Why We Left the US According to Nic - Part 3

REMINDER OF OUR PREVIOUS INTRO:

It has been on Nic's radar for months that I was coming after him for this blog.  He finally felt ready and we forced a few hours to ourselves over the weekend to talk - yes, I said hours.  My transcription of our conversation is almost word for word, so it's quite lengthy and I'm going to break it down into his specific points.

Alex:  So why did we leave the United States?

Nic:  Right… so, you have asked me to give kind of my take on the the political and systemic issues in the United States that made me not optimistic. I haven’t quite prepared this out, but I think it broke down into a few different issues.  First, you’ve got the breakdown of norms that underpin our system, and that is something I started noticing as far back as 2011 and really crystallized in maybe 2014 to 2016. Second, we have the systemic level imbalances in our political system that are on a trajectory to only worsen towards greater minority rule.  Third – and, to a large extent this stems from and it feeds back into both of those two problems – is we have the increasing antagonism within American society.  

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Alex:  It becomes a matter of desperation.  When you're not given the power that you need to do your job, you start feeling helpless and more desperate so you act more irrationally.

PART 3

Nic:  Yeah, which is the perfect time to actually move on the next point then, which is the systemic political imbalances inherent in US system.  These have always been there and they are very much there by design, but they are also worsening.  Specifically, they’re on a trajectory to worsen further.  Through American history, there have been three elections where the winner of the popular vote was the loser of the Electoral College.  Two of those happened in the last 20 years.  There is an increasing chance that those will happen with greater frequency in years to come, specifically with the self-sorting that we have in American Society right now.  That has roots in so many places, but people are moving out of areas they ideologically disagree with.  

 

Frankly, the Dobbs decision is only going to accelerate that as progressives or women move out of republican states where abortion is illegal to states where they have access to safe abortions.  That's only going to further exacerbate the political sorting that we're having and ultimately, from a political science perspective, that that creates a lot of overwork, what we what we call “wasted votes”.  It’s a crass term, I don’t like it, but it’s kind of the idea that you need 50% to win 50% + 1 to win, so every vote you have in excess of that plus one is a wasted vote.  In an ideal world, you're not drawing your districts at 50.001% you're trying them at 54% or whatever that's safe and reliable but minimizes the number of wasted votes.  Donald Trump got 7% in Seattle and Joe Biden got probably 13% or so in and a number of super conservative counties and states, a lot of places in Wyoming and Utah Montana where it was 10% or maybe even less.  

 

So, there are a lot of wasted votes on both sides, but of course the biggest concentration of wasted votes are in cities.  And cities are becoming more populous – someone could quibble and say “well, but with the pandemic and people moving out of cities” – but that's a very short-term thing.  If you look at the overall trend, in not just US but global population movements over the entirety of human history, the trend is towards greater urbanism.  It’s a good thing, but the problem is that those cities are becoming a larger share of the population and bluer at the same time.  Part of that, if you're doing the math on that on the statement I just made, is that it also means that society is becoming more liberal.  While that is true, it’s not being represented in electoral and policy outcomes or in electoral outcomes.  The issue with the American political system is it's designed very specifically to blunt the impact of that.  

 

Alex:  It’s a very logical and rational expectation to see that moving into the future because, as you said, urban areas have attracted more people throughout human history.

 

Nic:  Yeah, and the founders didn't want Boston and New York to run the whole country.  But there's no way they could have imagined the LA metro region having 14 million people or that the state of California would be the 4th or 5th largest economy in the world.  These fundamentally anti-democratic checks that were put into our system that were probably not good ideas in 1776 either – just to be clear, I'm not defending the founding fathers, I think they were aristocrats trying to maintain their system of power, of the land and nobility – but those anti-democratic checks were less damaging to an agrarian, 18th century society.  Our country at that time didn't have the degree of ideological self-sorting that we have today.  The trends towards urbanism and the urban rural divides and wanting to increase the share of rural political power was present, but you had a lot more people of different political persuasions living in both urban and rural societies.  

 

That's not the case anymore.  Everything seems to indicate that now there is a breakdown of social connections.  Fewer and fewer people have personal friends who are members of a different political party, fewer and fewer people are comfortable with the idea of their child marrying someone of a different political persuasion.  All the data indicate that these trends are escalating and likely to further.  The systems in the United States that are meant to increase rural or minority political power are actually, I believe, going to create a minority rule.  Over time the problem is going to get even worse than that because you're going to start to have a system where, as I mentioned, you're going to have increasing frequency not just the presidential level but especially at the Senate level, perhaps the House due to self-sorting. Where 55-60% of the country might be voting liberal and conservatives will control 55% of the seats.

