Donald Trump is a dangerous maniac who can barely complete a sentence, and it is lunacy to believe he can even recognize the existentially threatening collective action problems facing our nation, let alone actually solve them.
Collective action problem is the term political scientists use to describe any situation where a large group of people would do better for themselves if they worked together, but it’s easier for everyone to pursue their own interests. The essential work of every government is making laws that balance the tradeoffs between shared benefits and acceptable restrictions on individual or corporate freedoms to solve this dilemma, and the reason people hate the government is that not being able to do whatever you want all the time is a huge bummer. Speed limits help make our neighborhoods safer, but they also mean you aren’t supposed to put the hammer down and peel out at every stoplight, which isn’t any fun at all.
Every Verge reader is intimately familiar with collective action problems because they’re everywhere in tech. We cover them all the time: making everything charge via USB-C was a collective action problem that took European regulation to finally resolve, just as getting EV makers to adopt the NACS charging standard took regulatory effort from the Biden administration. Content moderation on social networks is a collective action problem, so are the regular fights over encryption. The single greatest webcomic in tech history describes a collective action problem.
The problem is that getting people to set aside their own selfishness and work together is generally impossible even if the benefits are obvious, a political reality so universal it’s a famous Tumblr meme.
You can sum up the history of civilization as a long fight about where the government’s authority to tell everyone what to do comes from
This is such an intractable problem that you can sum up the history of civilization as a long fight about where the government’s authority to tell everyone what to do comes from. Ancient rulers just went ahead and considered themselves gods, which made things pretty easy — anyone who lives in a neighborhood with an overzealous HOA president can see this approach in action today. Quite a few European kings decided they’d operate one layer up the stack and announced that they were empowered by God with the divine right to absolute control, which also made things somewhat easy but caused several wars and assassinations by other kings who’d gotten drunk and high enough to see Jesus.
Every so often, the world gets some bozo who decides his desire for absolute control is justified because of an emergency, which inevitably leads them to spend a lot of time convincing people that the very existence of foreigners is an emergency so they can hold onto that power forever. This is basically a hack, but it’s an effective one — there are always foreigners, after all. You know why Trump has lately taken to standing in front of backdrops that read DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW? It’s because when you put this dude under any pressure at all, he reflexively creates a Brown People Emergency to justify his authoritarian instincts.
It is extremely frustrating that the Harris campaign keeps going on about Trump being a danger to democracy without explaining why his whole deal is so deeply incompatible with America, so here’s the short version: the radical founding principle of the United States of America is the idea that the government’s authority to make laws and solve collective action problems comes from the consent of the governed. A clean rewrite, replacing centuries of architectural debt with what was, at the time, a cutting-edge foundation mostly unproven at scale. We vote for our leaders, they are given the power to tell us all what to do so that we might help each other reach better outcomes and be happier, and if they are bad at their jobs, we can simply throw the bums out. We open-sourced the authority, in other words. It was a big bet, and so far, it’s paid off.
Like any large open-source project, American democracy is kind of messy, requires a lot of volunteer effort, and often uses way too much memory. But it enables everyone to submit requests for changes so that we might better direct the power of our communities at every level toward solving our problems, and the democratic process provides an essential stability which allows people to keep buying into our country as the platform on which to build their own big ideas.
Trump doesn’t give a shit about any of this because he only cares about himself. He generally does not care to solve problems unless it benefits him personally, and the intellectual foundation of the MAGA movement that’s built up around him is the complete denial that collective action problems exist at all. The MAGA worldview is now so batshit that it requires its proponents to look at obvious failures of collective action and declare them immutable features of modern life — or, in an even stupider twist — announce them to be good things.
For example, school shootings represent a complete failure to solve a collective action problem — a uniquely American failure because not only have we not solved the problem, we have actively made it worse. Just look at this chart:
Credit: American Enlightenment Project / K-12 Shooting Database
That’s the alarming increase in school shootings since the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, which basically made any meaningful gun regulation impossible. With a bare 5–4 majority behind him, Antonin Scalia decided to fully reinterpret the Second Amendment and reset the balance of liberties in America to favor the rights of gun owners in what is now a clear tradeoff against the safety of our communities.
You can argue about this chart, or this specific tradeoff, or even that Scalia failed to foresee the rise of a wildly irresponsible gun culture that should otherwise moderate these harms but which has instead produced tactical cosplay chuds and would-be lifestyle influencer Don Jr. That’s fine! All of that would be evidence of a rational political culture: one that makes policy choices, evaluates the outcomes, and accepts the reality of the results so as to make better tradeoffs in the future.
