Various federal bureaucracies, each with its own particular and overlapping interests, each with a strong sense of world-class mission and excellence, all directed to prevent the worst from happening.

And yet, somehow, the existential test manages to slip over, under, around, or through the cracks in the system and the agencies are thrown back on their heels in the aftermath of the day they swore we would never see.

These things happen. They’re not supposed to, but they do. And we’re really not good about thinking and talking about them openly in our modern political culture. Clearly, some things are secret; just as clearly, we can’t have everyone looking for bad guys under every rock and around every corner. Yet we do a terrible job of preparing people for the painful but inevitable gaps between “the best in the world” and human fallibility.

The question, then, is what to do in the wake of failure.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, we created several new bureaucracies to cover up the gaps in the old ones — at an enormous cost in scale, complexity, and money. Almost two decades later, “homeland security” — the term, the remit, and the agency — has proliferated across every level of government. And the circa-2,000-person Office of the Director of National Intelligence sits atop the $50 billion, 17-agency non-military intelligence community.

We’ve all learned to live with the minor indignities of the TSA (not to mention the larger ones of Homeland Security’s border agencies, federal police, and acting directorship). Thankfully, we’ve also been spared the horror of further acts of mass international terrorism — but it’s impossible to say whether that’s entirely or even mainly to the credit of the post-9/11 agencies.

The Covid pandemic is still raging, and it has found many parts of the federal health agencies wanting. Even as we strive to get this disease under control, it’s safe to assume that (a) there are other viruses out there that might cause problems for humanity and (b) there’s going to be a huge political and bureaucratic push for “never again.”

Where will that lead us?

My hope is that it won’t mean that the federal health agencies are subjected to the homeland-insecurity treatment. Still less would I want the actual Department of Homeland Security to take pandemic-prevention matters into its own hands, making potential viral spread as elastic and unassailable a rationale for almost anything as preventing terrorism has become.

Somewhere, sometime, someone on earth is going to come down with another nasty cough. It might be sooner than we think, and it could be nastier than this one.

What will we be prepared to do, and who’ll be in charge of doing it, then?

Consider for a moment: what does each party really want?

Undoing the other guys’ work, only more so, is not really a strategy for governance.

And, administration after administration, it’s a recipe for terrible whipsawing.

As the investor Graham Duncan has written:

In life and business, “approach” goals are much more effective than “avoidance” goals. It’s important to give yourself enough time to build a positive vision of a future fund instead of simply reacting against someone else’s vision or your own prior frustrations.

The future belongs to leaders who can communicate “approach” goals that are bold enough to inspire, specific enough to achieve, and uplifting enough to be proud of.

When’s the last time you heard one of those, or saw it realized?

One of the most interesting things I read last week [via RadReads] was a breakdown of an argument I didn’t read in the original and don’t plan to.

James Altucher wrote that New York City is done forever. Jerry Seinfeld responded in the New York Times. Altucher responded to the response — and, in one blogger’s estimation, utterly destroyed Seinfeld.

I cite this piece for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest is that it’s an interesting example of internet culture and communication versus mass culture and communication. Regardless of what happens to New York City, it’s essential to understand this shift: Jerry used to be mainstream; now, most people get most of their information and opinion from people like Altucher.

Let’s keep pushing this thought in a couple of directions, based on a couple of lines in that blog post:

First, mainstream politicians and columnists still tend to write and speak more like Jerry. Whether or not they resort so quickly to ad-hominem attacks, they generally communicate according to a scripted and poll-tested formula. We’re already drowning in fairly unimaginative ink, and the next couple of months are going to spill a lot more.

Second, there might be a good reason for mass culture to sound the way it does (or did). As the blogger, Matt Tillotson, writes, Altucher “stakes out clear and bold positions that half his readers will hate.” If you’re selling sneakers, go ahead and segment all the way down to your niche. But a political culture that revolves around angering half of the people it governs will be lively but not sustainable.

This past week, I was driving through a relatively rural town. It’s big enough to be on the map yet small enough that you can zip right through it if the light stays green on the highway. As I was approaching the major intersection, the light turned red.