 

Okay, so here's where it gets really bad though.  I think we already do have that system to a large extent.  I think Mitch McConnell is very cognizant of this.  He knows that he's in the minority of American public opinion, but he has political power anyways and, especially under the Trump administration, he had political power in the majority in the Senate.  There has been a breakdown of norms to where behavior that didn't used to be acceptable is now either acceptable or can be justified and made acceptable by pointing to the breakdown of norms that preceded it.  Both sides view the other not as opposition, but as an enemy.  We can see that this gets dangerous in a lot of countries around the world when the faction that is in the minority has political power, they are incredibly scared of losing it.  They are fearful of losing their cultural hegemony and their way of life and things like that, and I think that's very much the case for conservative white men without college degrees in the United States, they feel like they're losing their social worth because of progressive politics.  Political players like McConnell are fearful that if they yield power, they will never again be able to reclaim power through the normal system.  So that side in particular has all the further incentive to toss what remain of our norms and systems out the window.

 

I'm saying this after it all happened, but I was actually saying this before it happened as well.  Those of you who I have had conversations with might remember that I was saying this in 2016, especially in 2020, that what you're going to see is these people unwilling to give up power and using violence and extra-legal, extra-political means to try to stay in power and exert their loosely held authoritarian power.  That's why we saw an attempted coup in the United States in 2021.  That was not a fluke, and that’s the most important point – it was not a fluke, that was not one man scared and desperate.  That was someone who was emblematic of the political forces that are scared and desperate.  Those systemic level incentives are still absolutely at play, even though we managed to squeak by that incident.  It was a failed coup, but the incentives that lead to coup attempts are absolutely still in place and only getting stronger.  It doesn't mean the United States is going to have a coup that just tosses democracy out the window next year, it totally could go on limping through for a long time.  In part because Republicans might actually win the election fair and square next year right and in part because Republicans are not the incumbents right now, so they don't have as much of that that raw political power to exercise.  Despite how bungled it was, it's easier to launch a coup when you're already in power than to try to overthrow someone else.  Part of the problem with the prosecutions against Donald Trump right now (which are all absolutely true and accurate and he should go to jail) is that it's going to be that much easier for president Ron DeSantis (let's suppose) during the election cycle prosecutes Pete Buttigieg (who's running against him) for campaign finance violations stemming from his mayoral run.  Let’s suppose Pete Buttigieg broke the law, maybe on purpose maybe not on purpose.  Most of folks in local politics have committed campaign finance violations, knowingly or unknowingly, there are just a number of laws that are not well enforced.  But all of the incentives will be in play the next time Republicans are in power and all of the norms will already be broken that prevented them from using that power to make the political system an unviable vehicle for airing political grievances.  The majority won’t be able to get policy outcomes they want by going through the political system.  At that point, I think not only can we say that democracy is dead – even if people continue voting – but also that is when society will start to break down even further.  I think this is to a large extent already the case.  Look at gun control, where people will accurately say we can't get what we believe we need through the political system and that decreases trust and confidence in the political system and increases political violence as the only means to accomplish their ends, from both the left and the right.  

 

So that is why I am not optimistic about the short or long term trajectory of the United States democracy and why, even if we don't have a coup or a civil war in the next 15 years I don't believe that my kids will grow up and have the ability to have their vote make a meaningful impact. 

 

Alex:  Particularly not if they are shot before they have a chance to grow up.

 

Nic:  There’s that too.  But that's a totally different issue to me.

 

Alex:  Statistically, it is far less significant…

 

Nic:  Not only that, there are so many policies that I like better about the Netherlands than the United States right now…

 

Alex:  …and vice versa…

 

Nic:  Right, if you really break it down, a lot of the things that we advocate for in my work is, for example, increasing transit and sustainability, decreasing our dependence on cars, density for environmental and human reasons, decreasing gun violence… all those policies are not perfect in the Netherlands, but they’re much better.  It’s as if I won on every issue that my local, municipal-level candidates we're working on and we overnight managed to implement a 20-year plan.  But that is fundamentally totally different from the systemic level political stuff.  It just comes back to people saying “Well, I understand that you were thinking of leaving but Biden won and the Democrats have the Senate, so doesn't that mean that all these fears are now moot?” and the answer is “no”.  We are winning policy victories, such as increasing investments in sustainable energy, but we are not addressing the systemic level political imbalances nor the cultural social antagonism that are leading to the decline of the American democracy.  And the reason those things are happening is because they can't happen.  It's not that Biden doesn't get it, he gets it.  But the system is made to stop them from changing.  The system is inflexible by design and so I don't see a way out of it.