about those Soviet shadows. The U.S.’ anti-Soviet position was so complete, that they long believed North Korea a Stalinist puppet state of the U.S.S.R., well after North Korea severed ties with both China and the U.S.S.R. and purged anyone loyal to Moscow in the 1950s. The result of this was the Pueblo Incident, where a U.S. warship, The USS Pueblo, was captured by North Korean forces in 1968. The U.S., still mistakenly believing North Korea had close ties with Moscow and China, asked the Soviets to step in and do something about it. They were shocked to learn the Soviets had zero control over North Korea and North Korea rejected overtures to return the ship and release the crew.

The North Koreans kept the ship. And in one of the most embarrassingly hilarious episodes in history that feels like the geopolitical version of a 2012 YouTube prank reel, in 1999, when the U.S. and South Korea performed joint military exercises in the Korean Peninsula, no doubt in an attempt to intimidate North Korea, North Korea in response towed the USS Pueblo from one side of the peninsula to the other to put it on public display, no doubt in an attempt to intimidate the U.S.-South Korean alliance.

The U.S. isn’t just getting high on its own supply of propaganda today. It has been since WWII. So what’s the problem? Well, reality, for starters.

You see, you can’t continually subject yourself to a fantastical version of reality, a rabbit hole that goes deeper and deeper and deeper without reality eventually confronting your fantasies. The fantasy is that we can force the future to fit into past models. But the future won’t contort itself around American nostalgia, it doesn’t care about our emotional comfort or bipartisan delusions, and the rise of Donald trump—no matter how any one of us feels about him—is stark proof that the U.S. desperately needs the coming reset.

Now, I can already sense some people thinking, “But what if Trump is the reset?” He’s not. He still abides the old oder. Cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans while the poorest Americans literally go hungry is a much meaner Reaganomics cosplaying as Fascism, but it’s Reaganomics nonetheless. He still spews on about endless growth and deregulation and all the old-school Republican policies that have proved immensely destructive.

His rise isn’t a reset but the light in the car blinking to let everyone know the engine is about to fall out of the bottom before we all careen into a tree. His rise is a warning that the system—high on its own supply, remember—is no longer capable of producing functional leadership. Not even good leadership, but just leadership that passes. So it produced a reality-show host instead, a twisted cosmic joke at the expense of the modern West’s second-oldest democracy (Iceland was the first with their Alþingi, the Parliament of Iceland founded in 930 CE), but also a helluva red flag if I’ve ever seen one.

Trump is what happens when a group of people try to solve 21st-century problems with outdated 20th-century politics. He wasn’t a break with the 20th century but a fanatical reenactment of its ugliest moments: paranoia, strong-man imperialism, ethno-nationalism, still trying to defeat the Soviet Union decades after its collapse, like a boxer shadow-boxing an opponent who retired in 1991 to go get flabby in the suburbs. Does the United States’ weird, post-cold-war-paranoia swan-song not sound like sad reverberations from a 20th century empire who unknowingly sings about its soon-to-be-former greatness?

Does It Feel Like Everything’s Falling Apart, to You?

This lack of a Reset is why everything now feels unmistakably like it’s falling apart and the closer your country is to the U.S., the more it feels like it. Here in Asia, our quiet, flatulent rumbles barely move the needle on the Richter scale. But, in the U.S., almost everyone feels the squeeze and they’re crushed beneath the jaws of the vice grip. The country’s outward imperial ambitions now thwarted, the powerful are turning them inward on its own population, as tends to happen. 10

But, back in the U.S., our infrastructure crumbles while paralyzed leaders do nothing. Only countries who still believe in long-term investment can build infrastructure and the U.S. is still living in its 20th-century fantasy. Our healthcare has already disintegrated because the fantasy of pornographized political yesterdays hasn’t kept up with today’s high-paced reality. Our communication has failed because we can’t build a functioning network anymore that facilitates healthy, constructive conversations.

Our work lives deteriorate because our institutions are pretending it’s still 1958 and we all believe employee loyalty will be rewarded by the greediest corporations on earth, even though we all know it’s just a slow-motion mugging of everyone who isn’t pornographically rich.

Our cities fall apart because we can’t build anything without two decades of lawsuits, environmental impact studies, zoning tantrums, and a whole lot of loud screaming about NIMBYism. We never had our Reset. This is why the U.S. is still arguing about LGBTQIA+ policies and flirting with treating Black people like it’s 1952 again (or, for some, like it’s 1852 again) while the rest of the world moves along into the future.

In the U.S., we like to talk about the rise of China a lot as if there will just be one Superpower that rises up to challenge us and everyone else simply doesn’t matter. You see this in Trump’s cause-havoc-with-our-allies policies he’s recklessly employed. But the rest of the world has started moving on too.In short, the U.S. hasn’t redefined itself for a long time and it needs to tell the world a new story about what it is and what it’s all about if it wants to be understood as anything more serious than a caricature of a world left behind. It’s nervous system is collapsing, it’s been pumping stimulants for decades. But, eventually, our bad habits will catch up with us. 11 Turns out, you can’t live on hubristic, paranoid delusions of grandeur forever.

