A
vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles
An endorsement of democracy, solving problems, and
Kamala Harris.
By Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, host of the Decoder podcast, and co-host of The Vergecast.
Oct 29, 2024, 7:00 AM CDT
Donald Trump is a dangerous
maniac who can barely complete a sentence, and it is lunacy to believe he can
even recognize the existentially threatening collective action problems facing
our nation, let alone actually solve them.
Collective action
problem is
the term political scientists use to describe any situation where a large group
of people would do better for themselves if they worked together, but it’s
easier for everyone to pursue their own interests. The essential work of every
government is making laws that balance the tradeoffs between shared benefits
and acceptable restrictions on individual or corporate freedoms to solve this
dilemma, and the reason people hate the government is that not being able to do
whatever you want all the time is a huge bummer. Speed limits help make our
neighborhoods safer, but they also mean you aren’t supposed to put the hammer
down and peel out at every stoplight, which isn’t any fun at all.
Every Verge reader is intimately familiar with
collective action problems because they’re everywhere in tech. We cover them
all the time: making everything charge via
USB-C was
a collective action problem that took European regulation to finally resolve, just
as getting EV makers to adopt the NACS charging standard took regulatory effort from the
Biden administration.
Content moderation on social networks is a collective action problem; so are
the regular fights over encryption. The single greatest webcomic in tech
history describes a collective action problem.
The problem is that getting
people to set aside their own selfishness and work together is generally
impossible even if the benefits are obvious, a political reality so universal
it’s a famous Tumblr meme.
You can sum up the history of civilization as a long
fight about where the government’s authority to tell everyone what to do comes
from
This is such an intractable
problem that you can sum up the history of civilization as a long fight about
where the government’s authority to tell everyone what to do comes from.
Ancient rulers just went ahead and considered themselves gods, which made things
pretty easy — anyone who lives in a neighborhood with an overzealous HOA
president can see this approach in action today. Quite a few European kings
decided they’d operate one layer up the stack and announced that they
were empowered by God with the divine right to absolute
control, which also made things somewhat easy but caused several wars and
assassinations by other kings who’d gotten drunk and high enough to see Jesus.
Every so often, the world gets
some bozo who decides his desire for absolute control is justified because of
an emergency, which inevitably leads them to spend a lot of time convincing
people that the very existence of foreigners is an emergency so they can hold
onto that power forever. This is basically a hack, but it’s an effective one —
there are always foreigners, after all. You know why Trump has lately taken to
standing in front of backdrops that read DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW? It’s because when you put this dude under any
pressure at all, he reflexively creates a Brown People Emergency to justify his
authoritarian instincts.
It is extremely frustrating that
the Harris campaign keeps going on about Trump being a danger to democracy
without explaining why his
whole deal is so deeply incompatible with America, so here’s the short version:
the radical founding principle of the United States of America is the idea that
the government’s authority to make laws and solve collective action problems
comes from the consent of the governed. A
clean rewrite, replacing centuries of architectural debt with what was, at the
time, a cutting-edge foundation mostly unproven at scale. We vote for our
leaders, they are given the power to tell us all what to do so that we might
help each other reach better outcomes and be happier, and if they are bad at
their jobs, we can simply throw the bums out. We open-sourced the authority, in
other words. It was a big bet, and so far, it’s paid off.
Like any large open-source
project, American democracy is kind of messy, requires a lot of volunteer
effort, and often uses way too much memory. But it enables everyone to submit
requests for changes so that we might better direct the power of our communities
at every level toward solving our problems, and the democratic process provides
an essential stability which allows people to keep buying into our country as
the platform on which to build their own big ideas.
Trump doesn’t give a shit about
any of this because he only cares about himself. He generally does not care to
solve problems unless it benefits him personally, and the intellectual
foundation of the MAGA movement that’s built up around him is the complete
denial that collective action problems exist at all. The MAGA worldview is now
so batshit that it requires its proponents to look at obvious failures of
collective action and declare them immutable features of modern life — or, in
an even stupider twist — announce them to be good things.
For example, school shootings
represent a complete failure to solve a collective action problem — a uniquely
American failure because not only have we not solved the problem, we have
actively made it worse. Just look at this chart:
Credit:
American Enlightenment Project / K-12 Shooting Database
That’s the alarming increase in
school shootings since the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, which basically made any
meaningful gun regulation impossible. With a bare 5–4 majority behind him,
Antonin Scalia decided to fully reinterpret the Second
Amendment and
reset the balance of liberties in America to favor the rights of gun owners in
what is now a clear tradeoff against the safety of our communities.
You can argue about this chart,
or this specific tradeoff, or even that Scalia failed to foresee the rise of a
wildly irresponsible gun culture that should otherwise moderate these harms but
which has instead produced tactical cosplay chuds and would-be lifestyle
influencer Don Jr.
