In an excellent column on Sept. 2, the FT’s Janan Ganesh writes that “the president cannot win on public health. He might on public order.”

He continues: “What should trouble Mr Biden is not the recent narrowing of his poll lead …. Far more ominous is the change in the subject of national discourse.”

Rhetorically, this is absolutely true. Of all the hard-to-believe things we’ve seen in the past five years, the lack of a coherent, widely shared vision and message that is not on the president’s terms is one of the hardest to believe.

(Or perhaps not: “the resistance” doesn’t carry the same connotation as “the movement,” and professional politicians have been playing it safely vague for years. In any case, No, really, we’re against X grants that X is in fact the issue. To grant the frame is to grant most of the game.)

In conclusion, Ganesh writes:

An election is often understood as pitting against each other two answers to the same question — classically, “who will best run the economy?” Really, though, it is a contest to set the question. Mr Biden wants voters to ask, “who will fix the pandemic?” Mr Trump wants them to wonder who will secure their cities. That the more pressing question is even in doubt attests to the president’s momentum.

Both questions, though, betray an enormous and widespread lack of trust in government. All of these questions — including the traditional one about the economy — boil down to “who will keep us safe?” They just have different ways of keeping score: safety in retirement, safety in homes and streets, safety from sickness and death.

Different people keep score by different metrics for different reasons, but there’s a concerning lack of faith across the board. From a sheer competence perspective, the answer is obvious: the president’s tools are bluff, lies, and violence — and he’s not even especially good at those. I wouldn’t even hire the guy to do a real-estate development.

But competence stopped being the decisive metric a long time ago, and there’s a lot of credibility that needs to be rebuilt before it can be again.

All of that, in case it’s not clear by now, starts with fixing the pandemic.

Yesterday brought a significant drop in the stock market, and especially in big tech stocks. Apple lost $150 billion in market value in a day; that’s not real money and its valuation is still above $2 trillion, but it’s a big round number that makes for a compelling headline.

What’s more concerning to me is how yesterday’s news followed weeks of not only climbing equities but widespread comments that ran the gamut from “Treasuries are dead; I guess we’re all betting on equities now” to “Big Tech stocks are the new bonds.”

This raises some questions:

• If government bonds don’t yield enough to make them worthwhile, why wouldn’t people keep piling into growth equity and/or riskier debt, just as they’re doing now?
• If we think about this in the context of retirement planning, are we really comfortable betting the farm on equities? After all, the U.S. government has been around a lot longer than any of the Big Tech firms.
• If Big Tech is held in any significant way to be the new sure bet, how are we going to think about regulating the companies whose profits we’ve all hitched our retirements to?
• Might the ETF trend provide a little slack here, in the hard-to-imagine case that a Big Tech stock (or several) fell so far, so fast that it had to be rotated out of an index? [I doubt it would be enough to matter on any meaningful timescale, but I wonder.]

All of this is at or beyond the limits of my circle of credibility. But the apparent disconnect between the investment case for Big Tech and growing suspicion of how those companies make the profits we’re all hooked on is giving me a lot of pause these days.

If you’re undecided, it might be worth getting clear about why you wouldn’t vote.

It might also be worth getting clear about the consequences — and responsibility — you’re willing to risk or accept for that decision.

There is a large and meaningful difference between acknowledging that there are many parts to the truth (or many stories that are true) and saying there’s no such thing as truth anymore.

The history you learned in 7th grade was (probably) mostly factual, but it certainly wasn’t the whole truth.

The same is true of the history you learned in college or later.

As Norman Maclean wisely observed in A River Runs Through It, there’s a difference between telling true stories and telling stories that are true. He preferred the second, and so should we.

After all, stories that are true can accommodate more parts than any discrete collection of data points, or even many true stories.

Really? Always?

Some dates to keep in mind:

• Spindletop, the gusher that began the petroleum age in the United States, first erupted on January 10, 1901.
• The Wright Brothers’ famous first flight happened in December 1903.
• The Model T was introduced in 1908.
• U.S. coal mining employment peaked in 1923. [Despite usage dating to pre-Columbian times, coal’s dominance as the most-used energy source in North America lasted from the 1880s through the 1950s.]
• The Macintosh computer was released in 1984.
• Google was a research project in 1996 and a registered company in 1998.
• Wikipedia arrived in 2001.
• The iPhone was unveiled in 2007.

