Category: Life, The Universe and Everything

[Warning: Politics Ahead.]

I just finished reading Drutman’s Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.

If you’re frustrated, or despondent, at the state of politics in America you should read it.

If you’re not frustrated at the state of American politics – because you’ve stopped paying attention – you should read it, too.

Drutman’s core argument is roughly that despite being two-party in name for the decades when American government was seen as being the most effective it was, practically speaking, a four party system. Factions of conservative-leaning Democrats and liberal-leaning Republicans enabled compromise.

Drutman presents a compelling argument that the breakdown of this “effectively four party” system into two well sorted parties leads directly to our current “lesser-of-two evils” state, and is the root cause of much of the fundamental dysfunction in American politics and government.

What makes his analysis different, and recommended reading, is that he proposes a plausible solution that doesn’t require a constitutional amendment and doesn’t immediately fail the sniff test.

Not to spoil the ending, but Drutman proposes abandoning winner-take-all elections and adopting single winner ranked choice voting for Senate seats and multi-winner ranked choice voting for House seats, while enlarging the house and expanding two-parties into between four and six.*

He supports this proposal with evidence from other countries that have done similar things, and with examples from America’s past where seemingly impossible electoral and political reform happened.

My read of his proposal is that it isn’t particularly partisan – it doesn’t help one party at the cost of the other. It fundamentally changes the election game and makes room for collaboration and compromise in a system that’s lost that ability by choice, accident, and design. He persuasively argues and presents evidence that this has worked in other countries, and that it can work in America.

I found the book well researched, considered and methodical in its approach, and focused on a concrete problem and a potential solution. I don’t know if what Drutman proposes will work, or can work, but I can’t find fault with his fundamental thesis: that American democracy is on a course to tear itself apart.

It’s up to America, and Americans, to find a way to fix it.

Next on the reading list: How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future.

* I’ve been supporting FairVote for several years, but honestly never saw it as part of a larger potential fix for American politics.

[24-May]

** For more thoughts on the subject of how the two party sorting contributes to the problem, consider Rethinking Polarization, by Rauch [nationalaffairs.com].

I’ve been a bit remiss of late in publishing updates. Mea culpa. Things have been simultaneously tumultuous and incredibly mundane.

I started working from home the first week of March. I stood at the stair rail for a week or so – my computer propped on a desk made of a box and a book.

By the time we saw City of Angels on the 10th, it was clear the city – and especially the west end – were running on borrowed time.

We encouraged a friend of ours, whose sabbatical year in Europe was rapidly unraveling, to accelerate her planned transit from Spain by a week and offered up our guest room while she figured out her next move. She arrived on the 16th, the day the theaters closed, and we condensed her planned “London experience” into a meal at The Wilmington, nearly-deserted on the night of her arrival and shut down the following day, and breakfast at our favorite local cafe the next morning.

She managed to see a few sights as the city shut down around her, and by the end of the week on the advice of her University, and a little help from the same, had abandoned her booked accommodation and secured a flight back to the US.

Our cleaning service came the day she departed, right on schedule. It turned out that would be the last visit for a while.

All the local restaurants in our bit of London quickly closed – not having sufficient traffic to support themselves without the daily crowd commuting into The City.

After our guest had departed, Dawnise pointed out that the guest room wasn’t likely to see any guests for a while and encouraged me to make it my office. After dragging my feet for a few days I disassembled the guest bed and took her advice. I bought a “podium-cum-standing-desk” from Amazon and dragged the Poäng in from the master bedroom. I’ve strongly resisted buying anything I can’t easily stash once we can welcome visitors again.

The next few weeks were punctuated with emails informing of us canceled theater bookings and concerts, news about new transport closures, and reminders from Transport for London not to take the tube except for essential journeys.

We live around the corner from the Barbican Waitrose – I’d typically stop on my way home to pickup whatever bits and bobs we needed for dinner that evening. Like everywhere else there was an initial run on stock – with some staples (like flour) only now returning to pre-panic levels. We’ve shifted our shopping to a weekly larger shop, Dawnise typically does the shopping and I meet her there to help mule it home.

In the long long ago I worked from home full time for a few years, and once I had a home office, it didn’t take us long to remember old habits that worked. Punctuating the start and stop of the work day, being conscious to eat an actual lunch on a regular schedule and not just wandering into the kitchen to snack.

I largely spend weekends reading – either short form, often COVID-related, or long form, continuing to alternate between fiction and non-fiction. Along the way I’ve written a couple blog posts I didn’t think worth sending to the mailing list. At some point I found an offer for three free months of Fender Play and pulled the guitar out of the closet. I hadn’t touched it in years, and forgotten most everything. I guess the good news is I forgot all the bad habits, too.

Dawnise has been reading, cultivating sourdough and baking with it, killing unsuspecting alternate-history Brits in We Happy Few, and of late amusing Facebook friends with the photographic adventures of QWar and Tina – if you Facebook, you can search for “#QWarandTina”

The weather has been, on average, frustratingly nice, which hasn’t helped compliance with the “Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives” directive. We feel very fortunate to have a deck and easy access to the out-of-doors. We bought a stand for an umbrella left by the last tenants, and I have a better tan than I’ve had since our last trip to Hawaii.

