There’s little meaningful "representative democracy" in a polity like the United States. There never really has been.

Your “representative” in Congress allegedly represents almost 800,000 people, people with whom you have nothing in common other than geographic proximity, if even that after all the oddities of gerrymandering. We teach our children we live in a representative democracy when the claim is very obviously absurd.

Europeans and political scientists may object that meaningful representation comes via the intermediation of political parties. Political parties are smaller, and by virtue of self-selection, more homogeneous than the polity as a whole. In theory, a person might be enfranchised within their political party by actively participating in it, and then be enfranchised via their political party in a parliament or legislature. Proportional representation means that all parties then are represented, according to their support within the population.

Regular readers know I strongly favor electoral reform to bring multiparty democracy to the United States. So far be it from me to piss too hard on this parade.

Nevertheless, even if we had six rather than two national parties, they would still, from the perspective of most citizens, be distant institutions run by insiders to whom most of us would have little access. Representation is a matter of degree, and multiparty parliamentary democracies do a better job of it than America’s destructive duopoly, but even in well-arranged parliamentary systems the claim a parliament is “representative” is a stretch.

What would it mean for a law-making body to be representative? What are we actually after?

Much as I am fond of sortition enthusiasts, I don’t think what we want is a representative sample in a statistical sense. Lawmaking is an activity most of us have little expertise or inclination toward. The whole point of “representative democracy” is to delegate the task to specialist-experts, who by definition are unlike most of the rest of us, who become even less like us by virtue of being formally employed as “representatives”.

In social affairs, statistical independence is the exception, correlation is the norm. The ways that specialist-expert representatives are different from the rest of us will bring divergences between that group as a class and the rest of our interests and values. There is no getting around this. If you choose legislators by sortition, they will be “representative” only until the moment they take their unusual job, school themselves in unusual skills, become overwhelmed by the generosity of well-wishers and lobbyists with whom ordinary constituents rarely truck. Representatives cannot be representative. Precisely because they are representatives, they are different.

I think that the version of representation we are after is the version generally provided by the legal profession. When we hire a lawyer, we don’t do so because we imagine that she is “like us”. We do so because we imagine that the skills our attorney could bring to bear would be effective at advancing our values and interests, if only she would wield those skills on our behalf. So we hire her, we pay her, to wield those skills on our behalf.

But in order for the arrangement to work, "we" — the people doing the hiring — must have a coherent set values and interests she can advance. We must actively, persistently communicate to our attorney what those values and interests are. Her role is to listen and understand our interests as we understand them, help hone them into something actionable and coherent, and then to develop effective means of advancing them. Although it is not her role to gainsay what we understand our own interests to be, it very much is her role to provide expert feedback about the relationship between various tactics we might consider and the likelihood of actually advancing those interests.

Effective representation doesn’t come from who our attorney is. She is nothing like us. Effective representation results from an active collaboration between the represented and the representative, and active supervision by the represented.

In status quo American democracy, this kind of representation certainly does take place. But the “client” cannot be the electorate that gave our representative her perch. The very idea is incoherent. Those 800,000 people disagree among themselves, often strongly. They do not share the same values and interests.

No, election as a representative doesn’t in practice mean a person represents the incoherent mass that is “their constituents”. It simply places a person in a position where they can choose what values and interests actually to represent. Some people who are elected have strong allegiances to a preexisting set of values, and they work to advance those, collaborating with people they understand to be important proponents of those values. That sounds noble, but keep in mind the values to which they are so strongly committed may be diametrically opposed to those of a significant fraction of their constituents, who are left not unrepresented, but anti-represented.

Most electeds are more pragmatic. They effectively sell their advocacy in the same way that a lawyer might. Election simply places them in a position where they have something valuable to offer in the marketplace that otherwise they would not have.

In any case, there is no meaningful collaboration with and supervision by “their constituents” as a whole. There cannot be. Constituents do not share a coherent set of values and interests that anyone could collaborate to advance.

If we want meaningful representation, we would have to move towards a very different system, something like mass representative democracy. But we are very, very far from such a thing.

This has been a pretty bleak presentation of status quo representative democracy. I think accurately so! One reason why people are not so exercised to save “Our Democracy” is because most of us do not perceive ourselves to be meaningfully represented in the democracy that we are supposed to save.

And yet.

The actual practice of American-style “representative” democracy is somehow a lot more open, a lot less indifferent, than the picture I’ve painted. Representatives do not and cannot meaningfully represent the mass of their constituents, no. But they are nevertheless desperate to liked. They cannot represent, but they still have to win the next election if they are to keep their job and the opportunities it brings.

