The Biological Problem Behind Politics
Politics is the story of our social and technological evolution struggling to extend beyond our innate biological limits.
Category: Future of Democracy
Amazon’s New Homeless Shelter
A corporate homeless shelter is not a feel-good moment. It’s a warning.
Nationalism Is a Good Idea That’s Past Its Prime
Nationalism worked because it let us build a far bigger mental picture of “us” than we’d ever before envisioned. It is failing now because it can’t keep pace with the power of newer social innovations, like the corporation, capable of even greater scale and reach.
The Long View
Look closely at our dilemma, and you see not decline, but leadership. We are being buffeted by the first waves of a storm spreading around the world. We’re not worst, but merely first.
Democracy In An Age Of Transience
Can a democracy organized around the mediating influence of social capital survive the rise of transience? Can this system function when so few of its brightest, most talented and successful people can name a single local politician? Perhaps, but across the world the results so far don’t look promising.
How Democracies Die
Trump’s personal repulsiveness, criminality, and incompetence deliver a second chance not offered to Italians and Germans in the 30’s.
Corporate Class Consciousness
Now that the government at the center of the “Free World” has been bought off by a corrupt global kleptocrats, who is standing up for liberal democratic values? Corporations, of course. Get used to it, because this is the strange new shape of liberal democracy.
What’s “Next” After Liberal Democracy
Monarchies still exist, they just don’t matter. This is likely the fate of democratic institutions as Next takes shape.
Social Democracy Won’t Save Liberal Democracy
A pivot toward social democracy might form a bridge to a post-Trump world, a rhetorical rally point to organize short-term resistance to fascism, but it is unlikely to offer any long term solution to the weaknesses eroding liberal democracy.