The White House is, by and large, the last bastion of change.

Depending on how you count, it took 20 or 40 or 50 years to get to where we are.

Biden-Harris might not be the ticket you want, but it’s officially the ticket we’ve got — and, even if it looks behind the times today, consider how different it is from four or eight or 12 years ago.

The U.S. government is really, really, really big. It has been for decades, and the growth has been one of the few truly bipartisan efforts during that time.

But I don’t want to focus on the size of the administrative state or the seriousness of the claims against it today. (Though it might be worth asking what a smaller, less regulatory government would do about Big Tech, given how little the current government has been able to govern.)

Instead, I want to ask when was the last time you were able to not think about government.

Somehow, we’ve ended up in the perverse paradox of being under-governed and over-governmented: after five years of practice, we still can’t wrest our attention away from the first shitposting presidency.

Dominating every waking moment of our attention (and a chunk of our sleeping ones, too) is an encroachment of a whole other degree and magnitude.

So, yes: we need to be more engaged, and we ought to demand and receive better services. But, first, let’s insist on a government that allows us to think about something else from time to time.

Remember the recurring gag in Team America, in which one character says something would be “9/11 times X” and another replies, in a tone of awed horror, “That would be [nine hundred eleven times X]”?

Sadly, the past several months have provided a real-life version of this. With more than 171,000 deaths due to the coronavirus as of latest count (by the New York Times), we’re at 9/11 [approximately 3,000 deaths] times 57.

As Scott Galloway pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the United States has been averaging a little over 800 deaths per day due to Covid — or approximately the Civil War (~500 deaths/day) plus World War II (~300).

That’s unprecedented. And it should be more than reason enough for an “unpresidenting.”

Imagine you’re running a company with 1,000 workers. For sake of example, it’s powered by a waterwheel, which is operated by three people.

Here’s the catch: the sluiceway empties into the office itself. At present, the office can’t function without the water and the waterwheel — but, the longer the water flows, the soggier the office gets. Sooner or later, it’s clear that the office might have power, but everyone and everything in it will be underwater.

Those three workers are in an interesting position. You can’t fire them today, since that would put everyone out of work as soon as their laptop batteries die. But you can’t keep them in their current jobs forever, either: not only will everyone be out of work, but the flooded laptops will be ruined, too. What would you do in this situation?

***

The truth is, we’re about to find out. According to the Financial Times, in a recent analysis of Joe Biden’s proposals for climate and energy policy, the fracking industry sees the presumptive nominee as an existential threat to their industry. If enacted, Biden’s policies might cost 600,000 jobs.

That’s a lot of people. A lot of livelihoods. (And, yes, a lot of swing voters, if you want to look at it that way.) But here’s the thing: 600,000 jobs represent about three and a half thousandths (0.36 percent) of the total U.S. labor force, which was right around 165 million before Covid struck in earnest.

And so we face the choice: what do we do with and for these people, whose jobs might embody 20th-century American progress but whose continued work is making the world less livable for everyone — and helping to give political cover to other countries that don’t want to break up with fossil fuels yet, either?

I hope that one of the lessons of 2016 is that we shouldn’t try to write people off or pretend to buy them off with vague ideas of retraining. Dignity matters, and our culture has hooked work awfully close together with dignity.

But I hope we can also agree that the overriding need for dignity does not mean we can’t also have priorities and act on them. We don’t still have a whaling industry, and that’s a good thing.

Which is more American: risking the future of the planet to preserve the already-tenuous jobs of 0.36 percent of the labor force with outsized political clout, or finding new ways for 600,000 people to contribute to a future that’s more sustainable in every way?

I recently came across the quip that living in Canada is like living in an apartment over a meth lab.

It’s easy to focus on the precariousness of that situation: who wants to live above a seedy spot that could explode at any moment?

The question I keep coming back to, though, is: what would you do if you found yourself living in the meth lab?

Two weeks ago, I read Paul Graham’s new essay “The Four Quadrants of Conformism,” and it’s stuck with me since.

As usual, Paul points to something hidden in plain sight — something many of us have probably felt, perhaps without consciously noticing it.