Boris Johnson addressed the nation last night to lay out a roadmap for reopening. It was hardly the Saint Crispin’s Day speech, but it was mostly coherent (aside from maybe the “we have a 1-5 scale, and we’re between 3 and 4” bit) and I’m pretty sure he actually understood the words he used.

We both struggle occasionally to keep perspective. We’re both healthy, safe, and mostly as sane as we were when this all hit the fan. That it’s completely fubar’d our travel plans for the year puts us in good company. We try with varying success to not focus on the work it took to get here.

So here we are. Living in London. Aside from when I’m out for a morning run the city outside our windows could be a matte painting.

I can’t throw a rock far enough to tell.

Punxsutawney Phil has seen his shadow. At least three more weeks of lock-down…

Like many of the 7.5 billion inhabitants of this insignificant little blue green planet we call home, we had plans. (Our best laid plans, you might say.)

Funny thing about plans – they’re bets on the future state of the universe. Much of the time, most of the time, reality cooperates. Tomorrow will probably be pretty similar to today, which is pretty similar to yesterday.

I don’t know anyone who’s plans included a global pandemic, infecting 2.1 million people, claiming over 140 thousand lives to date, forcing huge swaths of the population to stay in their homes, shuttering the global economy, and setting us on an uncertain path toward an as-yet-indescribable new normal.

And speaking of “new normal,” I can’t be the only one who’s (already) finding that phrase irritating. We have a deep desire to name things. I get it. And I guess “new normal” is as good a name as I can think of for the current uncertainty. And it seems true that we’re going to have no choice but to rapidly evolve our societal norms. But still. “New normal” is high on my list of phrases I’ll be happy to see the back of. Like “lock-down.”

Like many, I’ve been thinking about why basically all the western countries failed so utterly and completely to prepare for, and respond to, this pandemic. As comforting as it might be to think it was unpredictable, it wasn’t. People have been raising the general alarm about our global susceptibility to pandemic for years, and this specific event has been raising alarms for several months. But like a car in a mall parking lot, the alarm was screaming, and everyone was ignoring it.

I think it has a lot to do with how we learn. And how we don’t. And how a lack of deep scientific literacy among elected leadership became a force multiplier for uncertainty.

You might disagree, but on the whole I think individuals are pretty good at learning from their experiences. It’s generally a good idea not to make the same mistake twice – so much so that we often “over-index” on not doing so (everyone remember taking off their shoes at airports ’cause of that one guy who tried to get something on a plane in his shoes? everyone remember airports? ahh. good times.) It’s also usually sensible to assume that what’s happened (many times) before is pretty likely to happen again – and to assume that extraordinary events are… well… extra-ordinary.

What most of us are not so great at is learning from other people’s mistakes. Especially mistakes made by people we don’t have a high implicit degree of trust in. It’s too easy to convince ourselves that we’re different. That we’re smarter. That they were just unlucky.

Responding in the moment to the pandemic required taking action without direct experience – before, as they say, all the facts were in. It required us to take action based on theory.

It required realizing that novel in “novel coronavirus” was the game changer. That the exponential nature of the spread of infection meant a decision today was literally twice as good as that same decision tomorrow. And maybe most difficult, it meant realizing and admitting that we weren’t different. We weren’t smarter. And that this time we were all unlucky.

Politicians – at least US politicians – rarely have scientific training or backgrounds. They live in the shades of grey – in organizational structures and leadership, and soft power. The good ones have deep experience with the malleable rule systems humans create, negotiating changes to those rule systems is their stock in trade. To those people, the predictions of calamity must have been hard to fathom – and the idea that the counter-measures being proposed were proportional and appropriate must have beggared belief.

It couldn’t have helped that the only choice they were being offered by their scientific advisors reduced to a shut down of their economies. Those who acted quickly and decisively to curtail public activity – with immediate and massive economic impact – must have felt like they were taking a hugely expensive bet.

Consider what might have happened if every country, and ever local leader, had acted quickly. In that alternate timeline, with much lower infection rates and mortality counts, it seems certain that the nagging question would be if we over-reacted.

The key question now, and one I don’t have any answers to, is “how do we get out of this mess?”

And as we navigate toward that “new normal,” how do we learn from our near-global mistake? And how do we apply that learning to other low probability high impact events? How do we convince ourselves that just because yesterday and today are fine, there’s a small but important chance that tomorrow may be the day when our best laid plans gang aft agley.

I should establish something up front. I’m not “a runner.” I’m not one of those people who enjoy it. I’m not fast. It’s not easy. It doesn’t fill me with a sense of freedom. I started running because I’m not getting any younger, I appreciate good food and drink, and I have a “desk job.” So some aerobic exercise seemed like a good idea. I’ve tried joining gyms (I give them my money and quickly stop going), bicycles (every home we’ve owned has managed to be up a hill), and my low tolerance for “pre-workout-work” combined with crappy Seattle winter weather convinced me I needed an indoor solution at home.