It is absolutely true that ways of work and life, systems of values, houses of worship, thriving communities, and many other desirable things spring up around certain industries in certain times.

It is also true that we no longer have a whaling industry.

And it is further true that the reason we don’t have a whaling industry anymore is less because whales are cute or charismatic than because they were no longer economical to catch. [Though it’s worth noting that more than a century elapsed between the pre-Civil War peak of the U.S. whaling industry and the 1971, 1972, and 1973 laws that fully banned non-indigenous whaling in the United States and its exclusive economic zones.]

There’s a distinction between caring for fellow citizens whose livelihoods, hometowns, and cultures are threatened or lost and keeping forlorn industries alive for political purposes.

When was the last time you bought a road atlas? Printed out a set of MapQuest directions?

That’s what we always did. Until we didn’t.

Over the past three weeks, Richard Rohr explored his longtime framework of order, disorder, reorder as the fundamental cycle of the cosmos — the cycle that we’re all invited to participate in as people, as citizens, and as creatures sharing a common planetary home.

There’s much that struck and stuck with me from that exploration, but one of the ideas that’s been most persistent is that going through disorder is essential (“there’s no direct flight from order to reorder,” as Richard often says), but staying in disorder is harmful.

As a society and as a species, we’re reckoning with a lot of disorder right now. We’re sick of our politics, our economics, our culture, and our history (at least as we’ve learned and inherited and continued to live into it).

But we also seem badly stuck — and many of our modes and media of discourse are actively and/or structurally keeping us there.

As Tanner Greer wrote in June, summarizing Marc Andreessen,

In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not “how do we make that happen?” but “how do we get management to take our side?” This is a learned response, and a culture which has internalized it will not be a culture that “builds.”

I won’t be the first person to observe that it’s much, much easier to tear down, brush off, or grandstand in 280 characters than it is to build, engage, or empathize. But the cynicism that comes from staying in disorder is badly corrosive.

One of the great insights in design thinking is that the way forward is prototyping and iterating. This is extremely hard to do at scale: to pick an edge case, we can’t “fail forward” by amending the Constitution every month, even if that were politically possible.

But prototyping and iterating should be possible at smaller and more local levels, and I expect that’s where we’ll begin to see solutions emerge. We may never get a federal law about who can and cannot be bronzed, but lots of cities are taking long, hard, overdue looks at who their streets are named after and who’s been put up on pedestals.

Ultimately, the problem with endless critique and disorder — with trying to get management to take our side — is that, in a democracy, we are the management. Of course we have leaders, elected and not, but the system is premised on the ideas that they come and they go, and we should change them if they’re not taking us where we want to go.

So critique away. Just remember that the point of critique is to make room to create something better.

[This being 2020, I need to acknowledge the privilege argument here. Yes, it’s easy to say “Isn’t it time we just moved on?” from the safety and leisure of my desk. But I don’t mean to say that, in a few short months or years, we’ve all identified or confronted all the problems with the old order, so it’s time to just hustle along. Hardly: we’re still being called to our senses, and I expect — and hope — that will go on for a while. My point is that prophetic work is helpful, but piling on is not. Sooner or later, we’ll need people to build a future we can all live in.]

Two of the most interesting articles I read this past week each had to do with a different kind of essential literacy for the 21st century.

First was Rick Perelstein’s NYT article, “How Much Can 1968 Tell Us About 2020?” The historian’s answer, in a word, is probably not that much. This is a refreshing, bracing look at the importance of taking care with our similarities, differences, and path-dependencies. Invoking 1968 instantly conjures up certain images and storylines in many people’s minds, but those might not be predictive these days: even if we’re now seeing the biggest protests since 1968, we’re seeing them through post-1968 eyes — and there’s absolutely no guarantee that the outcomes are the same. (We might also wonder about the exact outcomes of 1968, of course. History didn’t stop then.)

The second was Zach Baron’s profile of Jason Lanier in GQ, “The Conscience of Silicon Valley.” [Hat-tip to Longreads for this one.] Lanier is hailed as a “tech oracle” and possibly “the last moral man” in the Valley; Baron, immersed like the rest of us even deeper in the internet’s imitation of life as a result of the pandemic, desperately wants to know if everything’s going to be OK. (Spoiler alert: maybe.)

So where does all this leave us? I’d argue it points to the two kinds of literacy most needed now: in the historical method, and in the changes wrought by technology.

