A former president of the United States has been indicted for allegedly spiriting away, refusing to return, and showing to unauthorized individuals some of the country’s most closely guarded nuclear secrets. According to the post-indictment polling, this has made him more likely to be the Republican nominee for president; one poll says that 80 percent of Republicans believe he still should become president even if convicted.
People therefore are understandably concerned to “know” whether Donald Trump in fact will return to the White House in 2024. Right now, polls indicate he would win the popular vote, and would almost certainly win the electoral vote, while there is considerable evidence that he and his party will attempt more successfully to ensure this time that Congress takes the actions to certify the election in his favor, whatever the actual vote totals. There is also good reason to think that none of that will occur. While we cannot know the outcome for certain, I think we can be reasonably confident that it will be, in the words of Wellington after Waterloo, “a close-run thing.”
Since Trump’s famous golden escalator ride to announce his candidacy in 2015, it has become commonplace to dismiss his latest assault on democratic norms as both “shocking” and “predictable.” While Trump’s defiance of norms, and his supporters’ constancy in defending it, may have become “predictable,” the precipitous decay of American democracy seems to be something that very few saw coming and still, for the most part, refuse to accept. However, such unlikely-seeming developments were, in fact, predictable—and, more importantly, their very predictability, if we learn to recognize it, may be our best and strongest hope for averting the most disastrous outcomes and maybe even bending developments toward better ones.
As I argued last year in this publication, history over the long term is shaped by technological change. This is not an argument for technological determinism: Within material realities that our technologies create for us—whether we must forage or can grow our own food, for example—people can and must make choices. But those realities shape and affect our choices, both in terms of what we do and how we think about them. The dominant technology of any era shapes the intellectual conceptions of the time, and today’s digital technologies present a material and conceptual reality that tends to atomize everything, undermine all forms of authoritativeness and authority, and divide and drive us apart. From these premises, I contended, we are able to make numerous, plausible predictions about where we might be headed.
Starting during Barack Obama’s first run for president, I began making a number of predictions that struck most people as outlandish at the time. First was the prediction, based in part on Obama’s rise, that politics would realign around a socially liberal economic elite and socially conservative working class, with political parties in the United States switching places as the perceived voice of the elite and working class, respectively. As Obama’s hope-filled tenure drew to a close, I grew concerned that an unprincipled, narcissistic, and buffoonish character such as Donald Trump could channel the hopes and anxieties of tens of millions of Americans into a successful White House run. And as that unfolded, I became convinced that when or if Trump eventually lost power, tens of thousands of armed Americans would rally in an attempt to keep him there. Despite the fact that all this has happened, many, if not most, Americans cling to the belief that this turbulent interval in US history was an aberration that has passed and that all of what I just described is behind us.
I beg to differ. This is not because I believe that our technological present dictates a particular political future: A wide range of contingencies and choices will determine the specific path we follow as a society. To borrow from Donald Rumsfeld, a catalog of not just “known knowns” but also “known unknowns” and even “unknown unknowns” can intervene between now and January 20, 2025. But we can take some guesses. And, more importantly, we can take some actions. What actions we choose to take, however, must be influenced by our guesses as to what the future holds. But how do we pretend to know anything about that future, other than—and, especially, because—all we really know about it is that it will be different from the past and present?
Well, in some ways, ironically, we know more about the future than we do about the past. If we come across an abandoned ball in a field, we don’t know very much about its past: We don’t know how it got there, or what path it followed to wind up where we found it. But if we pick it up and toss it, we have a pretty good idea of the path it will follow into the future—at least, part ways into the future: We know basically the arc it will follow as it leaves our hand, from a combination of the force and angle with which we throw it and our first-hand knowledge, even if we never learned the calculus equations that describe it, of gravity.
In fact, a baseball outfielder calculates, almost instantly and without thinking consciously about it, the path and likely end point of a fly ball from observing its trajectory in just the first split-second when it leaves the hitter’s bat. When we watch a fielder running to make a fabulous play—think of Willie Mays’s famed “basket catch” off Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series, with his back turned to home plate—we are not really watching him chase a fly ball, as the expression normally goes, but rather him running to where he has already predicted the ball will land.
The famous saying attributed to hockey great Wayne Gretzky, about skating not to where the puck is but rather to where it is going to be, doesn’t actually exemplify Gretzky’s greater insight about the future so much as accurately describe the ability of all of us to predict the future: The future may be unknowable, but it is usually not unguessable. The question really is, “With what accuracy can you guess?”
