“Entitled.” It’s a pejorative term that we like to throw at people – or groups – who ask for more than (we think) they deserve. As a previous post explored, many older cohorts use the term to describe Millennials, but it seems a more apt label for a much more powerful group: the New American Plutocrats (NAPs). This faction has always held economic power, but the Citizens United decision in 2010 threw open the previously only partially ajar gates to political power, and the NAPs have strutted right through. Even as we have decided to trust experts less, we have retained our faith in the American Dream, lionizing the NAPs who exude the trappings of one of our favorite national myths. We have always applauded the rags-to-riches story in the United States, even if we are overly optimistic about its probability, and our shared psyche continues to celebrate individuality and personal responsibility over collective wisdom and communal accountability. The consequence is a list of individuals who are revered and trusted even as the institutions they putatively represent are reviled.
Unsurprisingly, this encourages their sense of entitlement. NAPs almost always hail from the corporate world, and many of them already were accustomed to privilege before their tenure as businessmen (most are white and male). They believe their experience balancing the demands of shareholders, customers, and employees automatically qualifies them to govern. This is despite research showing that CEOs generally have at most a tiny impact on firms’ financial results. Even for the rare leader with genuine vision, running a business is not the same thing as governing. CEOs may claim to care about mission statements and multiple stakeholders, but the bottom line is more important than anything – appeasing stakeholders is a means to a goal: return on investment. Governing, on the other hand, is about redistributing money rather than making it: appeasing stakeholders is the goal.
Ideas about efficiency learned from business can help extend the reach of public investment, but in government, the mission statement is everything, and reach is more important than return. Unfortunately, the mission statement of the United States has been garbled, and the NAPs have seized the moment to rewrite it. Reversing the earlier vision of inclusion, they are “governing” entirely for their own benefit. Although some of them may also truly believe that what they are doing trickles down to help the masses, there has never been much evidence of this, indicating that NAPs are just as susceptible to cognitive biases as the rest of us.
The business of governing is more complicated than it was when the Founders penned the Declaration of Independence. While just a century ago a farming family could survive easily with very few connections to the broader world, technological advancements have allowed more specialization. The result has been not only economic growth (economists love to sing the praises of comparative advantage) but also an increasingly complex web of human interactions, many more of which take place in cities than in the past. Consequently, additional tasks have been entrusted to the government, and it is impossible for the average person to stay informed about all the issues while still maintaining some semblance of a normal life – job, family, friends, Netflix. Although policy wonks bemoan the cult of personality that epitomizes political campaigning, it is actually a rational response by voters to mounting complexity: understanding all the issues is not possible, but understanding one person’s character and motivations is. Or seems to be. As with social mobility, we overestimate our ability to differentiate between knaves and knights, warming to bluster and stories more acquiescently than we respond to facts and figures. All of this favors the rise of the NAPs: bluster is almost a required course in every professional school in America, although most NAPs probably learned it at home.
The ascendance of the NAPs seems to signify that the issues don’t matter anymore. However, just because our brains are not equipped to analyze the intricacy of the modern state doesn’t mean there isn’t a possible solution. Given the complexity and the amount of data to sort through, this sounds like an opportunity for AI! (Cue the Star Trek theme music.) Much like the algorithms used by dating websites, a process could be developed that asks questions about both issues and personal values and then parses all known statements and written work by various candidates, assessing sincerity from facial expressions, to determine the best “match” Some websites already do a version of this (it’s unclear how much sincerity calculation is done), but people have to be motivated to go to the site in the first place. It is so much easier to let our favorite newspaper editorial team or cable news anchors tell us who they like best as they show us just how likeable the person is via curated clips and scripted interviews.
The easiest way to work an algorithm like this into the standard electoral decision-making process would be to implant it directly into voters’ brains. Unfortunately, the technology isn’t there yet, and doing so raises other ethical issues – particularly if a single company owns the implanted technology. A low-tech version of this, requiring that voters take the algorithm’s quiz when they vote, reeks of poll testing, which has a particularly shady history in the United States. However, surely there’s a not-quite-NAP out there somewhere who’d jump at the chance to have a link to his (or, possibly, her…) algorithm interface included in the voter information materials sent out with every mail-in ballot. Regardless, whether we use technology – a creation that has democratized information while simultaneously diminishing its quality – alone or in combination with other procedural changes, it’s time to reinvigorate voter participation before the NAPs find a way to silence our votes.
You nailed this one, Jewls!!