So in lieu of representation, we get pandering. Our representatives publicize the least contentious things they do, tell us in our newsletters how hard they are working for us, bend over backwards to offer “constituent services” in order to communicate that they are on our side. In safe partisan districts, we get fairy tales of heroes and villains, in which Our Noble Representative stands up to the corruption and perfidy of the Bad Political Party.

Elected officials’ desperation to be liked offers a back-door simulacrum of actual representation. We cannot collaborate with our representatives to affirmatively advance our values and interests. But we can threaten punish them when they work against us. We can badmouth them, run ads against them, primary them. We don’t have representation, but we have “wreckresentation”. We can’t make them work on our behalf, but often we can frighten them away from working against us. Not always. Where controversies are aligned with partisan allegiances, representatives in non-swing districts can safely choose their party’s side with little fear of punishment. But when a representative might wish to work against a faction in their own party, or take a position on a controversy not yet calcified along partisan lines, they risk being villainized, demonized, becoming unliked and electorally vulnerable.

The system feels “open” because even though we cannot gain representation, our “representatives” assiduously crave our approval. It’s not enfranchisement, but flattery can be a consolation prize. We do have some genuine capacity to manipulate elected officials, by threatening to render them dislikable. That’s not representation, but maybe “wreckresentation” is the next best thing.

It may be over, however. “Wreckresentation” is becoming professionalized. AIPAC, of course, has been a pioneer, systematically surveilling American politics for dissidents against their version of a pro-Israel position, in order to disparage and destroy electeds who fail to toe the line. This cycle, the crypto industry adopted the same playbook. And Elon Musk, whose brave new scale of expenditures dwarfs all who came before, now threatens in general to wreck the careers of anyone not with his program.

The desperation of elected officials to be liked, their fear of scandal, is the heart of what’s left for ordinary Americans to perceive as “our democracy”. We don’t have representation. But we do have the people we elect constantly pandering to us and currying our favor. As the fear of organized interests comes to overwhelm concerns about pissing off random groups of constituents, as more and more it is Elon Musk rather than constituents whose favor must be curried, this last affective vestige of “democracy” may too, like so much else, wither and die.

This post is dedicated to John Roberts.

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People I talk to whose worldview is close to mine often profess a sense of bafflement:

I mean, they are just destroying this country. It's one thing to want to win, to want to run the place. But what's the point of ruling a country if you turn it into a cesspool of corruption?

The "Iron Law of Institutions", propounded by Jon Schwarz, offers one potential answer.

I want to offer a less cynical explanation. Perhaps where we see corruption, our opponents see virtue. Is "influence peddling" such a problem if the pedlars are, well, a good influence?

We tend to see collective action problems, tragedies of the commons, self-interested, transactional decisions that compose to catastrophes no one could want.

What if to our opponents these outcomes are not catastrophes at all, but great successes, a righting of wrongs?

A republic if you can keep it

From the moment of the American founding, our "republican form of government" has been Janus-faced.

To most of us, in most of our civics classes, a "republic" just means representative democracy. Unqualified "democracy", direct democracy, doesn't scale. It suffers from information problems, as high-quality lawmaking requires more attention and expertise than can be expected of ordinary citizens, if we are to have lives and a prosperous economy as well.

In a "republican" system, rather than participate directly in lawmaking, our information problem is simplified to periodically electing full-time professionals to represent our values and interests in the lawmaking process. Fundamentally, the system remains democratic. We've just settled upon a more practical, effective structure for government of the people, by the people, for the people than pretending we can run legislatures millions of citizens strong.

But the republican form of government makes an appeal to a quite distinct tradition, also strong at the American founding.

Under this second tradition, all men are not equal in real life, regardless what they were when our Creator endowed them. Some men are fit to rule. Other men and women are fit to serve.

In a well-ordered nation, the best men must rule. This is an edict not of any parochial interest or self-dealing faction, but of nature itself. It serves the interest of all.

A slave may have no control over his circumstance, yet be much better off than if he did, when his betters order a world in which his labor contributes to a prosperity that, in due measure, he also enjoys.

Whatever it is called — "Congress", "Parliament" — the republican form of government vouchsafes a kind of aristocracy. The great virtue of a republic, in this tradition, is that it attaches to this aristocracy institutions of notional consent, easing the burden leaders always face of persuading the ruled to submit to those who rightfully rule them.