But Trump is not rational, and Trumpism cannot abide the idea of a collective action problem. You might think that Trump’s brain is mush, but JD Vance’s weasel-like mind is constantly, actively finding ways to sanitize the chaos, and the philosophical demands of MAGA required him to look America directly in the eye at the vice presidential debate and say that school shootings are “a fact of life.”
It should be easy for Vance to imagine a world in which school shootings don’t happen — that is the pre-Heller world he grew up in! — but fixing the problem of school shootings requires admitting that a collective action problem exists. It requires admitting that the current policy solution — sending kids to school with fucking Kevlar in their backpacks — is less effective than restricting gun ownership in any meaningful way. He cannot do that. Trump cannot do that. Trumpism cannot allow that debate to happen.
Do you want to live in a country where the vice president refers to schools as “soft targets”? That’s a vote for JD Vance. That’s a vote for Donald Trump — a vote for the line on the school shootings chart to keep going up, forever.
That’s a vote for Donald Trump — a vote for the line on the school shootings chart to keep going up, forever
It’s the same with vaccines, which are a near-perfect collective action problem — they are generally only effective if almost everyone in a community gets them, which means either everyone has to agree to get them or the government has to mandate compliance. When everyone cooperates and gets vaccinated, our vaccines can be highly effective: the measles were effectively eradicated in this country nearly a quarter-century ago.
Then presumptive Trump health secretary RFK Jr. hit the scene to spew his dangerous anti-vax bullshit, convinced enough people to stop getting vaccinated, and the fucking measles came back. When this man visited Samoa in 2019, he contributed to a measles outbreak so bad that 83 people died, almost all of them children. But to see this failure of collective action would require a break with the MAGA worldview, so these dummies have fallen back to saying getting measles is actually good.
Do you trust Donald Trump to see this tradeoff and understand this outcome? To adjust to it and use the power of the Oval Office to convince Americans that the balance of harms favors vaccinations over a rise in measles cases? He couldn’t even do it for the covid vaccines his own Operation Warp Speed produced, and Vance is now blowing anti-vax dog whistles as loudly as he can in his public speeches. It is a near certainty that Trump will just blame the next measles outbreak on immigration because at least he can shoot at brown people.
Trump simply cannot use the tools of democracy to run the country on our behalf. His brain does not work that way, even when it appears to be working. He is too selfish, too stupid, too cognitively impaired, too fucked in the head by social media — too whatever. He just can’t do it. He will make our collective action problems worse because he doesn’t even know what kind of problems they are. There is a reason he loves dictators and that all his biggest ideas involve forcing people to do things at the barrel of a gun: mass deportations, arresting his critics, sending the military into American cities to quell protests. He is unable to imagine a world where people cooperate for any reason other than the threat of violence, and so violence has become an inextricable part of his movement.
The list of massive collective action problems facing our nation is almost overwhelming to consider, and they threaten to tear us apart: our population is getting older, with a looming healthcare crisis to come. Education. Housing. Income inequality. There are so many more.
We are not doing well right now, and when I look at the problems The Verge specifically covers and has covered for over a decade, the failures are blinding.
Solving climate change is the biggest collective action problem of our lifetimes — and nested within it, there are even more collective action problems like transitioning to EVs and rethinking our sources of power. Trump cannot concede that this problem requires collective action to solve, so the MAGA approach is to simply deny climate change exists while Trump blathers on about wanting to be a “whale psychiatrist.”
As a country, we have almost entirely failed to regulate the tech industry. There are almost no meaningful checks on its size or influence, or even requirements to be responsible with its power, even though American consumers express their clear preferences to rein in tech companies all the time. There is simply no other way to look at millions of instagram users — including the company’s own celebrity influencers — enthusiastically posting legalistic incantations for over a decade commanding Meta to stop doing things with their content. Fundamentally, they are all trying to renegotiate the instagram terms of service, which everyone signed without reading. But as individuals, they have no real leverage with which to drag Mark Zuckerberg to the bargaining table.
As a country, we have almost entirely failed to regulate the tech industry
This is a pure market failure. Despite this sustained, dramatic expression of consumer demand, there have been no policy changes, and there are no meaningful competitors differentiated by privacy. The industry has learned from this and imposed an ever more extractive set of platform policies with little meaningful consequence. Resetting all this is what the government is for — a functional federal privacy law would effectively provide a baseline terms of service agreement with every platform that would protect us all, and then we could see how well it’s working and adjust.
