Destabilization of the United States: The top X-factor EA neglects?
Highlights
Destabilization could be the biggest setback for great power conflict, AI, bio-risk, and climate disruption.
Polarization plays a role in nearly every causal pathway leading to destabilization of the United States, and there is no indication polarization will decrease.
The United States fits the pattern of past democracies that have descended into authoritarian regimes in many key aspects.
The most recent empirical research on civil conflicts suggests the United States is in a category that has a 4% annual risk of falling into a civil conflict.
In 2022 (when this was originally written), Mike Berkowitz, ED of Democracy Funders Network and 80,000 Hours guest, believes there is 50% chance American democracy fails in the next 6 years.
For every dollar spent on depolarization efforts, there are probably at least a hundred dollars spent aggravating the culture war.
Destabilization of the United States could wipe out billions of dollars of pledged EA funds.
Note following the assassination attempt of former President Trump
This is the extended version[1] of my 2022 draft submission[2] to the Open Philanthropy (OP) Cause Area Competition. I am releasing it today because the section on accelerationist events and protecting politicians from assassination seems very salient given the last 24 hours. (Thanks to Woody Campbell for relevant and possibly prescient thoughts on the latter).
The overall topic of this piece is also salient for this 2024 election year. I have been pleasantly surprised how many EAs have mobilized this year around the issue of protecting American democracy… I wish this had been the situation back in 2020 or after January 6th or after I pushed this on the Forum and EAGs in 2022. Democracy is jeopardized not because of a single candidate but because of the forces that made the viability of such a candidate possible. Thus this issue cannot be addressed only in election years.
The worry I’ve had this year is that EAs will prioritize this area only until election day and then forget about it after January 20th, 2025. The degradation of American democracy and stability is not stopped only at the ballot box, and the forces/dynamics that are driving that degradation have continued unabated despite every red line[3] that has been crossed to date. And I’m not optimistic that the red line crossed yesterday will be any different.
Preface
Epistemic status:
I have thought a lot about this over the years and was warning about risks to American democracy before the topic entered mainstream and often sensationalized discourse.. I could be more well read on academic literature, however I think it likely wouldn’t change my views much on diagnosis and prognosis of the situation[4] but could greatly influence my views of the prescription. This is a topic that lends itself to getting lost in the rabbit hole and alarmism. My greatest hesitation about the gravity of the situation is the fact that many very intelligent people come to very different conclusions than me; however, I have yet to see an argument I found compelling. I think the probability of a destabilizing event rests a lot on people’s subjective judgements. Below is an overview of my confidence on a few items in this piece:
Very confident that destabilization is more likely than EAs appreciate.
Confident the consequences of destabilization make it an X-factor.
Moderately confident it’s neglected financially relative to severity as an X-factor and relative to money injected annually into polarization efforts (read: culture war).
Very confident the problem is quite difficult to solve.
Very low confidence in most proposed interventions; modest confidence on a couple.
My top reading/listening recommendations are:
Robert Evans’ podcast series It Could Happen Here (March – May 2019)
Not to be confused with a book of the same name by Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League.
In August 2021, Evans released a daily podcast under the It Could Happen Here name. This is not the content I am referencing. If you are searching on a service like Spotify, you will need to sort the podcast episodes from oldest to newest to find the original series released in 2019.[5]
Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized
Robert Evans’s podcast miniseries “Behind the Insurrection” (a set of episodes from his Behind the Bastards podcast he released in the wake of January 6th)
Daniel Ziblatt and Steve Levitsky’s How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority
(if you don’t want to read a whole book, watch their presentation at Politics and Prose)
This is an extended version of my submission to the Open Philanthropy (OP) Cause Area Competition. The word limit and scoring structure affected the final product (I would prefer to have focused more on the possibility and importance of a destabilization event). I have been working independently on an informal effort to make the case that EA should prioritize protecting American democracy and ambitious structural change in the U.S. political system. (The latter is not just because of its role in the former but also because it has immense upside benefits even if American democracy were secure). Reach out if you are interested in collaborating or just want to give words of encouragement.
Apologies in advance for switching back and forth between nationality-neutral and American-centric language (e.g. the American government vs. our government). I know EA is majority non-Americans; although throughout this piece I feel like I am appealing especially to American EAs.
Acknowledgements
Rawan, Woody Campbell, Mike Berkowitz, Professor Spivey, Steve Thompson, Kyle Lucchese, Tom Latkowski, František Drahota, and public libraries.
Summary
The trajectory of polarization, increasing minoritarian rule, and the erosion of democratic norms and the rule of law in the United States is unsustainable. The forces that are driving this trajectory (the revenue models of social media and news media, and structural political incentives) are deeply entrenched and are known to us. Yet, if there was going to be an intervening force sufficient to alter our trajectory, it should have appeared by now (especially in the wake of the January 6th, 2021 insurrection). Continuing on this path–in addition to high levels of government dysfunction (also worthy of EA’s attention)–will eventually yield destabilization. Destabilization which would likely manifest as an authoritarian regime or civil conflict (likely sparked by a failed authoritarian power grab).[6]
The consequences of destabilization of the world’s most powerful superpower are immense, (including for suffering, x-risks, and the long-term future) and could be the catastrophic event that cascades into an existential event. Destabilization of the nation that is home to the largest efforts addressing artificial intelligence, bio-risk, and climate disruption would also be devasting for the EA movement because of the amount of EA talent in the United States and the degree to which the handful of fortunes (of Americans) that represent the vast majority of pledged EA funds are tied to the health of the America system. For example, a right-wing authoritarian could shutdown Facebook or take other actions that would wipe out most of its stock value; Forbes states that the majority of the net worth of Dustin Moskovitz—the principal source of OP’s funding—is from his estimated 2% stake in Facebook; billions of dollars of EA/OP funding would evaporate if this scenario were to happen.
OP and the Effective Altruism community can take a multitude of actions, many of which not only decrease the chance of destabilization but also have the upside of making our government function better, thus having a force-multiplier effect on the outcomes our trillion-dollar government. Action is urgently needed, but unfortunately most interventions have either a very unclear cost-effectiveness or appear to not meet OP’s typical 1000x standard in short-term measurements. However, a medium-level investigation could change the perspective on return on investment. Effective Altruism at large needs to explore the risk of destabilization of the United States, given the possibility it could become one of EA’s top X-factors.
If anyone reading this would like to discuss or collaborate on this topic, please reach out! Also, let me know if this changed your opinions/priors at all AND/OR what arguments you think need to be improved.
Possibility
Here is a distillation of my argument: the experts that I have read understand the situation as the elements and dynamics depicted in this flow chart. The reasons they cite for why they are not pessimistic about the worst-case scenario do not address the mechanisms of the situation and are more so hunches, each of which has a strong counter argument. They openly give the impression that they are optimistic because it is practical rather than intellectually merited. I am merely looking at the trajectory (where the flow chart is taking us) and the inertia (the fact that nothing has intervened to change the trajectory after an unprecedented presidency, pandemic, and insurrection), and making the logical jump that the end point is eventually destabilization.
Big picture
Authoritarianism
Democracies have fallen into authoritarian regimes throughout the past 100 years, and scholars have studied those instances to create a playbook of how tyrants successfully come to power in democracies. [7] Trump has partially or completely checked off every box except for crippling the opposition and wresting control of the security forces[8] (the latter being the most important).
Trump was unsuccessful in seizing power, however many people have interpreted the wrong lesson—our institutions work, we can be optimistic about democracy. The process of resisting Trump’s power grab and January 6th made them weaker, and they continue to be eroded—not rebuilt—to this day.[9] The pathway to power has been illuminated for other would-be authoritarians. The Trump-wing of the Republican party is finding decent success in replacing non-radical Republicans in critical positions to enable a future “constitutional coup.” The next authoritarian in the White House, be it Trump or someone more competent, will have much more success. These are the concerns of a number of serious scholars and pundits.[10]
The demise of democracies into presidential autocracies, fascist regimes, and one-party states is an arc, not a linear line. The rise of fascism in the 30s occurred on a sharp arc relative to the gentler curve of illiberal authoritarianism of Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Daniel Ziblatt and Steve Levitsky, the authors of How Democracies Die, emphasize how modern democracies deteriorate over longer time scales that enable a boiling-frog syndrome.
I contend that both a sharp and gentle curve are possible. The important point is that we could be near or past the inflection point of the curve. In Behind the Bastards’ miniseries “Behind the Insurrection,” journalist Robert Evans focuses on how insurrections, paramilitary groups, political violence, enablement of authoritarians by establishment politicians, and a voter base of around 30% of the population were at the inflection point of fascist regimes that came to power or attempted to come to power. In more recent regimes birthed from democracies, How Democracies Die emphasizes the erosion of the democratic norms forbearance and mutual toleration, establishment politicians enabling the aspiring authoritarian, and the aspiring authoritarian being elected to power in more recent.[11] The United States has roughly analogous features in the present situation.
A notable difference Evans highlights between now and then is that WWI supplied an enormous number of veterans that experienced brutal trench warfare that went on to become fascist foot soldiers, whereas the number of combat veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is much smaller and the combat is relatively sanitized compared to trench warfare in the 30s (this is not to make light of 21st century combat or say that most soldiers have a bent towards fascism).
Civil conflict
Civil conflict would most foreseeably manifest from a failed authoritarian power grab. We saw these dynamics play out on January 6th of 2021. The base of an aspiring tyrant faithfully believes their leader’s declarations that the opposition is illegitimately grabbing power. They respond to this perceived existential threat to democracy with violence.
This danger is underpinned by the proliferation of armed groups for over a decade,[12] alarming number of extremists in law enforcement,[13] easy accessibility of weapons—unique to America,[14] and historically-high population sentiments tolerating or advocating for political violence, believing their fellow Americans are the enemy, perceiving the stakes as existential, and not seeing democracy as essential.[15]
Some people find this hard to visualize so let me set out a few important points.
It would not look like the first American civil war—a conventional war divided neatly between belligerents. It would be somewhere on the range of messy low- to high-intensity civil conflicts like those in Congo[16] and Syria, respectively.
Also, people get hung up on the fact that the majority is against a civil conflict. Conflicts are always a minoritarian endeavor; there is a strong asymmetry between the number of organized combatants and the civilian population they can suppress.[17] This same dynamic plays out with authoritarianism. The European fascist regimes in the 30s came to power with around 30% support from the population[18] (which is roughly the support for Trump)[19].
Likewise, people have trouble reconciling what they see in the country right now with the prospect of destabilization in several or even a few years’ time. Humans naturally think linearly and are regularly mistaken when they encounter exponential trends. Many conditions of present-day United States are analogous to the conditions of ill-fated democracies around their inflection point—e.g. militias normalizing political violence, establishment politicians supporting an authoritarian outsider for political gain and/or miscalculation.