So, years ago, we bought an elliptical. I used it irregularly, and Dawnise never loved it, so when we moved from our house in the Seattle suburbs into the city we sold it and bought a treadmill. In theory the treadmill folded, and would take up less room in our more compact urban space. Even folded it still took up much of the room it was in, but it fit where the elliptical wouldn’t have. I convinced myself to work up to running a couple miles three mornings a week. I never really learned to like it, but after a while I built a habit, and would bring running shorts and shoes on business travel and mostly stick to my routine.

That all changed when we moved to London. Our initial apartment had an exercise room, and I used it for the month we were there before moving into our “permanent” space. We don’t have a good space for a treadmill, so I looked around at gyms. The fees seemed too high a price to pay for access to a treadmill – and I knew I’d likely stop actually going pretty quickly anyway. The prospect of running through London’s crowded streets and using my lungs as a fine particulate filter for London air didn’t appeal.

All that changed a couple weeks into the pandemic. The streets in our part of London are pretty empty. The air quality is notably improved. And I wasn’t even getting my 20 minute walk to work each day. So I woke up one morning with a plan to go running. And quickly realized that I didn’t have anything suitable to wear to go running when it was 3 degrees out (high-30’s in “freedom units”). I asked a couple friends who run what I needed and “went shopping.” From my sofa, of course.

A quick look at Amazon left me discouraged – running base layers aren’t essential goods, and delivery prioritization meant nothing would arrive for a month. By that time this crazy idea would have subsided. Which would be good for the lazy bastard in me, but probably not good in general.

One bit of advice I got was to avoid cheap synthetics and try a merino wool base layer. That bit of advice, combined with my inherent, um, frugality, led me to mountainwarehouse.com – who had what I needed on sale for a price I was willing to pay, and even claimed I could get it in a few days. True to their word, and frankly to my surprise, the package arrived only a day later than promised and the next morning I hit the road.

Turns out running on the street isn’t quite like running on a treadmill. And it turns out that I don’t know how to self-regulate my pace. I ran faster than “normal” and could only run about half my normal distance. I chalked it up to the elevated pace and 8 months of being sedentary. I’ve gone a bit further each run, and this morning I ran to St. Paul’s and back – which is about what I’d have run in the spare room in our townhouse. Despite reaching 22 today (72F) it’s still cool in the morning, and the wool base layer has worked well.

I figure as long as exercise is still a legitimate reason to be out, I’ll keep running. I’ll have to see how I feel when the weather turns in the fall – it’s hard to imagine choosing to run in the windy rainy cold – but frankly fall is so far in the future it hardly bears thinking about.

Who knows what the world looks like by then.

We woke up Saturday morning in Hawaii.

After a fashion.

The sky was bright blue, bright sun among scattered fluffy clouds. The hint of chill in the air was fighting a losing battle with the gathering warmth, and the only sound in the air was birdsong.

I opened the a wall of floor to ceiling glass windows that lead out onto our deck and welcomed the outside in. We spent the day sitting on the deck, or the sofas just inside. I finished the book I was reading and started another. In the early afternoon, Dawnise watched Ru Paul’s Drag Race on Netflix with a friend, her laughter spilling out into the hush of the courtyard. We had afternoon aperol spritz. The cats took full advantage of the unusual opportunity to lounge on the deck.

We left the wall open all day, closing it against the evening chill.

This morning started out much the same.

We tried our hand at making shakshuka – our regular dish at Mola, the cafe around the corner we frequent for weekend breakfasts and have been missing in the shutdown. (We gave it a 7/10, flavors were good, the eggs spread further than intended and ended up a bit over cooked.)

As I type these words the birdsong has been temporarily replaced by the ringing of the bells of St. Paul’s – a reminder of where we actually are. We’ve all temporarily retreated out of the direct sun, even the cats, currently lounging in the shade – one under a deck chair, the other on the rug inside.

I anticipate another day of forced relaxation. I’ve got a piece of brisket flat sous-vide’ing, and I think we have all the necessary bits for Pimms this afternoon.

And really, why wait?

Here’s to your health, safety, and sanity. Slainte.

Not too much to report from London. We’re still healthy and safe, and increasingly grateful to have access to the outdoors.

I think it’s fair to say that life is slowly settling into some semblance of a “new normal,” and the UK government is starting to more clearly communicate that this won’t likely be over anytime soon.

After a couple weeks camping out at the stair rail, my computer perched on a stack of books, I bought a small standing desk, and spent the last few days working in the master bedroom. At Dawnise’s suggestion we’ve taken down the guest bed and turned the spare bedroom into a work space. I’m resisting populating it with new furniture, as I look forward to converting it back and welcoming back visitors in the late summer, or fall.

In the past week I’ve added a dozen links to my growing list of worthy articles. Some I’ve stumbled upon, some I’ve been pointed at by one of the feeds I follow, and some I’ve been sent by friends and colleagues.  

I’m particularly interested in writing that explains the science of the disease, offers insight into the systemic failures of preparation and imagination that led to nearly all western governments being caught flat-footed, and that explores the potential medium and long term impacts of this moment in history.

If you have articles you think I should read, please send them my way.