A Government of Men

How political dynamics reinforce our current negative spiral

Apr 14, 2025

We are entering a period of American history where a confluence of factors is fundamentally changing the nature of our country. United States Founding Father John Adams famously said that a republic is “a government of laws, and not of men.” The Constitution was written to ensure that there would always be a balance of power, and laws rather than individuals would govern the land. In this moment, I would argue the United States is shifting in the opposite direction and men are very much in the driver’s seat. Journalist and author Farai Chideya told me we are in a “burn it all down” period in American democracy and I would have to agree. This post seeks to lay out the dynamics that brought us to this point, building on the destabilizing role of capitalism, climate change, and technology laid out previously. We’ll look at how we became so polarized, the fall of journalism in the public eye, our declining trust in political institutions, and the absence of common facts to help us reach a reasonable consensus on the best way forward.

As always, these posts are the synthesis of conversations that occurred prior to November 2024, so there is much more to say about the current state of democracy, in the United States and around the world. The purpose here is to highlight the dynamics that are reinforcing our current negative spiral, so we can seek out ways to reverse that cycle together.

Democracy and the Post-Truth World

Democracy does well in times of incremental change but breaks in times of transformational change.
- Roger McNamee, Founding Partner, Elevation Partners

We have coronavirus in the real world. Here, in the information ecosystem, you have the virus of lies.
- Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of Rappler, Nobel Peace Prize laureate

The United States is in a tenuous political moment. For the first time since the Civil War, our democracy appears to be truly at a crossroads. The first Trump presidency was a real education for many. Once considered robust and comprehensive, the Constitution is now understood to be short and vague, depending on people’s values and behavior to ensure principled outcomes. In the face of these changes in years leading up to November 2024 election, many politicians chose to stay quiet or step down. Unchecked bifurcation and polarization made it difficult to find middle ground and move forward on simple problems, let alone critical issues like income inequality, climate change, and ensuring technology serves humanity. The Judiciary has taken a decidedly partisan turn, most famously on the Supreme Court, where some members accept gifts from donors and no longer make important decisions based on precedent or seek to find a balance between competing interests. And all of this comes at a time when wealth inequality, exacerbated by a rapidly warming climate and technology-driven change, is already stoking fear and uncertainty about the future. After all, as Kenyan filmmaker Judy Kibinge observed, “From Africa, democracy just looks like inequality” so why would anyone prioritize choosing it over other options?

The result has been a growing willingness in the US populace to align behind leaders who acknowledge just how broken our system is, are quick to assign blame, and promise to protect and defend, rather than those who paint a more positive picture of collective success. Immigrants and transgender individuals in particular have been singled out in political rhetoric, not to mention the loss of female bodily autonomy with the Dobbs ruling and subsequent efforts to limit access to medical care and abortions at the state level. On the other side, efforts to increase environmental and business regulation, support undocumented migrants, and reduce funding for police are perceived as counter to a productive and law-abiding society where citizens are free to pursue their ambitions without government interference. Deep polarization has led to divided realities with little or no middle ground, where all sides feel they are behaving in the best interest of the country and have lost the ability to engage in civil discourse and respectfully disagree.

In trying to understand how we reached this point, we can point to our dominant two-party political system, excessive gerrymandering, and the staggering amount of private money in politics, but there is another compelling underlying cause. In The Big Sort,^[1] Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing make the case that between 1976 and today, rising education and affluence enabled people in the US to choose to live in neighborhoods and cities where they felt most at home, and so they naturally sought out like-minded communities. Previously, neighborhoods had been more mixed and people avoided talking politics. Demographics show that over the last 50 years, families have gradually sorted into very clear left- and right-leaning clusters, and it is increasingly rare for people to self-select into a community whose views they do not share.

According to Bishop and Cushing, research has shown that while diverse groups will naturally move toward a consensus middle ground, like-minded groups actually become more extreme in their collective thinking, more so than even the most extreme individual at the start. So as the country has “sorted” itself into more liberal and conservative communities, those communities have engaged in more political discussions and organically become more extreme in their views, only to be further exacerbated by social media and news echo chambers.

The end result is the tribalization of our country and our democracy, with both sides finding it easy to fall back on tropes and stereotypes to describe each other, from Republicans being labelled racists to Democrats viewed as anti-police. Politicians mirror and further exacerbate these trends, and gerrymandering and party politics make it impossible to be elected without defaulting toward those extremes.

Lack of gender parity in politics is also a structural endemic problem in the US, with only a third of the approximately 8000 elected seats nationwide held by women.^[2] As strategic advisor Bradley Myles put it, “it’s like singing Handel’s Messiah with only men” – the music just cannot be as good. The same is true of racial and ethnic representation, with nonwhite people making up around 23 percent of Congress, despite comprising about 40 percent of the population.^[3] We need the full range of everyone’s skills and lived experience to navigate through this time, and yet we are currently moving in the opposite direction, actively seeking to eliminate consideration of diverse lived experience as a priority.