Barbara Walter, author of How Civil Wars Start, makes an empirical case that the United States is vulnerable to a civil war.[20] The CIA’s Political Instability Task Force analyzes a dataset of incidents, and their most recent model has identified two predictive variables: anocracy and ethnic mobilization. Countries with both of these variables had an annual 4% chance of starting a civil conflict.
Walter cites the Center for Systemic Peace’s polity scale[21] which downgraded the United States to an anocracy on the bubble of being a democracy.[22] Daniel Ziblatt makes a similar point that the United States has a long constitutional tradition but only became a full democracy after the civil rights movement.[23]
I am uncertain how valid the empirical argument from Walter’s is.[24] Ethnic mobilization is definitely occurring, but the 4% annual risk of civil conflict is also dependent on the United States being an anocracy. Walter cites one measure of the United States dipping into the anocracy zone, but there are other ratings that have the United States as a democracy.[25] Walter also concedes, on a podcast with Michael Shermer, that the experts are unsure why anocracy is a predictor and that they think that it’s a proxy for a weak government—which the United States is not; however, I can imagine the dysfunction/deterioration of the government to a point that it creates the space for rebel groups, which is the mechanism she describes as driving civil conflicts. I am also skeptical of a forecasting tool by the CIA given the critiques of their abilities by Legacy of Ashes, Cass Sunstein’s 80,000 Hours interview, and the work of Philip Tetlock (Good Judgment Project).
Polarization
“The most fundamental challenge that we face today is extreme polarization”
- Steven Levitsky
Nearly every causal pathway (ultimate to proximate causation) of authoritarianism and civil conflict converge on polarization[26] at some point.
Polarization is driven by polarized content/rhetoric from politicians,[27] media personalities,[28] and political entrepreneurs[29] which reaches the population through news media and social media.[30]
Social media and news companies, especially cable news, earn the majority of their revenue through ads. The product they are selling is the attention of the audience.[31] Their revenue increases by maximizing the aggregate amount of time viewers spend watching their content. Directing/providing the audience towards polarized content that triggers their ape brain is one of the most effective ways to increase time spent consuming media.
Politicians are incentivized to engage in polarization to increase their visibility in the media and because of structural incentives—most decisively: the combination of party primaries, single-member districts, first-past-the-post voting—to appeal to an unrepresentative and highly politicized “base”.[32] This combination is one of the worst configurations of election methodology possible.[33]
We have reached a toxic level of polarization because of alternate information ecosystems. Robert Evans describes this as when people can watch and hear the same thing and come to wildly different conclusions (e.g. Kyle Rittenhouse Shooting). Carnegie Endowment researchers Thomas Carothers and Andrew O’Donohue found that American polarization is exceptional on multiple dimensions.[34] Ezra Klein finished his book, Why We’re Polarized, stating he suspects “we can’t reverse polarization.” He wrote the book before the COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6th insurrection.
The prognosis is even more damning following the double-down on polarization and neofascism that ensued the soft coup attempt. With the exception of the initial weeks after the insurrection, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has trivialized the attack and helped purge non-Trump loyalists.[35] Tucker Carlson, received two new shows from Fox News (in addition to his primetime show) after he began spreading flagrant disinformation about the insurrection one month after the attack. The list is long, but those are two of the most concerning.
So what is the end point of continual toxic polarization? I think that it is destabilization. I believe this because of how it drives the inputs into authoritarianism and civil conflict. I also contend that a society can’t be sustained if the two dominant factions can’t have a shared set of facts/truths about which they base their disagreements on. Despite the latter being purely my intuition, it is a view voiced by some experts[36] and I would speculate that it is most of our views if confronted with that question.[37]
Even if a toxically polarized United States can resist destabilization for a long time, it would be highly dysfunctional (keep that in mind as you read the “Importance” section). Ezra concludes his book that the United States must reform its political system to function amidst polarization. For reasons discussed in the “Tractability” section, this is very unlikely. This resigns us to a perpetual state of government dysfunction (which gradually decays the nation) and vulnerability to destabilizing events. The authors of The Paradox of Democracy, Sean Illing and Zac Gershberg, believe this eventually has to course correct back to liberal democracy or to the end of liberalism and democracy, with the predisposition being for the latter.[38]
How close we already came (January 6th)
Reporting and investigations into January 6th, including the House select committee on January 6th, have continually revealed we were closer to disaster than we expected. However, even in the initial aftermath, there was enough reason to believe that if we played this event out a hundred times that several of the times would have resulted in a destabilizing event (most likely a civil conflict following a failed coup—one that went a lot further than this coup attempt did). Below I list three variables that could have easily gone very differently and if they had, I think we’d be living in a very different situation today:
Had the extremists[39] held possession of the building for 24 hours.
The extremists were in a position to hold the building for substantially longer than they did. They had an overwhelming numbers advantage and the security forces were unwilling to use lethal force.
If the extremists held the building into January 7th, this would have dramatically inspired and emboldened extremists across the country including those withing a few hours drive of Washington D.C. Statehouses across the country could have come under spontaneous siege from extremists and tens of thousands more could have descended onto the nation’s capital. The longer the Capitol building was held the more likely extremists would sincerely believe this was a “1776 moment.”
The extremists however did not make a serious attempt to hold the Capitol. There are many plausible explanations: the extremists were all bark and not bite, they didn’t expect to make it into the building and thus were unprepared to capitalize on their success, they headed Trump’s eventual tweets, etc.
The situation might have played out very differently if Trump continued to double-down on the attack via Twitter instead of being talked down by aides and family members to tweet that the mob should go home.
This event likely wouldn’t have resolved in an overthrow of the federal government but it could have unleashed a wave of insurgencies or proto-insurgencies and domestic terrorism.
Had the insurrectionists intercepted a number of elected representatives and executed multiple of them.[40]
This would have the same emboldening and inspirational effect described in the point above. It could also function as an accelerationist event wherein future reprisal killings for the executions kicks off a vicious cycle political violence and assassination.
The insurrectionists were alarmingly close to intercepting elected legislators
A mob of insurrectionists were 60 feet[41] from evacuating legislators and had them in their line of sight at one point. Those insurrectionists were breaching the barrier between them and the fleeing legislators and only stopped after the first insurrectionist through the barrier was fatally shot.[42]
This could have played out very differently if the Capitol police office did not discharge his weapon, which is what happened in all other instances of confrontation that day between security forces and insurrectionists.
Some insurrectionists carried firearms with them. I do not know if any members of the mob in that corridor had a firearm. Play out this scenario enough times and you probably have situations where an armed insurrectionist near the front of the mob and is zealous enough to fire back. Now, play that situation out enough times and the mob overruns the few police officers in front of them and is on the heels of vulnerable legislators.
Insurrectionists had an unimpeded straight shot at the Senate chamber which had not been fully evacuated. The only reason they didn’t is because they followed Officer Eugene Goodman.[43]
I’m surprised Goodman’s ruse worked. I content that if played out multiple times, the mob enters the Senate chamber.
Insurrectionists where at their closest point 40 feet from Vice President Mike Pence.[44] Although the insurrectionists didn’t realize how close they were to Pence. Reporting has come out that Pence’s security detail perceived the situation as grave enough that it necessitated goodbye calls to loved ones.[45]
I don’t doubt that the insurrectionists would have executed elected representatives they got their hands on. It was a mob in full-on mob mentality. Multiple insurrectionists entered with firearms, zip ties, and other tactical gear. The rhetoric leading up to the event and at the event was clear that the extremists wanted to so see their opponents die.
Had Vice President Pence left the premise and the Senate Pro Tempe declined to certify the results or certified ballots of fake electors.
When Pence was evacuated to a subterranean secure location in the Capitol building, his Secret Service detail wanted evacuate him from the premise in his motorcade. The only reason they didn’t s because Pence refused.
It has been reported that some Secret Service officials were unprofessionally close or loyal to Trump.[46]
It has been reported that Pence’s National Security Advisor General Kellog perceived the evacuation of the Pence from the Capitol building as part of the desires of Trump/secret service officials loyal to Trump.[47] General Kellog is reported to have said “You can’t do that, Tony. Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.” to senior Secret Service official Tony Ornato.
Reporting has now revealed that some legislators, including Senator Ron Johnson, had explored plans to have a false set of electors stashed in legislators’ offices the night before and present them to the Senate as the valid representatives of their state’s electoral college.
When examining January 6th, we should also keep in mind that this was the last-ditch attempt to illegitimately overturn an election of an ongoing effort that was disorganized, poorly disciplined, lacking talent, and took action too far downstream. A more competent authoritarian could have taken action further upstream (i.e. before the election) to lay the groundwork for a less blatant constitutional coup.
A note on the military counter argument
Arguably the strongest guardrail against authoritarianism and civil conflict is the professionalism and strength of the United States Military (USM). Here are three things to consider:
USM is well positioned to stop an authoritarian power grab[48] but it is less well positioned to neutralize an insurgency. Even if insurgents have no hope of winning, the will to fight is sufficient to disrupt society (see Iraq War).
An authoritarian could 1) install civilian loyalists at the top of the military (e.g. Sec of DoD) and 2) promote officers loyal to the authoritarian. There are strong rebuttals to those two points being consequential for destabilization, however a potential authoritarian could still do serious damage with these actions regardless.
We have no confidence the military would act to stop a constitutional coup.[49] The military is not calibrated to decisively intervene in a gray area that is nominally legal/constitutional but is fiercely antidemocratic. Imagine if on January 6th there were no insurrectionists, but GOP senators presented false slates of electors and Vice President Mike Pence certified these electors. Imagine if we had a similar situation to the 2000 presidential election or worse. Now imagine if either of these actions were upheld by the Supreme Court (plausible with its current composition). What is your confidence level that General Mark Milley would use the military to override that Supreme Court decision?
Top reasons why the United States wouldn’t destabilize
If you told me that in 30 years I’d be proven wrong, I’d offer these two reasons as to why:
My top reason is that American rhetoric supporting political violence, especially on the Right, is all bark but no bite. The biggest indicator is that millions of Americans claim they believe Biden illiterately seized power, yet only thousands showed up on January 6th to do something about it.[50] However, this is also one of the strongest reasons a constitutional coup would prevail—the same lack of action by the Right to stop what they perceived as an illegitimate power grab probably extends to the Left and moderates.
I do believe it’s possible that the red line for GOP and media elites, which wasn’t triggered by January 6th, exists at some point before the point of no return. However, I believe the probability is small (perhaps 10% if I had to put a number on it).
What I would have included in a longer version
My original plan was to describe different components of the destabilization threat, detail different scenarios under which destabilization could have unfolded, as well as, cover a list of counterarguments and provide my rebuttals to them. An email exchange with OP clarified that it would likely have been beyond the scope of the competition and word limit. Here is a document with the topics I would have liked to discussed. I might expand on upon these in a future piece if EAs want to have a discourse around destabilization of the United States as an X-factor.