Horseracing used to be the most popular sport in the United States, with attendance outstripping that of baseball, football, basketball, and hockey combined. When Seabiscuit met War Admiral in their famed match race at Pimlico in 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt and all his aides—busy leading the country through recovery from the worst economic crisis in its history and unfolding global events that would lead to World War II—ceased their work momentarily to follow the radio broadcast of the two horses’ historic duel. That is how popular and important horseracing used to be in American life.
That is hard for most people to imagine nowadays—which just shows the difficulty of extrapolating the future from the past, as most people do. Lauren Hillebrand, in her best-selling book Seabiscuit, attributes the decline of horseracing to the rise of the automobile, which displaced horses as day-to-day phenomena in most people’s lives and thus some of the mythic importance of identifying the most outstanding horse. This, too, raises a caution against presuming that the effects of technological innovations can be easily discerned and predicted by looking simply at their most immediate impacts.
In short, predicting the future based solely on what we already know and have seen is a fraught exercise. Of course, the people who spend the most time trying to predict the future based on past performance are, in fact, the few remaining horse racing fans. I am one of those few.
If you bet on horses—or for that matter, the stock market—then you know that what makes for success is not necessarily being right most of the time. It is being right more often than the crowd.
In other words, you do better in the long run betting on long shots whose odds are not quite as long as everyone else thinks, rather than on the sure thing that will probably win but also probably is not as sure a thing as everyone else believes—and who pays back very little because the odds are so low. It is simple math—put your money on something underpriced rather than overpriced, not on what is more likely than less likely, and you will get higher returns over time. Figuring out the “real” underlying odds or the “real” price, however, is impossible: That would require knowing the outcome before the race is run (or, to use another example, before the stock split is announced). How can you do that?
Sometimes you have insider information, but trading on that is generally illegal. So, instead, you have to rely on your hunches, mix in a little analysis, and be willing to take a flying leap. I am a pretty conservative bettor and investor, but when it comes to predicting the future of politics, economics, and government, I have been willing to take some real long shots.
As a result, I am wrong as often as I am right. For example, while I believed, on the basis of election returns in the 2015 “off-year” in the United States, as well as others abroad, that some Trump-like figure would emerge as a potential president to represent the angry and economically dispossessed, I initially assumed that the Republican Party establishment still had the good sense and the ability to coalesce around someone else. That said, I have been pretty good at predicting outlandish events for the last decade or so because, if you look closely enough at what’s happening in the world today, you might realize that pretty outlandish things are happening more often than people want to think. We have been living through what market analysts would call increased “volatility.” Political developments, not just economic markets, are becoming more volatile as well. That makes predicting long shots a much better bet these days.
For instance, around the time that Barack Obama was elected president, a number of political observers—not least, the campaign team around Obama, whose successful strategy and tactics have been studied and copied in all election cycles since—predicted that the Democratic Party would enjoy a natural, and almost insurmountable, advantage from then on. Why? Because of the growth of a younger, more racially diverse, more highly educated, more urban and cosmopolitan electorate, what the Obama team called “the Ascendant Majority.” This emergent majority tended to vote heavily for candidates fitting a similar profile—Obama himself being the prime example.
Of course, this widely held view turned out to be wrong. It started with a prediction about the future based on current trends that was largely unassailable and has proven true—that the complexion of the American electorate was changing, and will continue to change, in ways that reduce the numerical strength of older, whiter, less educated, and rural voters—and then assumed that nothing else would change in response.
The notion that Obama’s election had ushered in an era of sustained liberal dominance in politics and culture depended, then, upon accepting a straight-line projection of existing trends. It failed to contemplate how this trajectory might be changed by the second-order effects, notably the backlash of older white voters unwilling to accept the “Ascendant Majority’s” premature report of their deaths.
Of course, second-order effects are by definition much more difficult to observe, let alone predict: To return to Gretzky’s famous phrase, they require seeing not just that the puck is heading in a certain direction, but also that another player is skating to intercept it and will end up deflecting it at an oblique angle.
In the case of predicting where our politics, governance, economy, and society are heading, it is necessary to take a much broader view than the day-to-day contemporary combat. That broader view reveals the current “time of troubles” as—like most times of trouble in the past—a product of the longer arc of technological change.