The US Constitution was the Barack Obama of its time, fresh-faced and inspirational and sufficiently vague that different factions could project their own hopes onto its form. Idealists inclined to democracy could scry within it an improvement on the Athenian tradition. Entitled men who fancied themselves practical saw clever machinery for manufacturing consent in rule of the country by its natural rulers.

We frequently discuss particular deformities framers of the Constitution adopted to ensure its ratification — "equal suffrage" of the states (and therefore radically unequal suffrage of citizens) in the Senate, counting slaves as three-fifths persons, the odd formula behind the electoral college. But the republican form of government itself — is it a duck or a rabbit? is the dress gold or blue — was the Constitution's main trick, allowing political opponents to rally together behind one document they interpreted quite differently.

Ever since, of course, we have been fighting over just what kind of document it is. On paper a duck and a rabbit may be contrived to take a single form, but in life the two animals behave distinctly.

Money as a martial virtue

Traditionally aristocratic lineages distinguished themselves in war. Men who were natural rulers held land, taxed peasants, raised armies for their own glory or to serve the even greater glory of the king. Men who held and taxed land, or who won the debt and favor of the king, became noblemen and ruled, as God and nature intended.

By the American founding, commerce was already vying with conquest as a source of wealth and power. Nevertheless, suffrage under the early Constitution was usually restricted to men who owned land, a reflex of deference to the natural ruling class.

Following the Industrial Revolution, however, the notion that land ownership uniquely demarcated the best and most capable became both normatively and practically unsustainable. Surely the claim to greatness of some ranch owner paled in comparison to the conquests of an industrialist like John Rockefeller. Just as surely, men like Rockefeller had the means to ensure that their interests would not be subordinated to those of a gentry that fancied itself Jeffersonian.

Proponents of aristocratic republicanism are not, have never been, mere throwback feudalists. Like all living traditions, aristocratic republicanism has adapted with the times. Rather than land, the marker of right-to-rule has been increasingly recast as wealth, money. In centuries past, men proved their mettle on horseback with lance or rifle. Now men contest for greatness on the terrain of business. In either case, the best men, those worthy of rule, are the winners.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with your dorky economics textbook. The basis for deference to winners isn't because they must have provided goods and services at higher quality or lower prices than their rivals. It's because they fucking won. The more unfair the contest, the more impressive the victory.

Business is the successor to the pillage and conquest that created duchies, kingdoms, empires. What of the theories of Friedrich Hayek? Milton Friedman? Bandits who style themselves kings have always hired balladeers to recast their pillage as glory unto God, service to the greater good. Even now, now more than ever, they extravagantly groom jesters and fools.

Antitrust is abhorrent to this tradition. Antitrust is for slaves. When the Huns poured from the steppes and overtook Europe, could defenders lay one hand horizontally across their other hand held vertically, call "time out" and demand that referees inspect the rulebook?

No. They fucking fought and fucking died. Or else they killed, held their patch of land and therefore continued to rule.

In a fallen world chock full of slaves, people contending to be masters recognize no higher authority. The idea is abhorrent. They themselves are the highest authority, or else they are a corpse.

Lineage

Emperors do not concede that their domains must crumble when frailty overtakes their skin and bones. The quality that martial or business conquest reveals, in which inheres the right to rule, must subsist, then, not in individuals but in families, lineages.

You can put this in terms as dweeby as you want. Just like they hire their Milton Friedmans, they hire their Charles Murrays and Arthur Jensens, balladeers who sing a different key. Men who rule are not "following the science" about genes and DNA and heritability. It simply is an axiom they require, that the unit of analysis for human quality should be lineage rather than person. Clever slaves can write up the textbooks.

You have your axioms. They have theirs. Don't imagine that you fool yourself any less when you choose the foundations for your version of "reason".

In any case, to understand the behavior of aristocratic republicans, you must understand that among them, excellence and awfulness, capability and cravenness, are characteristics of families rather than individuals. A just political order weighs and sorts whole lineages, rather than particular individuals. Inheritance is just, because it is the lineage, not the person, that conquers, accumulates, and so earns the spoils of conquest.

Every family will have its black sheep, its morons, its fail-sons and squanderers. All of that is noise, the private business of great families to address. Usurpers and strivers who trade in gossip about such characters in order to contest the status of the lineage should be crushed.

The constitutional order

From the perspective of aristocratic republicans, the purpose of the Constitutional order is to durably and reliably elevate the best to rule, while cloaking that coronation as the result of "democratic contestation", reflecting "consent of the governed".

But there is always a danger that forms of democratic contestation might give way to substance, to an order in which mobs of lesser men and women grasp the reins of power and do mischief — not least to their own interests, as unsuited men elevated to rule inevitably do.

