I. Outrage: How We Got Here

By Mike Gonzalez

The Incredible Shrinking Tent

For most of the 20th century, American politics rested on two large tents. Each contained broad ideological diversity: liberal Republicans, conservative Democrats, pragmatists who blurred lines. Primaries were fierce but tended to discipline extremes, and general elections rewarded moderation.

To mid-century theorists, that stability looked like stagnation. Ronald Reagan’s 1975 call for “bold colors, not pale pastels” captured the new mood: a demand for clarity, conviction, and sharper contrasts. America has received what it asked for.

The tents shrank. Primaries became ideological purity tests. General elections became mud-wrestling matches between rival echo chambers. The new system incentivized candidates to promise what the extremes demanded, only to disappoint once in office. Activists felt betrayed, moderates ignored, and the governing mandate fractured.

The narrowing of the tents didn’t just change who won elections. It eroded the old establishment, the informal network of institutions, norms, and expectations that once translated disagreement into compromise.

The Phantom and the Framework: What Is the Establishment?

“Establishment” has become political shorthand for everything and nothing: elites, donors, bureaucrats, “the system.” But originally it meant something quieter and more useful: the institutional framework that made self-government possible. This framework was inclusive of the Washington D.C. swamp, a bulwark of policy and procedural conservatism.

As parties sorted themselves into rigid tribes, that framework became suspect. Institutional experience, once a mark of competence, came to signify corruption. Outsiders promised to “drain” systems that, for all their flaws, kept the machinery running.

Political scientist Morris Fiorina argued that the political system has been structured in such a way that a narrow political class wields disproportionate influence, often distorting facts and subordinating them to ideology, with mandates for major policy changes claimed on the basis of narrow electoral victories.

When only the most committed activists participate, professionals of politics, the consultants, media strategists, and permanent campaigners, take control. The practical center disappears.

Historian Geoffrey Kabaservice has called this dynamic “rule or ruin”: movements that would rather destroy their institutions than share them. It’s not governance; it’s theater. The “establishment” becomes a phantom enemy, a stage prop for moral storytelling.

As historian Herbert Butterfield warned decades earlier, such moral certainty produces “giant organized systems of self-righteousness,” always eager to deepen hatred in the name of virtue.

Roots and Rootlessness in the American Experience

The collapse of institutional trust has produced more than polarization; it has created a kind of national rootlessness. For generations, American reformers operated within stable frameworks: parties, newspapers, churches, unions, civic groups. Change happened gradually, but it endured.

Philosopher Edmund Burke, a foundational thinker for both American liberals and conservatives, argued that reform must be evolutionary, not revolutionary, institutional change guided by precedent, not abstract principle. His caution wasn’t about resisting progress; it was about sustaining it.

Modern movements often reject that patience. Both left and right assume that society can be remade overnight if only the “right” people hold power. History becomes something to overcome, not to learn from. The result is political vertigo: constant motion, little direction. Demagogues look authentic; pragmatists look dull.”

Yet American history shows that moderation, not upheaval, is the country’s natural stabilizer. Edmund Wilson once described Theodore Roosevelt’s philosophy as “a game in which one may score but only by accepting the rules and recognizing one’s opponents.”

That idea, principled competition within shared rules, is precisely what modern politics has lost. When opponents become enemies, dialogue becomes impossible. The center doesn’t vanish because its policies fail, but because its temperament does.

How Theodore Roosevelt Would Have Campaigned Today

Few figures embodied pragmatic idealism better than Theodore Roosevelt. Both the far left and far right have tried to claim him, yet he fit neither. He was a reformer who distrusted monopoly, a conservative who respected limits, and a moralist who still understood compromise.

“Every movement has a lunatic fringe,” Roosevelt warned, and his own Progressive era proved it.

He used the “bully pulpit” not to rage but to persuade, believing moral clarity required civic restraint. He would have recognized today’s politics of outrage for what it is: performance without service.

“When there is great unrest,” he wrote, “it becomes extremely difficult to beat a loud-mouthed demagogue, especially if he is a demagogue of great wealth.” Roosevelt’s solution wasn’t cynicism. It was civic engagement: active, educated citizenship rooted in institutions rather than personalities.

