Democrats Should Not Revert To The Status Quo Ante

The great blue wave that washed over America in the election should not lure Democrats into the delusion that they are once again lovingly embraced by the body politic.

Rather, it should be seen for what it is: a widespread counter-revolt at the ballot box against all that Trumpism has wrought — a heightened crisis of affordability exacerbated by trade wars and a war of choice with Iran, self-dealing corruption, politicization of the rule of law and an unbounded, mean-spirited mega-megalomania rarely seen in mature democracies.

The worst mistake Democrats can make is to misread their mandate. That mandate is to narrow the margin of maneuver of a wounded lame-duck presidency, derail the trajectory toward autocracy and clean up the mess. It is not to return to the status quo ante of cultural elitism, censorious identity politics, lax borders and hyper-globalization that opened the path to Trumpism in the first place.

Above all, what Americans are looking for is not so different than what the Gen Z uprisings erupting across Europe and South Asia these days are seeking: to restore trust in the fairness of governing institutions and unclog the routes of opportunity and upward mobility by tackling inequality at the root of the affordability crisis.

With the double failure of the old Democratic agenda and now the Trumpist alternative, the 2028 presidential contest will be the next chance for a new governing vision to emerge in the United States.

Whatever else such a vision may encompass, there are two structural changes that are imperative to ensuring that an anxious and alienated public will have a real say and a clear stake in their future.

First, the only way out of social polarization and the appeal of autocracy is a deeper institutional culture of engagement in which citizens themselves are involved — outside the divisive passions of the partisan electoral arena — in setting the rules that govern their lives. In other words, participation without populism.

Second, mending the fissures of democracy will only be possible if the growing concentration of wealth at the top generated by the arriving AI economy is more widely shared.

We have written about this often in Noema, but I will restate the case in the new context of the latest turn in American politics.

Sharing The AI Wealth

Much of the driving force of politics to come is a pervasive sense of gross inequality, that chances are no longer fair and those with connections and assets are accelerating away from the average family, which is only falling behind with no hope of catching up. Upward mobility has become a mirage. For too many, the good life is receding beyond reach.

Those who revolted against a cultural elite they viewed as looking down on them found themselves faced instead with a politically connected economic elite more entrenched and consolidated than ever before in post-World War II America.

As a result, there is an upswelling reaction from below. Those across America’s various electoral contests voting for “democratic socialists” are not hardened partisans of an old ideology. They are only a broad constituency realizing that capitalism is not working for them; that the benefits of how our system works, supercharged by digital technology, go to those who are already rich and getting richer because they own the assets that are growing in value.

If the pervasive sense of gross inequality is a key driver of social and political division, then the answer is broader wealth sharing so all Americans are pulling in the same direction.

This is where the idea of “universal basic capital” comes in.

AI innovations are increasingly decoupling productivity growth and wealth creation from employment and income, widening the inequality gap between those who “own the robots” and those who labor for their livelihood.

The value of productivity growth associated with AI is accruing to those with financial assets that are ballooning on the tail of Big Tech, concentrating wealth at the pinnacle. The top 10% own 93% of all equities.

Despite the immediate post-election market turmoil, regulation on safety and data center-related energy concerns expected from the new Congress will, in the end, temper the justified worries of the public about AI. While slowing down the pace of the race to the frontier of superintelligence, it will incentivize the kind of practical applications we’ve seen in China that will boost productivity across the economy.

A new social contract that responds to this dynamic would foster an ownership share for all in the wealth generated by intelligent machines that portend the displacement of gainful employment and wage depression as AI penetrates the entire economy. After all, it is the general intellect — the public’s personal data — that is the raw material transmuted by algorithms into a productive asset. If wealth is produced by all, all should share in its value.

This can be done mostly through universal savings/investment accounts for families and individuals seeded by an innovation levy on companies across the AI economy. The idea is not only to break up concentration of wealth at the top but to also build it from below. The best way to fight inequality in the digital age is to spread the equity around.

Thinking Outside The Ballot Box

The connective tissue of democracy has seriously decayed in recent years as trust in impartial institutions has hit rock bottom and the public square splinters into social media silos.

The triumph of Trumpism was not the cause of this crisis of governance. It was a symptom of the decay of democratic institutions that, captured by the organized special interests of an insider establishment, failed to address the dislocations of globalization and the disruptions of rapid technological change. To add danger to decay, the fevered partisans of populism all too readily threw out the baby with the bathwater, assaulting the very integrity of institutional checks and balances that guarantee the enduring survival of republics. The revolt against a moribund political class transmuted into a revolt against governance itself.

Since neither the stakeholders of the old status quo nor the upstarts of populism have offered any effective, systemic solutions to what ails the nation, protracted polarization and paralysis set in.

In the end, there are only two solutions to this predicament — the move Trump has made toward strongman autocracy, or thinking outside the ballot box by inviting the broader civil society into governance through new mediating institutions of citizen engagement that complement representative government.

One reparative response, embryonic but indicative of the larger possibility, has been introduced in California: a first-in-the-nation online public platform to help bridge silos and mend the breach of distrust between the public and the institutions of self-government. The platform, called Engaged California (EC), encourages and facilitates the direct engagement of citizens with government and with each other.

Engaged California is not glorified polling and is more than a town hall gathering. It is a three-way tool that enables policymakers and administrators to listen at scale to average citizens outside of election cycles and be responsive; it invites citizens to directly voice their concerns and proposals on an ongoing basis; and it is a platform for Californians from all walks of life to interact with each other to find common ground.

AI serves as a sorting tool to register consensus among thousands of participants on priorities for government action and to collate fresh ideas that emerge from this practice of collective intelligence.

In short, it is exactly this kind of innovative institutional platform for “governing with the people” that can restore trust because the public itself is proactively engaged.

Beyond Tinkering

Since the great transformations underway in America today are systemic in nature, so too must new ways and means of governance go beyond tinkering around the edges of waning ways that no longer fit the times.

Governance is how communities invent and shape their destiny. It determines whether a society goes forward or backward. Like the homeostasis of all organisms, governance is the regulator, arbiter and navigator of human affairs. It processes emotions through reason, as the means by which societies not only survive but thrive by adapting to change.

Going forward in this light, democratic practices and institutions must adapt to the unprecedented scale of connectivity in a way that fosters a governing consensus instead of dividing the body politic against itself. In an AI economy, where massive new wealth is being generated by mining the general intellect of public data and transforming it into a productive asset, the old industrial division between labor and capital diminishes and everyone must become an owner sharing fairly in that wealth.

With the old slate now wiped clean by failed alternatives, the space is opening once again for the political imagination to think anew with a systemic response to the challenges at hand. The blue wave rebuke of Trumpism puts the onus on Democrats.

The post appeared first on NOEMA.