Which is why the Great American Reset is coming. It will be through the force of sheer historical necessity and inevitability. Everyone else globally has had to face theirs and history has been abundantly, extraordinarily patient with the United States, allowing every advantage to be taken, every fantasy indulged, and every opportunity to update itself voluntarily skipped. But the overdue 20th-century bill has finally come. What will that look like?

Are we ready for it?

The mythologies of empires die slowly. Long after the boots come home, the conquests end, and the colonies assert their independence, the stories linger like an untreated infection. Long after the palace walls are torn down, long after the buildings and vast lawns are weathered and overgrown, the empire persists in the mind. This was true of many empires across history.

Centuries after the last Western Roman Emperor was killed, the Germanic tribes who moved into what was once the Roman Empire considered themselves Romans. When Charlemagne declared himself Roman Emperor in 800 CE after being crowned by Pope Leo III, the first time anyone had seriously done so in nearly 500 years, his Latin-speaking brother had to be present, because Charlemagne didn’t even speak the Latin of the Romans, but Frankish. Charlemagne wasn’t any more Roman than I am Winston Churchill.

O, Fotuna magna inhumanita! From what heights the empire had fallen!

And this, I think, is what we’re watching now in the West.1 Not the sudden fall of a single nation, but the slow, shuddering death of an economic order and its correspondent mythology. The United States, and, to a lesser degree, the U.K., are nations built not just on land and law, but on movement—expansion, conquest—and the parallel wealth accumulation that comes with them. From Manifest Destiny to the American Dream, the concepts of constant growth and wealth (for some) were forged into the U.S. American cultural identity. For centuries, what many U.S. Americans consider “cultural values” were always tightly wrapped up with the real machinery underneath: the push outward in the name of prosperity. But eventually, we ran out of frontier.

For a while, we had a reprieve, a stay of execution after WWII, because of the simple fact that most of the world had been utterly decimated by the war. During that period, not only did the U.S. achieve immense material prosperity, but it pushed forward with groundbreaking sciences and technologies, investing heavily in becoming the technological and cultural engine of the world. This century of investments eventually led to the tech booms of the 1990s-2010s, which further forestalled the halt of growth. But now, that era is clearly over.2

Nietzsche saw something like this before. When he declared that God was dead, he wasn’t celebrating. It was a funeral dirge—he could smell death. 3He understood that the real crisis wasn’t disbelief in God—it was inertia. The moral frameworks that had once been dependent upon God—on sin, redemption, humility, charity, and divine command—would persist in a sort of disorienting, mutilated form long after God had faded. People would have the muscle memory of the old moral order without the “why” and “how” of the belief in God driving it. He saw woe and foreboding on the horizon.

Culture, he realized, lags behind history. People act out the old plays long after they’ve forgotten why they’re onstage.4 This is why, nearly 500 years after the death of the last Roman Emperor in the West, Charlemagne didn’t have any other language to use but to call himself (fake) Roman Emperor, even if he couldn’t say that much in the Latin language of the (real) Roman Empire. New narratives for what power looked like hadn’t yet been invented.5

In the U.S., something eerily similar is happening. The mythologies of expansion, of domination, of Manifest Destiny and global preeminence, are no longer congruent with the lack of expansion, domination, and global preeminence, but those mythologies—along with the narratives built to justify it—remain. We still have the scripts of self-sure supremacy, but no longer the conditions to make them plausible…and we know it.6

And so, like any myth unmoored from the material conditions of its foundation, the old stories become confused with the new realities. When this happens, those myths turn inward. When there are no new lands to conquer, the colonizer looks to his neighbors. In the absence of expansion, a strange reversal begins. The old hierarchies, once established and fortified by expansion, distance, and domination, begin to unravel. And those who were accustomed to living at the top of those hierarchies—white guys, mostly, but also those who benefitted from being adjacent to them—are forced to confront a world where their position is no longer guaranteed, but earned.

Some accept this, many do not. We could view our contemporary “culture wars” as this division—between those who do and those who do not accept the end of expansion—manifested in real time in our public discourse. Trump’s tariffs reek of a nation struggling mightily to return to expansion long after it cannot, like an old athlete who hasn’t quite yet realized he’s well past the speedy bursts of his younger years.

Now, a nation once drunk on the future, finds itself arguing over issues we settled seventy-five years ago. Who gets to be a full citizen? What stories get to be told in our schools? What’s women’s so-called “natural” place in society? What is the idea that women are “biologically hardwired” to certain passive (subservient) roles if not Manifest Destiny dressed up as science and used to justify the same patriarchal colonial mindset that has dominated the West for millennia? These aren’t “new” debates—they’re re-runs of a bad TV series we’ve seen before, symptoms of a cultural machine caught in reverse.

Now, many U.S. Americans increasingly feel the need to move backward. What is MAGA if not the promise to return to a former glory? And MAGA pretends that it can return to the material conditions of the 20th century by targeting the cultural progress made across the 20th century. The culture wars are very much a zero-sum battle for who gets to tell the stories of tomorrow and, like Charlemagne, we find ourselves recycling the same old ideas because there’s nothing new that’s compelling floating around in the æther.

