Phase Transition

Renaissance Humans, #39

The focus of this newsletter is sense-making and story-telling in the turbulent twenties. I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to think about the most sense-making and story-telling thing to happen thus far in the 2020s.

The American election.

With something as complex as an election, for an electorate as complex as America’s, the factors which contribute to the result will be many, and braided together, like the word complex suggests.¹

Sense-making is hard in a fractured and fragmented media environment. It takes effort to escape filter bubbles —echo chambers that mirror back biases, flawed assumptions, and wishful thinking.

A year ago, I wrote about the Turbulent Twenties, a term I first heard Peter Turchin use.

In the essay, I synthesized the work of Ray Dalio, George Friedman, Neil Howe, and Turchin. Together², they point to a political realignment in the 2020s, on the order of FDR in the 1930s and Reagan in the 1980s.

I thought this realignment would happen in 2028. But I don’t think that’s right.

I think it just happened.

Historian Jason Steinhauer called the election “The End of the 20th Century.”

Here’s Fareed Zakaria’s take:

A narrative frame is a scaffold on our perceptions. It is a way for humans to organize the confusing picture coming from our senses and make it intelligible. While no one frame is perfect, each provides something to grab hold of in the Maelstrom. There are several ways to frame the choice in this election:

• Felon vs. Prosecutor

• Order vs. Chaos

• Past vs. Future

• Masculine vs. Feminine

• Status Quo vs. Change

I want to zoom in on one frame in particular:

• Elites vs. Counter-Elites

Turchin discusses the concept of “Elite Overproduction.” Instead of musical chairs with decreasing chairs each round, imagine the game with the same number of chairs, but additional players over time. These elites graduate from prestigious universities and seek jobs as journalists, lawyers, business execs, and politicians. Groomed from a young age with education, networks, and ambition, they want to lead. When they are blocked from normal pathways to power, they seek alternative methods to get there.

They become Counter-Elites

I wrote about Elites a few months ago when I contrasted the work of Christopher Lasch and Martin Gurri .

In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Christopher Lasch analyzes contemporary American society, focusing on the growing divide between elites and the general populace. In the 1994 book, Lasch argues the elite class—comprising professionals, executives, and intellectuals— has become increasingly disconnected from the rest of society, leading to a breakdown in democratic values and social cohesion. Lasch critiques the idea of meritocracy, arguing that it promotes arrogance and entitlement among the elites, while fostering resentment and alienation among those left behind.

In The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, Martin Gurri examines politics, society, and the authority of established institutions through the prism of emerging communication mediums. In the 2018 book, Gurri, a former CIA analyst, argues that the rise of digital media, particularly social media, has empowered individuals while simultaneously undermining traditional authority figures and institutions.

This last bit— the rise of digital media, is worth dwelling on for a moment. Some have referred to this as “the podcast election.” Last year, Ted Gioia wrote a piece on Substack discussing the differences between what he terms Macroculture —Legacy institutions like newspapers and network news, and Microculture —Substacks, podcasts, and social media. Gioia asserts the Microculture is ascendant. We are living through the disruption of a Gutenberg Press-like event.

In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War

A safe estimate is top podcasts have an order of magnitude more reach than traditional media forms like Fox or MSNBC. President Trump, Senator Vance, and Musk all went on The Joe Rogan Experience, in addition to several other podcasts with enormous followings. In an age of six second attention spans, each did three hour conversations. Vice President Harris tried to set conditions³ for going on Rogan, and he refused. She did go on Call Her Daddy, but you can see the difference in followers below.⁴

The electoral margins in the 2024 election were not large relative to the recent past — Presidents Bush (41), Clinton, and Obama, all had higher numbers. It’s not the high 400s or even 500+ electoral votes Presidents Reagan and FDR pulled down in their landslides. But in winning the popular vote, President Trump put together a truly diverse coalition of voters. He made gains in nearly every voting block and geographic locale in the nation. What’s more, his party won the House and the Senate. This gives him both a decisive mandate to act on his campaign pledges, and the legislative horsepower to do so.

Rage Against The Machine

This election represents a rebuke of the establishment— the same establishment that took us to war all over the world after 9/11. Remember, one reason President President Obama appealed to voters in 2008 was his opposition to the Iraq war. Similarly, Trump gave voice to a part of the electorate unsatisfied with national security decision-making.

Under this Elite/Counter-Elite framework, when voters see Congresswoman Cheney campaigning with Vice President Harris, they don’t see bipartisan unity in opposition to an illegitimate criminal. Instead, they see a uniparty finally unmasked, squaring off against the chosen avatar of working class Americans in the form of President Trump. Establishment elites represent a globalized, cosmopolitan class seeking to homogenize the nation into a larger world market. For a group with such a goal, massive immigration is a feature, not a bug. These politicians have more in common with elites in other nations than average Americans.