Conclusion
Democracies do die and we check most of the boxes of democracies that have descended into authoritarianism and civil conflict.
Polarization is a convergent instrument in most of the causation pathways.
The forces of polarization are entrenched. If there was going to be change, we likely would have seen it by now.
Without an intervening force, we head towards an end point of destabilization. Even if we stop just short, the concomitant governmental dysfunction would still have highly undesirable consequences on the issues laid out in the “Importance” section.
My current personal prediction is that if we play out our present scenario ten times, six of those times would result in destabilization (at least eclipsing the point of no return) in the next ten years—civil conflict or authoritarianism, including minoritarian rule an order of magnitude greater than what we already have. Mike Berkowitz, executive director of Democracy Funders Network, believes there is a 50% chance that “democracy fails,” particularly an illegitimate election, in the next 4 to 6 years.[51]
To me, the lowest reasonable probability of destabilization over the next ten years is 15%. I expect that most EAs won’t rise to the degree of my risk assessment, however, I do think the case I presented should significantly increase people’s priors absent a concrete refutation of my macro arguments. To put this section in a sentence: unless you can point to why we are going to reverse polarization, our trajectory and inertia should make the default position that destabilization is probable enough to be considered a major x-factor.
Importance
Authoritarianism[52] and civil conflict have reliable negative consequences, such as economic decline[53] and increased violence. However, the consequences of destabilization of the United States would constitute an X-factor and a historic setback to alleviating suffering and stewarding the long-term future.
Global ramifications and great power conflict
Destabilization of history’s most powerful superpower would hijack global attention from other issues (e.g. eradicating abject poverty, developing better PPE). It could also disrupt the current liberal-led world order. Multiple international democracy experts think failure of American democracy would result in a global decline in democracy.[54]
The decline of the world’s superpower and/or the disruption of the Western hegemony would reduce the power disparity between China and other members of the Western alliance and incentivize competition in artificial intelligence and bio-capabilities for military purposes.
Superpower decline, disruption of the dominant alliance, a superpower led by an authoritarian with little checks on power, and a civil conflict of the 2nd largest nuclear arsenal (think rogue nukes) all increase the likelihood of a great power conflict. The risk of nuclear war, engineered pandemics, weaponized AI, and development of new WMDs all go up.[55] Cooperation on climate disruption, AI safety, and biosecurity all evaporate. The latest research suggests that the stakes from nuclear warfare can reach five billion human deaths.[56]
Artificial Intelligence and bio-risk
Applicable to both
The United States is the home of the top hubs (both policy and technical) for artificial intelligence safety and biosecurity, thus magnifying destabilization’s impact.
San Francisco, the world’s capital of AI and Bio-technology, is also a prime target of an authoritarian regime or belligerents in a civil conflict. San Francisco is a liberal bastion that is a national symbol of Leftism and cultural openness—perceived opposition to the Right-wing. It could be the target of punitive policies by a tyrant,[57] domestic terrorism, or combat operations attacking the metropolitan areas supply lines. This point is highly speculative but illustrates plausible scenarios on the darker side. In It Could Happen Here: The Revenge of Rural America, Robert Evans concretely describes how just a few hundred organized combatants from the outlying rural conservative areas of Northern California could cripple the supply lines to the San Francisco Bay area and disrupt supply lines across the United States.
Artificial Intelligence
An authoritarian will have the incentive to develop AI recklessly to enhance their suppression of the American population.[58] An authoritarian could foreseeably be less likely to listen to technocrats warning about AI safety and engage in a great power competition over development of AI.
Accelerating climate disruption
Authoritarianism
A regime[59] would most likely stop taking serious proactive action, rollback efforts to combat climate disruption, and not push other nation’s to do better. The regime might also be derelict in fighting wildfires, especially in coastal states perceived as bases of opposition support (namely California). California wildfires in 2020 contributed to 1.7% of the nation’s GHG emissions[60] and it gets worse each year.[61]
Civil conflict
Not only will conflict-affected populations neglect environmentalist behaviors, conflicts themselves release ridiculous amounts GHGs. The first five years of the Iraq war released the GHG equivalent to putting 25 million more cars on American roads.[62] From 2001 to 2018, USM has emitted 280 million metric tons overseas to directly support combat operations[63] representing 22% of the entire DoD’s GHG emissions for that period.[64][65]
Combat operations in wildfire-vulnerable areas will almost certainly cause wildfires.
Significance
I believe destabilization’s effect on climate change is the most significant part of the X-factor. I believe that mainstream EA underrates climate disruption because 1) the reasons laid out in this post, 2) we can’t accurately model how systemic species loss at mass extinction levels in nearly every ecosystem cascades across ecosystems and over a prolonged chain reaction, and 3) climate-induced mass migration will imperil the very liberal democracies we expect to lead safeguarding against other X-risks because of migration’s demonstrated effect on authoritarian/fascistic/nationalistic sentiments in voters and the leaders they elect.
My opinion on point 2 would be most likely to change if I were to be walked through one of the most comprehensive models to date and someone could demonstrate how the model is sufficiently capturing far-off run-on effects.
Effects on the Effective Altruism movement
Talent
According to the 2019 EA survey,[66] the plurality of EAs (39%) are Americans.[67] The destabilization of the United States would realistically disrupt the work of a substantial portion. This would also apply to EA organizations based in the United States.
Funds
The majority of the tens of billions of dollars pledged to EA is tied up in the fortunes of Americans Cari Tuna, Dustin Moskovitz, and Sam Bankman-Fried.
There is not a clear answer for how much authoritarianism and civil conflict would hurt the value of the equity behind the majority of pledged EA funds. It depends on how instrumental American consumers, American workers, American intermediaries, and the value of the dollar are to the net worth of the people behind OP and FTX. It also depends on the speed destabilization and the speed of mitigation efforts. However, it reasonable to believe that such a catastrophic event would reduce them by a substantial amount, even most of the value under some scenarios.
Plausible scenario
The principal source of OP’s funding is Dustin Moskovitz’s estimated 2% stake in Meta (formerly Facebook) worth between 13 and 29 billion USD depending on the month.[68] OP is very vulnerable to any changes in Meta’s stock value. An authoritarian’s attempt to control the information ecosystem could lead to a shutdown or crippling of Facebook and other Meta platforms. The likelihood is probably related to the degree the authoritarian views the organization, its users, or its discourse as adversarial to the regime. There is an extra risk if the authoritarian is Trump because his ownership of the social media platform Truth Social is more incentive to target Facebook.
Neglectedness
Preventing destabilization of the United States is dangerously neglected when taking into account its probability and importance which make it a major X-factor. Additionally, it will have substantial reverberations in suffering and likely the long-term future. It is also very neglected when considering the investment in forces that are actively making the problem worse.
Given the gravitas and tractability (covered in the next section) of the problem, there is a deficit in funding, scaling, and longitudinal efficacy in depolarization interventions, and, possibly, innovation to produce new effective strategies and tactics to advert destabilization. I suggest interventions in the “Prescription” section.
The rest of this section examines neglectedness through a financial lens.
[2024 edit: if I had the time, I would like to update this section with findings from the Democracy Fund’s report on “The State of Pro-Democracy Institutional Philanthropy” which projects that pro-democracy institutional philanthropy in the ’21-’22 cycle was 6 billion USD. I think that number should be taken in context to the numbers from section below on polarization, as well as the funding that goes into organizations undermining democracy in ways other than polarization–e.g. project 2025 or the organizations[69] involved in placing judicial nominees that go on to carry water for increased corruption[70] and decreased accountability of the executive. [71] [72] [73]]
Through the lens of polarization
I did a “back-of-the-envelope calculation” (see my BOTEC here) to estimate the amount of money going into American depolarization and polarization efforts.[74] Depolarization efforts are at best outspent ten to one by polarizing efforts. My best guess returned a ratio of 278 dollars spent on the culture war for every dollar spent on depolarization efforts.
Unfortunately, it’s likely that each dollar spent on polarizing efforts is substantially more effective than an equivalent dollar spent on depolarization.[75] Our ape brains are wired for identity, fear, and disgust.[76] These triggers will often supersede the more taxing cognitive activities of deciphering complexity and nuance.
To conduct this BOTEC, I made several assumptions and decisions that have strong implications. For example, choosing to focus on money that goes into polarization and depolarization instead of the amount of hours or content. Broadly, I chose to focus on polarization at the macro level instead of individual elements farther downstream (i.e. more proximal causation) of destabilization risk. A more downstream assumption was that substantial amount of messaging by federal-level candidate campaigns was messaging that fed into the culture war.
A future investigation of this issue would use different approaches and improve on the one I used in the BOTEC.
Tractability
Reducing the risk of destabilization is, at the least, difficult. The solution generally breaks down as a combination of structural reform, halting the forces driving polarization, and actively depolarizing the population. Ballot initiatives are arguably the best available vehicle for accomplishing structural reform and getting polarized Americans to work together in a constructive way that humanizes each other.
Here is my depiction in a flow chart.
Polarization breaks down into stopping the drivers of polarization and depolarization itself. These two approaches are analogous to addressing climate disruption through reducing GHG emissions and the creation of carbon sinks. One attacks the source of the problem, the other tries to undo the damage.
For the former, our problem is not a lack of solutions but a lack of political will. We know what the problem is at both the macro and micro levels, and we have solutions ranging from rough ideas to proposed policies. However, decision-makers are unwilling to act forcing us to circumvent them—the same is true of structural reform. The latter is an issue of funding and a lack of practical solutions. If we can’t overcome the former’s issues of political will, then we are stuck trying to scale one of the largest social projects in American history amidst competing polarizing forces.
I’d give preference to shutting off the sources over reversing damage already done.Ezra doesn’t believe we can sufficiently scale depolarization efforts[77] and is skeptical that we can reverse the incentives of polarization, thus he opts for reforming government to function amidst high polarization.[78] My sense was that Berkowitz has more optimism in the potential of depolarization efforts than I did.
I believe the best strategy is to invest in all approaches but particularly in methods that cross over multiple approaches—e.g. grassroots organizing around structural reforms (supported by the populist Left and Right) that creates a depolarizing space for activists on both sides.
What is needed
The broad needs
Change the incentives so the GOP pursues diversifying their voter base instead of minority rule.
Stop would-be tyrants from being elected.
Stop Americans from viewing each other as the enemy and the stakes as existential (especially on the Right).[79]
Increase the quality of life of regular Americans to reduce the potential for radicalization.
Structural-reform needs[80]
Address weaknesses of the primary system through: [81]
Voting reforms that don’t reward extremist candidates or polarizing political behavior (e.g. approval voting, ranked-choice voting).
Multi-member districts (or other form of proportional system) to break the two-party duopoly.
Creating a universal/non-partisan primary.[82]
Reform minoritarian institutions
Abolish the filibuster
(These are not imperative at the moment, but it’s an eventual necessity to avoid a legitimacy crisis and other bad outcomes of minoritarian rule. By 2040, 70% of the population will live in just 30% of the states—15.)[83]
Make the Senate proportional or abolish it.
