My Grand Strategy

“At cusp, choice is. With choice, spirit grows.” — Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

What’s my personal strategy for the upcoming election? To vote, of course! But what’s my grand plan? Do I have one? Or am I just surfing the endless waves of distraction and outrage that pummel me, like everyone else, on the Internet and in the daily news?

When I analyze our moment in time, I come to a stark conclusion. We are at a cusp.

By “we,” I mean our entire human species. And by “cusp,” I mean a really, really big one. What we do collectively in the next decade could fix our species’ collective fate for centuries to come, if not forever. In the worst case, we could extinguish ourselves by nuclear fire or runaway global warming.

What we Americans do 31 days from now could set our species’ direction for the next decade. So our November 8 elections are a big, big deal.

More analysis leads to four pretty simple conclusions. First and foremost, we must stop fighting and work together. Every one of us—and every minority—must put aside our differences and work for peace, progress and human survival. That includes the white devout Christians who are rapidly becoming a minority here at home.

To do that, we all must marginalize and disempower those who divide in order to dominate. The ways of Putin and our Demagogue are the way to Hell. Not the fictional Hell of scripture, but a real, impending Hell of lies, dystopia, war, more deadly pandemics and climate catastrophe.

Neither our Demagogue nor Putin is responsible for global warming. Yet both, in different ways, are helping accelerate it. Our Demagogue, who calls it a “hoax,” is retarding efforts to fight it. And Putin’s atrocity in Ukraine not only increases demand for fossil fuels, but threatens to morph into World War III. If only by distraction, both power-mad men are helping let chances to avoid a climate tipping point slip away. Just think of hurricanes like Ian and Fiona coming twice a year, every year, and growing in destructive force annually.

My second conclusion is that the Enlightenment is dying. The four-century trend in human thinking that once promoted democracy, freedom, science and Reason—all at once—is fading. It’s toppling under the combined assault of prejudice, hate, disinformation and distraction, worldwide. Perhaps the Enlightenment’s greatest achievement, popular democracy, is also under assault.

It’s even losing ground in the US, where the filibuster and local gerrymandering, not to mention our skewed Senate and Electoral College, are pushing us relentlessly toward consistent minority rule. And the Enlightenment’s second greatest achievement—science—is under assault by demagogues and oligarchs everywhere. Today they demonize scientists and contest and dispute science, in their own personal interests, using all the power of modern advertising, public relations and Internet disinformation.

If these trends continue, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on Reason as the foundation of both democracy and science will be next to go. We may be observing the twilight of the grand new epoch in human history that began with Galileo Galilei, John Locke, John Adams, and Queen Elizabeth I, perhaps the single most consequential leader in human history.

My third conclusion is that thinking men and women must resist this downward trend with every erg of their energy. We must not let ourselves be distracted by this or that lesser issue. We must keep our eyes on the ball. Even the sudden ripping of reproductive rights from women is only one small part of this dismal picture. Single-issue voting—or refusing to vote—is the road to perdition.

If we look unflinching at the big picture, what do we see? We see a worldwide rush of terrible leaders to dominate for domination’s sake. Putin, of course, is the worst example. But he’s far from alone.

Among the next worst are Kim, MBS, and Maduro. Then there’s Xi, who’s nipped what could have been a more democratic China in the bud. He plans to anoint himself the Second Coming of the disastrous dictator Mao in the same month as our crucial election. Finally, there are “dominators-on-the-rise”: Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Egypt’s El-Sisi, Hungary’s Orban, Poland’s Duda, and Turkey’s Erdoğan. And let us not forget Duterte’s murderous tyranny in the Philippines, as its people turn to the son of a former dictator in a desperate quest for solace.

Yet by far the most dangerous trend is right here at home. Our Demagogue has gripped the minds and hearts of nearly half the people of the world’s greatest superpower. Waiting in the wings, he has studied and learned the arts of tyranny. If elected president again, he will not hesitate. He will stack the entire executive branch, the federal bureaucracy, our military, and our precious regulatory agencies (the FAA, EPA, FDA, OSHA and more) with his sycophants and cronies, without regard to qualifications or policy. He will do to our entire government what he just did with our Supreme Court.