With a few moments to look around, I started reflecting on what I’d seen on the way into town and what I saw around the stoplight. Almost without exception, it was all low-cost national chains — for food, for tires, for clothing — in prefab concrete and large tinted windows. Anytown, USA.

I’ll admit right up front that I don’t know anything about this town. Never stopped in. Never eaten there. Don’t know the locals, their livelihoods, or their watering holes. But a few thoughts came through in quick succession:

• Viewed from the highway (not a flattering angle), this isn’t the sort of place you’d want to live. It’s not truly small-town nor an Insta-worthy Millennial idea of a small town nor thriving small city.
• Obviously, people live there nonetheless. And whether they moved there or just didn’t move away, they’re not stupid: they have to see more or less the same thing from the highway as anyone else.
• Hence the challenge: if you do live there, what stories are you living by? How would you leave? How could you stay?
• The laptop-and-coffeeshop life is simply another way to live, not necessarily a better one. And the conclusions people jump to (from coffeeshops and passing cars) about places like this and the people who live there are often not helping us move forward.
• Everyone needs to find a way to justify their way of living. Yet it continues to boggle my mind that Taco Bell can be positioned — socially, culturally, and politically — as the crowning achievement of modern American culture.
• Still more does it boggle my mind that we now have a large and strong political movement cynically holding this up as all one should want out of life and culture.

It’s one thing to speak up for forgotten, marginalized, or passed-over people. It’s another to work for thriving communities of all sizes and locales. But it’s another to drape low prices and lack of opportunity in the unassailable red, white, and blue — and still another to do so when you’re so transparently out to help the people who own the national brands and their franchises.

Neither spending $5 on a cup of coffee nor $0.99 on a taco makes you a smarter or better person. But people and places across the nation shouldn’t have to be living on that spectrum in the first place.

Do you feel safer?

“Security” is everywhere — yet are we more secure?

Today’s a good day to re-read Molly Ivins’s classic essay, “The Fun’s in the Fight.”

All the way back in 1993, Ivins wrote:

[I]sn’t that what we keep doing in this country, over and over again? We get scared so bad — about the communist menace or illegal immigration or AIDS or pornography or violent crime, some damn scary thing — that we hurt ourselves. We take the odd notion that the only way to protect ourselves is to give up some of our freedom — just trim a little, hedge a bit, and we’ll all be safe after all.

Those who think of freedom in this country as one long, broad path leading ever onward and upward are dead damned wrong. Many a time freedom has been rolled back — and always for the same sorry reason: fear.

I’ve only seen more fear — not to mention trimming and hedging on what really matters — over the past two decades.

At what point do we try to find a different way to handle ourselves?

Five years ago, peddlers of nonspecific bromides about the past, present, and future got a big comeuppance. Their nostrums, it seemed, no longer held any water.

Now we’re down to “build back better” versus “unimaginably bad things [will] happen to America” and “I will preserve it [your American dream], and make it even better!”

Even if it’s true that regular old politicians haven’t found fresh words or actions in years or decades (which isn’t totally the case, though it can feel like it), the level of cynicism and specificity surrounding “keep America great” is really breathtaking — both in its specified details (which you can bet won’t be realized), and especially in its unspecified direction of travel (which is being pursued vigorously).

I’m aware of more and more friendships in which politics are verboten to preserve the friendship. At least one person can’t bear to know how another has voted or plans to: if the answer is as suspected, mutual trust and liking would evaporate and the friendship would be lost.

The upcoming election is much less likely to be decided by flag-wavers and lawn-sign-planters of either persuasion than it is by people enmeshed in these sorts of friendships.

And the health of those friendships on the day after — whenever that comes, and whatever the result — will tell us a lot about where the country’s going next.

Let’s talk about conspiracies and coincidences.

First, we need to get clear about conspiracies, and Seth Godin’s recent podcast on “Industry and its Discontents” is a great place to start.

In brief, the idea is that the most titillating conspiracies — the lizard people who run the world, the mind-altering chemicals falling from jet exhaust, who killed JFK — probably aren’t real. But the really big ones that happen out in the open are the ones that get us. Apple and Samsung, locked in apparently fierce rivalry, actually depend on each other: they just don’t want any other alternatives to enter the market for phones. (Besides, how could Apple be the premium product for smart people if there was nowhere else to go?)