He saw the Constitution not as a prop but a guardrail. “I acted for the common well-being of all our people,” he later recalled, “whenever and in whatever manner was necessary, unless prevented by direct constitutional or legislative prohibition.”

That mindset, duty bounded by law, energy tempered by restraint, is the lost art of governance in an age of moral absolutism.

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Center

The American experiment has survived not because it avoids conflict, but because it channels it. The old “big tents” were never signs of weakness. They reflected confidence: a belief that a noisy, divided nation could still share institutions and rules.

Rebuilding that faith means rejecting the politics of permanent outrage in favor of the politics of principle. It means accepting that compromise isn’t surrender; it’s stewardship.

The next Roosevelt won’t come from viral movements or ideological crusades. They’ll come from the rediscovery of the pragmatic center, the place where reform, rightly understood, is an act of preservation.

II.  Microtargeting, Microaggressions, and the Breakdown of Civic Engagement

By Mark Harris

We all know how annoying microtargeting can be, even if we don’t really know what it is or how it works.  Companies use your data, through location data records, census records, social media activity, television watching habits, and even credit card purchases, to target you with ads. It’s the reason why, suddenly, you get ads for vacuum cleaners on your phone, smart TV, and every other device you have that connects to the internet after you had a conversation about buying one in front of your smart speaker. The idea for the advertiser is that, using data about individuals, you can target them with ads they receive to induce them to purchase. That’s why data is collected from you everywhere you go online and do anything. Buried in the pop-up terms document you get from visiting nearly any site is a section giving the website’s owner the right to collect, sell, and share your data. This is an annoying problem when you have received ads all day about the same vacuum cleaner, but it is terrifying when you realize that anyone with enough money can buy the data they have collected from you.

One major type of non-commercial buyer of data is political campaigns. They use the information to target people like you with campaign messages and ads. They choose which of their ads you see online based on your data, and they craft their campaign messages to appeal to you. Which is basically what the companies selling vacuums and such do, but campaigns aren’t selling you a product you may or may not need; they are buying your perception of the election. So, they can look at the data they bought, filter for voters likely to vote for them, and filter further to determine what kind of people are likely to support them. They can cross-check with polling data to see which groups are showing their support and which ones need a bit of encouragement. Eventually, with enough information, they can target not just macro-demographics, like white men over 40, they can target micro-demographics, like white men over 40 who have liked and shared at least one social media post discussing a firearm. Campaigns in the last two decades have become increasingly adept at microtargeting as data collection has increased, allowing messaging to become more niche.

Campaigns need not appeal to everyone; they only have to target about 51% of the voting population. Through public voting records, they know roughly how many people will vote in each election cycle, and through polling, they know the demographics most likely to vote for them. They also know the same for their opponents. In a two-viable-candidate race, they could use time and resources to appeal across the aisle, or in the middle, or they can make sure that their base turns out in higher numbers than their opponents. Depending on the situation, the campaign might choose any of the three, but more likely than not, one of the top candidates’ campaigns will choose to focus on their base. They will then target micro-demographics within their base of support with messages designed to drive them to the polls. This could mean ads talking about how great their candidate will be in office, but often, these days, these ads are aggressive or fearmongering against their opponent or the other side of the aisle in general. 

The datafication of the electorate and the ever-advancing microtargeting have turned campaigns into finely tuned outrage machines. Messages that claim that their opponent is Satan incarnate and the opposing party is an existential threat to people’s lives are used to stir up their base. The machine can also work to the advantage of campaigns when targeting independents and moderates. If a campaign can target moderates persuaded by a wedge issue like gun rights and push the narrative that the opposing candidate is against gun rights, then they can push them to vote for their candidate. This behavior in campaigns is a major cause of the hyperpolarization of our current moment. Campaigns have internalized the idea that the way to win is through data acquisition and microtargeted messaging instead of a broad appeal to the majority of the people to garner the majority of the people’s support. It is also a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma, as no campaign is going to give an advantage to the other side by not using information they could leverage into a better chance of winning.

