Donald Trump is simply a dangerous maniac who can barely complete a sentence, and it is lunacy to believe he can even admit the existentially threatening collective action problems facing our nation, let alone actually solve them.
Collective action problem is the word political scientists usage to describe any situation where a large group of people would do better for themselves if they worked together, but it’s easier for everyone to prosecute their own interests. The essential work of all government is making laws that balance the tradeoffs between shared benefits and acceptable restrictions on individual or corporate freedoms to solve this dilemma, and the reason people hatred the government is that not being able to do whatever you want all the time is simply a immense bummer. velocity limits aid make our neighborhoods safer, but they besides mean you aren’t expected to put the hammer down and peel out at all stoplight, which isn’t any fun at all.
Every Verge reader is intimately acquainted with collective action problems due to the fact that they’re everywhere in tech. We cover them all the time: making everything charge via USB-C was a collective action problem that took European regulation to yet resolve, just as getting EV makers to adopt the NACS charging standard took regulatory effort from the Biden administration. Content moderation on social networks is simply a collective action problem, so are the regular fights over encryption. The single top webcomic in tech past describes a collective action problem.
The problem is that getting people to set aside their own selfishness and work together is mostly impossible even if the benefits are obvious, a political reality so universal it’s a celebrated Tumblr meme.
You can sum up the past of civilization as a long fight about where the government’s authority to tell everyone what to do comes from
This is specified an intractable problem that you can sum up the past of civilization as a long fight about where the government’s authority to tell everyone what to do comes from. Ancient rulers just went ahead and considered themselves gods, which made things beautiful easy — anyone who lives in a vicinity with an overzealous HOA president can see this approach in action today. rather a fewer European kings decided they’d operate 1 layer up the stack and announced that they were empowered by God with the divine right to absolute control, which besides made things somewhat easy but caused respective wars and assassinations by another kings who’d gotten drunk and advanced adequate to see Jesus.
Every so often, the planet gets any bozo who decides his desire for absolute control is justified due to an emergency, which inevitably leads them to spend quite a few time convincing people that the very existence of foreigners is an emergency so they can hold onto that power forever. This is fundamentally a hack, but it’s an effective 1 — there are always foreigners, after all. You know why Trump has lately taken to standing in front of backdrops that read DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW? It’s due to the fact that erstwhile you put this dude under any force at all, he reflexively creates a Brown People Emergency to justify his authoritarian instincts.
It is highly frustrating that the Harris run keeps going on about Trump being a danger to democracy without explaining why his full deal is so profoundly incompatible with America, so here’s the short version: the extremist founding rule of the United States of America is the thought that the government’s authority to make laws and solve collective action problems comes from the consent of the governed. A clean rewrite, replacing centuries of architectural debt with what was, at the time, a cutting-edge foundation mostly unproven at scale. We vote for our leaders, they are given the power to tell us all what to do so that we might aid each another scope better outcomes and be happier, and if they are bad at their jobs, we can simply throw the bums out. We open-sourced the authority, in another words. It was a large bet, and so far, it’s paid off.
Like any large open-source project, American democracy is kind of messy, requires quite a few volunteer effort, and frequently uses way besides much memory. But it enables everyone to submit requests for changes so that we might better direct the power of our communities at all level toward solving our problems, and the democratic process provides an essential stableness which allows people to keep buying into our country as the platform on which to build their own large ideas.
Trump doesn’t give a crap about any of this due to the fact that he only cares about himself. He mostly does not care to solve problems unless it benefits him personally, and the intellectual foundation of the MAGA movement that’s built up around him is the complete denial that collective action problems be at all. The MAGA worldview is now so batshit that it requires its proponents to look at apparent failures of collective action and declare them immutable features of modern life — or, in an even stupider twist — announce them to be good things.
For example, school shootings represent a complete failure to solve a collective action problem — a uniquely American failure due to the fact that not only have we not solved the problem, we have actively made it worse. Just look at this chart:
Credit: American Enlightenment task / K-12 Shooting Database
That’s the alarming increase in school shootings since the 2008 ultimate Court ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, which fundamentally made any meaningful weapon regulation impossible. With a bare 5–4 majority behind him, Antonin Scalia decided to full reinterpret the Second Amendment and reset the balance of liberties in America to favour the rights of weapon owners in what is now a clear tradeoff against the safety of our communities.
