In this week's episode, Brian Czech and Rick Tibbetts (producer of The Steady Stater) provide candid and cogent reactions to the 2020 presidential election from the steady stater point of view. The two CASSE colleagues discuss the current state of the election, why 68 million Americans voted for Trump, and what a Biden victory might mean for steady staters.
In this week's episode, Brian Czech and Rick Tibbetts (producer of The Steady Stater) provide candid and cogent reactions to the 2020 presidential election from the steady stater point of view. The two CASSE colleagues discuss the current state of the election, why 68 million Americans voted for Trump, and what a Biden victory might mean for steady staters.
Richard Tibbetts 00:01
From the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, this is The Steady Stater, a podcast dedicated to discussing limits to growth and the steady state economy.
Brian Czech 00:10
Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Brian Czech, and I have to say we have a very unique arrangement here today at The Steady Stater. We had a guest scheduled to be on the show, but at the last minute, we stumbled into some technical difficulties in the studio. What to do? Well, we decided to talk about what everybody else is talking about right now, the election, but with our steady state angle on the election, and when I say we, I mean yours truly, as the host, and Rick Tibbetts, our producer. When Rick isn't producing The Steady Stater podcast, he's plenty busy with other tasks as CASSE's Communications Specialist. Rick Tibbetts, welcome to the show.
Richard Tibbetts 01:06
Well, thank you so much. I'm glad to be on the other side of the mic.
Brian Czech 01:10
Yeah. So, you know, Rick and I are just going to talk a little bit about the election per se, what's going on in the different states. I should mention, also, that, like most podcasts, this one isn't live, we're probably moving in that direction, but for now, we've been recording these on Thursdays, and then Rick produces the show on Friday, and then it comes out at 8AM Monday mornings. So by the time this one comes out, there may be a few things that are a little bit different, but a lot of the things do seem to be pretty well set in motion. So we'll talk about some some of the different scenarios in the state, some of the potential legal challenges, but we're going to try to keep that down to a few minutes, and then we're going to talk about the implications of these election results to advancing the steady state economy. So first, Rick, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, actually, and what you do at CASSE, and then we'll start talking about the election.
Richard Tibbetts 02:25
Right. So, I am from right outside of Boston, Massachusetts. I went to college at Syracuse University where I got a Bachelor of Arts in Public Relations and Policy Studies. And I joined CASSE in June 2020. I joined as the Communication Specialist. It was a position that seemed to perfectly suit both of my areas of interest, both of my disciplines, and so, you know, as you mentioned, I do stay busy. But you know, I'm here fighting the good fight alongside my colleagues.
Brian Czech 02:59
Yeah. And, Rick, you may want to mention your experience in the campaign.
Richard Tibbetts 03:06
Yes, yes, of course. So, I served as a communications director for a local state representative race in Massachusetts, the 19th Middlesex district of Massachusetts, and that is composed of the towns of Wilmington and Tewksbury, Massachusetts. I was the communications director at a mere, I believe, 20 years old, and I had a lot of say, a lot of authority over that campaign, all aspects of it, the social media photography, advertising, debate prep, editing of public statements, you name it. I had my hands in it. And so, it was quite a formative experience. I learned a lot. And I got to leverage my passion for politics.
Brian Czech 03:50
Yeah, and I must say, that's one of the reasons we grabbed on to Rick when we found him, because we always thought that that combination of communications expertise and political campaigning insights would be a great thing to have at CASSE, and it has been. So, some of the key results, the key tallies in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia are just coming in and just got taking shape. Chances are, there may be challenges, like Trump is going to challenge the result in Wisconsin. And with how close things are looking in Nevada and Arizona, that may be a possibility there as well. But the way you have this tallied so far, pretty much congruent with what we've been seeing, I guess, pretty much on the mainstream channels?
