Today is election day in America. In the immortal words of C3PO “Thank the Maker!” I do not know about the rest of you, but I am well past my factory-specified structural tolerance levels for unsolicited texts and calls. I get it; all of you want me to vote for you. Some of you will receive my vote, and some of you will not. Now that it is election day, all of you need to GO AWAY.
Negative partisanship has been on the rise, meaning that an increasing number of voters find their primary motivation in voting against parties and candidates rather than for anyone. Thus, whatever happens with the elections, a substantial portion of the American public will react to it as if a trio of heavily armed and armored trolls just burst through the gates leading a legion of bloodthirsty orcs.
As they say in the military stay frosty.
Like many, I find turbulence unsettling while flying. When I encounter it, however, I think of our flight crew and the fact that they have flown by a factor of 100 times or more than me, and they are delightfully still alive. At that point I will calmly wait to get our wheels on the ground. Likewise in an election year I remind myself what Matt Ridley taught me when I read his book, “The Rational Optimist.”
In that book, Ridley builds a persuasive case that so long as people are out there developing new products and services and grinding on solutions for problems, the human condition continues to improve. Government can and has done things to speed things along (for instance by enforcing property rights) or slow things down in a wide variety of idiotic ways. Overall progress has proven to be robust in liberal market-based societies. As an example, Ridley noted that despite the collapse of a market bubble, unimaginably stupid policy errors by the Federal Reserve, Congress and Hoover starting a global trade war, and too many policy mistakes by the Roosevelt administration to count, followed the onset of a World War, the average American was still better off in material terms in 1939 than they had been in 1929.
Ridley’s perspective should both get you, regardless of your perspective, to stand your ground no matter what comes through that election gate.