The way out is to cut off the flow of the data further up the chain so that campaigns don’t have access to it in the first place, so no one has a perceived advantage in continuing the practice. This could happen in a few ways. One way is to make it illegal for campaigns to purchase data from the public and limit them to just what is publicly available. Another option is to keep data from being so freely collected from the public by companies online, through changing data privacy laws. The latter is preferable in a lot of ways, as it may diminish the abrasiveness of the current advertising market, as well as keep people’s information in their own hands. That being said, data collection is big business in the tech industry. So, it’s not likely to change without massive resistance. The former, on the other hand, might fare far better. Campaign staffers, candidates, and the major parties see just how dangerous our current political landscape is getting. Most, if not all, would like to get off the ride to the bottom, and most know that the datafication of the political messaging is not making it easier for them to get things done in a deadlocked legislature. So, a way out for everyone where they can focus on connecting with real public support instead of messaging to demographics and hoping that garners the right kind of support is broadly appealing. That being said, the legislation will have to be carefully written, because if campaigns themselves can’t buy data to micro-target, and PACs and political consulting companies can, it will just add steps in the chain, not change the result.

III.  Perspectives for Future Political Consensus

By Mike Gonzalez

We will know that our American political experiment is successful when we fulfill the Founders’ vision of the future state: rectifying parties and achieving a lasting consensus. Alexander Hamilton noted that, in ratifying the Constitution, the Founders were determined “to abolish factions and unite all parties for the general welfare.” We all know that Washington and Jefferson also warned the nation of the dangers of faction. Critics will note that political parties are the vehicle with which groups achieve their political goals. But isn’t this definition more applicable toward government? 

Certainly there will be groups that arise to promote certain issues and solutions, and there will always be elections, but why must there exist a permanent duopoly, in eternal opposition over every single issue, real or imagined? As Cicero noted, “what house is so stable, what state so enduring, that it can’t be destroyed by hatred and division?” We can begin to address this hatred and division by adopting Henry Clay and Daniel Webster’s position that the national interest trumps narrow sectional interest. Likewise, as we are all equal in respect to being American citizens, broad growth is preferable to narrow growth. At its core, a vast majority of Americans are after this same thing. We can get Americans to buy into national interest by selling a common vision: maximizing material prosperity in a system that respects the practical limits that we’ve set for government. In marketable parlance, this vision is “responsible innovation.” 

The idea of responsible innovation becomes, essentially, Burke’s steady reform. This singular vision stands in contrast to contemporary left and right thought, both of which bundle positions to unite single and limited-issue groups in order to achieve electoral success. In bundling issues to appeal to disparate groups, liberal and conservative definitions to terms like “freedom” and “equality” become increasingly nebulous, as ideologues struggle to squeeze extreme single issue voters into their tiny tents. These positions become contemporary “liberalism” and “conservatism” which, somehow, become passed off as pure, even though they are simply an electorally potent issue bundle.

A message of “responsible innovation” is different because it accepts that American priorities change. A political centrism that captures the widest swath of the population recognizes that, in a liberal democracy, a party must reflect the interests of the voter and centrism readily and unreservedly accept fact. Historically, responsible innovation is a fairly well-accepted technological concept: an innovation process which considers effects and impacts on society. All things equal, the conservative prefers tradition to novelty, and vice versa for liberals. These preferences are consistent in regard to what the left and right find distasteful about governance and society, tradition being tied to historical majoritarianism and novelty linked with breaking existing power structures. The political centrist rejects the false choice of novelty and tradition by achieving innovation while preserving, to its maximum extent, our existing framework and institutions. 

The Golden Rule of Budgeting

Having referenced the unbroken line between past and present, it is perhaps pertinent to consider the solid line between present and future.

Much of Western Europe’s fiscal policy revolves around a concept of the fiscal golden rule. This rule can best be described in terms of intergenerational responsibility. That is, a generation’s revenues should match its expenses, and a government should only encumber itself with additional spending when future revenues will match or exceed that number. The practical effect is that deficit spending is only justifiable in increasing debt for future generations when it will help to increase revenues to those generations. The fiscal golden rule reveals a truth that all centrists know, yet most ideologues find hard to grasp: all government spending is not equal. There are defensible and indefensible government programs, and the distinction normally revolves around cost, effectiveness, and reach.