The US is not alone. Polarization and the rise of authoritarian leaders is a global phenomenon, fueled by many of the same conditions. Wealth inequality, climate change, and technology innovation are all significant contributing factors that authoritarian leaders have leveraged to rise in prominence. Several people specifically called out the floods in India and famine-induced African migration to Europe as examples of severe weather events bolstering support for leaders like Narendra Modi and Marine Le Pen, who use immigration as a wedge issue to stoke fear and anxiety and promote nationalist agendas.

And everyone has seen how the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation is a potent tool such leaders use to further exacerbate fear and uncertainty, making it difficult to parse fact from fiction. Ever since Gutenberg and the advent of the printing press, there has been an aggregation and consolidation of information, creating a common basis for what is considered knowledge. Now we are experiencing the rapid disaggregation and disintermediation of knowledge creation, significant both in terms of the magnitude of people reached and the wealth created in doing so. And the rise of deep fakes means that any photo or video, regardless of its authenticity, can be plausibly declared false if it does not match the expected narrative, so it is increasingly difficult to find common ground in what is true. Social media clearly exacerbates the proliferation of alternative facts and narratives, which many fear may be unstoppable once fueled by AI.

In this rapidly evolving world, author Richard Powers says people can only take in things that are unfolding more or less on our physical scale, in more or less the psychic timescale that we have evolved to take in.^[4]Humans are wired to make decisions based on their past experience plus their knowledge of the world, and with change happening so quickly, facts being uncertain, institutions becoming more ineffective, and economic survival being on the line, there has been an opening for leaders around the world to stoke nationalism and provide narratives offering protection to those it serves and shifting blame to others. Between self-interest and loyalty to the group, people do not have an incentive to see the destructive impact these leaders and their policies have on the broader community, civic health, and civil rights. Instead, they embed themselves in their own version of reality, comfortably reinforced by everyone they live near and everything they hear on their social media and news channels.

As a result, we have entered what many referred to as a “post-truth” era, with traditional journalism in decline, public media under attack, and individual journalists facing unprecedented threats of personal violence for doing their job. Over the last 30 years, we have seen journalism eviscerated by the domino effect of digital disruption, loss of advertising revenue, consolidation and cost-cutting, lack of sustainable business models, shifting consumer habits, and especially now, polarization. Politicians blames journalists and “fake news” when coverage does not align with perceived reality, resulting in a rising concern for journalist safety. Trust in media is at an all-time low and public media, a cornerstone of the 1960s Great Society and historically beloved across the political spectrum, is now on the chopping block.

For career journalists like news executive Edith Chapin, there is an understanding that democracy, civic engagement, and media literacy are inextricably intertwined. People must possess the ability and the willingness to be informed, ask questions, check sources, and come to their own conclusions even if they are different from one’s chosen group. Instead, we have the balkanization of civil society and the disappearance of the “common good,” allowing for autocrats and special interests to fill the vacuum.

And since the cost of creating accurate and truthful information is so much higher than the cost of false information, the economics of information support strategies like Steve Bannon’s infamous “flood the zone” approach, whereby he ensures there is enough noise in the system that the truth is simply lost in the uproar.

All of which leads to the rise of impunity. Media serves as democracy’s watchdog, holding malicious actors to account. With journalism underfunded and constantly on the defensive, those with power – be they dictators, politicians, or billionaires – can increasingly act with impunity and expect no repercussions. Journalism has always been the last line of defense against the misuse of power. We only have to look at Russia, Poland, Hungary, or the Philippines to see the authoritarian playbook in action, where leaders invested in media capture and control and then had free rein to seize natural resources and wealth for their own purposes. Conversely, investments in journalism and media offer accountability on issues and institutions beyond government and can create positive impacts not only for democracy but in addressing inequality, climate change, and corporate responsibility as well.

With so much noise and an absence of clear facts, people have lost trust in rational systems and institutions broadly, and as film funder and story strategist Cara Mertes pointed out, democracy is the most complicated form of rational system. When it comes to the question of whether democracy can still be effective, the view is divided. Some claim that government could actually be effective, but it is in the private sector’s interest to minimize government credibility since it is the only force that can stop companies from doing exactly what they want. Others counter that government is too large, bureaucratic, or corrupt to operate effectively, and support current efforts to scale back government in the name of efficiency and tax cuts. Those voices are clearly dominant in this moment, with significant consequences for individuals and countries at home and around the world.

The bottom line is that current political agendas, partisan polarization, and declining trust in media are accelerating our negative spiral. They are also exacerbating those challenges, feeding back into them as social safety nets are cut, climate regulations are rolled back, and technology is allowed free rein. We will need strong community networks to support each other through this time, especially as more people are feeling isolated and alone. In the next post, we’ll investigate the role of community and culture as the fifth and final domain.

The Elephant & Butterfly

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