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!) understand 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.

Last week there was a brawl on Twitter between people all of whom I mostly admire, including Eric Levitz, Matt Stoller,Basel Musharbach, Matt Bruenig, and David Dayen, among others. It centered around Levitz's claim

Small biz is not inherently more desirable than large-scale enterprises. Economies of scale exist. Large firms pay better than small firms, and are also easier to regulate (with large chains, a spot check at one location can incentivize compliance at hundreds of locations while policing the practices of every individual small business is not logistically feasible).

A lot of different things are true. It is true that

• Bigger businesses often (not always) treat workers better than "Mom & Pop" firms can manage, especially in terms of benefits and flexibility.

• The state is capable of enacting useful social policy — workplace safety standards, accommodations of disability, antidiscrimination law, etc — through bigger firms in ways it cannot through very small firms.

• There are often technical economies of scale in production that very small firms cannot exploit. Societies that rely too heavily on very small firms can end up impoverished by low productivity.

These factors tilt in favor of "bigger business" and against "very small" or "Mom & Pop" firms.

But there are some benefits and advantages of very small firms:

• In some industries, economies of scale are modest, and much of the value produced at an industry level lies in diversity of output, which favors very small firms. Restaurants and cafés and microbreweries, spas and nail salons, retail boutiques, artists and musicians — all at least sometimes have these characteristics.

• Very small firms create opportunities for agency in production, which some (though far from all) people really value. Many people are perfectly happy to trade obedience for a paycheck. Others bristle at toiling in the belly of a hierarchy, being told what to do. An economy too heavily weighted towards larger firms may leave too few opportunities for those who value this kind of agency.

• Very small firms create opportunities for agency in consumption. A small customer's interactions with a large firm are typically characterized by contracts of adhesion.

  « These are the terms on which our product is offered, this is the price, click the checkbox to accept or else fuck off. »

  A small customer has a greater likelihood of negotiating bespoke terms with the proprietors of a very small firm than with agents of a bigger firm.

• "Relationships" can be valuable in commerce. A relationship exists when parties to repeated transactions sometimes accept a worse deal than they might find elsewhere, not out of laziness or inconvenience, but in well-grounded expectation that each party's occasional indulgences will be reciprocated. This serves as a form of mutual insurance. It may ipso facto enhance the perceived value of goods and services. Smaller customers may be capable of forming more reliable and resilient relationships with very small firms than with larger firms.

• Many of the best bigger firms start as small firms. This is not always true: Investors with large pools of capital can spin-up big firms de novo. Big firms sometimes spin out other big firms. Nevertheless, small firms that grow big constitute an important source of new entrants in most industries. These firms may be especially important for innovation. Very small firms can experiment at modest risk, and then scale up practices that eventually improve whole industries. If an industry is inhospitable to very small firms, this source of innovation may be blocked.

The net effect of all this is that it's silly to argue over which is better. We should expect and want both kinds of firms. We should want a restaurant industry with a much larger fraction of "Mom and Pops" than an automobile industry. But even in a restaurant industry, we'll want some Chipotles and Panda Expresses. And even in an automobile industry we'll want some startups producing novel products by novel means at initially inefficient scale.

The fact that entrepreneurs and customers value the kind of agency and relationships that very small firms enable means we should expect and want more "Mom and Pops" than a narrow focus on efficiency or regulability would predict.

But overall, we should expect and want most industries to be dominated by bigger firms. Even in industries where economies of scale are only modest, the value of diversity tops usually out at a pretty low level as well. Those modest technical economies of scale, the insurance economies of scale that allow larger firms to treat employees better, plus susceptibility to regulation all tilt the balance toward larger firms.

But how large? I keep using terms like "bigger" and "very small". How big?

This is where the anti-trusters have the better of the argument. Almost always, all of the advantages of "bigger" firms are fully exploited once enterprises reach medium size. You don't need behemoths that dominate whole industries.

The state has little trouble perceiving and taxing and regulating midsize firms. Midsize firms are fully subject to labor and safety and other regulations that "Mom & Pops" would find unaffordable, and so are left exempt from. Midsize firms can tolerate worker flexibility (say time off for emergencies, or parenthood), because they are big enough to have alternate workers who can pick up the slack.

Most importantly, for an economy the size of the United States, midsize firms are large enough to exploit technical economies of scale almost completely. Your friendly neighborhood monopolist will deny this — they will finance studies to snow you — but neverthless it is true. Yes, any firm fixed cost can be made smaller if amortized over a larger number of customers. But even in theory, the incremental benefit of new scale is ever diminishing, and becomes increasingly negligible. In practice, most "fixed costs" hit capacity limits by midsize scale, after which they become variable again. You can only sell so many cars before you have to build a new factory.

What do I mean by midsize? It is best to talk in industry terms. Policy seeks to shape market structure, not churn out identical firms of the size the commissar deems optimal. Firm sizes will vary within industries, and reasonable firm sizes will vary by industry.

But in rough numbers, for the US national market, I'd describe an industry as dominated by midsize firms if the top ten firms in the industry together account for no more than 75% of the market, each have at least 3% share, and no one firm accounts for more than 20%. It's an industry in which most customers have meaningful access to tens of viable competitors — not hundreds or thousands of tiny "Mom & Pops", not the handful (less than ten) that has become the norm in most US industries. Midsize firms exploit technical and insurance economies of scale, are legible vehicles for socially valuable regulation, and compete with one another vigorously.