The writer Paul Kingsnorth terms this The Machine. Multi-national corporations, surveillance capitalism, and attention harvesting on big tech platforms— these are all manifestations of this great leviathan. Through this frame, the 2024 election is a rebellion again the octopus-like system of the Machine, ensnaring the world through new technologies and the incentive structure of the free market.

Another aspect of the story is what author Tim Urban calls “Social Justice Fundamentalism.” In this clip with journalist Bari Weiss, Urban discusses the difference between Liberal Social Justice (The Gay Marriage & Women’s Suffrage movements) and Social Justice Fundamentalism (AKA Wokeness). This movement has become entwined within many American institutions—universities, corporations, traditional media, and government entities.

A major component of this election was a referendum on the role of Social Justice Fundamentalism in American life.

Below is a graphic produced by left-leaning Blueprint 24. The report finds the top reasons voters listed for not voting Harris are inflation, immigration, and cultural issues. You can see under the Swing Voters Chose Trump column, the largest factor at +28 was Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.

The counter-argument is voters for President Trump are illiberal, racist, ill-informed, misinformed, and sexist. This argument blames them, rather than Vice President Harris and her message. In this essay, Musa al-Gharbi discusses and disposes of many of these arguments—racism, sexism, rich people, turnout.

A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives

I don’t find this counter-argument compelling in light of the gains President Trump made, both in types of voters and geographic locations. He swept all seven swing states and made large inroads in deep blue states like New York and New Jersey. It’s the same electorate that voted for President Obama twice, and gave Secretary Clinton three million more votes than President Trump in 2016.

If you’re a supporter of Vice President Harris, the easy excuse is to point to racism, sexism, and misinformation, rather than confronting the brutal prospect that your candidate and message was flawed. Here’s Bill Maher dispensing tough love to his fellow liberals:

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What Then? (Shoutout to Sam Alaimo)

In complexity science, a phase transition refers to a critical point where a system undergoes a sudden and qualitative change in behavior or structure. This concept is borrowed from physics, where it describes changes like the transition from water to steam or ice. A new pattern emerges when a certain threshold is breached. These transitions are characterized by non-linear behavior, meaning small changes in certain conditions can result in large and often unpredictable transformations.

This election was a phase transition —a realignment of voters, parties, and direction for the future.

Republicans have become the party of the working class. Democrats represent the most well-educated and well-off in society.

If you voted for Vice President Harris, the results of this election hurt.

It presents a choice— examine the outcome with a clear-eyed humility, or double down on the racism/sexism/misinformation narrative.

The former represents the best path back to political leadership, while the latter is a recipe for a longer wander in the electoral desert. Luckily, democrats have done it before. Below, Eli Lake of the Free Press discusses how democrats climbed out of a much larger electoral hole after 1984:

Whether you are elated by this outcome or demoralized, it was a clear, definitive result. I am reminded of the old Zen admonishment, “we’ll see,” here related by Hanks and Hoffman in Charlie Wilson’s War:

We don’t know what will come next.

We think we have a good idea, but what is certain that we don’t know.

We descend to a deeper level of the 2020’s. No matter your political persuasion, you likely see the status quo in need of change. Many feel the way we’re living is untenable and unsustainable, for a variety of reasons. Whether we love this result or hate it, this is what is unfolding. This is the hand we’ve been dealt.

What then?

We have a choice.

We can lament about how fucked up everything is. How delusional and awful those other people are.

Or, we can roll up our sleeves and get to work, creating the world we want to live in.

The world we want to hand down to our children.

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Currere Certamen Tuum

1. The Latin root of the word "complex" is "complexus", from the verb "complecti". "Complecti" means "to embrace" or "to entwine," and it is formed from the prefix "com-" (meaning "together") and "plectere" (meaning "to weave" or "to braid"). So, "complexus" refers to something entwined or woven together. Thus endeth the Latin lesson for the day, and my Grandmother can smile down upon me from her perch in the numinous beyond.

2. There are a few other big history type predictions out there I didn’t discuss, like Kondratiev waves and such. I stuck with four so the essay didn’t get ridiculously long.

3. Only a one hour interview instead of three, and Rogan had to come to her.

4. As I was writing this essay, Andrew Sullivan made a similar point here in his Weekly Dish. Short answer— fear of angering her progressive base kept Vice President Harris from going on Rogan.