I (and others) often compare the Internet Age we’re living through to the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions, but around the time I started really thinking about these issues, a book was published called 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which explored how that era had strange but compelling parallels to our own. This was the dawn of the Bronze Age, when the development of new techniques in metallurgy made possible new kinds of tools—and so, of course, new kinds of weapons—forged more easily and cheaply from bronze than their iron-based predecessors. These tools and weapons greatly expanded the capabilities of the societies that possessed them in both economic productivity and ability to destroy others. The result was tremendous political upheaval across the world of the Mediterranean and Middle East, with long-time imperial powers falling practically overnight to quicker, lither invaders essentially unheard of moments before, from the Aegean to the Nile to the Zagros Mountains. New forms of ploughshares and pruning hooks don’t just change farming and fishing techniques; they overturn religions, wipe out cultures, and bring down empires.
It sounded implausible when, in the midst of Barack Obama’s triumphal march to the White House, I argued that the parties were realigning so that Democrats would become the party of the rich and powerful in the New Economy and Republicans the voice of disaffected workers, and that this would pose problems for Obama’s “Ascendant” America in future elections. It sounded unlikely when I suggested early in Obama’s tenure that conservatives would adopt the tactics of the Civil Rights movement and use the courts to treat white Christians as a disfavored minority entitled to “affirmative action” of sorts in all government policies. It was going out on a limb in 2015 to predict that 2016 would see more countries abroad start to pull away from international coalitions like the European Union and for their subcomponents to start voting to break apart—as the United Kingdom did with Brexit and Scotland came close to doing—and that the United States would turn to an angry, populist, outsider businessman as president. And everyone I know thought it was absurd to predict before Trump’s election in 2016—and right on up through January 6, 2021—that, if and when he lost, thousands of armed supporters would attempt, violently if necessary, to keep him in office.
But, of course, all of these things, and more, came to pass. In hindsight, they all make sense. But they also were all predictable. That doesn’t mean that they were going, or even likely, to happen, but simply that one could predict them. And I did. In the midst of the January 6 riot, one of my former students emailed me: “I hope you know [we] are all waiting for your I-told-you-so.”
The main points, however, are three:
- These were all fairly logical extensions of existing trajectories.
- They went, however, beyond the first-order effects that most observers touted—for instance, that Obama had constructed a new, winning coalition; religious conservatives had seemingly lost the culture wars; a twenty-first century liberal world order had solidified the “end of history”—by asking what sorts of reactions these might engender, and what reactions to the reactions, and so on.
- And, while they might seem like long shots, they were—because care was taken in analyzing the first two steps—far less unlikely than most observers thought. And that made them pretty good bets.
As a result, while I try to push beyond the conventional wisdom about what that future might look like, I believe the future will look something like what was spelled out in the long essay I wrote for this publication, “Democracy Disrupted.” In fact, I am willing to bet on it.
But, most importantly, we are not interested in making predictions simply for the idle sport of placing bets on them. Wayne Gretzky didn’t skate to where the puck was going to be just so he could watch it whiz by him. He skated there to be in a position to affect its future path—to turn it in the direction he wanted and fire it into the goal. We seek to understand where we are today and how we got here, as well as the direction the world is headed, not just as an intellectual enterprise—and certainly not simply to wring our hands in dismay—but rather to see if we can help turn things in the direction of the greater good.
Martin Luther King, Jr., famously remarked that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. That may be true. But it does not bend on its own. It bends because individuals, in large numbers and small, famous and unknown, in victory and even defeat, answer the call of justice and bend the universe in that direction. You can do that better if you look to where the world is going to be—and then move in that direction so as to make your contribution to its trajectory.
Ultimately, as with Napoleon, epochal as will be either Trump’s return or eventual defeat, there are even greater historical tides moving underneath these developments that will still be there afterward, either way. Most immediately, American presidential elections will continue to be close-run things until a new societal consensus, like that which dominated US politics during the decades between the Great Depression and the Reagan Revolution, emerges.
But such a political consensus depends in turn upon a resolution of the economic and social displacements that the current technological changes are causing, and which we are only part-way through. These ultimately concern how the economically and culturally dominant segments of our society choose to treat those on the losing end of these struggles. As I have argued, the Democratic Party today has generally chosen to build a new coalition of what it has openly called the “Ascendant” and to crush the seemingly revanchist working class—which I believe is both politically deleterious to the party and, more important, to the country, and also a moral dereliction of the historic progressive duty to speak politically for those who are disadvantaged economically or culturally. The country will still face that basic choice if and when Trump is defeated for good. And will reap the whirlwind if he is not. Those more fundamental tides, rather than the admittedly important, and more immediate, election outcome, will continue to be the real challenges our society faces in the years ahead.
Of course, that is merely a prediction.
Whether we could be doing a better and more equitable job as a country in addressing them is not.