Abolish the electoral college
Curb money in politics[84]🡪 better policies 🡪 more prosperous Americans 🡪 less economic populism that is co-opted by demo gauges
Campaign finance reform
Lobbying reform
Cracking down on the revolving door
Needs for stopping polarizing forces
Decrease incentives for politicians to play to the culture war.
Alter the revenue model or decrease optimization of the revenue model of:
New media companies, particularly cable news
Social media companies
Social media companies are more tractable because of bipartisan anger at them for their effects on mental health and to a lesser extent their polarizing algorithms and disinformation.
Needs for Depolarizing the population
Massive efforts that:
Humanize Americans to each other (i.e. empathize).
Get Americans to not see the opposition as an existential threat and believe that we can move forward without getting everything we want (i.e constructively disagree)
Why it’s difficult
Structural reform
Enacting structural reforms are a herculean task for two reasons. The American government is built for gridlock[85] and has minoritarian institutions. Therefore, a polarized reform, such as abolishing the electoral college, will not pass under current conditions. A popular non-polarized reform, such as multi-member districts that would lead to a multi-party system,[86] doesn’t have traction with politicians because they are incentivized to not change the rules that they came to power under.
Stopping polarizing forces
The forces that are driving polarization are heavily entrenched. We know this because the majority of elected Republicans and media executives have doubled-down on those forces despite Trump’s election in 2016—the first undeniable sign of how far polarization had come—the politicized pandemic that killed 1+ million Americans, and the January 6th insurrection. If these people’s red line wasn’t crossed by the attempted coup, it’s hard to believe that it exists somewhere where it won’t be too late.
If GOP and media elites won’t voluntarily reverse course, then there are three paths forward: 1) pass structural reforms that eventually lead to politicians that have the political will to regulate social media and news media, 2) mass mobilization of citizens to create a pressure to reform that is untenable for these elites to resist, 3) effectively personally lobbying decision-makers to take these actions. The first is an undesirably long feedback loop. The latter two need innovation to be more effective than they have been in the past.
Epistemic notice:
I am confident that politicians and news media have doubled down on it. I am uncertain if social media execs have taken low-visibility actions to reign in their algorithms. I am aware that they enhanced their operations to purge extremists and extremist groups on their platforms.
Depolarize the population
Depolarizing the population is a problem of immense scale—Mike Berkowitz questions if we have historical precedent for it. Tens, if not a hundreds, of millions of Americans are unhealthy polarized. One-time interventions rarely change attitudes; longitudinal interventions are required. Additionally, we lack the scientific literature to know what interventions have longitudinal efficacy.[87] If the problem is as urgent as I describe it, then we don’t have the time to wait for that research either.
Interventions can also make the problem worse if not thoughtfully constructed. A common oversimplification is that Americans need to watch more news of opposing viewpoints or interact with more compatriots that are different from them. Research finds that more informed citizens, especially when they consume news of the opposition, are more likely to engage in motivated reasoning.[88] There are also studies that find that exposure to opposing media can moderate beliefs under specific conditions.[89] Constructive direct interactions with a person of contrasting beliefs is dependent on the circumstances (e.g. do they feel pressure to preform for an audience, does the opposition concede points to be intellectually honest).[90]
“Once a society becomes deeply divided, it is very difficult to heal.” [91]
Polarization is expected to worsen as the development of artificial intelligence exacerbates social media algorithms and propagates deepfakes.[92]
Where there is traction
Ballot initiatives
Given the incentives for political actors to not pass popular structural reforms, multiple organizations and leading advocates[93] in the structural reform space opt for ballot initiatives to circumvent legislatures. Ballot initiatives are not a perfect tool,[94] but they are arguably the best direct intervention available.
Ballot initiatives can also contribute to depolarization by bringing heterogeneous ideologies and identities into the same team working for a unified cause. This is applicable for structural reforms that are popular across the Left-Right axis (e.g. ranked-choice voting).[95] This is congruent with Ziblatt and Levitsky’s position that saving democracy necessitates coalitions of dissimilar views.[96]
Robust federalism
An advantage of the federal system is that it enables compromise through fractionalizing geography instead of nation-wide policy concessions. Ezra notes that there are Progressive and Conservative advocates that support using federalism to get through this highly polarized period.
Prescription (what OP/EA could do)
I spent 90 minutes listening to a semi-public meeting of 75+ civil-society leaders in the protecting-American-democracy space and 30 minutes speaking 1-1 with a leader in this space. The field has developed dramatically since 2018 and organizations are now developing robust coordination capabilities. Arguably the most significant value-add that OP and EA could have is funding and helping the field scale.[97] Not only is the field not adequately prepared to scale, but the scale likely needed to avert serious threats to democracy is immense.[98]
I offer a curated menu of interventions. Given the level of uncertainty in these interventions, a cost-effective approach would likely invest broadly in the upstream interventions and carry out narrow experimentation with downstream interventions. Lessons learned from these actions will enable more effective and aggressive downstream interventions. However, a cost-effective approach may be in tension with an approach calibrated to the urgency and exigence of the issue—the more probable a destabilization event is over a short-time frame, the smaller the window to operate in and the more impetus to prioritize action over cost-effectiveness.
Funding and scaling existing efforts
Create an operation focused on recruiting more funders and key non-funder partners to this effort
Part of scaling up depolarization and structural reform efforts is increasing the capital (and maybe talent) going into them. OP could spin-up an operation that focuses on recruiting big-dollar funders to the effort. The operation would specialize in researching potential targets, identifying the network to reach them, developing a pitch that persuasive in their own worldview, and maintaining relationships with them. My understanding is that this is somewhat neglected in the space.
Presumably, as depolarization and structural reform efforts scale, there will also be talent gaps that can’t be filled by existing people/organizations in the movement. I don’t know what these will be but I think it is reasonable to be in a position to readily fill them.
Fund ballot initiative efforts and organizations
Ballot initiatives at this moment are the most tractable means of accomplishing structural reform. They also can be used to depolarize politically active Americans.
Historically, the cost per signature (to get a measure on the ballot) has ranged from 1.30 USD to 32.49 USD.[99] Smaller states can act as experiments, only costing six-figures to get a measure on the ballot. California could also be targeted for the “California effect.” The most and least costly measures to get on the 2020 California ballot were 6 and 2 million dollars respectively.[100]
Those figures do not include costs to campaign for the measure after it’s accepted onto the ballot. The most expensive ballot measure in the state’s history was Proposition 22 in 2020.[101] Uber and Lyft spent over 200 million USD of the 224 million USD spent on that measure (both for and against the measure).[102] The recent typical cost of a California ballot measure has been in the eight figures.[103] For example, the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative (Proposition 12) was passed in favor (63% to 37% on 12 million votes) with over 13 million USD spent in support and less than 700,000 USD spent in opposition.[104]
There are multiple options for investing in the ballot-initiative approach
Fund relevant ballot measures that make it onto ballots independent of EA activity.
Fund existing organizations that leverage the ballot-initiative process.
E.g. FairVote which is most known for enacting ranked-choice voting via the ballot initiative process.
[find name of that center that does research]
Fund new ballot initiatives tailored to EA’s agenda and strategy
Fund new organization(s) that will be EA-aligned and optimize leveraging the ballot-initiative using EA’s comparative advantage (i.e. intellectual rigor and culture).
My guess is that there is a strong case to diversify across all of these options.
Fund existing depolarization efforts and organizations
Organizations like Braver Angels already exist. A study[105] (n=1,800) of their red-blue workshops found that roughly 75% felt less angry about the other side. [106]
Organizations like More in Common[107] already do research to understand why societies are polarizing.
Here is a fairly comprehensive list of organizations and projects that engage in depolarization: https://icccr.tc.columbia.edu/media/media-library-2018/centers-amp-labs/icccr/Organizations-Bridging-Divides-Nov-2020.pdf
Fund new organizations to fill gaps through an approach similar to the arrangement between CE and FTX for biosecurity
Most of the interventions listed could be carried out by new organizations that have the competitive advantage of being EA-aligned. Open Philanthropy could make an arrangement with an incubation and research organization, like Charity Entrepreneurship (CE)[108], to build a more confident view on what the best interventions are and then spin off organizations to carry out these interventions. An example would be standing up an operation specializing in message testing prospective content for depolarization efforts to prevent inadvertent consequences.
A minimum viable prototype of this would be an EA-aligned hackathon on the topic of protecting American democracy/preventing destabilization.
FTX and CE recently announced a deal for FTX to fund 470,000 USD for CE to spin off charities that will fill gaps in the biosecurity space.[109]
Fund experiments/projects that will give us actionable information
OP could fund select projects or experiments in downstream interventions that are promising but untested or are missing crucial information. These projects/experiments would be similar to a minimum viable prototype and offer information that could lead EA to go deeper on a particular intervention or pivot away. An example would be funding a ballot initiative slate (e.g. voting, money in politics, and structural reforms) to contrast it with existing piecemeal ballot initiatives (e.g. just ranked-choice voting).
Miscellaneous interventions
Preempting accelerationist events
Now this one bloody protest would not lead inevitably to a civil war. It just starts a process. Crossing the bridge from civil unrest to civil warfare doesn’t require a magical and improbable shift in the firmament of reality, it just takes a bunch of the same fucked up shit that’s always happening in America happening all at once and in quick succession.
- Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here
The United States is vulnerable to attacks by accelerationist[110] groups/individuals that seek to destabilize the nation through strategic acts of violence that create cascades of upheaval.[111]
The accelerationist events I am most worried about are well thought out false-flag attacks that would elicit a major wave of reprisal attacks in response to it.[112]
Assassinations are another accelerationist event that is more tractable to stop.
Imagine how things would spiral out of control if a lone wolf assassinated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and then two weeks later there was a retaliatory assassination of Lauren Boebert. This is very unlikely but completely possible.
One intervention could be to provide security details to visible elected-office holders (credit goes to fellow EA Woody Campbell for this idea).[113] Of the interventions I propose, this intervention might be one of the easiest to calculate cost-effectiveness for. Open Philanthropy or other EA funders could fund a lobbying operation (layered on top of existing EA lobbying efforts) for this measure. I’ll take a guess that the cost would be in the seven figures. This would be the cost for a substantial reduction in an accelerationist assassination.
Invest in local journalism
According to Mike Berkowitz, revitalizing local journalism is imperative for:
Combating disinformation
Keeping federal, state, and local political actors accountable
Philanthropy has been taking a more active role in supporting journalism during the digital age and that need will exist for the foreseeable future. This intervention is favored by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing (authors of The Paradox of Democracy) and Mike Berkowitz.