Richard Tibbetts 04:56
Yes. So right now, we are at 253 electoral votes for Joseph Biden, Joe Biden, and 214 for Donald Trump. And so it is looking in all likelihood that Joe Biden will be our next president. We are just waiting on Arizona in Nevada to pull through. And once they do, Joe Biden will have the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the presidency. But, many people don't know this, we are waiting on Nevada and Arizona because they are aggregating their mail-in ballots, their absentee ballots, and they've decided to release the big batch of information today at noon. So we are now recording Thursday at around noon time, so we may well know the president by the time you the listener are listening into this episode. But as of now, it's 253 to 214 and we're just waiting on those final ballot tallies.
Brian Czech 05:51
It's gonna be right to the wire. And finally, before we go on to some of the steady state implications, pretty much the same scenario playing out in Pennsylvania. I just want to give a shout out actually. Remember, Rick, we were collaborating there for a while, and we do on and off, with MAREA. That's the Mid Atlantic Renewable Energy Association. And I'm going to give them credit. If Pennsylvania goes blue, why then, their past president, their immediate past president, Vera Cole, she did a yeoman's job in getting Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and the surrounding counties very much informed about the problems in obsessing over economic growth, relative to well-being of people and sustainability. So shout out to Vera Cole and the Mid Atlantic Renewable Energy Association, and let's see what happens in Pennsylvania. Well, I think that we're probably talking about eighty-some percent likelihood that it's Joe Biden in the White House in 2021.
Richard Tibbetts 07:19
Yes, something would have to go catastrophically wrong for the Biden campaign for him not to win at this point. This being different from 2016, when many people were confident early in the night on election night, but things turned for, well, at least for our purposes, for the worst for Donald Trump later in the night. And it became clearer and clearer that those key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were going to go for Donald Trump, but this time around with such high margins already reported and those counties that still need to report being so liberal, the likelihood, it is at this point, I would call it above 90%, that we will have Joe Biden in the White House.
Brian Czech 07:59
Okay, and so now we have to clarify one thing pretty early on as well, which is that, yeah, it's true, as we would prefer, but we are in no way partisan. What we are, is the organization in the United States that is focused explicitly on advancing the steady state economy, not for purposes of any political ideology, but because that's the sustainable option to pushing for perpetual GDP growth or degrowth. It's that option, it's in that sweet spot, if you will, in the middle, that is the only sustainable option for the long-term. You know, we could add that, technically, at least, there is a plank in the platform of the Green Party, Green Party of the United States for a steady state economy. So there is that. And that was our doing, we got that to happen back in, I believe it was 2004. It may have been as early as 2000, but definitely by 2004, we got that platform. But I think later on, we may talk about the Green Party a little bit and where they fit into this mix. But yeah, Trump has been almost, I want to say, a ridiculous example. And when I say the obsession with GDP growth, I mean that in that sense of the word, you know, we saw this article come out. Where is that? This article came out just this morning about how it happened that 68 million Americans have, indeed, apparently voted for Trump. Everybody's asking that question. How is that possible? And the author of this article that's answering this question, this is Bandy Lee, she's the forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine. She's the one that wrote that book, "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump." Bandy Lee said in her article this morning that in mental pathology where higher functions are impaired, an individual taps more easily into the quote unquote, "primitive brain," which is irrational, but very powerful as it is survival driven. And one thing that we've all been working on here recently at CASSE, because we're still a tiny nonprofit, we have a handful of staff, so we've all been pitching in on the publication and now the distribution of a new book by Peter Seidel. And Peter actually collaborated in recent years, to an extent, with with Bandy Lee so you know, that draws a connection right there. But the title of Peter's book is "Uncommon Sense, Shortcomings of the Human Mind for Handling Big-Picture, Long-Term Challenges." And, as Peter laid it out in this book, these big-picture, long-term challenges are the challenge of the 21st century. And you've got to wonder sometimes if our American political system is very well designed to deal with it. You know, Peter argues, as Bandy Lee alludes to, it's the primitive brain. And it's not just among those 16 million Americans that voted for Trump. Everybody starts, you know, they have the genome of a primitive brain, and then with other aspects of the brain genetics, and also life experiences and so on, many people are indeed inclined or, you know, the propaganda that comes out, is more conducive to inflicting others as well. And so that's the upshot of Bandy Lee's article this morning. In a way she's saying that Trump's mental illness, infected 48% of the electorate, and that's an interesting way of looking at it, especially during a viral pandemic, but she's seeing Trump's mental illness, in a way, as a function of four years of his lies, you know. The lies are very well documented and, lies, that's roughly synonymous with propaganda when the lies are geared toward political ends. And so, she saying that that mental illness infected 48% of the electorate?