The question he poses is whether and how much the space to freely share and debate ideas has shrunk in recent years; the answer, it seems, is quite a bit.

Anecdotally, and in my own experience, this is true: in the decade or so since I was in college, I’ve noticed (mostly subconsciously) how many fields of discussion are basically closed, how many more require caveats, and how many of those caveats are premised on “Speaking as a …”.

That’s a tough way to carry on a conversation at any level, but it’s also notable how much that was once acceptable to discuss but not to believe can now be said with a straight face. (So far as I know, none of my classmates marched and heiled with tiki torches.)

Banning ideas tends not to work. Identity shapes how we see the world, but not the basic facts of life. (Imagine Galileo’s op-ed today: “As an astronomer, I am compelled to report what I observe ….”)

And, above all, it’s hard to see how we might conform our way out of our problems.

I read a poll this week that said that something like 40 percent of people still support the president, and another 4 percent are undecided.

There’s a separate essay to be written on the 40 percent, and how hard it is to see democracy surviving the “leadership” of a guy who genuinely believes he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and get away with it — and he might be right.

But it’s the undecided who really get me. If 4 percent of America really is undecided, that’s an awful lot of people: let’s say 8 million, if two-thirds of about 12 million are of voting age. (That’s a little more than the combined population of Croatia and the country of Georgia.)

There has been no other topic of conversation for five years — until Covid came along and killed more than 150,000 Americans. And some people still can’t decide?

Politicians (especially executives) make decisions. That’s their job. And decisions made and unmade have made the United States not great but, for the first time, pitied.

In a couple of months, it’s our turn to make a decision about those decisions. About who’s responsible. About which way we want to go as a country, as a society.

Decide. And decide well. Because there’s no longer any question as to what a difference four years can make.

Survival is success.

Sometimes, that’s true.

But it’s also true that terrain-following is the most harrowing, technically demanding, exhausting, and dangerous flying there is.

It’s much more efficient — and a whole lot easier — to seek altitude if you possibly can.

It’s painful to watch a sports team coast for years or decades on former glories.

“Never mind the losing,” they say: “Keep coming to the ballpark and paying through the nose for snacks and souvenirs. After all, the ghost of So-and-so still inhabits this field. And who knows? You might catch a glimpse of him.”

The truth, as everyone can see, is that these teams aren’t those teams of yore. And a mismanaged team in legendary uniforms is pretty hard to watch.

Sooner or later, it’s time to rebuild. And once you make that decision, buckle up: it’s going to look different, it’s going to take time, and it can’t be done by half-measures.

After all, the only thing worse than a refusal to rebuild is a constant rebuilding. Then you’re the Browns: named after a founding father of the league and with a proud history, but with a new coach this year, a new GM the next, and a new quarterback after that — and precious little to show for all that on the field or the scoreboard.

Watching the first half of the Netflix series about a young Hasidic woman’s attempt to leave her community in Brooklyn, I was first captivated by the images of travel and music.

Those are scarce commodities these days, of course, so the plot line that unfolds in a Berlin conservatory offers plenty of food for the homebound soul.

But the cultural portrayal leaped off the screen, too: this tiny (admittedly elite, adapted for the screen) slice of Berlin is filled with people of all colors, cultures, and characters. They slip effortlessly between languages and deal openly but relatively lightly with their country’s past.

My first reaction was, “They are who we said we were.” But then I realized that’s not really true: even if we take this ludicrously small sample as representative in any meaningful way, what really matters is that the culture, the history, and — crucially — the promise are different.

Saying that contemporary Germany is like the United States is like comparing the two countries’ constitutions: you can spot the resemblances, but Germany’s resembles — and does not resemble — that of the United States in specific ways, for specific reasons.

Covid might hasten a constitutional crisis in the United States, but the virus isn’t going to help us write a new “basic law,” as U.S. and allied intellectuals did in defeated Germany. We’re going to have to do that for ourselves, but we don’t have to do it truly alone: more than 200 years on, there are plenty of other examples of similar ideas on different evolutionary paths to borrow and adapt.