Ditto Apple and Google when it comes to mobile operating systems. They can tell great war stories about competition for marginal customer acquisition, but both companies can live very happily with over a billion people interacting with them every day. [Take a look at Android’s numbers.]

Now it’s time to point out two of the strangest bedfellows I’ve ever encountered: legendary Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, assault-rifle-toting militias.

The idea of a duopoly in U.S. politics first crossed my radar (in those explicit terms) in a Freakonomics podcast. The episode is based on a 2017 paper published by Porter and Katherine Gehl, through HBS, called “Why Competition in the Politics Industry is Failing America.” Harvard Business School might send a lot of people to Apple and Google, but it’s not exactly a hotbed of crackpot conspiracy theorizing.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Leah Sottile profiled one of the scariest conspiracies in the United States for the New York Times Magazine (another thoroughly mainstream publication). Lo and behold, the group explicitly cites “the duopoly” — the very one that Porter and Gehl described in their paper — as one of its raisons d’être.

Naturally, Porter and Gehl come to different conclusions about what to do than the survivalist anarchists, but it’s fascinating that the same conclusions about the nature of the problem are being reached in the halls of HBS and in underground bunkers. I would much rather reform our political system than embrace some sort of Hobbesian nihilism — though the unbelievable jump in firearms purchases this spring indicates a lot of people are hedging their bets.

We face a real and important choice this November. But the thing to work toward, before and after Election Day, is to put a lot more and better choices on the menu.

***

If you want to better understand how we got to here — and what on earth is happening with militias — the two seasons of Bundyville, which Leah Sottile hosted, are well worth your time.

And if you want to understand just how narrow our current options and processes are, and how we might begin to think about moving forward, listen here.

That’s always been a powerful slogan, and it clearly still has power to unite and motivate.

Let’s consider the promises.

The one that’s sort of easy to intuit — and all too easy to focus on, once you intuit it — is, we’re going to keep racism front and center on the agenda.

That’s red meat for the committed few, and it’s proven to be an irresistible distraction for many. But if this proposition is like every other, it’s not the full story.

The underlying promise is, you are not forgotten. “Deplorable” was, of course, an infamously succinct expression of a desire to forget about people until they disappeared; unsurprisingly, a lot of people took that as an existential challenge and have been rewarded with unceasing attention ever since.

If there’s a way back from the brink, it’s going to involve reducing the existential stakes. And that’s going to have to start with making and keeping specific, relevant promises to people who’ve been underserved and ignored for a very long time.

And the fact that you can put an awful lot of people in that category is a testament to the scale of the challenge.

This was a good week for reading. I finished the summer/fall Oxford American, revisited some of Derek Sivers’s best work, re-read Graham Duncan, and listened to some vintage Hardcore History (what would happen if some sort of disease broke out in the modern world, indeed?).

But my favorite was a multi-book review essay by Rana Foroohar in the FT, entitled “Why Meritocracy Isn’t Working.”

In addition to a damning moral argument — meritocracy, as opposed to the random inheritance of aristocracy, insists that those who do better are in fact better — Foroohar cites statistics that show the lie. One book she reviews (Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit), for example, finds a direct correlation between family income and SAT scores: children of families with earnings of at least $200,000 have a one-in-five chance of scoring above 1,400 on the SAT, while children of families earning only $20,000 have a 1-in-50 chance of getting the same score.

And all for what? “One Harvard admissions officer quoted in Sandel’s book worries that those who spend their high school and college years jumping through hoops of high achievement wind up as ‘dazed survivors of some bewildering life-long boot-camp.'”

Most interestingly, Foroohar wonders if this is a big part of the reason that so many elite Millennials are turning out for protests or turning down the spoils of the winner-take-all version of the meritocracy. As it becomes clearer and clearer (from underneath a pile of student-loan debt that now exceeds $2 trillion) that the race does not even necessarily go to the strong or the smart, people are beginning to ask better questions about the supposed escalator.

What if it’s narrower or shorter than we believed?

What if it’s not taking us where we wanted to go in the first place?