Emergency 2024 election coverage
Ambivalent above all
By Ashley Fitzgerald
A friend of the podcast, Josh Kearns, wrote to me, Jason and Nate a couple weeks ago with what was “possibly a terrible idea:” a group of DO hosts get together a talk about the election.
Part of the reason this could be terrible is because we’ve elected to keep Doomer Optimism relatively apolitical, or I guess not an explicitly political project. By that I mean it is a place for people who disagree about politics to get together and talk shop.
Fundamentally, DO is a place for people focused mostly on active projects, and making a material change in their world, much more so than a podcast focused on endless philosophy or navel gazing.
So, everyone was a bit hesitant at first, except for me. Part of my vision for DO is a place where people can talk about difficult subjects — including politics and religion — without drawing lines in the sand or treating the other as a deplorable or an enemy. It is fundamentally seeking to model a civic orientation, one where friendship and neighborliness or working on a shared project makes you remain on your best and most polite behavior so as to not piss someone off beyond repair.
In fact this is how most of human history worked in low resource societies (all societies before this one). There is a kind of loyalty and good behavior that results from forced interdependence. If you go around making everyone mad and alienating them, and you come around looking for help in the future, good luck.
Back to the election coverage. I managed to convince the boys that taking some time modeling this respectful disagreement is important, but also that it’s important to model that all of us are deeply, deeply ambivalent about national politics.
This conversation seems to have been really helpful to our listeners, who, like us, remain unconvinced that there is any cut and dry path to the future we want to see through national electoral politics. It seems we are all navigating through an increasingly complex and muddy set of priors to decide who to vote for, or whether to vote at all.
You’ll see in the episode that we run the spectrum. Nate is committed to voting against Trump (for Harris), Jason is ambivalent about voting but it also strongly against Trump. Josh thinks the Cheney democrats are evil and sees Trump as a kind of “sand in the gears of the Death Star” figure, I am less convinced that Trump is anything to pin hopes on, but I do hold out hope that the chaos of a Trump administration means certain visionary actors could get into positions of power and make positive change.
I am cautiously hopeful about people like Thomas Massie, JD Vance, and RFK Jr. They have genuinely steeped themselves in some of the issues I care most about: agricultural subsidy reform, regenerative agriculture, conservation environmentalism, against chemical pollution, against the corporate overreach of big pharma, etc. It is not clear to me that, even though these figures circle around Trump, that they’ll either get positions of actual power to make the changes they’d like to see.
I also acknowledge the the Biden admin has done some significant work on these issues. The inflation reduction act had a lot of funds in there for legitimately good regenerative agriculture projects and infrastructure. They’ve done some real regulations on chemical pollution, and at least in name put their weight behind the idea of a climate corps, a service corps working on actually environmental infrastructure around the country. I also acknowledge that Corey Booker and AOC have made nudges in the direction of regen ag., and could potentially be allies as well.
Like I said, I am ambivalent.
More than anything though I think the way one votes or leans politically is not that important at this point in the American experiment. I am sick to death of being afraid to speak aloud some of these ideas. All nuance gets lost in people’s positions when they are not allowed to discuss them. It all becomes caricature.
So I do think it was good we spent some time modeling this - both that we are ambivalent but also that we don’t care that much about disagreeing. I love Jason, Josh and Nate. I think they’re doing excellent work in the world and I am glad to call them my friends. Which is much more important than whatever button they push in November.
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