The Missing Vision
Maybe it’s me, but the news cycle seems both terrifying and tedious. We’re treated to a steady diet of crises followed by reactions which create new crises. It’s as if we’re in a straitjacket, bouncing off today’s emergency instead of making deliberate choices that might lead to a coherent future.
In a thoughtful New York Times column, Ben Rhodes explains how “short-term compulsions blind us to the forces remaking our lives.” He characterizes Trump as seeking “short-term ‘wins’ at the expense of the future”—for example, ignoring unsustainable national debt, climate change, and other existential perils. But Rhodes says Democrats too are trapped in short-termism—“spend[ing] more time defending what is being lost than imagining what will take its place.”
Rhodes argues that Democrats need to counter Trump’s wrecking ball approach with a new positive vision—maybe not Zohran Mamdani’s radical socialism, but a disruptive vision that addresses “the sense of crisis many Americans feel.” I think Rhodes is too gentle with Democrats, who are controlled by public unions and other interest groups who are primary causes of the dysfunctional government that helped propel the MAGA movement.
I also have a somewhat different diagnosis. Short-termism is a pervasive evolutionary instinct of all creatures—as fish are attracted to a shiny lure. Humans are different because we can use our judgment—to see second-level consequences, make tradeoff judgments, and adapt when circumstances change.
But in today’s reactive culture we no longer seem to value human judgment. We want the quick fix. Calling for free buses, rent freezes, and municipal grocery stores, as Zohran Mamdani does, is just a shiny lure—ignoring the predictable consequences, including municipal insolvency and the deterioration of housing stock.
Short-termism reveals the absence of human judgment. What happened to leaders whom we looked to for good judgment? Part of the problem was a deliberate change in governing philosophy after the 1960s to replace human judgment with a kind of legal software program. Just follow the rules. Basically, we made leadership illegal. That’s why President Obama was unable to use the 2009 stimulus to rebuild infrastructure: “There’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”
Trump’s support is fueled by legal paralysis and overbearing bureaucracy. Instead of re-empowering human judgment at all levels, however, Trump is replacing top-down legal controls with top-down autocracy. Sustained achievement requires human judgment at all levels of responsibility over the life of an institution, not just disruption today.
In my book coming out next month, Saving Can-Do, I argue that populist resentment and broken government stem from the same flawed idea—that law should preempt human judgment. The proper role of law is to provide a framework for human responsibility, not tell people how to do things.
America feels tossed in a storm because it’s missing the keel of human judgment. That’s why politics today is a contest between shiny objects and laying blame when, inevitably, those promises fail. What’s needed, I argue in Saving Can-Do, is a new legal framework that empowers people to make things work. Let Americans roll up their sleeves and act like Americans again.
– Philip
In his blog Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen describes Saving Can-Do as “short, to the point” and excerpts from the third essay on what decision-making structure is required to build infrastructure.
Writing about Abundance in Vital City, Greg Berman cites our earlier work on the need for government to focus on results, not process.
A Toronto Star op-ed on the revived “King of the Hill” describes how producer Greg Daniels had all his writers read The Death of Common Sense.