The Long View

Recently, a friend challenged me to avoid hiding away from the current state of affairs through taking the long view, which is my default setting. Better, she said, to look for ways to act. And yes, I can see some ways to do that, in the necessary circumstances. But the long view can really be very long. Things have been happening since the dawn of time and will happen for even longer. So, yes, why vex oneself. The comings and goings of our leaders, our nations, our species, will pass into the mists and Earth and life will persist even when we don’t.

Let’s review. The universe has been around for at least 13.7 billion years, with the first galaxies, stars and planets forming just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Our sun formed 4.6 billion years ago and our planet 100 million years later. Life may have gotten under way not so long afterwards at 4.1-3.5 billion years ago. In all, there’s been plenty of time for all sorts of things to have happened. Civilizations elsewhere may have come and gone many times before.

But let’s stop a moment. One can talk about billions of years as if we could actually understand what that would be like. The physics and the chemistry of our cosmos permit, perhaps require, a process of physical and chemical evolution that populates existence with an ever-increasing degree of complexity, but one that takes immense stretches of time to work out. It took 50,000 years for regular matter particles to emerge from the radiation of energy following the Big Bang. According to the Standard Model, it took the universe 379,000 years to cool enough for electrons and protons to combine into atoms, mostly hydrogen. Even these cosmologically short sums of years are really beyond our comprehension.

The life that began that 4.1-3.5 billion years ago – perhaps at deep sea hydrothermal vents or shoreline tidal pools – manifested as self-reproducing complexes of simple chemical compounds, perhaps primitive RNA-like viruses. It took a very long gestation for these to give birth to single one-celled plants able to photosynthesize, around 1.75 billion years ago. Animal life – simple organisms unable to move but deriving nutrients directly from the water – took another billion years to arrive, some 600 million years ago.

While microbial life may have reached land 2.8 billion years ago, the surface was essentially barren until the first land fungi at 1.3 billion years, followed by plants a few hundred million years latter and, eventually, animals – most likely arthropods – some 530 million years ago. Life took off rather “quickly” after the Cambrian explosion of complex multi-cell life forms in the seas 560 million years ago. (David Attenborough did a wonderful two-part special on this period called First Life.) Again, all this took an unimaginably long, slow time. For millions of years, it would have seemed that nothing had changed, that nothing much was happening. (Although the earth may have gone through a global snowball glaciation along the way.)

For the last 600 million years, the earth and life continued to change. The continents moved around – coming together, splitting apart – and massive events occurred that wiped out most life, clearing the slate for new forms. The last of these extinctions, 66 million years ago, helped the mammals come to the fore. Primates may have first appeared as far back as 90 million years but it took around 70 million to reach the Hominid family – the great apes lineage to which humans belong – around 20 million years ago. Australopithecus apes arose 4 million years ago and it took another two million for Homo Erectus.

The first Neanderthals arose 600 thousand years ago and they lasted until just after meeting Homo Sapiens, around 550 thousand years later. Can we even grasp the reality of this human timescale in which Neanderthals – fully human they were – loved, lived, raised children, dreamed and mourned through thousands of generations in which each was like the last?

As for us, our species, coming along 300,000 years ago, experienced seemingly unchanging lives of hunting and gathering until just 12 thousand years ago and the discovery of agriculture. It took another 7,000 years for the first city, Uruk, to come into existence in Mesopotamia in 5400 BC (around the time the Great Basin bristlecone pines were germinating). Before the Greeks, from the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians to the Persians, 5000 years of recorded history unfolded dense with human life

So, the past – full of countless moments of change, life and death – is very, very long. And so will be the future. Seems that in 250 million years the continents will again crash into each other forming a new Pangea. The earth itself will endure another five billion years until the sun becomes a red giant and swallows our planet. (I won’t mention how many trillions of years until the heat death of the universe.) I wonder what the earth and its creatures will be like in a million years, in a billion years.

Meanwhile, we have our moment here and now. We are the stuff dreams are made on. Living the good life remains our timeless challenge.

Watching President Trump

In my previous piece, I laid out what another Trump presidency might look like. In short, if he does what he said he would do during the campaign: chaos. But it could also be, if not actual fun, certainly interesting – an experiment, if you will – to watch him do, try to do or, in the end, not do all the things he said. The list is a long one:

• seeking revenge on his opponents, including by weaponizing the Justice Department;

• imposing high tariffs on China and goods not made in America;

• putting Musk in charge of making more government more efficient (apparently by stopping all $2 trillion of USG discretionary funding);

• letting RFK Jr. “go wild” on health issues such as vaccines and fluoride;

• rounding up and deporting 20 million “illegals” using police and the National Guard;

• preventing by various measures “illegal migration” and finally building that wall;

• supporting a wide open field for crypto including Bitcoin;

Now, it may be that the Trump will not take any of these actions. The Republican leadership – and JD – may focus instead on using control of all three branches of government to do the things the party has always sought to do, provide tax cuts for corporations and the rich, dismantling “troublesome” regulations on business as well as consumer protections and ending efforts to combat climate change. There are also positive elements among the many other promises Trump made during the campaign, such as ending taxation on Social Security or providing payments for IVF. This approach would make the new Trump Administration a “normal” one in which the ruling party carries out its own ideological platform (with or with out elements of Project 2025).