When people say they feel like the U.S. is “declining,” this is exactly what they sense, even if they don’t always know how to put it into words. It’s not about the GDP or test scores (though it’s also about those things). It’s about the mood, the adjustments that are hitting like a withdrawal period after a centuries-long high, the desperation of a once-expanding culture that’s just now learning a taste of sustainability—the tiring repetition of cyclical living.

Meanwhile, something else is happening. The rest of the world is moving on. This is abundantly clear from where I’m sitting right now, in Thailand. Spend a little time in Asia—Vietnam, Indonesia, South Korea—and even parts of Eastern Europe, and you don’t get this dreaded sense of cultural decay. The cynicism just isn’t present here. Instead, you get the smiles of people who are authentically, genuinely happy. It’s undeniably forward-looking. This isn’t utopia, and no country without its share of problems, but it’s alive.

In Chiang Mai, the street outside your apartment might be loud and chaotic, but you can’t help but feel the cultural vitality and life. People are starting new businesses, making art, and building families, and, most important of all, they have reasons for doing these things besides the expectation of maintaining a certain lifestyle. No one is revisiting 1955’s moral panics.

There’s something unspeakably freeing about this lack of burden. As the U.S. dwells in its own material and cultural stasis, the rest of the world is now rising, and they aren’t clinging to a glorious past that they must restore. They don’t have to protect a creation myth—they’re still creating theirs.

The West, by contrast, is trapped inside its own narrative—its own illusions. We see this most clearly in the U.S. and where the culture wars have become its national identity. There is no longer a unified story of progress and cohesion—only warring factions, each trying to tell the stories of tomorrow.

As Nietzsche wrote, “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” That, in a sentence, is the U.S. cultural identity in decline: a civilization so married to its mythology that it can’t bear the truth of the present, let alone the uncertainty of the future.

None of this is to say that the U.S. and U.K. are “over” or “collapsing”—decline is not collapse and, as we’ve seen with the Roman Empire (and many others), even centuries after the dagger plunges into the dying heart of economic and military power, the illusions and mythologies can persist. But it is disorientating. I’d imagine that’s how the foederati—the Germanic tribes invited to live inside the Roman Empire to protect its borders and settle internal power disputes—must have felt after the last Western Emperor was killed. They must’ve felt increasingly disoriented, as must have the Romans themselves.

Now, in the vacuum left by the end of U.S. expansion, the challenge is not how to restore dominance. The challenge is to learn how to live without it, how to build meaning that isn’t predicated on a sense of superiority. It’s learning how to live in a multipolar world, instead of a unipolar one where the U.S. is the lone, unchallenged superpower. This will require humility, as well as both personal and cultural reinvention, and a willingness to let go of the stories that once served (some of) us, but now no longer make sense.

The frontier is gone. The empire has returned home. The question now is whether it can learn to live there. Or is it doomed to forever conquer itself?

As I sit down to pen this, the clock approaches midnight and states around the U.S. are counting their ballots. We’re still a long way out from any sort of certainty about who will win, and I expect for us not to know for hours, at least, but having to wait days isn’t out of the question. As hold our collective breaths for the results, I can’t help but reflect on some things we, the voters, consistently get wrong about elections. I don’t expect this to be the most popular thing I’ve ever written, but it’s one of the most necessary.

Since it’s pretty clear I won’t be sleeping like a baby tonight, I write this so we can reflect on what we, as an electorate, can do better to improve the system.

Anyone can complain, but it’s our task as citizens to find solutions. No matter who you voted for and whom you support in this election, this applies to all of us (though not equally). It’s just a list of things about which we would do well to change our collective perspective.

1. Kamala’s Miracle

I’ll start with what’s relevant to tonight’s election. I’ve heard numerous people wonder aloud, “How is this election so close?” as they express their frustration and disapproval of Donald Trump. Actually, that it’s close at all—and Trump marching to a landslide victory—is the surprising part.

If Kamala Harris manages to pull off a victory tonight, it will be nothing shy of a political miracle. The Vice President announced her candidacy a mere 107 days before the election—fourteen weeks. As someone who’s worked a lot of ground campaigns for numerous politicians, causes, and political parties, I can say firsthand, that is not a lot of time at all.1 True, campaigns usually call in the boots-on-the-ground GOTV2 volunteers and workers in the final two months for the final push, and the last month is what’s crucial. But Kamala still didn’t have much time to introduce herself to the U.S. electorate.

More importantly, we’ve seen candidates get slaughtered in races around the globe—there were numerous elections this year, at least seventy, in countries around the world and, irrespective of party or ideology, the sitting parties around the world have been unceremoniously losing thanks to the economic damage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. This was true regardless of national strategies to mitigate the virus. It was disruptive to national economies worldwide, plain and simple. Justin Trudeau, in Canada, has seen a marked decline in support, called “a political tragedy” earlier this year.3

While I share a vehement disapproval of Donald Trump, I think we do Democrats a massive disservice by not acknowledging what an uphill battle they had, and we should recognize how hard they’ve fought this election.