Promote sincere populist leadership in the Republican apparatus to replace culture warriors
Note: Populism and anti-establishment might mean different things to you than they do to me. This suggestion is not premised in populism/anti-establishments being great, but the suggestion assumes that populism—the top vs bottom, class-oriented, anti-establishment populism—is better than continued culture war polarization of Liberals and Conservatives.
Most populists/anti-establishment people on the Right and Left support voting, money-in-politics, and structural reforms and often agree on interventions or goals (e.g. disclosing dark money[114], multi-party system[115]). However, their attention and effort are often diverted from working on these issues (the solution) and towards culture war issues (the problem) because of politicians and media personalities. The Right is substantially worse at this. I attribute the disparity between sincere leadership of Left- and Right-wing populism to talent pipelines (or the lack thereof).
Occupy Wall Street kicked off a wave of organization of the populist Left and it grew year after year. Thus, as the Left began to gain national recognition and institutional power,[116] they had people ready to become public figures and fill institutional roles. Whereas this pipeline was never developed in Right-wing populism before Right-wing populism assumed the mantle of the Republican Party and the White House.[117] Hence, establishment figures and political opportunists latched on to nominal populism to maintain influence with the Trump base whilst cynically peddling the culture war.
Right-wing elites nominally presenting themselves as anti-establishment/populist and then working to make the culture war salient is, in my view, the chief obstacle to depolarization through building anti-establishment Left-Right coalitions of average citizens that work towards structural reforms (which would at the same time have a strong depolarizing effect).[118]
Open Philanthropy can explore and carry out efforts to displace culture warriors from the populist Right with anti-establishment people seriously committed to structural reforms over the culture war. These people would be willing to cooperate with the Left on structural reform and use rhetoric with the base that pushes the base to focus on the top-bottom axis instead of the Left-Right axis.
Specific interventions could include hosting a right-wing populism conference, hosting a populist conference open to everyone across the ideological spectrum, providing fellowships, training, and media/branding assistance for promising sincere Right-wing populists, funding constructive right-wing populist and general populists organizations, and supporting select sincere populists candidates that would displace nominal populists pushing the culture war.
This objective carries serious risks and should be evaluated carefully before taking action.
Invest in mutual aid networks
Mutual aid networks are the “voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services.”[119] They often arise to address material inadequacies when the government fails to do so. Robert Evans advocates for mutual aid networks to bring together people across the ideological spectrum in a depolarizing situation (i.e. helping each other).[120]
Strengthening unions and preparing for a general strike
Unions often organize Americans across the political spectrum that inhabit the same workplace. There is some evidence that they are effective in depolarizing people. This study suggested that unions decrease racial animus (one of the driver’s of Trumpism). [121] My friends involved in the labor movement say there is other evidence, however I did not dive deep into it.
One of my friends in the labor movement advocates for a general strike as a last-ditch attempt to stop an authoritarian from seizing power. I have yet to hear back from them about historical precedent for this.
I think it’s plausible but has serious tractability issues which compounds with opportunity cost i.e. the scale of that organizing could be invested in more upstream preventive efforts. Notably, this option becomes attractive if the time-scale of destabilization was seen as imminent and withing the course of a couple years. Such a timescale would preclude structural reform and stopping the forces of polarization. I would guess that depolarization at that time scale is more intractable than a general strike. In this case, a general strike is truly an “in case of emergency break glass” tool.
My personal favorite
Left-Right coalitions to run a slate of ballot-initiatives for structural reform
Features:
Ballot-initiative process
Most viable option for enacting structural reform currently.
A slate of ballot initiatives
Current efforts are afflicted by piecemeal implementation (ranked-choice voting in one county, public campaign finance in another county). A slate of initiatives branded as one bundle to the public is a means for enacting comprehensive structural reform through the ballot-initiative process.
Coalitions of the anti-establishment Left and Right
There are structural reforms that are popular with both sides (which can be bundled together in a slate). E.g. unmasking dark money, multi-member districts, and ranked-choice voting.
Outputs
Structural reform (long-term feedback loop)
Depolarization (short-term feedback loop)
Innovation:
Focusing on slates instead of single ballot measures
The combination of the above features in one intervention
Uncertainties (why OP/EA should do a medium-level investigation)
These are my chief uncertainties/concerns/action items that would be worth exploring further in a medium-level investigation:
How long can a society function with the population being divided into two incompatible meta realities?
Why haven’t millions of Americans that believe Biden illegitimately grabbed power resorted to force yet? Is there an identifiable point where they would likely resort to force?
How much would authoritarianism and civil conflict hurt the net worths behind EA?
Is there a viable window for eliciting action from GOP and media elites through innovative and effective lobbying?
A better quantification of the ROI and cost effectiveness.
Quantify the consequences I mapped out in “Importance.”
What amount of money spent do we think leads to an X% decrease in the likelihood of destabilization. Could be broken down into specific causal pathways:
How much money into depolarization efforts results in X units of depolarization in X number of citizens?
How much money would an aggressive lobbying and public opinion campaign cost to increase the chance of social media regulations being enacted by 50%?
What is the best value add of EA to the saturating field of democracy protection efforts?
Conclusion/call to action
Destabilization of the United States is immensely important and quite possible—to the point it is a major X-factor. Work to prevent destabilization is drastically neglected relative to the gravitas of destabilization and the asymmetry between polarization and depolarization funding. There are clear pathways to decrease the risk, but all have great difficulties. Funding opportunities are immediately available for both pre-existing efforts and to explore new novel contributions. Non-fungible funding from OP (i.e. no one else would have provided the funding) for interventions with a force-multiplier effect (e.g. targeting obstacles to scaling depolarization efforts) are conceivably the most likely actions to meet OP’s 1000x impact standard.
OP should conduct a medium-level investigation into the possibility/probability of destabilization of the United States and the adverse impact that it would have i.e. how much of an X-factor is it. The more severe those considerations are, the more willingly OP should be to take big bets even if they appear less tractable or cost-effective. A worthwhile question is how much of pledged EA funds are jeopardized by destabilization. The investigation additionally should look at the return on investment of existing interventions and potential of new innovations in the field.
OP and the Effective Altruism movement at large should explore with earnest the possibility that destabilization of the United States is the most pressing X-factor. The movement should be wary that how it pursues impact, by focusing on marginal impact that can be measurably demonstrated, creates a blindspot for preventing speculative events of historic proportions–which might be less neglected and less tractable than typical EA focuses but whose impact would drastically change the world we live in and could easily erase the progress of the movement to date–and that this blindspot could result in a world where the event has come to pass and EA will have done nothing about it.
[1] It is 2X what could be submitted. The original submission was released on the Forum the final day of the red team competition which I think is partly why it got little visibility.
[2] This has not been significantly updated for the last two years and in some parts you will clearly notice it (e.g. references to SBF).
[3] e.g. heavy politicization and polarization of a pandemic that killed more Americans than WWII, an insurrection
[4] The works of people much more well-read than me (e.g. Ezra Klein) don’t indicate there is a compelling completely alternative explanation lurking in the scholarly literature.
[5] When listening, remember this was recorded in 2019 before the George Flloyd protests. I personally found the podcast eerily prescient.
[6] Another potential form of destabilization is entrenched one-party minoritarian rule.
[7] Daniel Ziblatt, Steve Levitsky, Jason Stanley
[8] This includes armed forces, intelligence services, and law enforcement. In the case of the United States, the most important element is its nearly two-million-person military.
[9] Daniel Ziblatt and Steve Levitsky emphasize forbearance and mutual toleration and the most important democratic norms. Forbearance: constitutions are not exhaustive, there is a lot of room to play no-mercy politics that hurt democracy; without legal restraints, norms are what restrain political actors from playing constitutional hard ball (e.g. obstructing Supreme Court nominations, court packing). Mutual toleration: the opposition is a legitimate rival and not the enemy.
[10] Daniel Ziblatt, Steve Levitsky, Fareed Zakaria, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, Brian Klass, David Kilcullen
[11] Daniel Ziblatt and Steve Levitsky state the best way to prevent an authoritarian regime is to not elect an authoritarian in the first place.
[12] https://www.csis.org/blogs/examining-extremism/examining-extremism-militia-movement
[13] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/white-supremacist-links-law-enforcement-are-urgent-concern
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-police-extremism
https://www.csis.org/analysis/military-police-and-rise-terrorism-united-states
[14] https://www.vox.com/2018/6/21/17488024/gun-ownership-violence-shootings-us
[15] [long list of polling citations]
[16] 2024 edit: The conflict currently being waged by M23 makes North Kivu in Congo a less accurate example. However, South Kivu and Ituru provinces are still apt. The Central African Republic would be another appropriate example.
[17] The height of American troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan was one solider for every 164 and 300 inhabitants, respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_troop_surge_of_2007
[18] Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards (mini-series called “Behind the Insurrection”)
[19] [ polling numbers on different frames of the question]
[20] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqTeqc4DqgU&t=1271s
[21] It runs from −10 to +10. Positive six through positive ten are democracies, negative six through negative ten are autocracies, negative five to positive five are anocracies.
[22] The United States was declining throughout the 21st century and in _ it slipped to a positive five. It rebounded in _ to a six.
[23] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v4NTtS2f5k&t=2334s
[24] I base my concern in civil conflict mostly in a mechanistic understanding of the situation rather than a comparative empirical lens.
[25] I also think these ratings are calibrated to capture the flaws in repressive nominal democracies in the global south, but are not calibrated to capture the decay of Western democracies via plutocracy.
[26] This is not be confused with “political sorting.” The polarization I am referring to includes the identify-based animus and intensity that layers onto political sorting. See Why We’re Polarized for an in-depth description of the distinction.
[27] E.g. Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis
[28] E.g. Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro
[29] E.g. Charlie Kirk, Dennis Prager, Candace Owens
[30] Social media includes YouTube.
[31] Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
[32] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized
[33] https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-reform/
[34] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2019-09-25/how-americans-were-driven-extremes
[35] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mccarthy-cheney-trump-stefanik-republican-conference-chair/2021/05/09/f9b9f476-b0ed-11eb-a980-a60af976ed44_story.html
[36] Mike Berkowitz, Jason Stanley
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mike-berkowitz-preserving-us-democracy/
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
[37] Ezra, in his talk with Lawrence Lessig, notably argues that other political systems have functioned amidst high polarization, but the American system is designed to stagnate amidst political sorting and polarization. I am unsure if the high polarization he describes here is interchangeable with the toxic polarization he characterized in the book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11NOuikZHD8
[38] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih4i5Qwneo8&t=1871s
[39] This included insurrectionists within the building and extremists on the Capitol grounds premises that could have been emboldened.
[40] We don’t know the exact number of deaths needed to trigger crazy spin-off effects. It could be just one, it could be a dozen. My guess is that the inflection point is around three legislators. It’s subjective how many elected federal officials would need to be killed to trigger an existential crisis
[41] My best guess. I couldn’t find the exact number looking through the internet.