Richard Tibbetts 13:09
Well, you know, I think that to say that an illness affected that number of people, probably not. I think, of course, what she was getting at was that the power of the rhetoric really activated a large swath of the American electorate, and you touched upon this, the propaganda piece, that's really what it's about. I mean, if you are, at least as Donald Trump was in 2016, if you are an outsider, and you are railing against the system, and you have people who feel like their lives have not improved, and they feel like the country has gone in the wrong direction, then that conceit and bombast coming from this fringe candidate, you will probably identify a lot more with, because he in a way is flipping the bird to the system, the system that so many people were dissatisfied with. And so, you know, an illness, Donald Trump may well have one, narcissism being, you know, prominent among them, but still having that proverbial strong man saying, "I know the problem, and I'm going to fix it," is, frankly, all a lot of people need to hear. They don't really want to hear any more substance. They just want things to change. And they hope it's for the better. And so Donald Trump represented that change and psychologically, that is how he triggered all of these people. And I also want to note, most Americans are not attuned to politics. They do not spend their time looking into policy platforms and the nuances of it. And so all they really want to do is judge somebody more so off of feel
Brian Czech 14:43
Simple messages, heuristics.
Richard Tibbetts 14:45
Everybody always says, "Can I have a beer with this person? Can I sit down and talk to this politician?" And people really discount how important that is. A lot of times it's not even policies that matter. You could have argued Hillary had wonderful policies, very detailed, down to the very last percentage point, but people didn't really care. What they cared about was how relatable the politician was, and through that relatability came their confidence in the candidate.
Brian Czech 15:13
Yeah, I think that does help explain why Biden's won this thing, because you can envision sitting down and having a beer with Joe Biden, you know. But I want to go back to that earlier point about the simplicity of the messaging, the thinness of the arguments. Well, that's kind of what he did with this GDP obsession, you know, and we have to put some of the responsibility for this on politics on the parties and politicians going back now several decades, because they did this to us, and to the American mind. They said, "a rising tide lifts all boats, don't worry folks about, you know, redistributing wealth, or trying to take care of all these different problems of inequality, or even of environmental problems." They said, "let's just grow the economy, and everybody's going to get a little bit of that, and we're going to have enough money to spend to fix supposedly, those environmental problems." And of course, that's one of our biggest contributions at CASSE is to put the lie to that sort of illogic, because we know that, you know, money comes from the liquidation of that natural capital, the pollution of the environment that must go along with that. And so, you know, we've got to get this through, into the political system. And man, it's tough sledding for us to make this happen because like you said, first of all, not too many people dabble in politics beyond that very thin layer of thin propaganda sort of statements. And then secondly, it's not the type of issue, as Peter Seidel argues in his book Uncommon Sense, that readily draws political action. What do you what do you have to say about this?
Richard Tibbetts 17:30
Well, I have quite a bit. So I would first start off by touching on what you were speaking about at the beginning of your statement, talking about basically reaganomics, trickle-down economics, a rising tide lifts all boats. Now we've seen that does not work. If a big company at the top of the economic pyramid is raking in money, they are far more likely to reinvest that money into their own company, or just make their paychecks bigger, as opposed to letting that money, as was predicted, fall to the bottom and grow the entire economy. That is not what happens. And so that is a fallacy, but still, it is one championed by, more often than not, Republican candidates, you know, the better the business does, the better regular people will do. But that is not the case. And of course, going deeper into what you were talking about, about surface level issues and the more propagandist aspects of political rhetoric, the term growth, for instance. Growth in American vernacular, and in most English vernacular across the world, has a positive connotation. And if you are a, let's say, Republican politician, you can even be democratic too, whichever party you're a part of, if you are saying that the economy will grow, that there will be growth and that there will be an upshot in the stock market, we have a common understanding of anything going up, anything expanding, as a good thing. When kids grow up, that's a good thing. When grades go up, that's a good thing. Growth in many capacities is a good thing. How we should perhaps try to envision growth is more as a metastasizing of bad things. More like a cancer cell, for instance. That's not exactly good growth. And that's precisely the kind of thing that CASSE is saying, that kind of growth, just unmitigated growth to obscene levels, it has an impact. If you're growing the economy, you're sucking up more and more resources, and you're further damaging the environment through those processes through that agricultural base.