The campaign and the party both deserve praise for this.*

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2. Voting is NOT About Identity

Complaints about identity politics are nothing new, so I’ll spare you a rant about how they’re bad and skip to what we don’t often think about when it comes to identity politics. Ironically, many of the people who complain about identity politics are the biggest purveyors of it. Identity politics sounds, to many, like a synonym for “minority voting” when it’s not. Nearly every single non-voter I’ve ever met is guilty of identity politics. They say, “Neither candidate represents me,” or “I don’t feel a connection with either candidate.”

What do we think people mean when they say stuff like this?

They mean the candidates aren’t speaking to their identities.

Similarly, I’ve heard countless people, especially Democrats, complain about how the candidates don’t represent them or that their party should’ve picked a better candidate. All of this fundamentally misunderstands politics.

Politics is a game of compromise.

Identity is a badge you wear—it’s a fucking t-shirt. Values are the actions you take, and principles are the values you stick by when it’s least convenient for you. When we look for someone to represent our feelings, rather than asking ourselves how we can build a better society by electing them, we’re guilty of identity politics.

Consistently, Democratic candidates are usually somewhere to the political right of my left-wing friends who easily forget that candidates don’t only have to appeal to my peers in hyper-liberal Northern and Southern California, they also have to win voters in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Identity politics are ubiquitous in a selfish culture (and we are a selfish culture of the highest order). Swathes of the electorate can’t not make politics about their identities. This is a skill that we, as a populace, need to learn.

3. “It’s the Economy, Stupid”

Currently, exit polls show large swaths of the electorate saying the economy is a top priority. In every election cycle, American presidential candidates promise robust economic growth, lower inflation, and prevalent job creation. We’ve heard this a gazillion times. The phrase “it’s the economy, stupid,” by Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville has its own Wikipedia page.

Yet, politicians’ influence over the economy is more symbolic than substantial. The president wields power over the executive branch and foreign policy; the economy remains largely beyond the reach of the Oval Office. The levers of economic control are limited in the U.S. by design.

The U.S. economy is governed by a web of independent institutions, particularly the Federal Reserve4, and is influenced by a gang of forces beyond the purview of the government. This structural framework limits the extent to which any one administration, or Congress, for that matter, can dictate economic outcomes. No president sets gas prices.

Yet, every election, we hear people say they’re motivated to vote because of high gas prices. As much as I’d love to agree with Mark Cuban when he says Donald Trump is to blame for high gas prices, I must disagree. It just doesn’t work that way, and there are far too many factors that go into gas prices than any given president.

The President and Congress can influence the economy through fiscal policy, which involves government spending and taxation. But fiscal policy is a slow, dull, and politically contentious tool. In a divided or highly partisan Congress, legislative deadlock can thwart any president’s economic agenda. Even if a bill passes, the economic effects of fiscal policy changes are almost always indirect and delayed. The COVID-19 stimulus was a rare example of economic legislation that was passed quickly and with bipartisan agreement. But it was a total anomaly, the exception that proves the rule.

Once we wrap our brains around this fact, we realize that the engine that’s driving so many people’s political decisions is a senseless one. The sad irony in Carville’s statement, “It’s the economy, stupid,” is that anyone who believes that politicians control the economy is, in fact, stupid.5

4. Politicians Aren’t the Entire Problem

More unpopular takes: we’re quite terrible at democracy in the U.S., where we seem to think that voting is the end-all-be-all of democracy. But democracy happens between the elections, in conversations much more than voting booths. We do a bare-minimum job and it shows.

One consequence of our bicameral system is how it seductively invites us to blame the other party and those in power for our problems. Two-party systems give everyone cover—they can just blame the other team.

We continually hear the tired cries of, “The system is broken!” and calls to “drain the swamp” as frustration of political dysfunction hums constantly in the background of our discourse. It’s practically an Americanism to bemoan dysfunctional government, and this has been true for a very long time, since well before the current era of genuine dysfunction. Such sentiments are echoed across political spectrums, framing politicians as corrupt, power-hungry maniacs with zero interest in public service.

Millions of (most?) Americans believe this.

When I started working in politics professionally nearly fifteen years ago, I believed this, too. I thought voters were generally good and politicians were power-hungry people who corrupted things. Within a few years of working face-to-face with the electorate, this view flipped. It was the biggest (and hardest) lesson during my years in politics, and a tough pill to swallow.

This reflection isn’t meant to absolve those in office from accountability, nor does it suggest there aren’t abuses of power. Corruption and unethical behavior do exist, and such practices deserve scrutiny and reform. Yet, a fundamental aspect of improving the system lies in shifting our focus from lamenting its flaws to examining the electorate’s role in perpetuating them.

Politicians, after all, are responsive to the pressures of their voters. 

Consider how often we demand (and reward) bold promises and absolute solutions, or how polarized rhetoric drives voting choices, often at the expense of nuance and compromise. Politicians, conscious of these demands, frequently respond in kind, giving voice to the loudest demands even if it means sacrificing pragmatism for popularity. The structure of democracy rests upon the principle that leaders are elected by—and accountable to—the people. When the people themselves prioritize partisan loyalty over competent governance or reward rhetoric over results, the system naturally mirrors those preferences, and we all point our fingers at one another.