So there must be a kind of dance. On the one hand, the forms of institutions must be sufficiently "democratic" or at least "legitimate" to cultivate the voluntary submission upon which a peaceful, prosperous order depends. On the other hand, the institutions should not be so "democratic" as to permit among the unworthy more than token representation in the halls of power.

Suppose there were some kind of council, a chamber in which robed wise men could fine-tune and reconfigure the institutions that are only vaguely sketched on the several pages of the American Constitution.

Congress must be elected. Inadequate vigor on the part of the council's predecessors has rendered universal formal suffrage a fait accompli. The Senate as well as the House is now directly elected.

Perhaps in time these errors can be reversed. But holding actions are needed now. The best men — recognizable as the richest men — must rule, despite institutions that insist on formal equality for all.

What would you do?

If there must be elections, you might ensure that the best have influence over those elections as mighty as they can muster.

Elections are managed at the state level, and some states are, unfortunately, run by governments beholden to the other republican tradition, villainous mob democracy.

But some states are not. States that are run under virtuous, aristocratic republicanism — if they given freedom to manage how elections are run, or to strategically define electoral districts — will vigorously use those powers to elevate men suited to rule, or men and women who can be counted upon to do those men's bidding.

States that rule in the democratic republican tradition will refrain from using these powers with full, cold-eyed vigor as a counterweight. To do so would be to violate and undermine the very democratic norms they are besotted to protect. Idealists rather than warriors, they are hobbled. (Idiots. Fools. How could one trust such men to rule?)

With great effort, considering several decades of backsliding, elections have been reoriented towards what the founders (at least those in the aristocratic republican tradition) intended — plebiscites that imbue legitimacy to rule by natural rulers.

But the republic is large, messy. Some states are still run by usurpers, idealists, communists, "democrats". Unworthy men and women will, unfortunately sometimes be elected, and placed in positions where they can do real harm to the interests of the republic, even to interests they would understand as their own, if they were not so unworthy.

So it is important that the best men retain channels of informal influence, by which they can guide and tutor men and women who rise above their station. They must be permitted to reward the best and worst alike for acting correctly.

When the Constitution was debated, the danger of mob rule was well understood by men in the aristocratic republican tradition. They calculated that, between the institutional safeguards ("checks and balances") within the new Constitution and attention to the administration of elections, the mob could be simultaneously coöpted and kept at bay. There have been some difficult decades, but patriots are now well on their way to restoring that balance. Elections are less and less a threat.

Men who seek election are usually ambitious and vain. That is providential, because such men can be bought by those who have proven suited actually to rule by achieving and sustaining great wealth.

Over the past few decades, however, a new threat has emerged, one that was not foreseen by the founding generation. A "professional civil service" — peopled by men of modest ambition but tremendous pride, confident in false moral and social theories — has arrogated to itself much of the state's capacity to govern. By virtue of their limited ambition and dangerous theories, this class of people is somewhat resistant to remunerative tutelage by their betters.

Fortunately, these "professionals" are very devoted to the notion of service in the context of paid employment. Establishment of a revolving door between professional roles in government and "private sector" jobs arranged in their interest can usefully serve to educate them.

Nevertheless, as a class, they remain vexatious and dangerous.

Happily, this class can be cast as illegitimate under both the aristocratic and democratic republican traditions, by virtue of being insulated from the influence both of money and elections. As at the founding, adherents of these two grand traditions, marinated in the best "common sense" money can buy, join together in a common goal — routing the influence of "unelected bureaucrats".

We are now well on our way to neutralizing this pox.

Yea and truly, we are finally restoring the American founding.

One side of it, that is.

Duck or rabbit, gold or blue. In the end, there can be only one.

I think most people misunderstand what constitutional democracy is all about.

A constitutional democracy is not a system in which a king or aristocracy stands periodically before a popular plebiscite. You do not live in a constitutional democracy if, every eight years, you reaffirm the autocrat, even if the affirmation is not coerced, even if it reflects genuine support (whatever that might mean in the context of a media environment that the autocrat controls).

Under the US Constitution, the President is not supposed to be king. Congress is not a ruling aristocracy.

The point of a constitution in a constitutional democracy is to define a web of procedures and relationships that constructs a whole quite distinct from any of its parts. State action should result from deliberation and contestation in which all interests and values held by members of the polity play a role.

Melting pot is the metaphor, not battleground. We construct a common mind together, an “artificial intelligence” that none of us dominate or control, but within which all of us have some influence.