When industries are composed of firms larger than midsize, when the top few firms account for most of the share, the result is oligopoly. Rather than being susceptible to regulation as Levitz suggests, the state finds itself dependent on dominant firms. Boeing, Intel, all the "systematically important financial institutions" are too big to regulate or prosecute, and too critical to be permitted to fail. Very large firms become specialists in exploiting market and political power rather than technical processes of production. They develop "efficiencies" in a financial sense, and come to see the preconditions of hard-to-measure "quality" or "innovation" as fat to be trimmed. They get away with it, because they (and perhaps a few other giants, who adopt the same "best practices") are the only game in town.

It is true that while "Mom & Pops" have a role, they are not a great way to organize the bulk of a modern economy. It is also true that firms durably larger than midsize — defined by the scale at which they bestride their industries — ought to have no role whatsoever in a well run economy. Any "natural monopolies" should be public, or put under effective public control by regulation.

Some industries — in which economies of scale are modest, diversity is highly valued, and durable relationships between small customers and businesses are important — should be regulated in ways particularly friendly to "Mom & Pops". But for most industries, the goal of policy should be to construct a regulatory environment that favors vigorously competing midsize firms, and smaller upstarts that seek to join or displace them.

A while back I wrote that two parties make us stupid.

Effective public deliberation requires a neutral-ish population who can help adjudicate. For any matter of public concern, there should be a sizable group whose interest in the question flows only through a broad public interest, rather than from any parochial stake in the outcome.

In a courtroom, we choose juries randomly, rather than letting the prosecution and the defense stand their own jurors. We understand that if we let each team hire six jurors, nearly every jury would be hung. There'd be little point in holding a trial. Partisan jurors would not base their verdicts primarily on good-faith evaluation of the evidence presented. They'd deliver the verdicts they were hired to deliver. If we want a defendant to be judged without prejudice on the basis of evidence presented at trial, we need neutral-ish jurors with little skin in the game.

Similarly, if nearly the whole of the politically engaged public is segmented into two camps, each of whose members share an overriding interest in winning contests that enhance the power of their side, then there can be no arbiter on behalf of a broader public interest. In every matter of public controversy, one of the two camps will have adopted a position which the other will oppose. Partisans on each side will tend to support their own party's position, regardless of cases earnestly made by advocates and activists on the broader merits of the issue. Substantive public deliberation will be short-circuited.

If members of the public are segmented into five or six different camps, a matter of public controversy may have entrenched advocates on one side or the other in some of the parties. But the issue may be orthogonal to the remaining parties' core allegiances. A multiparty system leaves room for neutral-ish adjudicators who serve as a good faith audience to public deliberation, who will constitute the "swing" vote when the question is decided in a legislature or referendum. A two-party system can pull this off only when it sustains a population keenly interested in public affairs, but with only weak factional identities — people who are politically engaged but routinely cross party lines. That is, the parties cannot be sharply polarized.

Criminal justice is largely exempt from this dynamic. While the guilt or innocence of a shoplifter is, in a certain sense, a matter of public controversy, the direct interests at stake are so small as to render the matter effectively private. The accused has a direct interest. The victim may perceive a direct interest. But for most of the rest of us, our stake in the outcome is only that justice be done. Courts can call jurors, filter away those whom there is some reason to think prejudiced, and conduct something like a fair trial.

This becomes more difficult, however, when the defendant is herself a public figure, particularly when the defendant is aligned or associated with a major political faction. In a sharply polarized two-party system, whenever a prominent figure of either party faces criminal charges brought by members of the opposing party, people strongly identified with the defendant's party will call the prosecution illegitimate and politically motivated. People associated with the prosecuting party will claim merely to be applying the law, without fear or favor.

Who is right and who is wrong? Without a credibly neutral public to adjudicate, the question is not decidable. You may be absolutely sure that your view (and, coincidentally, your side's view) is correct on the merits. The other side will have alternative facts.

In a sharply polarized, two-party system, there is simply no fixed point, no neutral vantage from which anyone persuasively judge. Except in cases so egregious that even copartisans concede a necessity, the question of whether a prosecution is invidiously political can find no authoritative answer. It becomes the macro analogue of a he-said, she-said controversy. You may have a strong view, and have your own deep understanding of the merits of the case. But then you would have that view, wouldn't you.

Again, in a multiparty system, or in a system with only weak factional identification, a less interested public can serve as arbiter and decide these questions. They might be complicated and hard and fraught, but when the bulk of a public not strongly identified with either the prosecutor's nor the defendant's faction comes to a decision, that decision can stand. No decision will engender a consensus or become authoritative while the public remains sharply polarized into two camps. Convictions will not be durable, unless transfers of power are prevented and one faction rules in perpetuity.

A system that, to a reasonable approximation, administers rule-of-law in cases involving ordinary people, but which cannot credibly impose criminal consequences on people who are famous and political and wealthy, is not rule-of-law at all. The fissures between the factions become the basis of, and a veil over, a deeper divide, between those whom the law protects but does not bind, and those who, the law binds but does not protect.

We can argue all we want over whether Trump or Elon Musk deserve imprisonment. I think there are strong cases against them both. I would, wouldn't I? People on the other side are sure Joe is the pater familias of a "Biden Crime Family".

I know I am right and they are wrong. They know the same. We're collectively so polarized and sorted there is no one who can serve as jury, no way to credibly adjudicate the question.

If we want rule-of-law, we'll need electoral reform. Not so much because we'll elect different people, but because of the way elections, by structuring citizens into constituencies, organize society as a whole. We need an electoral system that segments us into multiple camps, not just two, so that on many public controversies, most of us will have no factional interest, and can adjudicate rather than advocate.