[42] WARNING: GRAPHIC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQaeg1d82Lo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWMpTHLJXbw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgnh5jvmuZw
[43] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Goodman#Responding_to_the_2021_Capitol_attack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFzx1FJia94
[44] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/proud-boys-jan-6-pence-vp-b2102995.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2022-07-22/mob-got-feet-away-from-pence-during-riot
[45] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNbpvtaqxpg
[46] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/31/joe-biden-secret-service-team-trump-loyalty
[47] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/18/jan-6-probe-renews-questions-about-secret-service-independence/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU2wL0vIfGg&t=335s
[48] I am agnostic on the risk of mutin(ies) in USM. Three former generals wrote a Washington Post piece arguing the possibility of it. This is a worthwhile research question.
[49] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_coup
“[I]t is important to note that the ‘constitutional’ element of constitutional coups refers more to the exploitation of ambiguity within democratic rule of law, not a truly legal process. This ambiguity, combined with enough political power, allows anti-democratic seizures of power to occur under the guise of constitutionality.”
[50] Epistemic notice about my prediction track record:
In August 2020, I correctly predicted there would be an unprecedented violent skirmish in D.C. sometime between the election and the inauguration (my premise was that Biden would win). However, I greatly overestimated the size of pro-Trump belligerents anticipating tens of thousands even eclipsing six figures. I also overestimated the scope of the violence.
[51] Author’s conversation with Mike Berkowitz
[52] This is not universal. Counterexamples are China, Singapore, Rwanda. Also, some argue that authoritarian government is better calibrated to certain X-risks than other forms of government.
[53] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ahranYvH9uum5dhtH/open-philanthropy-shallow-investigation-civil-conflict
[54] I learned this second-hand from an American practitioner that interviewed them.
[55] Toby Ord, The Precipice, pg. 175-176
[56] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0
[57] Think of Desantis and Disney
[58] A right-wing authoritarian is also less likely to care about discrimination and biases being baked into algorithms/training data sets.
[59] I presume this to be a right-wing regime because an authoritarian regime is most likely to emerge from the far-Right.
[60] 91 million metric tonnes of the national 5,222 million metric tonnes
[61] https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3066/the-climate-connections-of-a-record-fire-year-in-the-us-west/#:~:text=To%20put%20the%20carbon%20dioxide,metric%20tons%20of%20carbon%20dioxide
AND
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks
[62] 141 million metric tons. Oil Change International said these were “very conservative” estimates.
[63]https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/Pentagon%20Fuel%20Use%2C%20Climate%20Change%20and%20the%20Costs%20of%20War%20Revised%20November%202019%20Crawford.pdf
[64] When accounting for the DoD’s domestic GHGs to support Central Command (the command overseeing Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria) the authors estimate war operations as 35% of DoD’s emissions those 18 years.
[65] The plurality of emissions from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars was from jet fuel, thus there is could be a significant difference between the emissions of a high-intensity war overseas and a low-intensity civil conflict in the homeland.
[66] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wtQ3XCL35uxjXpwjE/ea-survey-2019-series-community-demographics-and
[67] The number of EAs living in the United States is likely higher than this. Many EAs from abroad come to the United States to study or work on policy, bio-risk, and AI.
[68] https://www.forbes.com/profile/dustin-moskovitz/?sh=1fdb6fd21dd3
https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/dustin-a-moskovitz/
[69] https://www.propublica.org/article/dark-money-leonard-leo-barre-seid
[70] https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-limits-scope-of-anti-bribery-law/
[71] https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/11/21/23964561/supreme-court-sec-jarkesy-donald-trump-authoritarian-unitary-executive
[72] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supreme-courts-radical-immunity-ruling-shields-lawbreaking-presidents-and
[73] https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/the-specter-of-dictatorship-and-the-supreme-courts-embrace-of-the-unitary-executive-theory/
[74] Many people conducting polarization efforts probably don’t explicitly think of their work as a polarization effort. However, that is precisely the effect of political actors and media personalities that engage in the culture war.
[75] At some point there will be an diminishing marginal returns for polarization efforts because of saturation or a natural asymptote.
[76] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized
[77] Julia Galef’s interview of Ezra Klein:
http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/260-why-were-polarized-ezra-klein/
[78] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized
[79] This is a thoughtful actionable list of 7 ideas
[80] This list is not comprehensive; I am highlighting what experts, at least the ones I’ve been exposed to, referenced most
[81] Ezra Klein and Aaron Hamlin say we have one the worst combinations of voting/representation methods.
[82] See California and Alaska for examples.
[83] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized
[84] Represent.Us’s Anti-Corruption Act is the most comprehensive approach I’ve seen yet.
https://represent.us/anticorruption-act/
https://anticorruptionact.org/
[85] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized
[86] I don’t actually know if multi-member districts as a policy are popular, but I do know that a multi-party system is very popular.
[87] I surveyed the scientific literature for about two hours. This is also similar to the opinion of Mike Berkowitz.
[88] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized
[89] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2112552118
[90] An example of some conditions that lead to constructive interactions are presented in Better Arguments’ five principles:
https://betterarguments.org/our-approach/
[91] https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/01/how-to-understand-global-spread-of-political-polarization-pub-79893
[92] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih4i5Qwneo8&t=1871s
[93] E.g. Lawrence Lessig, FairVote
[94] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/11/6/21549654/california-ballot-initiative-proposition-direct-democracy
[95] https://publicconsultation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/RCV_Report_0422.pdf
[96] https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mike-berkowitz-preserving-us-democracy/
[97] This is very dependent on limited exposure to practitioners in this space.
[98] Author’s conversation with Mike Berkowitz
[99] https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_measures_cost_per_required_signatures_analysis
[100] https://ballotpedia.org/How_much_does_an_initiative_petition_drive_cost
[101] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/4/21549760/uber-lyft-prop-22-win-vote-app-message-notifications
[102] https://ballotpedia.org/What_were_the_most_expensive_ballot_measures_in_California
[103] https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_measure_campaign_finance,_2018
[104] https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_12,_Farm_Animal_Confinement_Initiative_(2018)
[105] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kkpwt59p7Ci6jhtOaAIYFr0cqy4QOAy9/view
[106] Again, there are uncertainties about strength of longitudinal effect. Self-selection bias also distorts the effects.
[107] https://www.moreincommon.com/our-work/what-we-do/
[108] See CE’s model:
https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/research-process-2021
[109] https://ftxfuturefund.org/our-grants/?_organization_name=charity-entrepreneurship
[110] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism#Far-right_accelerationist_terrorism
[111] https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/11/11/20882005/accelerationism-white-supremacy-christchurch
[112] I think we should approach this topic as having serious info hazards.
[113] Judges and Justices are also good candidates for this program. Reasonably, the most vulnerable is the legislative branch because the nature of their office means regular interactions with the public.
[114] From my personal experience, eliciting a positive reception to these issues is largely about how you frame them. When I talk to a Progressive, I ask them if they like Charles Koch funding astroturfing with dark money. When I’ve spoken with Trump supporters they get excited when I say we should know were George Soros is injecting money into politics.
[115] Both Bernie and Trump supporters generally don’t identify with the two parties and are hostile to the establishment of the parties.
[116] Starting around the rise of Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016
[117] Interestingly, multiple people at Occupy Wallstreet where disillusioned by the lack of results and spiraled into neofascist organizers, including Jason Kessler, organizers of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.
[118] I talk about this prospective intervention later on.
[119] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_aid_(organization_theory)
[120] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/87567555.2021.1915237
[121] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ajps.12537
Thanks for this[1], I’ve been interested in this area for some time as well.
Two organizations / researchers in this area that I’d like to highlight (and get others’ views on) are Protect Democracy (the executive director is actually a GiveDirectly donor) and Lee Drutman—see e.g. his 2020 book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America. For a shorter summary, see Drutman’s Vox piece (though Drutman has become less enthusiastic about ranked choice voting and more excited about fusion vorting).
I’d be excited for someone to write up a really high-quality report on how to best reduce polarization / political dysfunction / democratic backsliding in the US and identify promising grants in this area (if anyone is interested, feel free to contact me as I’m potentially interested in making grants in this area (though I cannot promise anything, obviously)).
ETA (July 25th). Only managed to fully read the post now. I also think that the post is a little bit to partisan. My sense is that Trump and his supporters are clearly the main threat to US democracy and much worse than the Democrats/left. However, the Democrats/left also have some radicals, and some (parts of) cultural and elite institutions promote illiberal “woke” ideology and extreme identity politics (e.g., DiAngelo’s white fragility) that gives fuel to Trump and his base (see e.g. Urban (2023), Hughes (2024) or Bowles (2024), McWhorter (2021)). I wish they would stop doing that. It’s also not helpful to brand everyone who is concerned about illegal immigration and Islam as racist and Islamophobic. I think there are legitimate concerns to be had here (especially regarding radical Islam) and telling people that they are bigoted if they have any concerns will drive some of them towards Trump.
This post is timely, given the recent selection of J.D. Vance as Trump’s VP.
J.D. Vance said that he would not have certified the 2020 election results if he were in Pence’s place.
As Trump’s VP pick, he has about a two-thirds chance of being the President of the Senate when the 2028 election results are certified. If the Democratic candidate wins that presidential election, it doesn’t seem implausible that he’ll refuse to certify the election results.
The Electoral Count Act was overhauled after January 6 to give the VP a less ambiguous and discretionary role in the certification process. But there’s reason to think Vance could maximally adversarially exploit any remaining discretion or ambiguity. Or worse, he may not even respect the law. After all, Vance has previously said that there are cases in which the president should defy the Supreme Court[1]
Vance has once “called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump.” It could be reasonable to conclude from this that the freedom of the press might be at risk.
To make matters worse, Vance is young. He’s not even 40 yet. He graduated from Yale Law School, so he’s extremely smart. He has a lot of time, and a lot of competence, to achieve his antidemocratic aims.
Trump is approaching his 80s. Optimistically, Vance may have made his antidemocratic statements to (successfully) get Trump’s attention and advance his career, and those ideas will retreat after Trump’s death, taking the Republican Party back to the ideals of people like Mitt Romney and Nikki Haley. But it’s not obvious that this will happen. Trump’s example may instead empower more politicians domestically and abroad to challenge democratic institutions and accumulate power, as we already started seeing with Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Many countries have voted themselves out of a real democracy. Turkey, Hungary, Russia and Venezuela have all done so in recent decades. The base rate isn’t that low.
For non-Americans: this claim is legally incorrect, and very worrying coming from a likely future VP. It directly counteracts Marbury v. Madison, regarded as “the single most important decision in American constitutional law,” which asserts that the Supreme Court has the ultimate power to interpret the Constitution. If the President and the Supreme Court disagree on something, the Supreme Court’s opinion is the only legal one.