No, this doesn’t mean that “both sides are bad” and that compromise is always good. But if we lose sight of politics as the aforementioned game of compromise, we miss the whole point, which is building coalitions to accomplish things as a cohesive American whole.

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Voting is one of the few acts in our secular societies that borders on the sacred. In doing so, we carry on a tradition of self-governance bequeathed us by our cultural ancestors from Ancient Greece roughly 2,500 years ago. It’s among the privileges our democratic republic affords. 

Yet, few of us vote regularly. Pew Research found that between 2018 and 2022, a meager 70% of the U.S. population voted in any election; 37% voted in all three elections. That’s why I’ve spent the last twelve years of my political career registering people to vote. Those of us doing voter registration drives combat two forces—apathy and disinformation.

Recently, myths about widespread voter fraud—especially by undocumented immigrants—have spread like an unchecked wildfire on a hot day in a dry forest. While concerns about voter fraud typically rise after an election, fears reached new heights after the 2020 election. Republicans, especially, doubt election integrity.

Earlier this year, Donald Trump said “millions” of undocumented immigrants are registered to vote in the upcoming election. In a speech delivered on January 5th, 2024, he said, “That’s why they are allowing [undocumented immigrants] to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote.”

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson followed suit, saying undocumented immigrants pose a “clear and present danger to the integrity of our election system.” Promoting the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, Johnson said, “If a nefarious actor wants to intervene in our elections, all they have to do is check a box on a form and sign their name.” 

Johnson hatched a conspiracy theory that the Biden Administration intended this, saying that the Administration “welcomed millions and millions of illegal aliens” and “the millions that have been paroled can simply go to their local welfare office or the DMV and register to vote.” 

Elon Musk jumped on the bandwagon, saying Democrats are “importing” undocumented immigrants to bolster their vote in the upcoming election. Messages like these spread like a high school rumor across social media.

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I retired from professional politics in 2018 to write full-time and now strictly volunteer doing non-partisan voter registration. Nonetheless, I’m deeply familiar with the political process — and let me tell you, the statements above are flat-out wrong. Worse than that, they aren’t mere lies — the usual cacophonous political smears that incessantly flow through our information spaces — they’re lies that couldn’t possibly be true.

How Voting Works

The rumpus over alleged voter fraud centers around voter ID laws or lack thereof. Trump has called for voter ID laws time and again. Elon Musk tweeted, “Wow, it is now illegal to require voter ID in California. They just made PREVENTING voter fraud against the law.”

The problem with voter ID laws probably isn’t what you think it is. No, this isn’t where I lecture you on the evils of voter ID laws. The issue is that every single state currently requires an ID or social security number—either to register to vote or vote on election day. 

Different states have different laws. In most states, you must present identification at the polling place no matter what. In some states, you must present ID to register to vote — or when voting at the polling location. 

Take California, for example, which technically doesn’t ask for voter ID at the polling place unless you registered to vote by mail:

A voter may be asked to provide identification at the polls if it is his or her first time voting (this requirement applies if the individual registered by mail without providing a driver’s license number, state identification number, or the last four digits of a Social Security number). Acceptable forms of identification include driver’s licenses, utility bills, or any document sent by a government agency.

A crucial line here is “the last four digits of a Social Security number.” This highlights another glaring defect of such laws: state ID cards don’t contain information that could help weed out non-citizens. I’ve been registering people to vote in California since 2012. We were required to obtain either a government-issued photo ID—ID numbers copied onto the voter registration form—or the last four of their social security number. 

The push for voter ID laws — that require you to show ID at the polling location when you cast your ballot — fundamentally misunderstands how the process works, and, ironically, risks making fraud much more likely.

Signature Matching

Every legal document in the U.S.—petition, ballot, contract—must be signed, or it’s invalid. When you cast your vote, you sign the ballot. If you don’t sign the ballot, your vote doesn’t count. The signature on your ballot is then matched by representatives working for the Secretary of State to your signature on file. This is how you’re identified in most states, whether you show ID at the polling location or not. Here’s how it works.

Neither a signature nor ID, even a government-issued ID, signify citizenship — they merely identify you. If you take out your state ID right now and look at the back of it, you’ll see it has your signature on it. 

This is what the Secretary of State matches. They already have your name, birthdate, address, social security number, and more on file, so your signature serves as your ID, except it’s always with you. The signature undergoes a three-point verification. 

• First, a machine compares the signatures, matching the voter’s signature with the signature on file, like when a homicide detective using a machine to match fingerprints. You must sign to receive any government-issued ID. They have your signature, just like if you’ve been convicted of a crime, detectives have your fingerprints on file to match with, except everyone must sign to get an ID and only people who’ve been booked into jail or immigrate are fingerprinted.

• Next, if the machine notices discrepancies between your ballot signature and the signature on file, the ballot is sent to a human reviewer to resolve the issue. For mail-in ballots, all states require signatures and special election workers are trained to spot discrepancies in thirty-two states. 