Of course we frequently disagree with one another. Our common mind must sometimes choose between mutually exclusive courses of action. So in that sense, some of us win, some of us lose, love is a battlefield.

But even when we lose, we condition the results. Our arguments that haven’t won the day contribute to risk management, as “winners” of the argument address our concerns as much as possible consistent with the project we have chosen. No one has been excluded or locked out. Choices have been made, not by some of us against the will of others, but by all of us together, even as some will be delighted by those choices and others bitterly disappointed.

Ideally this “mind” is constantly working, frequently acting across a wide range of concerns. We all “win some” and “lose some”, not every two years in occasional elections, but every day and week. The mind is wise because it aggregates and weighs the experience of all of us who compose it. We accord it legitimacy, we “trust” it, because we see our own values and interests reflected in the portfolio of choices it delivers, even though we all “lose” frequently with respect to particular choices. “Turn-taking” should be as fine-grained as possible.

Obviously this is none of our experience of contemporary American government, or of contemporary American life. We are sharply divided into two tribes, many of whose members see themselves as substantially sharing values and interests which the other tribe viciously opposes. Each group wrestles to control the state in bitter, zero-sum contests. Every two years we fight over which tribe will be aristocrats, and which tribe subjects. Every four years we have a grand fight over who will be king.

We constitute together no wise common mind. Deliberation gives way to propaganda, a necessary evil given all the lies the other guys are telling. Losers get shut out, rather than see their insights incorporated into our common project. We become collectively incapable of coherent, adaptive, effective action. The actions we take are rendered ill-informed and cartoonish as we become intoxicated by our own side’s propaganda.

We are where we are. But it’s worth taking a moment to remember that this is not our system working as intended. This is dysfunction, pathology, atrocity. Constitutional democracy in which we are ruled by none and all, in which state action emerges from a common mind we together constitute, is possible, achievable. It has nowhere ever been perfect, but it has often been better, here and elsewhere.

We are on the verge of giving way to cynicism and reverting to tyranny as a more practical and capable, if brutal, form of government.

I’d rather we understand how and why we’ve simplified, calcified, infantilized ourselves into absurd, moronic factions, and work to undo that. We actually can improve the institutions by which we collectively deliberate and choose and act.

Constitutional democracy remains possible. You, dear reader, have your own values, interests, and perspective. For me, I am quite sure constitutional democracy would be far superior to the status quo to which we’ve devolved, much better than the brash alternatives all the strivers and grifters tout and shout in clashing cacophonies of bitter enthusiasm.

Is it still worth trying to make sense of how US elections work?

Elections always change — I’d like to see US elections change dramatically — but I worry that the most likely changes going forward may render Tuesday's election the last Presidential election really contestable for a while.

I hope I am just paranoid.

Nevertheless.

To understand this election, and other US Presidential elections of the recent past, I think that you should divide your analysis into two parts.

Part I, and only Part I, is the issues game. The candidates each try to position themselves on issues of public concern in a manner that renders them maximally popular. However, since it is a competitive game, both candidates are strongly incentivized to achieve at least 50% support. And there is no prohibition on copying. The result of this game almost always is that, by the time of the general election, “decided voters” break pretty close to 50:50.

The population of “decided voters” is not invariant to how the issues game is played, however. On many, perhaps most, issues, one position seems popular, so both candidates “tack to the center”, adopting a position as close as they can to the popular view. When both candidates do this, the issue becomes a matter of consensus rather than electoral competition (and portions of the public that disagree with the consensus are left disenfranchised and alienated).

For example, in this year’s campaign, Harris converged towards Trump’s position on immigration. Trump converged towards Harris’ position on abortion.

Because of their prior expressed views, or constraints imposed by their coalitions, candidates may lack credibility to fully neutralize issues this way. But a candidates’s public embrace of a position goes surprisingly far. Despite the clear antiabortion maximalism of much of the Republican Party, Trump’s assertion he would not impose further restrictions at a Federal level, along with the availability of remedies like ballot initiatives at the state level, seems to have been effective at eliminating an expected source of motivation among women voters to prefer Harris.

In the limit, both candidates could converge to nearly identical, popular positions. But then there’d be little basis, at least in terms of issues, by which decided voters might decide. The more the candidates converge on issues, the less issues become determinative of the outcome. A greater fraction of the electorate comes to decide based on matters other than "the issues".

Candidates converge more than you might expect, and not always because they both want to take the most popular position. In our oligarchic system, the two parties can and often do agree that neither will take a popular position, because elites or donors in both parties dislike it. Both candidates tacitly agree to adopt a less popular position, removing the issue from the pressure an election might otherwise exert. Most Americans say US weapons should be withheld from Israel, but neither candidate offered that position, so it could not become a dimension of electoral competition.