In my mind, there are structural features that make this very difficult for EA in particular to do. The major font of money is a well-known Democratic donor, and the EA movement is predominately left-of-center. Almost any attempt at combatting polarization is going to come across like a operation on behalf of Team Blue, rightly or wrongly. For example, taking money from Open Phil would be the kiss of death for any potential “sincere populist leadership in the Republican apparatus” who actually wanted to gain influence in conservative circles. The only way I see offhand around this is to plow lots of money in advance into an organization controlled by a group of people proportionally representing the U.S. political spectrum—which means some people you really don’t like.[1]
Moreover, I don’t get a non-partisan feel from the proposal as currently written. Reforming the Senate would take power away from rural voters and Team Red; what are you planning to offer them in exchange? What are you expecting Team Blue to give up in the interests of depolarization, and how would you go about that? “Depolarization” can’t have the effect of moving the country leftward, or it isn’t going to be effective in places you need it to be effective.
Finally, I get the sense that some of this would require a serious revamp of First Amendment doctrine. Some recent doctrine is controversial (e.g., Citizens United), but attempts to regulate media content are generally going to be found unconstitutional based on broadly respected doctrines going back decades. You can’t even stop newspapers from publishing leaked highly classified information, for instance. There are certain people who want their hyperpolarized news, and there are people with ideological reasons to produce it (on top of economic reasons). The market abhors a vacuum, so those consumers will gravitate to those news sources. For example, the threat to Fox News appears to be to the right—when it started pulling back due to its massive libel exposure in 2020, people starting shifting to more polarizing news sources like Newsmax and OAN.
No matter what your political views, you won’t like some of the people. The range would probably need to be at least 10th to 90th percentile, and few people approve of both the 10th and 90th percentile political view in the US.
Yelnats—thanks for this long, well-researched, and thoughtful piece.
I agree that political polarization, destabilization, and potential civil war in the US (and elsewhere) are worthy of more serious consideration within EA, since they amplify many potential catastrophic risks and extinction risks.
However, I would urge you to try much harder to develop a less partisan analysis of these issues. This essay comes across (to me, as a libertarian centrist with some traditionalist tendencies) as a very elaborate rationalization for ‘Stop Trump at all costs!‘, based on the commonly-repeated claim that ‘Trump is an existential threat to democracy’. And a lot of the rhetoric, and examples, are basically repeating highly partisan Democratic Party talking points, which have been promoted ad nauseum by CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post, NY Times, etc. And, many of which have been debunked upon further investigation.
EAs tend to lean Left. We know this from EA surveys. Rich EAs (such as SBF) have donated very large sums of money to Democratic candidates. That makes it very important for us to become more aware of our own political biases, when we address issues such as polarization.
In my opinion, both current US political parties are showing some highly authoritarian tendencies. You mentioned some authoritarian tendencies from the Republican side. But you seem to have overlooked many authoritarian trends on the Democratic/Leftist side, which have included:
outsourcing government censorship to social media and Big Tech, especially from 2015 through today
demanding lockdowns, school closures, mandatory vaccinations, and public masking during Covid
using organized ‘lawfare’ against political opponents, including Trump
promoting pro-Jihadist, pro-Hamas, anti-semitic protests on college campuses,
promoting racially and sexually divisive identity politics in public K-12 schools and universities,
threatening the independence and integrity of the Supreme Court (e.g. by planning court-packing, AOC threatening to impeach SCOTUS justices, and Biden ignoring SCOTUS decisions, e.g. prohibiting ‘forgiving’ student loans)
promoting infringements on Second Amendment rights through unconstitutional ‘gun control’ legislation and executive orders
promoting ‘regulation by enforcement’, e.g. Gary Gensler & Elizabeth Warren weaponizing the SEC to harass the crypto industry and infringe on American rights to hold digital assets
undermining states’ autonomy to pass their own laws regarding controversial social and sexual issues, such as abortion
promoting a Central Bank Digital Currency, which would create a ‘financial panopticon’ in which the federal government has information about every economic transaction that every citizen makes
trying to protect the permanent, unelected, unaccountable, federal bureaucracy (aka ‘deep state’) from legislative oversight (e.g. objecting to SCOTUS recently overturning ‘Chevron deference’)
turning federal law enforcement (e.g. the FBI) into a partisan weapon for demonizing political opponents (e.g. claiming the ‘white nationalism’ is the ‘biggest terrorist threat to America’)
treating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election as illegitimate for years afterwards, e.g. blaming it on ‘Russian interference’
defending a manifestly senile president (Biden) whose executive branch seems to be run by an unelected, unaccountable, shadowy set of advisors who remain unknown to most citizens, and who have concentrated a huge amount of authoritarian power behind an aging, incompetent figurehead.
Many on the Left think of ‘authoritarianism’ as a purely Right-wing phenomenon, following the Frankfurt School Leftists such as Adorno et al. publishing ‘The authoritarian personality’ (1950). However, more recent work in political psychology shows that there are plenty of Leftist authoritarians. Also, history reveals plenty of examples of authoritarian socialists, such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, etc—who are responsible for tens of millions of deaths.
Moreover, the standard 2-D graph of political orientation, which includes a Left-vs-Right dimension, but also an Authoritarian-vs-Libertarian dimension, reminds us that the Right does not have a monopoly on authoritarianism.
So, I would urge you to continue this work, but to re-examine your own political biases, and perhaps to collaborate with researchers who hold more diverse political views, such as Centrists, Libertarians, Conservatives, Neo-Reactionaries, Nationalists, Populists, etc.
I expect this comment to be downvoted into oblivion by EAs who reflexively think ‘Trump bad, Progressives good’.
But I beseech you all, consider the possibility that the Democrats are just as much of a threat to American democracy and liberty as the Republicans have ever been.
Threats to democracy aren’t always distributed evenly across party lines. It’s unclear why that should be your prior.
Let’s see what Manifold markets think about this.
https://manifold.markets/Siebe/if-trump-is-elected-will-the-us-sti
https://manifold.markets/Siebe/if-a-democrat-is-elected-president
You can see from this that the two sides aren’t equal.
Purely definitionally, it seems pretty uncontroversial to say that a presidential candidate who’s tried to steal an election is a threat to democracy. Like, it’s unclear what a “threat to democracy” would even mean, if it doesn’t include “president trying to steal an election”.
I’m a libertarian myself and understand the negative reaction towards seemingly hysterical statements. I spent late 2015 and all of 2016 disregarding people who were scared of a Trump presidency.
But, just as a matter of base rates, it’s reasonable to consider that hysteria is justified. Many countries have voted themselves out of a democracy before. It’s not a rare phenomenon. And if a presidential candidate who did not accept defeat, plus a vice presidential candidate who’s openly said he would have stolen an election and defied the Supreme Court, isn’t grounds for worry, it’s unclear what would be.
I asked GPT-4 to list democracies in which a major candidate refused to accept defeat in a national election. GPT-4 was unable to list any democracy other than the US. (Instead, it misunderstood the question and included countries like Kenya, Venezuela and Belarus, which obviously don’t count). So this is a pretty unprecedented situation.
…
Your comment contains many policies that conservatives dislike because they’re associated with the left — not because they’re authoritarian. You phrase them in a way to make them sound maximally authoritarian, but one could do the same about the opposite policies. For example:
I could equally say that conservatives are authoritarian for limiting women’s autonomy to make decisions that affect their health and reproductive choices. In fact, this is much closer to the central meaning of the term “authoritarian” than your usage in this bullet point.
The Constitution clearly states that Justices ”shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” It’s perfectly constitutional to remove SCOTUS justices. The allegations against Alito and Thomas seem to make a good case that their behavior hasn’t been “good.” In fact, one of the most common features of authoritarian governments worldwide is corruption. Enforcing a norm against it is good for maintaining the integrity of democratic institutions. Were AOC trying to remove Coney Barret, the situation would be different.
Suppressing protests is generally considered repressive and antidemocratic.
Other points in your comment sound like standard conservative grievances with liberal policies, with tenuous connections to authoritarianism or with the risk of democratic backsliding. E.g. “promoting racially and sexually divisive identity politics in public K-12 schools and universities.”
Unfortunately these questions will be resolved based on V-DEM indicators which are a poor metric for this question, as I illustrated here. The scores are not particularly rigourous or consistent and the evaluators have clear partisan bias.
Very minor point, in defence of African countries where there might be decent-ish democracy. Depending on your criteria, Kenya might “count” here.
”I asked GPT-4 to list democracies in which a major candidate refused to accept defeat in a national election. GPT-4 was unable to list any democracy other than the US. (Instead, it misunderstood the question and included countries like Kenya, Venezuela and Belarus, which obviously don’t count).”
I was using the categorization of the Economist Group as a reference. Kenya is listed as a hybrid regime
Well, the main asymmetry here is that the Left-leaning ‘mainstream’ press doesn’t understand or report the Right’s concerns about Leftist authoritarianism, but it generates and amplifies the Left’s concerns about ‘far Right authoritarianism’.
So, any EAs who follow ‘mainstream’ journalism (e.g. CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, WaPo) will tend to repeat their talking points, their analyses, and their biases.
Most reasonable observers, IMHO, understand that the US ‘mainstream’ press has become very left-leaning and highly biased over the last few decades, especially since 2015, and it is functioning largely as a propaganda wing of the Democratic Party. (Consider, for example, the ‘mainstream’ media’s systematic denial of Biden’s dementia for the last several years, until the symptoms became too painfully obvious, to everyone, to ignore. Such journalists would never have run cover for Trump, if he’d been developing dementia; they would have been demanding his resignation years ago.)
In any case, the partisan polarization on such issues is, perhaps, precisely why EAs should be very careful not to wade into these debates unless they have a very good reason for doing so, a lot of political knowledge and wisdom, an ability to understand both sides, and a recognition that these political differences are probably neither neglected nor tractable.
If we really want to make a difference in politics, I think we should be nudging the relevant decision-makers, policy wonks, staffers, and pundits into developing a better understanding of the global catastrophic risks that we face from nuclear war, bioweapons, and AI.
It’s unclear what your specific disagreements with my comment are.
Take what I think is the most crucial point I made: that there doesn’t seem to be a democratic country in which a major candidate refused to accept defeat in a national election.
Which of these 4 best represents your position?
Trump won the 2020 election
Trump did not refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election or try to subvert it, that’s just a leftist media narrative. If you talk to him, he’ll say he accepts that Biden won fair and square.
Trump did try to subvert the election or refuse to accept defeat, but it’s not a big deal (despite the lack of precedent in democratic countries)
Trump did do those things and they are a big deal, but things that similarly powerful Democrats have done are just as bad or worse.
If it’s the latter, can you show that those actions from powerful Democrats are unprecedented in democratic countries?
While I agree that the post suffers from an unfortunate left-wing bias, I don’t think this bias weakens its conclusions. Most of the discussed anti-polarization interventions are applicable to both right-wing and left-wing autocracy and extremism, so, for the sake of depolarization efforts, it matters relatively little how much authoritarianism is coming from each side of the aisle. The fact that you can also identify anti-democratic tendencies on the left strengthens the case for depolarization.