• Last, in most states, if there’s an issue with the signature found by both the computer and human reviewer, the voter is contacted and given a chance to come in and resolve the problem in person. This is called “ballot curing” and it adds one more layer of accountability.

This signature method is much more secure than the ID method. How on earth are signatures more secure than IDs? Glad you asked. The answer is machines. 

Poll workers are overwhelmingly volunteers, working long days, often churning through thousands of voters in a day. Fatigue is a real thing, and people lose concentration when repeatedly performing the same task.

Ever counted money and lost your count halfway through, and you had to start over again? It’s like that, but instead of counting a few hundred dollars, they’re analyzing hundreds or thousands of IDs. Pretty soon, they all start to look the same. Combine this with the three-point, rather than one-point, verification, and you have a much more secure system. 

People get into bars and clubs with fake IDs of siblings or friends all the time. It’s easy to fool. Signatures are much harder to replicate, especially if you’re going to get it right in one shot, like on a ballot in a voting booth.

Meanwhile, fake IDs have gotten harder to spot as digital technologies have improved. We abandoned having humans scrupulously match fingerprints in homicide cases because humans are more fallible than a machine verified by a human.

Since undocumented immigrants have no official signature on file with corresponding citizenship (as verified by their social security number), supposing anyone tries this, their attempts are cast out because there’s no signature to match with (and they’re prosecuted). 

This begs a larger question — are we expected to believe that “millions” of scheming, plotting, “nefarious actors” are giving the government their handwritten name, address, and date of birth when they commit crimes?

The answer is no. When non-citizens wind up on voter rolls, it’s through administrative errors, not deliberate attempts to commit voter fraud. This makes such cases an exceptionally rare phenomenon, so rare it’s “undetectable” according to researchers who study it. 

That doesn’t mean it never happens. Recently, Oregon passed a law allowing people to get driver’s licenses without proving citizenship. Oregon also has automatic voter registration; when you get your driver’s license, you’re registered to vote. Since then, 300 non-citizens were added to the state’s voter rolls and three reportedly voted, not the “millions” claimed by Trump, Johnson, and Musk.

But Oregon is unique in having both the new DMV law and automatic registration, and, considering 3,143,497 people were eligible to vote in Oregon, in 2020, safe to say an election won’t hinge on those three votes. Voter ID laws wouldn’t have prevented this. If a poll worker scans a voter’s ID in a computer, and it indicates that they’re a citizen registered to vote, there’s no way to recognize the error. Ensuring that non-citizens aren’t accidentally registered as citizens, like in Georgia, would have.

In March 2022, the officials in the State of Georgia conducted an audit of the voting records from the past twenty-five years. They found 1,634 individuals who attempted to register to vote despite being non-citizens. Want to know how many of these people actually voted over the past quarter-century? None. 

Georgia requires voters to provide ID at the polls. But Georgia’s voter ID law—that eliminated the signature-match process—wasn’t signed until 2021. This unequivocally proves how robust the signature-match process is. That’s what I meant when I said these lies couldn’t possibly be true. There can’t be systematic, rampant voter fraud because these checks prevent it.

The last problem with passing voter ID laws is that there’s an implicit admission that widespread voter fraud is a problem, a problem which, as we’ve covered, doesn’t exist. I may not know perfect government policy, but I know passing laws combatting fraud that’s not happening, isn’t it.

What comes to mind when you think of American Libertarians?

You might close your eyes and picture groups of young white men so devoutly in love with freedom that they drape themselves in “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and star-spangled shorts; sitting around a bonfire and passionately discussing the works of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman — the kind of people who read the U.S. Constitution to their kids at bedtime.

Maybe you envision hipster-ish neckbeards swapping inside info about the latest cryptocurrencies and get-rich-quick schemes, professing their hard-earned stripes as the die-hard capitalists they proclaim to be.

You’ll almost certainly hear them say “taxation is theft” at least once (for a great criticism of Libertarian philosophy, see this story by Dustin Arand).

No matter what, you’re probably picturing someone profoundly skeptical of the Federal Government and was a staunch supporter of States’ Rights.

Individual freedom and States’ Rights are two cornerstones of American Libertarian philosophy. And yet, we rarely reflect on the fact that they stand in stark opposition to one another.

The nebulous contradiction — of professed support for the states and individual freedom — doesn’t much matter in the minds of many people, who are more political hobbyists than activists.

As someone who’s worked in politics for over a decade now, I’ve learned that there are two types of people in this world — the political hobbyists, who view politics as an exercise in personal identity or group subscription. Then some people are actually into politics, the activists.

Political activists are collecting petition signatures, working in soup kitchens or animal shelters, and generally putting their money (not to mention blood, sweat, and tears) where their mouths are. Political hobbyists just argue online all day.

Political hobbyists operate in highly romanticized fantasy worlds where everything works just so in the artificial realities their brains cook up, worlds that hardly map onto reality. It’s all an intellectual exercise. What they envision in the peaceful recesses of their minds doesn’t translate when the changing, unpredictable world rears its ugly head.

To be fair, Libertarians are usually highly principled people. But even the best principles dissolve into an ocean of problems when taken too far and held onto too steadfastly.