That’s fine! All of that would be evidence of a rational political culture: one
that makes policy choices, evaluates the outcomes, and accepts the reality of
the results so as to make better tradeoffs in the future.
But Trump is not rational, and
Trumpism cannot abide the idea of a collective action problem. You might think
that Trump’s brain is mush, but JD Vance’s weasel-like mind is constantly,
actively finding ways to sanitize the chaos, and the philosophical demands of
MAGA required him to look America directly in the eye at a recent rally and say
that school shootings are “a fact of life.”
It should be easy for Vance to
imagine a world in which school shootings don’t happen — that is the pre-Heller world he grew up in! — but fixing the
problem of school shootings requires admitting that a collective action problem
exists. It requires admitting that the current policy solution — sending
kids to school with fucking Kevlar in their backpacks — is less effective than
restricting gun ownership in any meaningful way. He cannot do that. Trump
cannot do that. Trumpism cannot allow that debate to happen.
Do you want to live in a country
where the vice president refers to schools as “soft targets”? That’s a vote for
JD Vance. That’s a vote for Donald Trump — a vote for the line on the school
shootings chart to keep going up, forever.
That’s a vote for Donald Trump — a vote for the line on
the school shootings chart to keep going up, forever
It’s the same with vaccines,
which are a near-perfect collective action problem — they are generally only
effective if almost everyone in a community gets them, which means either
everyone has to agree to get them or the government has to mandate compliance.
When everyone cooperates and gets vaccinated, our vaccines can be highly
effective: the measles were effectively
eradicated in
this country nearly a quarter-century ago.
Then presumptive Trump health
secretary RFK Jr. hit
the scene to spew his dangerous anti-vax bullshit, convinced enough people to
stop getting vaccinated, and the fucking measles came
back.
When this man visited Samoa in 2019, he contributed to a measles
outbreak so
bad that 83 people died, almost all of them children. But to see this failure
of collective action would require a break with the MAGA worldview, so these
dummies have fallen back to saying getting measles is
actually good.
Do you trust Donald Trump to see
this tradeoff and understand this outcome? To adjust to it and use the power of
the Oval Office to convince Americans that the balance of harms favors
vaccinations over a rise in measles cases? He couldn’t even do it for the covid
vaccines his own Operation Warp Speed produced, and Vance is now blowing anti-vax dog
whistles as
loudly as he can in his public speeches. It is a near certainty that Trump will
just blame the next measles outbreak on immigration because at least he can
shoot at brown people.
Trump simply cannot use the
tools of democracy to run the country on our behalf. His brain does not work
that way, even when it appears to be working. He is too selfish, too stupid,
too cognitively impaired, too fucked in the head by social media — too whatever. He just can’t do it. He will make our
collective action problems worse because he doesn’t even know what kind of
problems they are. There is a reason he loves dictators and that all his biggest
ideas involve forcing people to do things at the barrel of a gun: mass deportations, arresting his critics, sending the military into American cities
to quell protests. He is unable to imagine a
world where people cooperate for any reason other than the threat of violence,
and so violence has become an
inextricable part of his movement.
The list of massive collective
action problems facing our nation is almost overwhelming to consider, and they
threaten to tear us apart: our population is getting older, with a looming
healthcare crisis to come. Education. Housing. Income inequality. There are so
many more.
We are not doing well right now,
and when I look at the problems The Verge specifically
covers and has covered for over a decade, the failures are blinding.
Solving climate change is the
biggest collective action problem of our lifetimes — and nested within it,
there are even more collective action problems like transitioning to EVs and
rethinking our sources of power. Trump cannot concede that this problem requires
collective action to solve, so the MAGA approach is to simply deny climate
change exists while Trump blathers on about wanting to be a “whale psychiatrist.”
As a country, we have almost
entirely failed to regulate the tech industry. There are almost no meaningful
checks on its size or influence, or even requirements to be responsible with
its power, even though American consumers express their clear preferences to
rein in tech companies all the time. There is simply no other way to look at
millions of Instagram users — including the company’s own celebrity influencers — enthusiastically posting
legalistic incantations for over a decade commanding Meta to stop
doing things with their content. Fundamentally, they are all trying to
renegotiate the Instagram terms of service, which everyone signed without
reading. But as individuals, they have no real leverage with which to drag Mark
Zuckerberg to the bargaining table.
As a country, we have almost entirely failed to
regulate the tech industry
This is a pure market failure.