There are always some issues over which the candidates ultimately choose to contend rather than converge, or where one candidates’ attempts to converge just aren’t credible. “Character” I think should count as an issue in this sense. An appearance of “good character” is something both candidates would converge upon if they could, but in practice the ability of one or both candidates to credibly do so may be limited.

So. Some fraction of the public decides the way you were probably told you are supposed to, based on "the issues", including “character”. But that fraction gets divided pretty close to 50:50, because both candidates adjust their stated commitments strategically to achieve 50%, and empirically it seems rare that difficult-to-adjust commitments like character impose too great a handicap.

Which brings us to Part II.

The marginal voter, the motherfucker who decides the election, is rarely an issues voter at all.

As the issues game plays out, the “decided voters” are never precisely divided 50:50. One candidate can have an edge, which translates ceteris paribus into an advantage, a bias, going into the second part.

But as long as the pool of voters unmoved by the gaps left open in issue-positioning is larger than the advantage one candidate has achieved in the issues game, the election will always ultimately be decided by something else.

Part II is the “beer primary”, the vibes, likability, people going with their guts. It almost always decides the election.

Suppose that 80% of voters do decide based on issues (including character), and among those 80%, one candidate would achieve an extraordinary 60% of the vote. That candidate would begin Part II with an incredible advantage. She’d only need to win 10% of the undecideds.

But she does have to win that 10%! The issue-undecideds will have the final word, unless an extraordinary fraction of the public decides based on the small sliver of openly contested issues, and their decision is extraordinarily lopsided. If only 70% decide based on openly contested issues and one candidate leads with a more plausible 55%, that candidate still has to win almost 40% of the voters who were left unmoved by the issues, or else she loses.

It’s not true, as people cynically suggest, that “issues don’t matter, it’s all emotion, all vibes” in US Presidential elections. But the system we have, in which there are just two parties who converge, due to the popularity of some positions or mutual agreement, on most issues, who then competitively sculpt the space of contested issues into something close to a tie, the fraction of voters left undecided by the issues becomes large, and the bias imposed by issue positioning becomes weak.

Further aggravating the situation is the empirical observation that people’s guts, vibes, whatever are surprisingly correlated with one another. Even if a candidate leaves the issues game with a strong win, so they only need to win over 40% of undecideds, if 70% of the undecided are ultimately going break in one direction or the other, that big issues advantage proves to be no advantage at all.

So, in this system we’ve built for ourselves, even if strong majorities of voters decide based on issues just like your civics teacher said they should, elections are ultimately won or lost based on… something else.

What is that something else?

In the Bush-Gore-Obama era it was who you’d prefer to have a beer with, given candidate personas as large media outlets portrayed them. We used to have private lives that were in-person and personal. The public sphere was whatever large media organizations crafted it to be.

Today, we don’t really have personal spheres fully distinct from the media sphere. Much of our personal life gets mediated through digital platforms of one sort or another. Our media mimic and blend together with our personal digital relationships. We interact online with people we trust, sometimes because they are our friends in an old-school way, but often because they comport themselves like friends even though the interaction is one-way and our companions don't know us from Adam. Their friendly conversational vibe and the frequency with which we accept their company tricks deep mammalian emotions into an inference that they are in fact friends.

I think Donald Trump won this election because he and his surrogates made themselves parasocial superstars.

Kamala Harris did podcasts, but she treated them as interviews. Her campaign conceived of them as extensions of traditional media hits. She followed the traditional rules politicians master, she stuck to her talking points. She openly boasted that her very scripted style constituted discipline. Which it did! She never made a gaffe!

Trump and his surrogates said stupid wrong stuff all the time. It didn’t matter. Issues decidable people who chose Trump because they like tax breaks or whatever didn’t treat whatever Trump spouted on Rogan or Fridman as scary. They developed their information about his issues positioning through other means, and just wrote off whatever he or Vance or whoever was saying as shooting the shit, mouthing off.

When people shoot the shit and mouth off among friends, they exaggerate. They speculate. They bullshit. They boast. Considering potentially outrageous stuff and talking it through is something we do only among close friends, because that kind of exploration might get us scolded or worse in other settings. The kind of loose-lipped bullshitty candor that Harris eschewed for fear of an old-school gaffe is exactly what communicates intimacy. In the context of this (false) intimacy, this simulacrum of a private conversation among friends, words that might count as dangerous public commitments in an NPR interview become tentative, deniable, mere fleeting thoughts bounced off confidants.