Case in point: Grafton, New Hampshire and the crisis of bears.

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Grafton, New Hampshire: Libertarian Utopia

Grafton is a small town that fell on hard times. As shifting demands of the changing American economy left Grafton barren and unable to collect enough tax money from the remaining citizens, extremely-online Libertarians saw an opportunity in a struggling town.

They hatched a plan online called The Free Town Project. They moved to Grafton in droves, purchasing property in large enough numbers in an attempt to overrun the local government and set up a near-lawless Libertarian paradise.

It was as if Atlas himself shrugged, and the Free Townspeople of Grafton felt the weight of bureaucracy lift from their shoulders. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me the residents of the newly-Libertarian Grafton woke up in the morning and lifted themselves out of bed by their bootstraps.

At first, it seemed like a dream come true if you’re a Libertarian. Taxes and regulations were slashed away, allowing businesses to thrive without the red tape.

The town became a mecca for self-sufficient individuals who cherished their personal freedoms like badges of honor. Residents reveled in their newfound autonomy. But the plan wasn’t executed perfectly. And soon, the residents of Grafton would have a much larger problem on their hands as they came to learn “the right to bear arms” they cherished so much had another meaning.

The first town meetings were described as “angry” and “shouty” as long-time residents clashed with the Libertarian newcomers who’d heard about the experiment from far away and moved there hoping to get in early on the Libertarian utopia.

While they hoped to secure a majority, that never actually ended up happening, so the whacky ideas they had were never implemented. Matthew Hongolgz-Hetling, author of A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears), tells Sean Illing of Vox:

They couldn’t pass some of the initiatives they wanted. They tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from the school district and to completely discontinue paying for road repairs, or to declare Grafton a United Nations free zone, some of the outlandish things like that. But they did find that a lot of existing Grafton residents would be happy to cut town services to the bone. And so they successfully put a stranglehold on things like police services, things like road services and fire services and even the public library. All of these things were cut to the bone.

As the days turned into weeks and weeks into months, the absence of government oversight began to have some unintended consequences. People did whatever they wanted. They could decorate their houses like something out of a Dr. Seuss book if their hearts desired.

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Democracy is getting a lot of attention these days. While that, in itself, is wonderful, it’s also a profound political tragedy that would make an Ancient Greek dramatist proud. If you’re like me, you’re worried about the ongoing siege of democracy as an institution. This isn’t partisan. Some from every party—from Republicans to Democrats and Independents, in the U.S., and Labour to Conservative and Liberal Democrats in the U.K.—can, in theory, agree that democracy is good. But it’s also imperiled.

As democracy comes under assault worldwide, many of us have taken a step back to reflect on the system that we’ve long taken for granted. It’s sobering that such a reflection only awakens once we realize how fragile our democracies are. Half of the world’s democracies are declining, driven by the unchecked spread of disinformation and a growing sense of cynicism and discontentedness people feel. Small, growing, vocal minorities in nations worldwide are forsaking democratic values.

It’s the great 20th-century hangover. We made so much progress after WWII, that, now, at the start of the new millennium — as technological progress reaches breakneck speed — there’s a skulking sense of “Now what?” Our technologies are rapidly evolving, our sociopolitical structures can hardly keep up, and many people worldwide feel left behind. Strongman leaders have come out of the woodwork, promising the restoration of a tarnished glory from a time before life became so messy.

This is true of most anti-democratic movements. Now, we stare out into the unknown, casting our gaze into the gaping abyss from the precipice of the heights of our crumbling democracies, both fearful and frustrated that so many of our peers have committed themselves against democracy itself.

We Are Democracies

In October 2020, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah drew sharp criticism after penning a four-word tweet: “We’re not a democracy.” While this wasn’t the first time I’ve heard such rhetoric, a form of intellectual dishonesty that’s become so commonplace on the political right-wing in the United States, it was an especially chilling moment reading such words from a sitting United States Senator.

“Does he really not know that the country he serves under genuinely is a democracy?” I couldn’t help but wonder, though I was immediately familiar with the anti-democratic tendencies he espoused. They’d reverberated in right-wing filter bubbles for years and, despite the best prevarications from the “we’re not a democracy” crowd, we know exactly what they mean. They’re saying they don’t want a democracy.

The powerful, elite classes have always had an uncomfortable relationship with the idea of democracy, both in abstract form and lived praxis. Κλεισθένης (Cleisthenes) himself, the creator of Athenian democracy in the 500s BCE, had to battle the entrenched interests of the aristocratic class when establishing the first documented democracy. When you’re part of, or represent, a powerful, elite group (read: wealthy, white men, usually of Northern European descent, in the United States), the mere idea of “power to the people” feels vaguely threatening.

The backlash against Lee’s tweet was immediate. Media, both legacy and social, lambasted the tweet. Rightfully so. It’s alarming that a Senator doesn’t grasp the political structure established by the U.S. Constitution he swore an oath to. Couple that with the swaths of American Republicans who’ve become anti-democratic, and the situation is daunting.