Overnight, he will turn us into a simulacrum of the old Soviet Union. The end will be utter domination of the world’s greatest superpower by a man of the worst character ever to darken the White House.

Then there’s his (adopted) party, the so-called “Grand Old Party.” Its so-called “establishment” leader, Valium-blooded Mitch McConnell, told us all we need to know about dominating for domination’s sake—and for the sake of the oligarchs who fund the GOP. When asked what he would do with power if his party took control of Congress, Mitch said, “I’ll let you know when we take it back.” The GOP has no program at all, just more hate, distraction and domination.

So our voting choices are easy this year. Just vote for every candidate with a “D” for “Democrat,” and mark no name with an “R” for “Republican.” Even for so-called “non-partisan” offices, I plan—as I vote by absentee ballot at home—to research all candidates’ names on the Internet for any trace of partisanship and vote accordingly. Weren’t Supreme Court Justices also supposed to be non-partisan?

That’s our collective task for the next month or so, until all the votes are counted. It’s a simple task, but a vital one. On its outcome turns the fate of our nation, and, perhaps consequently, the fate of our species. Our shining city on the hill may be tarnished by multiple homeless encampments, but it’s still the city toward which all eyes turn.

As we vote and seek to influence others, we must seek the middle, for that’s where the votes are. We must seek the middle also because Republicans have abandoned it. It’s neutral territory waiting to be occupied without much of a struggle. We don’t even have to fight for it, as must Ukraine in recovering its occupied, blasted homeland.

Jim Clyburn and Joe Biden taught us that. The results of their so-called “moderation” are, among many other things: rejoining the Paris Climate Convention, trillions of dollars in pandemic relief, a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, the biggest federal investment in climate-changing renewable energy in our history, tens of billions of dollars to bring chip-making (which we invented) back home, and (recently, hidden in the Inflation Reduction Act) beefed-up authorization for the EPA to fight climate change.

All this we did with a broken Congress and an evenly-divided Senate stymied by the filibuster. What could we do with just a bit more?

If we Dems and keep our majority in the House and add just two seats in the Senate (to nullify Senators Manchin and Sinema), we can kill the filibuster stone-cold dead. Then we can get on with the serious business of bringing our nation, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century. Among many other things, we can restore abortion rights with federal legislation, stamp our gerrymandering (at least in federal elections), stop voter suppression and make voting easier, and advance LGBTQ rights by federal laws and rules.

All this lies within our grasp, beginning in 31 days, if only we vote and vote smart. The sky may now seem to be falling, as power-hungry psychopaths grab for the reins of governments everywhere, including here at home. But here at home we are now as close to saving and accelerating the Enlightenment as we have ever been since Ronald Reagan first urged us to be selfish. Next to this cusp on which we stand, all else fades into insignificance.

So I’ll only mention my beef with Daily Kos, which recently censored (deleted) an entire post of mine. That’s the first and only time I’ve suffered censorship in fifty years of writing as a scientist, law student, lawyer, and law professor. As a private company, DK has a legal right to censor me, which I recognize. I even favor the rule supposedly applied in the censor’s single sentence of condemnation, which misapplied that rule to my post. Since I could find no way to open a dialogue or communicate with the anonymous censor, I’ll just have to suck up this Soviet-style censorship for the time being.

But—like so much else that that urges us to outrage—that act of unjustified censorship is chaff in the breeze. We all need to emulate Jim Clyburn in the last presidential primaries and keep our eyes on the ball.

Now we must expand the Democratic majority in the Senate, keep the House in Democratic hands, and help Stacey Abrams and Beto O’Rourke flip Georgia and Texas, respectively. Next to these goals—whose achievement could keep our species’ four-century run of Enlightenment alive for centuries more—all else is trivia.


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