It’s not that Trump is some kind of digital code-switching genius. He talks this way everywhere. It’s always locker room talk with Trump.

It just turns out that, by 2024, someone had invented locker rooms that fit millions of people, but that simulate for listeners the same low-consequence intimacy. (Codeswitch Note: Do not call it “intimacy” when you are actually in a locker room.) People who in fact know nothing about Donald Trump feel like he’s a good guy they can trust, even if — in a sense because — he acts like a dick a lot.

I wish Kamala Harris had done Rogan. But the one hour interview she assented to wouldn’t have done it. Rogan was doing her a favor, when he insisted on sticking to his three-hour conversational format. But even had she accepted, she would have bombed if she had continued to try to pass off caution as discipline. She would have had to make the audience feel like insiders. It would have had to be confessional, dangerous. And by that point, it couldn’t be. Trump could cloak himself in having publicly said so much awful shit, any new awful shit rarely seemed newsworthy. The issues game was immunized from Trump’s bullshitting in a way Harris’ hair-down misremarks would not be. Harris had an edge on character that she could only lose. And it was too late, in the last week of the campaign. Parasociability takes time, repeated presence rather than repetition of talking points.

I hope that, in terms of character and policy chops, Trump proves to be an aberration, a crisis we survive again without too much damage done. But as a matter of style, he may be the future.

As we revert to a kind of massive, preliterate village, if we retain an electoral system in which the vibes decide, the people we elect will increasingly be our “friends”.

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Disclosure: I strongly expected Kamala Harris would win, did not predict the actual outcome. I considered what has in fact occurred unthinkable. So take my analysis with whatever grains of salt that merits.

So, tomorrow is Election Day. Perhaps you've already voted, one way or another. If so, good for you. If not, and you are an eligible US citizen, please vote.

Voting is not, actually, the essence of our democracy. The essence of our democracy is the respect we have for one another, day by day, one by one, as equal citizens, whose values, interests, and perspectives we mutually thirst to understand. No expert can see the world through your eyes. Plutocrats spend billions of dollars mostly to avoid having to walk a millimeter in your shoes. In a certain respect, the true enemy of democracy is pride. It requires tremendous humility to let other people's experience and ideas and hopes and grievance have play, in our own minds, in our political institutions, on equal terms with our own. No matter how rich you are or how much you know, when it comes to the values and interests of any other person, you cannot and do not know better.

Our electoral system in the United States is poorly arranged. I devote a whole lot of ink here to how we might fix it. Nevertheless, elections, such as they are, are an important institutional embodiment of our democratic ethos. In practical terms they are much of what, at least ideally, gives real-world consequence to the democratic ethos we aspire to live every day.

You should vote for whomever you choose to vote for. I cannot, and would not, gainsay your understanding of the world, dear reader. But if you want to know my views, this election — perhaps for the first time in my life — I will "vote blue no matter who" up and down the ballot, even with some enthusiasm.

You don't need yet another pundit to tell you that the political formation Donald Trump has conjured around his damaged human soul is fascist. It is, if that word has any meaning.

But the people who support Donald Trump are, for the most part, very far from fascists. We live in times when nearly all of us feel belittled and ripped off, threatened by forces beyond our control. Most Trump supporters mean to cast their vote against the know-it-alls and corporations they have come to believe — correctly in my view — now illegitimately dominate our collective lives.

But Donald Trump is himself a plutocrat, not a counter to corporate and monied interests. He doesn't soak the rich when in government. Your annoying manager is rich, and pays you dirt, and treats you like shit, even while she mouths all kinds of platitudes about tolerance and antiracism and bullshit. Of course she is voting for the Democrats. Any enemy of hers, you think, is your friend, and she sure hates Donald Trump. But her real enemy is a union that gives you the power to tell her to fuck off. Donald Trump will crush the least possibility of a such a union while he plays dress-up as garbageman and fry cook.

As I said, I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Whitney Fox with real enthusiasm this time. I have "voted blue no matter who" before, but it was a hold-your-nose kind of thing. Joe Biden — working with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, I think — has changed that.