Unfortunately, a critical flaw of the conventional far left and far right is that they are structurally two dimensional. Both ideologies only think in terms of generations which live today. Hence, budget busting is amenable to both the right and left, so long as infrastructurally destructive low taxes and expensive domestic programs, respectively, in addition to sizeable military spending, are all funded by extravagant borrowing to be paid by people who are not alive today (read: people who are not us). At the PEN World Voices literary festival, author Jostein Gaardner urged his audience to apply the golden rule, also known as the Principle of Reciprocity, in terms of a third dimension – we shall do to the next generation what we wish the previous generation had done to us. When one considers the damage that we’re causing to future generations, our government’s financial behavior becomes less and less defensible regarding both revenue and expense.

It was, perhaps, Gaardner’s closing that served as the most impactful portion of his speech: “based on the Principle of Reciprocity, we should only permit ourselves to use non-renewable resources to the extent that we at the same time pave the way for our descendants to be able to manage without the same resources.” Applying this principle elsewhere, it becomes clearer where our nation’s financial deficiencies lie.

What We’re Reading

If you or anyone you love is concerned about the impact of social media on your life, regardless of political or religious or other stance, this book is a must-read.  

Start from the Foreword by Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who says, “We are now drowning in outrage.  It wasn’t always like this, it didn’t have to be this way, and we can’t go on like this.”

Author and media designer (and, I dare say social media philosopher) Tobias Rose-Stockwell takes us through how and why we got here and how social media fits into the historical framework of the human story in the first four parts of the book: Making the Machine, Powering the Machine, History of the Machine, and the Cogs in the Machine.  His writing is a powerful master work of technology, anthropology, history, psychology, politics and economics, and, lest it become too dry, liberally sprinkled with easily understandable data, diagrams, and personal or historic anecdotes to illustrate the data.  

The final part, Rewiring the Machine, is an optimistic, yet realistic play book for how to get us all to a better place.  

And, in a bold counter to obsolescence, this book is a never-ending story, with a living appendix of research, diagrams, principles and suggested solutions that will be kept updated indefinitely at http://outragemachine.org.

Reviewed by Ruth McLatchie

This Day In History

• October 1854 – “Bleeding Kansas” violence erupts:
  
  • In October, pro-slavery forces attacked the Free-State settlement of Hickory Point, intensifying a cycle of retaliatory violence. Northern abolitionist papers used the bloodshed to outrage voters against the “Slave Power,” while Southern politicians warned of Northern “fanaticism.” The outrage helped solidify the newly formed Republican Party around anti-slavery identity and moral defiance.
    
• October 1859 – John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry:
  
  • Occurring October 16–18, Brown’s failed insurrection electrified the nation. Southern newspapers portrayed it as proof of Northern conspiracy and used the outrage to justify harsher security and secessionist sentiment, while Northern abolitionists framed Brown as a martyr for justice. The episode showed how both sides weaponized moral fury to define loyalty and identity.
    
• October 1917 – Bolshevik Revolution in Russia:
  
  • Beginning October 25, Lenin and the Bolsheviks capitalized on public fury over war and hunger to seize power. Propaganda papers proclaimed, “Down with the bourgeois ministers!” as outrage over corruption and inequality became a moral justification for violent revolution — a textbook use of collective indignation to dismantle an existing order.
    
• October 1932 – U.S. Presidential Campaign (Hoover vs. FDR):
  
  • In October 1932, as the election neared, both Hoover and Roosevelt sharpened their rhetoric to channel public anger. Hoover warned against “agitators exploiting misery,” while FDR turned outrage into hope, declaring that “the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.” Each campaign tried to harness economic outrage — Hoover defensively, Roosevelt transformatively.
    
• October 1938 – “War of the Worlds” broadcast panic:
  
  • On October 30, Orson Welles’s radio dramatization triggered widespread fear among listeners who believed the U.S. was under attack. Though apolitical, the incident became a case study in mass manipulation, demonstrating how quickly emotional outrage and fear could be mobilized — lessons soon adapted by propagandists and politicians during WWII and the Cold War.
    

– Compiled by Elizabeth Frost and Staff

Coming Next Month:  

Knowledge, Wisdom, and Artificial Intelligence

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