Friday, February 28, 2025

What is our ideology?

President Trump seems to operate without an ideology, swinging from left to right on a dime, considering only the political logistics of each move, but his behavior suggests an ideology in itself, a sort of survival of the fittest scheme, where the "good" is whatever can claw its way to existence, and the "bad" is whatever loses strength and collapses. Trump's m.o. to generate support for this vision is to scan the landscape for frustrated, furious people, then appear as their spokesperson and savior.

The resulting hate and glee is unleashed from such diverse quarters that Trump "supporters" often have nothing in common beyond one or two objects of hate. Thus, most of the time Trump is a force for chaos, dangerous and scary, though his destruction of the Democratic party is exhilarating and long overdue. The first nail in the party's coffin might have beeen the sight of silent Democrats at Trump's inaugural address to a joint session of Congress, holding up ping pong paddles of protest but not able to do anything forceful to stop this well-planned coup. Talk about being asleep at the wheel!

The complication, however, is that Trump has destroyed the GOP as well, revealing it as a front for a newly empowered billionaires' club.

This leaves the U.S. with no credible party, and no consensus about what to do about it.

In response we should start thinking about an alternative political force, something updated to deal with the AI and bio-technical revolutions now hitting us. To create such an entity in the midst of Trump-induced chaos would require focus and money. And it would need something of an ideology, one that would be able to embrace the remnants of both left and right wing thinking. Its rallying cry might be: "Evolving technology must not be enabled to replace historic humanity at will, but must be required to understand humans and be influenced by their desires and hopes."

This group need not identify as a political party, and it might be practical not to, as Trump may bring down the whole archaic apparatus of parties, replacing it with a facade of democracy even less credible than previous facades. In Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, published as installments in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, 1942-1949, human governments face such a crises, and the response is a group called the Foundation, originally a non-political scientific organization led by “psychohistorians,” whose job is to analyze the history and likely future of our species. The Foundation must struggle against a mutant telepath called the Mule, who takes over humanity and makes a mess of everything (impressive foreshadowing!). Through dealing with the Mule, the Foundation develops into a political force. Meanwhile, psychohistorians predict the imminent end of human civilization, followed by 30,000 years of barbarism. Spoiler Alert: The Foundation is able to reduce the period of barbarism to 1,000 years.

Let's see if we can get it down to 4!

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