Stuck Between Narratives

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Stuck Between Narratives

Thank you for your engagement around how to change our political system. It's both complicated AND important and I hope you’ve had a chance to get to know Final Five Voting and find ways to spread and support that idea. I think it can make a real difference.

This week, I wanted to really elevate my own thinking by trying to draft a framework of why our discourse is so stuck. I humbly recognize that this is a tall order. And I have certainly danced around this idea in prior newsletters, but I felt like trying to attack it head-on this week.

I don't know about you, but I certainly have always been a bit of an ideological nomad. Meaning, I have never felt at home in either of the two dominant ideological narratives surrounding us.

I’ll share a brief history of my own ideological journey over the years. Firstly, my upbringing in Sweden was hugely impactful. This beautiful country with kind and hard-working people was blessed for so long with peace. That, coupled with a very homogenous culture, enabled stability and provided a nourishing condition for progress. In the ’50s and ’60s, Sweden also took "Social Democracy" to a new place, prototyping and scaling a level of "generosity" in its welfare system that the world had hardly seen prior.

By the time I was coming of age in the early 1970s and 1980s, Sweden had begun demonstrating evidence that suggested that there might be a limit to how much government can do for its people. So, I grew up surrounded by a rather intense debate between people on the left wanting to further expand the role of the state (including socializing private companies) and people on the right who believed we had gone too far and wanted more private initiatives and individual freedoms.

At the same time, I also grew up inside McDonald's. It was our family business. Working in restaurants from a young age, I got the chance to develop great skills (enjoy some great food!) but most importantly experience a decentralized business model that delivered similar outcomes without much-centralized powers. I also got to experience the contrast between American neighborhoods from the ones I knew at home.

So, in a way, I was raised in the midst of proxies for the two main ideological narratives that still dominate our political and societal landscape. There are no GREAT names or labels for these two narratives. Capitalism and Socialism. Marxism and Liberalism, progressivism and conservatism, left and right. I don't like any of these, but then again, I am not a big fan of labels. By definition, they are limiting. But for the purpose of this newsletter, let me just call these two narratives the LEFT and the RIGHT.

I am neither a political scientist, a historian, nor an economist. I am a simple human being who desperately wants to understand what is going on here. So please, to those more educated on this subject than me, do not take what I am about to say literally, but rather directionally (and most importantly, conversationally.) And per usual, please engage and offer ideas for what is missing and what you see differently than I do. That way we might increase our collective understanding.

Summarizing the general ideas of the left and the right is not easy. But I tried to at least posit the key differences between them. Here you go:

I know the coloring is confusing to non-Americans. In Europe, red is typically left, and blue is typically right. Go figure. It's impossible to accurately capture the differences between the two narratives, but I believe the "tolerance" for the difference in outcomes and what the role of government should be in equalizing them (if at all) is at least one central difference.

I do believe that both narratives have good intentions. The left wants a fairer split of the pie and the right wants a bigger pie in hopes that this will ensure a bigger slice for everyone. The evidence of the last 100 years or more suggests that both narratives are actually correct. There is plenty of suffering, misery, and objective unfairness to go around. But there has also never been a time in human history where more people have flourished, more people have been lifted out of poverty, and more of humanity is living in freedom.

I think this is where our collective frustrations are born. Some feel, quite accurately, that while things are imperfect — look at all this progress; let us not fix what isn't broken. And others look at all the challenges, including climate change, the rise of authoritarianism, and populism, and worry deeply about the future of the free world.

Personally, I am most committed to the ideals and philosophies of free markets. I believe with all my soul that competition, free trade, and the free exchange of goods, services, ideas, and thoughts is the best condition for creating the kind of life we all want.

However, freedom without responsibility is one of the deadly sins. And the problem is that we as individuals are not equipped to properly assess the risks and costs of our own freedoms across vast distances in both geography and time. We need some type of moral and ethical framework to do so. This is where religion first was born. And whatever your thoughts on religion today are, to some extent, most of us still are religious in so far as we live in societies very much framed around religious beliefs that solidified culturally what is considered right or wrong.

Without going into a diatribe over the perceived moral recession and its possible association to an increasingly secular world, I will simply state that today’s key political debate should be centered around two important questions:


1. What challenges are we truly concerned about and why?

• We have to prioritize. All problems are not created equal. And trying to fix too many we will fix none.

2. What are the best ways to address them? Centralized or decentralized approaches?

• Can centralized good intentions over time have counterproductive effects on the very problems they are trying to address or can markets and private initiatives without regulation crowd out important "public goods" (air, water, freedoms, opportunities, etc)?

Herein lies our real political debate. We would all be better off if we first recognized that most of us actually want similar outcomes. That is NOT where the big difference lies. It is rather HOW we accomplish those outcomes and whether or not the proposed solutions make things better or worse.

We are not well served by the left criticizing the right for “not caring about people” or the right criticizing the left for just wanting to “take what is not theirs”. It has become personal, rather than political, and led to a sense of both debilitation and dehumanization. We need to focus on outcomes rather than intentions, on political craftmanship more than personal gamesmanship.

The debate and civil discourse I’d like to see is one where we evaluate evidence around government effectiveness at large. Our political debate is truly stuck here. In business and science, the entire marketplace obsesses around competing ideas, around dissent, and around creative destruction, all in pursuit of finding higher value outcomes of investments. Our politics would benefit from more of that. Less about declaring which color of the team you are on, and more about what that color actually will DO for people.

So, what do you think? Does this resonate at all?

Instead of many links this week, I thought I'd share a podcast I listened to as I was looking for a good dialogue "representing" both sides well. In this podcast, Ezra Klein interviews Alex Tabarrok. Ezra writes for the New York times and is a bonified progressive. But unlike some, he is more open-minded and willing to read and engage with people from a very different ideological spectrum. I respect that very much. Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University and co-founder of the Marginal Revolution together with Tyler Cowen. Professor Tabarrok generally refers to himself as a libertarian.

Their conversation is the kind of dialogue I wish we saw more of. It's respectful, it's informative, it's kind, and both parties here clearly want to help our society be better. They just differ on to what extent more government involvement will lead us there. Their discussion is very much centered around the lessons from the book The Rise and Decline of Nations by Mancur Olsen from 1984.

The general idea is that mature cultures and civilizations build more and more centralized structures to protect what they have and at some point, despite the good intentions, those structures start slowing and ultimately eroding the very outcomes they were designed to protect.

I believe this is at the heart of our political struggles, and I truly enjoyed their conversation. Please listen.

I want to see a left that is more humble about the vast failures of good intentions resulting in bureaucracy, counterproductive outcomes, and sheer waste, and I would like to see a right more sympathetic to the proper use of regulation, the importance of a more effective government and more empathetic to the suffering of the less fortunate.

Primarily, I want to see more kindness and more curiosity. The two competing narratives sound like petulant children who lack both experience or knowledge to be that upset.

We need a new narrative for a new age. It's time!

Let me know what I am missing here!

Ps. I didn't comment on what is going on in Ukraine. I simply lack the data to have an informed view. It's sad, frightening, and, of course, worrisome. Let's hope for a quick resolution.