Sublime

He regularly invited top computer scientists to his office to explain emerging trends in hardware and software. He had three home computers. He was typing a future bestseller, Earth in the Balance, on an early laptop. He went to computer-industry conferences, wrote articles for Scientific American, and fluently spoke the language of VLSI and AI,

Such hopes have not always been realized. Near the end of Donald Trump’s first year in power, for instance, The New York Times reported that, before taking office, he had “told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

Each of the two countries that the election of 2020 exposed is split by two narratives—Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on. But the election, forcing a binary choice, temporarily consolidated the narratives on either side of the

Democracy’s survival depends on what happens inside our skulls, where anything is possible. The destruction of a shared reality does more damage than economic decline or impeachable acts.

So even if one were to cite inexorable improvement in the world’s only superpower and the land of the free, and in aggregate on a global basis, it would appear that progress does not have its own momentum. It is not fueled by the principles of the Enlightenment and oiled by the invisible hand of capitalism. It is a tentative and fragile state which

Then came the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the rise of populism, and the pandemic. These were three hits that a healthy democracy could have withstood but that caused ours to buckle and give way, revealing pillars and beams that had been decaying for decades. Pollsters are struggling to catch up with the depth of Americans’ dismay across the