The tech industry is also racing ahead with ai, even though it’s shown no ability to restrain itself from causing the most obvious problems: our social networks choked to death with ai slop, the death of photographic truth, and sexualized deepfakes of teenagers. These problems were all predicted and warned against in the most dire ways, and yet they have all come to pass. Solving these problems will require creative and flexible lawmaking that considers a huge balance of interests, benefits, and harms, and a rigorous approach to thinking through the tradeoffs over time.
There is no shortage of proposed legislation to solve these problems floating around, and there are other countries making laws that we might look at to evaluate the tradeoffs. But the Republican Party is so resistant to solving collective action problems that Meta has spent years saying it welcomes regulation because it knows half of our government will never allow it to happen. Hell, one of the very first tech bills passed during the first Trump administration was a rollback of rules preventing ISPs from sharing your data, and Trump signed it immediately — pure ghoul shit.
In most normal circumstances, America would slowly, incrementally figure this stuff out. States would pass some laws, there’d be some litigation, maybe some Supreme Court decisions, maybe some federal legislation in the end. But the absolutely fucked thing about the United States in 2024 — the looming dread that keeps me up at night — is that a bunch of tech billionaires have decided it would be easier if they were simply in charge of remaking society and have fallen in line behind a man they clearly despise because it’s easier for them to get what they want by manipulating the addled mind of a narcissistic monster than by winning people’s dollars in the market or votes in the ballot box.
Let’s just name some important ones: Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos — they have all decided to kiss the ring in various ways and sell out the very concept of America. They’d rather fly their helicopters over the burned-out husks of our cities to their private beaches and secure bunkers than participate in our democracy. They would prefer to remake our country into a broken oligarchy where they have finally ended the free market and privatized our lives into an overlapping series of enshittified subscription monopolies, and they have taken to openly wishcasting what they would do with unchecked power. “Competition is for losers” is not just a thing Peter Thiel says — it’s a worldview that’s produced the monarchy-curious JD Vance arguing that the purpose of antitrust is to regulate the speech Google distributes and Trump himself saying the company has to be careful or get shut down.
Our Silicon Valley billionaires don’t actually believe in this sloppy gloss on competition law. Rather, these men are all trying to protect or create their very own empires, and they are funding, supporting, or at least accepting of Trump’s strongman instincts because they each understand how it will benefit them individually, even though it will cost us all much more. These would-be oligarchs are a collective action problem, personified: they cannot curb their individual greed so we must all endure their furious attempts to prop up a madman who might end the American experiment.
Let’s not fool ourselves.
Kamala Harris is not a perfect candidate for president. It is possible to pick apart her policy ideas and extremely easy to criticize her unusually circular speaking patterns — she often sounds like she’s vamping until her internal search algorithm finds the right keyword and issues a preloaded response. Did you know she prosecuted transnational criminal organizations? You will.
But look beyond the locked-in message discipline to her approach to campaigning, and it is clear Harris is deeply, meaningfully committed to solving collective action problems. She has assembled a politically diverse group of people to support her that range from AOC to Liz Cheney to Mark Cuban, and most of her claims about how she’ll run the country differently than Biden come down to putting Republicans in her Cabinet and reaching across the aisle more. She has, for better or worse, made approaches to the crypto community while championing restrictions on price gouging and regulations on banks. She had antimonopoly Senator Elizabeth Warren onstage at the Democratic National Convention while having Google antitrust defense lawyer Karen Dunn serve as her debate advisor.
You might not agree with some of the depressingly averaged-out policy positions produced by this unnervingly big tent. You might have some serious problems with, say, her proximity to the current administration and its approach to the war in Gaza. But this is what happens when the other party in our two-party system can only generate policy ideas that amount to ai-generated blood libel and RETVRN memes on x. Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican Party of the ability to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris coalition.
In many ways, the ecstatic reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you have to guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality but energized by it. More than anything, that is the change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.
It is time to stop denying the essential nature of the problems America faces. It is time to insist that we use the power of our democracy the way it’s intended to be used. And it is far past time to move beyond Donald Trump.
A vote for Harris is a vote for the future. It is a vote for solving collective action problems. It is a vote for working together, instead of tearing our world to shreds.