@Yelnats T.J., thanks for writing this. Also grateful to my friend John who pointed me to your post (I’m new on this forum). This topic is near and dear to me: I believe that unity is key to achieving humanity’s full potential and avoiding dystopian and annihilative outcomes.
Your work here sparks a few thoughts.
America’s broader fatalism about polarization—the heart of this problem—is unfortunate. There are promising routes to bridging divides, especially through technology. If social media has (accidentally) contributed as much to polarization as it has, imagine the potential effectiveness of technology explicitly aimed at constructive unity. Social psychology offers a wealth of evidence on what creates an “us” identity (Van Bavel and Packer’s The Power of Us is a great overview as of ca. 2020). There is scope to implement these ideas at scale, especially with the help of LLMs/NLP and other AI. (A thorough discussion is beyond the scope of this comment, but to anyone with whom this idea resonates, please DM me; I’d love to discuss.)
Destabilization is not a U.S.-only problem. Although polarization seems most pernicious in the U.S., other liberal democracies have been growing increasingly divided (see, e.g., 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer) due to similar factors, including echo chambers (largely due to social media), more time spent online, and surging migration (see, e.g., Monk’s The Great Experiment, 2022).
The potential long-term implications of U.S. destabilization are hard to understate. Emphasizing negative implications for EA funding may actually minimize the problem. Beyond the U.S., the stakes are much higher. A failure of U.S. democracy could pave the way for Chinese global hegemony, leading to significant global retrenchment of philosophically liberal notions of equality and individual liberty. It might even usher in a global totalitarian surveillance state, one that is AI-empowered, and potentially permanent/locked-in. Conversely, suppose the U.S., among other liberal democracies, actually gets its acts together and functions effectively. Then the rest of the world might see this “shining city on a hill” of America and become more open to its liberal values. That includes China which, following Xi’s “scientific socialism”, is fundamentally guided by empirical evidence.
International division is also underrated. You hypothesize that destabilization within the U.S. could increase risks from “great power conflict, AI, bio-risk, and climate disruption.” While I agree, this increase in risks strikes me as overshadowed by any persistent disunity among nations. That is, pursuing unity within the U.S. is mostly about preserving liberty; pursuing international unity is mostly about preventing annihilation. In an AI arms race, for instance, that throws caution to the wind to maintain the upper hand over foreign adversaries, it would seem to make little difference whether the U.S. is democratic or authoritarian (Suleyman’s The Coming Wave, 2023, argues this well). From a long-term and more abstract perspective, increasingly powerful and accessible technologies present both bigger upsides and more dangerous ways to harm or destroy one another. The proximate existential risks to humanity (e.g., as outlined in Ord’s The Precipice, 2020) may largely boil down to one ultimate meta-risk of disunity. Over a long enough time horizon, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s categorical imperative strikes me as a mathematical certainty: “The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish”.
Disunity within the U.S. and internationally, being driven by the same us-vs.-them tribalism, have potential solutions that are not fundamentally different. Moreover, I’m hopeful that AI could make communicating with those who speak other languages more seamless.
Back to the U.S., I echo the point about leftist/partisan tone made by @David_Althaus, @Jason, @Geoffrey Miller, and @Marcus_Ogren. Hard as it may be to avoid suggesting that the other side is the bigger problem, even if it were hypothetically true, I don’t see it as productive. On the contrary, if the ultimate problem is polarization/disunity, then the solution involves talking and compromising with people who have different values; it might be counterproductive if those people feel blamed. If an enemy must be made of specific views/values, I think “extremism” (including in one’s own party) fits the bill. Relatedly, I’d avoid discussing institutional reforms that are theoretically wonderful but impractical given their extreme partisan implications, e.g., abolishing the electoral college. Such ideas could be mentioned in the footnotes.
RE general strike—see Kapp Putsch in Weimar Germany, as Gene Sharp discusses in The Anti-Coup.
Regarding left wing ‘bark no bite,’ given the weakness of American unions and the decay in civil society, it may be hard to coordinate mass resistance for an extended period of time to actually thwart a coup attempt, but the Women´s March offers some hope.
I wrote a related entry for the cause explorations on voting methods, and I broadly agree about the importance of polarization and the most promising solutions. However, alternative voting methods vary considerably in how much they disincentivize polarizing rhetoric and policy, and single-winner Ranked Choice Voting is one of the least effective voting methods in this regard. In a recent paper, I found that Condorcet voting methods and STAR Voting offer candidates an incentive to appeal to opposing voters that’s over twice as strong as the incentive presented by Ranked Choice Voting, so efforts to build momentum behind these lesser-known voting methods could be especially effective. Additionally, creating momentum for one of these voting methods could get non-EA funders involved, so it would take a dramatically lower investment than a statewide ballot initiative to make considerable progress.
Tangentially related: Effektiv Spenden created a donation fund for interventions that strengthen democracy. However, so far it only focuses on Germany.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RRDAzpi6vS8ARvsDF/introducing-the-effektiv-spenden-defending-democracy-fund
Just an FYI that most non-profits are often legally constrained on doing many sorts of political advocacy work, I think.
Depends on the subsection, at least in the US. 501(c)(3) organizations are fairly limited on political activity. While 501(c)(4) organizations are less constrained, one does not get a tax break from donating to them. So you’ll see some 501(c)(3)s have an associated 501(c)(4) organization.
I’m not sure the problem is “EA neglects this” instead of something more like “SBF funded political campaigns and considered bribing Trump to avoid his re-election and this resulted in terrible optics...” Maybe EAs and politics don’t mix well?
i think a key risk not included is that the objections to PA and AZ passed. then objections to another state could’ve been passed. that would’ve meant it went to a contingent election. that would’ve been decided by the House delegations of each state, each state decided by 1 vote. the Reps controlled 26. though Liz Cheney probably would’ve voted for Biden. so there would be a stalemate 25-25. that would mean Nancy Pelosi would become President.
now that Liz Cheney is out, it would mean Trump becomes President.
many—i believe most—Republicans in the House voted to object. A fair amount in the Senate too. There would be more next time.
this is covered in Jamie Raskin’s book “Unthinkable.”
This is a much-needed piece. I really appreciate your mention the need to reform the primary system as this is, in my view, one of the main root causes of extremist candidates rising to power in the legislative and executive branches. It’s hard to imagine that in the pre-1968 system a Donald Trump-ish candidate would ever have gotten close to the nomination. One thing you might consider is how the parties themselves are weakening, particularly the Republican party (which is, at this point, barely a party at all). My somewhat unpopular opinion is that parties should be strengthened and given more power to choose candidates, as a way of mitigating the current (broken) primary system and exerting a moderating influence on extremism. They used to function that way, but now they don’t, and it’s to the detriment of the whole system.
Thanks for posting this. I think it’s an important issue that’s underdiscussed on the Forum. I found your counterfactual analysis of January 6th especially useful.
I do think it’s hard to find cost-effective interventions, harder than you suggest. And it will be very hard to obtain EA funding for this. However, from a distance it seems like that’s not needed for people to work on this, as I would expect a lot of US donors to be interested in funding effective initiatives.
I think it will be harder to get Democrats on board with voting methods that would diminish their power in favor of multi-party dynamics (as much as I’d like to see that).
I just made this Manifold Dashboard on US Democracy and welcome any suggestions for further questions.
All of the footnote links are broken for me, both from the text to the footnote and the footnote back to the text :(
Thanks for the post. I suppose you’d agree that there’s a good chance that, once Uncle Sam gets unstable, many other countries will follow suit.
The link with the comprehensive list of organizations and projects that engage in depolarization doesn’t work. Here is the link: Organizations Bridging Divides | Resources | The Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution | Teachers College, Columbia University
And the pdf: Organizations-Bridging-Divides-Nov-2020.pdf (columbia.edu)
Looking at forecasts, here’s a few. I recommend focusing on the resolution criteria and not the title, as they can diverge quite a lot.
Metaculus, Civil War before 2031: 4% (n=714)
Resolution criteria:
Manifold, Civil War before 2030, 15% (n=114)
Resolution criteria
Manifold, Civil War, Violent Revolution, or Insurgency in USA before 2031?, 21% (n=31)
Resolution criteria:
I also made 2 questions with highly specific resolution criteria for “intermediate’ violent events. I’m not showing the probabilities because there’s still only a few forecasters for those (so I encourage you to join in to improve precision!).
Manifold: Will there be armed conflict between left- and right-wing extremists before 2030? (10v10 & 100v100)
Manifold: Will the US see a violent insurgency before 2030? (This is civilians against the state)
I like the argumentation for possibility & importance. My only nit-pick would be how bad would a realistic bad case scenario actually look like. Hungary seems like a good model—you could get some anti-liberal legislation, more gerrymandering, maybe some politicized audits of media and universities—however, the government is still selected based on the number of votes (Freedom House) and it’s not a stereotypical “fall of democracy” accompanied by a collapse of economy that would destroy most EA efforts.
I occasionally ruminate two projects in this area (for 2028):
1) Funding a mock-election with ranked-choice voting. (Now I see wes R proposes something similar). To legitimize it, it would have to
a) have robust identity checks
b) have a large demographically representative sample
c) be accompanied by a campaign informing people that a consensus candidate X would win if enough people were honest in surveys, cross-voted, cross-registered or switched to a new party.
2) Policies / financial incentives to make the army more representative of the US population.
I read this, and wrote a BUNCH of notes. They are non-exaustive (I didn’t look at everything, and might in the future, especially if people request it.)
For a bit of context, here’s what the secondaries are: (I mention them in one of my comments) because the 2 parties are largely only stable because people consider them to be stable, if people considered different parties to be stable, they would be the stable parties. So, if there were an unnoficial election held through a better system (such as approval voting) to decide which 2 parties would be the main parties for that election, AND people considered it to be stable, we would have a fairer system and subvert needing approval from politicians. Now, with enough of these 3rd party candidates in power, they would have an incentive to change the voting system to allow for 3rd parties more permanently.
Also, for my final note on the “growing triangle”, I’d like to add this: This also works with more than 3 parties.
Oh, and also, a “red line” keeps being mentioned, one where any given wntity puts its foot down, and one where polarization is too far gone to stop, or too far gone to reverse. I wonder how a president publicly aiming for or getting for a third term would play into this? Maybe looking at how similar entities reacted to Franklin D. Roosevelt running for a 3rd term?
Also, this picture should show the order of each of these images, assuming I did things right:
(Here’s a link to a Miro board with all of this on it: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVKpNf6pk=/?share_link_id=537769097618 (I turned on “comments” on the Miro board, but I won’t get notified when there’s a new comment on it, so if you’d like to comment, pls do it here, or notify me if you do it in the Miro.))