You can argue about this chart, or this circumstantial tradeoff, or even that Scalia failed to foresee the emergence of a wildly irresponsible weapon culture that should otherwise average these harms but which has alternatively produced tactical cosplay chuds and would-be lifestyle influencer Don Jr. That’s fine! All of that would be evidence of a rational political culture: 1 that makes policy choices, evaluates the outcomes, and accepts the reality of the results so as to make better tradeoffs in the future.
But Trump is not rational, and Trumpism cannot abide the thought of a collective action problem. You might think that Trump’s brain is mush, but JD Vance’s weasel-like head is constantly, actively uncovering ways to sanitize the chaos, and the philosophical demands of MAGA required him to look America straight in the eye at the vice presidential debate and say that school shootings are “a fact of life.”
It should be easy for Vance to imagine a planet in which school shootings don’t happen — that is the pre-Heller planet he grew up in! — but fixing the problem of school shootings requires admitting that a collective action problem exists. It requires admitting that the current policy solution — sending kids to school with fucking Kevlar in their backpacks — is little effective than restricting weapon ownership in any meaningful way. He cannot do that. Trump cannot do that. Trumpism cannot let that debate to happen.
Do you want to live in a country where the vice president refers to schools as “soft targets”? That’s a vote for JD Vance. That’s a vote for Donald Trump — a vote for the line on the school shootings illustration to keep going up, forever.
That’s a vote for Donald Trump — a vote for the line on the school shootings illustration to keep going up, forever
It’s the same with vaccines, which are a near-perfect collective action problem — they are mostly only effective if almost everyone in a community gets them, which means either everyone has to agree to get them or the government has to mandate compliance. erstwhile everyone cooperates and gets vaccinated, our vaccines can be highly effective: the measles were effectively eradicated in this country nearly a quarter-century ago.
Then presumptive Trump wellness secretary RFK Jr. hit the scene to spew his dangerous anti-vax bullshit, convinced adequate people to halt getting vaccinated, and the fucking measles came back. erstwhile this man visited Samoa in 2019, he contributed to a measles outbreak so bad that 83 people died, almost all of them children. But to see this failure of collective action would require a break with the MAGA worldview, so these dummies have fallen back to saying getting measles is actually good.
Do you trust Donald Trump to see this tradeoff and realize this outcome? To adjust to it and usage the power of the Oval Office to convince Americans that the balance of harms favors vaccinations over a emergence in measles cases? He couldn’t even do it for the covid vaccines his own Operation Warp velocity produced, and Vance is now blowing anti-vax dog whistles as loudly as he can in his public speeches. It is simply a close certainty that Trump will just blame the next measles outbreak on immigration due to the fact that at least he can shoot at brown people.
Trump simply cannot usage the tools of democracy to run the country on our behalf. His brain does not work that way, even erstwhile it appears to be working. He is besides selfish, besides stupid, besides cognitively impaired, besides fucked in the head by social media — besides whatever. He just can’t do it. He will make our collective action problems worse due to the fact that he doesn’t really know what kind of problems they are. There is simply a reason he loves dictators and that all his biggest ideas affect forcing people to do things at the barrel of a gun: mass deportations, arresting his critics, sending the military into American cities to quell protests. He is incapable to imagine a planet where people cooperate for any reason another than the threat of violence, and so violence has become an inextricable part of his movement.
The list of massive collective action problems facing our nation is almost overwhelming to consider, and they endanger to teardrop us apart: our population is getting older, with a looming healthcare crisis to come. Education. Housing. Income inequality. There are so many more.
We are not doing well right now, and erstwhile I look at the problems The Verge specifically covers and has covered for over a decade, the failures are blinding.
Solving climate change is the biggest collective action problem of our lifetimes — and nested within it, there are even more collective action problems like transitioning to EVs and rethinking our sources of power. Trump cannot concede that this problem requires collective action to solve, so the MAGA approach is to simply deny climate change exists while Trump blathers on about wanting to be a “whale psychiatrist.”
As a country, we have almost entirely failed to regulate the tech industry. There are almost no meaningful checks on its size or influence, or even requirements to be liable with its power, even though American consumers express their clear preferences to rein in tech companies all the time. There is simply no another way to look at millions of Instagram users — including the company’s own celebrity influencers — enthusiastically posting legalistic incantations for over a decade commanding Meta to halt doing things with their content. Fundamentally, they are all trying to renegotiate the Instagram terms of service, which everyone signed without reading. But as individuals, they have no real leverage with which to drag Mark Zuckerberg to the bargaining table.