I've been disheartened by people with whom I usually find common cause acting as if it's some nearly hopeless, sisyphean task to try to move the Democratic Party an inch when, under Joe Biden, the Democrats really did struggle to enact an extraordinary Build Back Better agenda. Despite failing, they managed to get some remarkable things done. We got the CHIPS act and rehabilitation of industrial policy as a thing we have to take responsibility for, rather than pretend not to have. We got the Inflation Reduction Act, which despite its stewardship by a mustache-twirling fossil-fuel villain, smuggled into being extraordinary green energy subsidies, and represents the first time the US policy apparatus has moved beyond conjectural and expressive "pledges" about global warming to actions that will have real effect. It's not enough! But it isn't nothing. Our current Supreme Court is illegitimate, villainous, and traitorous. It has done everything it could to prevent the Biden Administration from reducing student debt burdens past and future. (Biden's blocked SAVE plan would be effing extraordinary!) Yet the Administration has worked strategically to circumvent the mock justices who still pretend they can interpret the Constitution for us, and gotten a lot of onerous past debts eliminated.

On foreign policy, the Biden Administration has been a catastrophe. There is no sugarcoating that. From the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan that inevitably invited future mischief, to failing to deter the invasion of Ukraine, to abetting a genocide in Gaza, the Biden Administration foreign policy team has lurched this way and that, from no-more-forever-war-peacenik impulses at the beginning of its term to butt-hurt give-war-a-chance neocon idiocy towards the end, each time looking for isolated "wins" rather than hewing to a coherent strategy. (No, "democracy vs autocracy" does not constitute a coherent strategy.) I think we are all looking forward to turning a page on Biden's foreign policy.

We'll turn a page no matter what. There is no information — zero, none — in Kamala Harris' refusal to put daylight between herself and the current administration. She plainly decided that, in the context of a bitter election, any "debate" that puts a wedge between her supporters and those more invested in Biden's foreign policy choices would divide and demoralize her coalition. The only information — only, whatever tea leaves you pretend to have read — we have about foreign policy under a Kamala administration is that she won't tell us. (She probably does not yet know herself.) I am fairly sure she would be better than Donald Trump. Even Joe Biden has been better than Donald Trump.

(Sure, there were "no wars under Trump" if you don't count crushing ISIS and ramping up drone wars and arming the Saudis and completely hiding the extraordinary carnage of all of these operations from public view. But Donald Trump planted the seeds for the Afghanistan debacle by sidelining, undermining, emasculating the Afghan government that was our ally, then negotiating an agreement to withdraw and betray all of those we had promised to protect, a terrible agreement which Biden chose to fulfill rather than abrogate. Trump's Administration did do more to deter Russia in Ukraine than Obama's had, but with a perfunctoriness and half-heartedness made clear in the grounds for Trump's first impeachment. The sad fact is, no American President truly believed Russia would reopen World War II with a full-scale land invasion of Ukraine until it became clear, under the Biden Administration, after Afghanistan, that it would.)

I am hoping that Kamala Harris is a continuation of the Biden Administration on domestic policy, and a break from the Biden Administration on foreign policy. Why do I give the Democrats credit for the former, while overlooking the discredit, the shame really, of the latter?

The fact of the matter is I have no idea what Kamala Harris will do, and neither do you. But the Biden Administration serves as an existence proof, that in fact the Democratic Party is not a mere conspiracy of its corporate wing to neutralize any progress towards civilization and social democracy. Harris could prove to be a regression, back to the awful Obama, Clinton version of the Democrats. She could prove to be a younger, more vigorous champion of social democracy, following in Joe Biden's footsteps but sprinting farther. She could stumble into the war with Iran that Biden and Binyamin Netanyahu have placed us on the verge of. She could champion a principled, Westphalian, basis for a new foreign policy consensus, over the (understandable!) wails of those who would (correctly!) score it as a retreat from 1990s-era hopes of universalizing human rights. Only the future will tell what Kamala Harris will do.

We have a pretty good idea what Donald Trump will do, globally and domestically. None of it is any good. A real shot at making progress under Kamala Harris is far better than a near certainty of moral and practical catastrophe under Donald Trump.

Yes, I will be voting against Donald Trump and his toadies and enablers. But I also think a Harris Administration really might continue the best and shed the worst of the Biden Administration. She might continue Biden's tradition of giving social democrats a real voice rather than corralling us in a veal pen. Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, the bigger the better, would help enable a Harris Administration to actually move us towards a more civilized society, rather than cave to corporate interests and tout the "accomplishment".

So I will vote, enthusiastically, for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Whitney Fox. I hope that you too will vote blue no matter who, this time around.

Perhaps you disagree. This is all just me, the world as it I see. Tomorrow will pass, and I will still be eager to understand how you, dear reader, make sense of everything.

However you see the world and your place in it, whatever your values and calculations about how best to steward those values through our very imperfect electoral institutions, I do hope you will take some time out of your day tomorrow to participate, to vote, if you have not done so already.