But what if Trump does try to take action against political opponents and “illegal migrants” using the justice system, law enforcement and the military? This could result in considerable activity in the courts. If the military is asked to undertake actions forbidden under the Constitution – such as domestic law enforcement – relations between the Commander-in-Chief and the military leadership could become very tense.

Discretionary spending ($1.7 trillion in the 2023 budget) includes the military ($806 billion, where surely there must be considerable waste) and everything else the government does including education, social services, health, transportation, science and technology, justice and local development. Leaving aside the military (?), allowing Musk to dismantle the social safety net and backbone of our economy built up over the last several decades would have a serious social and economic impact. Raising tariffs – and therefore prices – of everything we now import – also causing shortages of needed goods that we cannot yet produce in quantity – could plunge the economy further into a downward spiral. Rounding up “illegals” and stopping the flow of migration into the US – if even possible – would reduce the supply of labor in the many places in which no one else wishes to work. Allowing an unfettered field for crypto-currency speculation could add financial turmoil to economic disruptions.

Empowering Kennedy to turn the U.S. health system into a haven for anti-vaxers and anti-fluoride, flat-earthers could lead to more pandemics and a legion of new dental patients.

Trump has also said he would settle the Ukraine war even before taking office and has vowed to bring peace to the Middle East. These too will be interesting to watch, especially the process of picking the losing and wining sides. It may also be “fun” to watch our NATO allies try to back fill their ability to go on their own. And the whole world may experience economic and political tremors.

Some of the 71 million majority who voted for Trump could experience a bit of buyers remorse. But he may not have any interest in matching his election campaign performance with real life action. It may also be that his supporters really don’t expect him to do so. In any case, we will all have front row seats.

PS: A friend reminded me of this from H.L Mencken:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

So what if Trumps wins?

If Donald Trump wins the presidency on November 5, it will be the third time this century that a Republican has won with a minority of the vote. This owes to the anti-democratic elements of our 18th Century Constitution (the Electoral College, Senate and Supreme Court). The Republican Party is a minority party riding on every advantage our outdated system gives it. They win – with help from the Russians and arrogant tech lords like Musk – by converting Trump’s clownish authoritarianism into the false consciousness of whites who feel threatened by the increasing diversity of America despite being themselves among the richest 4% of the global population.

What would Trump’s victory mean? One can consider the U.S. domestic implications and the impact on the world in general.

Domestically, Trump will seek political vengeance while using the justice system to avoid prison. (Avoiding prison is his main reason for running.) His cohort of Project-2025ers will seek to undermine the administrative state while using state power to favor those capitalists that see government as hindrance. Together they will probably throw our economy, politics, courts, health & education systems, social safety nets and society in general, into turmoil. Their efforts to govern through authoritarianism and populism – the essence of MAGA – will test our democratic institutions and wreck havoc.

But we are not Weimar Germany. Our institutions will hold, although any Trump effort to use the military for domestic actions – such as dealing with “illegal migration” – could lead to a real crisis. It may well be that in the midterm elections of 2026, the upheaval would be enough to lead to a Democratic resurgence. (It will be interesting to watch a Vice President Vance. He could call the policy shots from the background. As an opportunist par excellence, he may be sensitive to the popular reaction to the various outrages pushed by the P-2025ers and tack accordingly.)

A Trump regime’s impact on the world stage is another matter. He will favor isolationism, economic nationalism, unilateralism, pro-Russian approaches in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, disengagement from the Mideast and who knows what with North Korea. This will fundamentally weaken the global position of the U.S. But let’s consider this from the 35,000 foot level.

The U.S. has held center stage in the world since the end of World War II. The various political and economic institutions of the global order – including the UN, IMF, World Bank, NATO etc – were ours by design. We established the contours of the Cold War that divided the world into good guys and bad guys and led to many distortions of the domestic affairs of other countries. After the fall of the USSR, we found other ways to define bad actors by choosing – often unwisely – which regional states to offer favored status and protection. As we began to lose our industrial advantage – with other economies coming online – globalism became our religion and we used the available levers to impose austerity and free trade everywhere we could.

We Americans have always been pretty self-centered, focused on our own navels. We governed the world – to the extent we did – for our own purposes, assuming that what was good for America was good for everyone. Trump’s obsession on making America “great again” is simply a dysfunctional flavor of this.

Our record as the predominant global hegemon has been mixed, to say the least. The world today can be legitimately described as a mess, with violent conflicts of various kinds and sources, terrorism, mass migration, political polarization, continued poverty and inequality, nuclear proliferation, the emerging technological singularity, and widespread and worsening climate disruptions. The U.S. did not cause any of these – at least not by ourselves – but they all happened on our watch. Meanwhile, the world has increasingly begun to just ignore us. (Watch China, India and the other BRICS cozy up to Putin despite his assault on world order.) Our inability to anything about the Mideast has not surprised anyone but ourselves. Maybe it’s better that we do withdraw somewhat from world affairs and let folks get on with finding their own way? If Trump wins in November, however messy it will be, maybe it’ll be what the world needs?  Like a heart attack that scares you into changing your bad habits? 

(Maybe we Americans will finally upgrade our Constitution.)