A number of years back, I was in China for a conference when, during a dinner thrown by the hosts for their international presenters, I was lucky enough to find myself sitting next to James
Fallows, who was in China on assignment for The Atlantic. His dispatches back eventually became the book “Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China.”
It was my
first trip to China, and I was stunned by the apparent contradiction of the most entrepreneurial society I had ever seen under the rule of a Communist regime. I asked James how China’s then
leader, Hu Jintao, managed to maintain that seemingly impossible balance without widespread insurrection. He said something I’ll always remember: “As long as the Chinese people believe
that their lives today are better than they were yesterday, and that they will be even better tomorrow, they will continue to follow their leader.”
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That same very simple equation is what
populists, some of whom may eventually become dictators, depend on -- promising to make life better for their base. If you were Hitler, Mussolini, or Francisco Franco, that was easy to do. Each
of those countries and their economies were fundamentally broken in the 1920s or 30s. You didn’t have to be a genius to make things better for the average German, Italian or Spaniard. Just
getting trains to run on time was a pretty big step in the right direction.
But that’s not the U.S.A. Things there are (or were) pretty good. Perfect? Not by a long shot. But pretty
good.
You disagree? The plain facts are that at no time in history have people eaten more, had more, did more or lived longer than right now. And that is doubly true for the U.S., which has
about 5% of the world’s population but consumes about 20% to 25% of the world’s resources. Yes, there’s a lot that can be fixed (for instance, there are huge disparities in wealth
and consumption), but things are pretty good. Especially in the U.S. of A.
So where does that leave a populist like Trump? Populists say that they -- and they alone -- can make life better
tomorrow for their base. But when things are pretty good already, that’s a hard promise to keep. The U.S. -- and the rest of the world -- is a complex place that exists thanks to complex
systems. The economy, financial markets, diplomacy, healthcare, immigration, education -- all of these things are complex. And because of this complexity, the problems that do exist are what are
called “wicked” problems -- problems that have no quick or simple
solution. In fact, they may have no solution at all.
Someone like Trump has no clue about complexity. He will spout inanely ignorant “fixes” and back them up with talking points that have no basis in reality.
Take Trump’s insanely
stupid “tariff” solution he imposed just over a week ago. It wasn’t even 24 hours old when he started pulling it back because the U. S. economy started running off the rails. As I
said a month ago, imposing a 25% blanket tariff is like doing open heart surgery with a hand grenade.
And this is a big problem for Trump. He has no idea how to keep his promise to make life
better for people in a complex environment. It’s not just tariffs. The flurry of executive orders and the chainsaw massacre that is DOGE are similarly stupid solutions to complex issues.
They are doomed to fail, which means the U.S. will inevitably slip backwards, rather than leap forward.
Trump will blunder from mistake to mistake, blowing up all the systems that made things
“pretty good” in America. He is bulldozing through the complex international relationships that have enabled the U.S. to perch on top of the world order for 100 years, pissing off every
other country in the world with the exception of one: Russia.
As the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau just said, “Make that make sense.”
It would be easy to blame
Trump. But I won’t. He’s just being Trump, just like a shark is just being a shark. It would also be easy to blame the Republican sycophants that are letting him do this. But again --
sharks will be sharks. They have evolved to swim toward blood.
No, to truly assign blame, we have to ask “why” a few times.
Why was Trump put in the position where he could
do this? He’s there because 77 million Americans voted for him. And why did they vote for him? Because they believed he could make things better tomorrow than they are today. It’s a pretty
simple equation.
Let’s ask why one more time. Why did they believe that Trump could save them? Ah! Now, we’re getting somewhere. Our media built this belief. They built it because
there is no profit in saying things are “pretty good.”
The media thrives by creating conflict. And so they built the belief that things were fundamentally broken and needed
fixing. They created the illusion that there are simple solutions to complex problems. They gave Trump the air he needed to breathe.
The media -- especially social media -- also planted the
false notion that we deserve better than “pretty good.” It has fostered the nonsensical equation that all of us should have the same as the richest of us.
We are entitled to it. And
if we don’t get it, somebody is to blame. No one stops to think that that equation is mathematically impossible.
That is what we have to fix.