“The Great Body of the People”

Lee then did what we’ve come to expect from Republicans in the Trump era—instead of apologizing and reflecting on his tweet, he doubled down, publishing an essay titled Of Course We’re Not a Democracy. The thrust of his argument followed the same tired, familiar lines of contemporary, anti-democratic right-wing discourse. “We’re not a democracy,” they’ll tell you, “We’re a republic.” Lee went on to say:

Insofar as “democracy” means “a political system in which government derives its powers from the consent of the governed,” then of course that accurately describes our system. But the word conjures far more than that. It is often used to describe rule by majority, the view that it is the prerogative of government to reflexively carry out the will of the majority of its citizens.

But, that’s precisely what we have, Senator Lee. Our U.S. Constitution begins with the words, “We the People of the United States,” or, as the founder of Senator Lee’s Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, described it, “A Government for the People, by the People,” that he said, “shall not perish from this earth.” “O tempura! O mores!” Oh, how far we’ve fallen.

Contrarily to Senator Lee, James Madison wrote in 1788:

…we may define a republic to be…a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices…It is ESSENTIAL to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic.

Meanwhile, Lee’s Republican Party has consistently filibustered in the Senate to block popular legislation proposed by Democrats. It only takes 41 senators, representing 21% of the U.S. population, to do so.

Tyranny of the Minority

The “disdain for modernity” underpins the desire for minority rule, or, as comedian Stephen Colbert said, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” When your worldview conflicts with reality as it’s popularly understood, the only recourse you have is an appeal to naked power.

Right-wing groups like The Heritage Foundation share a similar sentiment when they bemoan “the tyranny of the majority.” As Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D., said in Preventing The Tyranny of the Majority:

In a democracy, of course, the majority rules. That’s all well and good for the majority, but what about the minority? Don’t they have rights that deserve respect? People often refer to the United States as a democracy, but technically speaking, that’s not true. It’s a republic.

I have two bits of bad news for both Lee and Feulner. First, they can spare us the pity party about how wealthy white elites are a minority. Because someone in society must have power and make decisions, the alternative to what they call “tyranny of the majority” is “tyranny of the minority”—which is what they really want (and it’s what they’ve enjoyed for a very long time).

Political scientists know well that what we have can accurately be described as the latter, not the former. When Trump was impeached (again) in 2021, fifty-seven senators voted to convict him of the riot and insurrection on January 6th, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, fewer than the two-thirds majority required to secure a conviction. Those mostly Democratic senators represented 76.6 million more people than the senators who voted to acquit—yet, Trump was acquitted. If that’s not a minority rule, I don’t know what is.

Distance, Not Disempowerment

While it is true that the Founding Fathers, steeped in limited information, were deeply skeptical of what they called the “pure democracy” of Ancient Greece, their primary reasoning for making a distinction about distance, not who is and is not entitled to exercise power through representation.

James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers:

As the natural limit of a democracy is that distance from the central point which will just permit the most remote citizens to assemble as often as their public functions demand, and will include no greater number than can join in those functions; so the natural limit of a republic is that distance from the centre which will barely allow the representatives to meet as often as may be necessary for the administration of public affairs.

The obvious concern here is the distance people would have to travel to convene and make decisions in the 18th century. So when they posit the word “republic” against “democracy,” the implication that they’re describing direct democracy is obvious. But that’s not what Senator Lee and his ilk are protesting. Nobody in the U.S. is insisting that the Constitution doesn’t really spell out a representative government, but rather, a pure democracy. It’s a non-sequitur. As George Thomas wrote for The Atlantic:

American constitutional design can best be understood as an effort to establish a sober form of democracy. It did so by embracing representation, the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the protection of individual rights…

A Democratic Republic

The second count is even more damaging, namely, yes, yes we are a democracy, and all the kicking, screaming, self-victimization, and toddler tantrums of anti-democratic aristocrats in the world won’t change that. The immediate problem is the fact that a constitutional republic is a type of representative democracy. They’re near-synonyms.

A kingdom is a form of monarchy, but not all monarchies are kingdoms, just like a constitutional republic is a form of democracy, but not all democracies are republics.

If I held up an apple and said, “This is a piece of fruit,” and someone barked back at me, “That’s not a fruit—it’s an apple!” anyone present would have to pause to peel their eyes from the back of their heads where they’d rolled uncontrollably because, as we all know, an apple is a fruit.

“Salus populi suprema lex,” wrote John Locke — the “founding father of liberal thought” — in Second Treatise on Government, in 1660 — “The Welfare of the People shall be the highest law.” Locke’s work would later go on to become the seeds that would germinate into the much larger idea called The United States of America. It seems Senator Lee and many others like him are either forgetting or ignoring the clear lineage of roots that have delivered us The United States we currently live in. Tweeting, “We’re not a democracy,” is patently anti-American.

Has our union, our beautiful democratic republic, ever been perfect? Not in the slightest. We’ve seen slavery, Jim Crow, the subjugation of women, the oppression of Native Americans, ethnic Chinese, Japanese, and more. But it’s better than the alternatives being proposed by those who seek to destroy it, and it’s our responsibility to defend it. Progress toward “a more perfect union” is never made by those who wish to drive society backward.