Unbound

Trump’s opponents struggle to articulate a compelling vision for America’s future. What’s holding us back?

Inevitability sits on us like a thousand-ton weight.

Trump orders the military to occupy L.A. and Washington, D.C. His donors bankroll a rapidly metastasizing network of detention camps and prisons. Congressional minions strip health care from millions. Musk dismantles entire government agencies, condemning the world’s poorest children while siphoning off our personal data. Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, and other Silicon Valley CEOs deploy A.I., crypto, and social media algorithms to construct the vast attention-sucking surveillance state they’ve long envisioned.

Inevitability is the language of power. It’s happening because they say so. It’s the future they choose. It’s not the one we’d choose for ourselves – and they want us to believe there is nothing we can do about it.

Americans used to own the future. Together we dreamed, innovated, and built. We got a lot of things wrong, but the nation genuinely aspired to make life better for people. Defeating fascism, inventing transistors and semiconductors, and landing a man on the moon were unifying accomplishments; there was an American “we” that got the job done.

Photo: Peter Teague

We launched the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe. We created the G.I. Bill and great public universities that built a broad American middle class. We funded the medical breakthroughs, the Peace Corps and USAID, nuclear power, solar panels, and smart phones that improved lives around the world. They all came out of the nation’s desire to make the future better than the past, “to forge a more perfect union.” And it worked. Millions of us have been freed to chase our own dreams and make our own lives in this incredible country.

The most dangerous thing

Today, it’s Trump and his political allies, the richest businessmen on earth, who are building the future. They’re going to Mars, launching rockets and satellites, and racing the Chinese for global dominance.

Trump has bound himself to the most powerful elements in tech. Their shared goal is to seize a monopoly on the future. That alliance may be the single biggest danger of this crisis. The threat comes from the alignment of immense wealth and power behind a bleak vision they insist is inevitable.

That their project is the opposite of the American project as conceived by patriots ranging from Madison, Lincoln and Douglass to FDR and King doesn’t matter because, in their telling, there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

If we don’t stop it - and we must - the potential for corruption and tyranny is limitless; there is zero chance that we will emerge with a more perfect union.

They have no loyalty to America or Americans.

These men have no loyalty to America or Americans. They do not believe in the American project—or even understand that it exists. To them, self-government, liberty, and equality are meaningless abstractions. Sacrifice for the good of others? Unthinkable. As journalist Kara Swisher says of Musk: each of them believes he is “Player One.” The rest of us are digits.

Where’s the alternative?

One of the remarkable things about this moment is that Trump’s opponents have so little to say about the future. Bernie thunders about oligarchy. “Centrist” politicians worry about polarization and the damage it does to democratic norms and institutions. The left talks about injustice and attacks on marginalized communities. Everyone worries about the dangers of technology. There is moral outrage. There is legal combat. But there is no powerful counter-vision to contrast with the future Trump and his allies are planning.

It shouldn’t be that hard. We are looking at a terrifying mashup of history’s worst totalitarian states and Severance. It’s bleak. It’s oppressive. And when people see it clearly, they hate it.

But we’ve been infected by the lie of inevitability. I recently asked a Lyft driver how he felt about competing with Google’s driverless cab company. “It’s the future. It’s what’s happening” he said, apparently resigned to the fate Silicon Valley has planned for him. My progressive San Francisco friends feel the same way. To ask questions about people losing their jobs, or the vehicles as surveillance platforms, or who benefits, is to be anti-progress, a Luddite.

Historian Timothy Snyder talks about “the politics of inevitability,” a way of thinking that trains us to dismiss troubling facts and stop asking questions about values. If a ride-share app siphons money from drivers and communities, we shrug. If Google kills off those jobs entirely and takes all the money for itself, we rationalize it as “the necessary cost of progress.”

Our political imagination has atrophied as we’ve learned the habits of passivity. Our kids are addicted to social media. Musk has seized control of space. Amazon, Google, and Meta shape our economy, politics, businesses, and daily lives in ways that most of us barely understand. Now an A.I. tsunami – fueled by oceans of electricity generated by climate-warming natural gas - is about to amplify the effects of all of it. And we’ve convinced ourselves that there’s nothing we can do about any of it.

Of course that’s an illusion, a dangerous self-defeating lie. We’re forgetting our own American story. The nation began with a fight against tyranny and for self-determination. We’ve waged that fight over and over, against the King, the slavers, patriarchs, robber barons, union busters, white supremacists and fascists. Each generation of patriots has repaired inherited faults and passed the project forward, stronger than before. That is the great unfinished work Lincoln described: to build “a more perfect union.”

To accept the inevitability of authoritarian government, monopolized markets, and algorithm-driven communications is a betrayal of the patriots who came before us. We must reclaim our agency before it’s too late.

The key to the cell door is in your pocket

We can mourn the loss of the old order, but let’s also note that its destruction frees us to construct something better. Generations Z, Alpha, and Beta don’t have to live within constraints that no longer serve us, that hinder our ability to imagine a new world.

Let’s focus on the future we could make if we were true to the American project and the values that anchor it – equality, freedom, opportunity, decency, honesty, and fairness. We should be talking about getting rid of things that get in the way, that make it hard for people to live lives filled with purpose and meaning. We need to figure out how to remove the barriers that prevent people from having satisfying work that pays well, or affordable and decent housing, healthcare, and education. We could be demanding that corporations and the technology they produce work for all of us, make us more free, more equal, and grow the opportunities available to all Americans.

And we should call out the false values of those who oppose us. The goals they articulate sound good - to connect people, to make information accessible, to lower prices, to usher in a new “golden age” - but they’d play as well in China or Russia as they do in the U.S. The values that anchor the American project are nowhere to be found. The men who lead the U.S. Government and their corporate allies are demonstrating that they are loyal only to themselves, with no commitment to, understanding of, or interest in the nation that gave them everything they have.

The evidence is in. These villains deliver “solutions” to non-existent problems, while creating existential risks to everything that matters.

Our challenge is to reconnect to the story and the values that make that clear.