As a country, we have almost entirely failed to regulate the tech industry
This is simply a pure marketplace failure. Despite this sustained, dramatic expression of consumer demand, there have been no policy changes, and there are no meaningful competitors differentiated by privacy. The manufacture has learned from this and imposed an ever more extractive set of platform policies with small meaningful consequence. Resetting all this is what the government is for — a functional national privacy law would effectively supply a baseline terms of service agreement with every platform that would defend us all, and then we could see how well it’s working and adjust.
The tech manufacture is besides racing ahead with AI, even though it’s shown no ability to restrain itself from causing the most apparent problems: our social networks choked to death with AI slop, the death of photographic truth, and sexualized deepfakes of teenagers. These problems were all predicted and warned against in the most dire ways, and yet they have all come to pass. Solving these problems will require creative and flexible lawmaking that considers a immense balance of interests, benefits, and harms, and a rigorous approach to reasoning through the tradeoffs over time.
There is no shortage of proposed government to solve these problems floating around, and there are also countries making laws that we might look at to measure the tradeoffs. But the Republican organization is so resistant to solving collective action problems that Meta has spent years saying it welcomes regulation due to the fact that it knows half of our government will never let it to happen. Hell, 1 of the very first tech bills passed during the first Trump administration was a rollback of rules preventing ISPs from sharing your data, and Trump signed it immediately — pure ghoul shit.
In most average circumstances, America would slowly, incrementally figure this stuff out. States would pass any laws, there’d be any litigation, possibly any ultimate Court decisions, possibly any national government in the end. But the absolutely fucked thing about the United States in 2024 — the looming dread that keeps me up at night — is that a bunch of tech billionaires have decided it would be easier if they were simply in charge of remaking society and have fallen in line behind a man they clearly despise due to the fact that it’s easier for them to get what they want by manipulating the addled head of a narcissistic monster than by winning people’s dollars in the market or votes in the ballot box.
Let’s just name any crucial ones: Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos — they have all decided to kiss the ringing in various ways and sale out the very concept of America. They’d alternatively fly their helicopters over the burned-out husks of our cities to their private beaches and safe bunkers than participate in our democracy. They would like to remake our country into a broken oligarchy where they have yet ended the free marketplace and privatized our lives into an overlapping series of enshittified subscription monopolies, and they have taken to openly wishcasting what they would do with unchecked power. “Competition is for losers” is not just a thing Peter Thiel says — it’s a worldview that’s produced the monarchy-curious JD Vance arguing that the intent of antitrust is to regulate the speech Google distributes and Trump himself saying the company has to be careful or get shut down.
Our Silicon Valley billionaires don’t actually believe in this sloppy gloss on competition law. Rather, these men are all trying to defend or make their very own empires, and they are funding, supporting, or at least accepting of Trump’s strongman instincts due to the fact that they each realize how it will benefit them individually, even though it will cost us all much more. These would-be oligarchs are a collective action problem, personified: they cannot curb their individual greed so we must all endure their furious attempts to prop up a madman who might end the American experiment.
Let’s not fool ourselves.
Kamala Harris is not a perfect candidate for president. It is possible to choice apart her policy ideas and highly easy to criticize her unusually circular speaking patterns — she frequently sounds like she’s vamping until her interior search algorithm finds the right keyword and issues a preloaded response. Did you know she prosecuted transnational criminal organizations? You will.
But look beyond the locked-in message discipline to her approach to campaigning, and it is clear Harris is deeply, meaningfully committed to solving collective action problems. She has assembled a politically diverse group of people to support her that scope from AOC to Liz Cheney to Mark Cuban, and most of her claims about how she’ll run the country differently than Biden come down to putting Republicans in her Cabinet and reaching across the aisle more. She has, for better or worse, made approaches to the crypto community while championing restrictions on price gouging and regulations on banks. She had antimonopoly Senator Elizabeth Warren onstage at the Democratic National Convention while having Google antitrust defence lawyer Karen Dunn service as her debate advisor.
You might not agree with any of the depressingly averaged-out policy positions produced by this unnervingly large tent. You might have any serious problems with, say, her proximity to the current administration and its approach to the war in Gaza. But this is what happens erstwhile the another organization in our two-party strategy can only make policy ideas that amount to AI-generated blood libel and RETVRN memes on X. Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican organization of the ability to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris coalition.
In many ways, the ecstatic reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you gotta guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality but energized by it. More than anything, that is the change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.
It is time to halt denying the essential nature of the problems America faces. It is time to insist that we usage the power of our democracy the way it’s intended to be used. And it is far past time to decision beyond Donald Trump.
A vote for Harris is simply a vote for the future. It is simply a vote for solving collective action problems. It is simply a vote for working together, alternatively of tearing our planet to shreds.