Despite this sustained, dramatic expression of consumer demand, there have been
no policy changes, and there are no meaningful competitors differentiated by
privacy. The industry has learned from this and imposed an ever more extractive set of platform policies with little meaningful
consequence. Resetting all this is what the government is for — a functional federal privacy law would
effectively provide a baseline terms of service agreement with every platform that would protect us all, and then
we could see how well it’s working and adjust.
The tech industry is also racing
ahead with AI, even though it’s shown no ability to restrain itself from
causing the most obvious problems: our social networks choked to death with AI
slop, the death of photographic
truth, and
sexualized deepfakes of teenagers. These problems were all predicted and warned
against in the most dire ways, and yet they have all come to pass. Solving
these problems will require creative and flexible lawmaking that considers a
huge balance of interests, benefits, and harms, and a rigorous approach to
thinking through the tradeoffs over time.
There is no shortage of proposed
legislation to solve these problems floating around, and there are other
countries making laws that we might look at to evaluate the tradeoffs. But the
Republican Party is so resistant to solving collective action problems that
Meta has spent years saying it welcomes
regulation because
it knows half of our government will never allow it to happen. Hell, one of the
very first tech bills passed during the first Trump administration was a rollback of rules
preventing ISPs from sharing your data, and Trump signed it
immediately —
pure ghoul shit.
In most normal circumstances,
America would slowly, incrementally figure this stuff out. States would pass
some laws, there’d be some litigation, maybe some Supreme Court decisions,
maybe some federal legislation in the end. But the absolutely fucked thing
about the United States in 2024 — the looming dread that keeps me up at night —
is that a bunch of tech billionaires have decided it would be easier if they
were simply in charge of remaking society and have fallen in line behind a man
they clearly despise because it’s easier for them to get what they want by
manipulating the addled mind of a narcissistic monster than by winning
people’s dollars in the market or votes in the ballot
box.
Let’s just name some important
ones: Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos — they have all decided to
kiss the ring in various ways and sell out the very concept of America. They’d
rather fly their helicopters over the burned-out husks of our cities to their
private beaches and secure bunkers than participate in our democracy. They
would prefer to remake our country into a broken oligarchy where they have
finally ended the free market and privatized our lives into an overlapping
series of enshittified subscription monopolies, and they have taken to openly
wishcasting what they would do with unchecked power. “Competition is for
losers” is not just a thing Peter Thiel says — it’s a worldview that’s
produced the monarchy-curious JD Vance arguing that the purpose
of antitrust is to regulate the speech Google
distributes and
Trump himself saying the company has to be careful or get
shut down.
Our Silicon Valley billionaires
don’t actually believe in this sloppy gloss on competition law. Rather, these
men are all trying to protect or create their very own empires, and they are
funding, supporting, or at least accepting of Trump’s strongman instincts
because they each understand how it will benefit them individually, even though
it will cost us all much more. These would-be oligarchs are a collective action
problem, personified: they cannot curb their individual greed so we must all
endure their furious attempts to prop up a madman who might end the American
experiment.
Let’s not fool ourselves.
Kamala Harris is not a perfect
candidate for president. It is possible to pick apart her policy ideas and
extremely easy to criticize her unusually circular speaking patterns — she
often sounds like she’s vamping until her internal search algorithm finds the
right keyword and issues a preloaded response. Did you know she prosecuted
transnational criminal organizations? You will.
But look beyond the locked-in
message discipline to her approach to campaigning, and it is clear Harris is
deeply, meaningfully committed to solving collective action
problems. She has assembled a politically diverse group of
people to support her that range from AOC to Liz Cheney to Mark Cuban, and most
of her claims about how she’ll run the country differently than Biden come down
to putting Republicans in her Cabinet and reaching across the aisle more. She
has, for better or worse, made approaches to the crypto community while
championing restrictions on price gouging and regulations on banks. She had
antimonopoly Senator Elizabeth Warren onstage at the Democratic National Convention
while having Google antitrust defense lawyer Karen Dunn serve as her debate
advisor.
You might not agree with some of
the depressingly averaged-out policy positions produced by this unnervingly big
tent. You might have some serious problems with, say, her proximity to the
current administration and its approach to the war in Gaza. But this is what
happens when the other party in our two-party system can only generate policy
ideas that amount to AI-generated blood libel and RETVRN memes on X.
Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican Party of the ability
to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris
coalition.
In many ways, the ecstatic
reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so
clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way
it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With
data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not
deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you
have to guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and
over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality
but energized by it. More than anything, that is the
change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of
fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.
It is time to stop denying the
essential nature of the problems America faces. It is time to insist that we
use the power of our democracy the way it’s intended to be used. And it is far
past time to move beyond Donald Trump.
A vote for Harris is a vote for
the future. It is a vote for solving collective action problems. It is a vote
for working together, instead of tearing our world to shreds.