It’s widely lamented that Americans don’t know their own history very well, but still less do many of us know the historical method well enough to apply it. On one level, whataboutism is about facts. But on another level, it’s often about false equivalencies, non-sequiturs, and mangled analogies. (“What about 1619?”, asks one side. “What about 1945?!” bellows the other.)

And then there’s technology — specifically the internet, and most specifically the social networks — which is changing not only what we see and claim to know, but who we are. (“[C]igarettes … kill you,” Lanier says, “but you’re still you.” In contrast, he asserts that social media addiction actually changes us as people.) In any case, what used to pass for literacy no longer suffices, as Kevin Roose’s writes in his NYT article “What if Facebook is the Real ‘Silent Majority’?“:

“We live in two different countries right now,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist and digital director of Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign. Facebook’s ecosystem, he said, is “a huge blind spot for people who are up to speed on what’s on the front page of [t]he New York Times and what’s leading the hour on CNN.”

That’s exactly right: it’s easy for NYT readers to scoff at “those” people walking around in a reality of their own (or the president’s) making, but 40 percent of the country isn’t walking around in a consciously false reality. Are there monstrous, intentional falsehoods afoot? Of course. But they can’t be understood — historically, or in their persistent electoral efficacy — if they’re not seen in the context of an ongoing, evolving, multi-level, multi-media system.

***

Speaking of history, the article I’m most looking forward to reading is “‘This Story Cannot Be Told Unless We Start From the Beginning:’ A Conversation on Black History, Sorrow, and Protest,” in the summer/fall Oxford American. It’s an interview with Minnijean Brown Trickey [one of the Little Rock Nine] and Crystal C. Mercer, moderated by Danielle A. Jackson.

Two tropes worth highlighting in the op-ed pages lately:

First, the usual suspects at the NYT and the FT are declaring the Republican Party brain-dead. Depending on the columnist, the party is officially out of ideas, actively brainwashing its base in an ecstasy of mutually-constructed hallucination, or worse.

The worst that most of them have to say about the Democrats is that they’re fractious and/or less than totally inspiring. (Good heavens — a candidate who doesn’t demand our attention every moment of every day! That doesn’t sound like a relief at all, does it?)

But the FT’s Ed Luce, in a multi-book review on the future of the West, lands a critique that ought to give lingering pause. Discussing Thomas Frank’s new book, The People, No, Luce writes that

Rather than blame themselves for [their] 2016 defeat … [Democrats] targeted the electorate. Much as Bertolt Brecht joked that communist dictators should dissolve the people and get a new one, America’s liberal cognoscenti would happily trade the country’s white working class for another.

Ouch. Four years later, the word “deplorable” is off-limits, but the sentiment is still clearly there.

Here’s where we need to get really clear about something, and it’s something that traditional conservatives, ever alert for relativism, ought to primed to see especially crisply.

Simply, put, there are problems with both parties — that’s plain to see. But, difficult as a heart transplant is, it’s still much easier than a brain transplant. And a kleptocratic cult of personality looks like brain cancer, not heart disease.

Anger and disillusionment are well deserved. Soul-searching is much needed, and a change of heart can’t come soon enough.

But our politics, always the realm of less-worse choices, has given us a choice between brain cancer and heart disease. Neither a diagnosis you want; both conditions the result of years’ or decades’ worth of lesser decisions.

We don’t get a chance to remake all the decisions that led us here. The only decision now is between these two ugly prognoses. And the only questions are, which one can we recover from — and which one will we pick?

Today’s a good day to think back to the day after election day, 2016. Plenty of people were stunned and sobbing; others pointed out that the sun had still come up and birdies still chirped that morning, as they would the next day and the days and years after that.

This morning, indeed, the sun came up and the birdies chirped. As far as we know, they don’t know or care that the Republican Party not only nominated the same candidate four years later, but didn’t even bother to update their platform in the process.

But more than 180,000 Americans weren’t around to see the sun come up or hear the birdies chirp. The question isn’t whether the earth will still be turning in four years — let’s not give the guy too much credit here — but whether we’d make the same decision today, or, if we did, whether we’d like the country we’d be living in after four more trips around the sun.

There’s a special thrill that comes from encountering fellow travelers — those who are also on the way, and who share at least our language if not our specific destination.

To walk together, even for a few steps, is a real treat that can keep us going much further along the road.

Genuine connection is always valuable. In the long and uncertain slog of a global quarantine, it’s vital.