Brian Czech 19:34
Yeah, I think we got to try to help the American polity, the citizens and policymakers to realize that growth in many contexts still is a wonderful thing. The growth of a puppy, the growth of a little kid, the growth of a kid's college savings, but so many other things shouldn't be growing. Right? In the case of GDP, GDP growth in the 21st century is the single biggest problem, you could say. And there's a very good argument to make that the top priority for sustaining America, for sustaining civilization, the top priority should be transitioning away from GDP growth. And probably now, we've overshot capacity so far for the long-term, it's going to take some period of degrowth, and then down to a sustainable and nice level for a steady state economy. And, you know, Trump was leading us the opposite direction, he was leading us in a very mid 20th century direction. And Joe Biden, well, you know, it's not like he's gonna be a steady state panacea. But I wonder if, with Kamala Harris as the VP, and you may recall, we were talking after she was selected by Biden as the running mate, that she's got a very interesting background in terms of potential to "get it" about limits to growth and speak to it. Her father, was a PhD economist, studied at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and you know what his specialty was? Was growth theory. So, she surely would have, you know, picked up here and there. And then as a child, she spent a lot of time in India, in Africa as well, I guess, but especially in southern India, where her mother was from, and I think has a pretty good sense, then, about limits to growth. So what we see there is the power of more than, first of all the power of somebody setting the precedent. And then the power of more than one, you know, you have, I think, greater than a two times effect when the second person weighs in, because all of a sudden, it's just not some lone ranger there. All of a sudden, this is a topic, you know. And if that if those debates had continued and that topic had stayed as a prominent one, I think we would have heard a lot of talk about, hey, Trump's calling card? It's not worth a nickel, because all he can brag about is that GDP, but it's causing more problems than it's solving at this point. And he helped to really demonstrate that. That's the one thing I think we're going to be losing as Trump leaves the White House, we're going to be losing that classic example of the growth at all costs mentality.
Richard Tibbetts 23:15
Yep, I would agree. I think that this transition into a Biden administration, it might not put the CASSE position first and foremost, we don't expect that, but what it will do is put, finally, and appropriately, the environment into focus, the health of the planetary environment into focus, and there will be a legitimate effort to combat climate change, hopefully a rejoining of the Paris Climate Accord and trying to make sure that carbon emissions go down. This, of course, is not directly what CASSE talks about on a day-to-day basis, but it certainly is not antithetical to our aims as well. And so having Trump out, all of his pro-growth rhetoric, his destructive decisions, for instance, to open up vast areas of protected wildlife sanctuaries in reserves, most recently, one in Alaska for logging, his just unabashed destruction of nature and how little he cares about it. Finally, that will be coming to an end, at least as we predict. Again, for our listeners, we do not know the outcome, you may, you may be listening and we already know the outcome to our American listeners, but at the moment, it's 253 Joe Biden, 214 Donald Trump, and we are eagerly awaiting the results. But like we've said before, we are confident in Biden's victory and hopefully getting back to prioritizing the environment.
Brian Czech 24:44
Yeah, it'll be a nice change of pace not to have the economic doctrine of what we were calling Trumpism. Remember, we had a little comparative politics diagram. We had a two-variable diagram with four quadrants it was truth on the x axis, and concern for posterity on the y axis. And if you had no concern for posterity, because you were hell bent on GDP growth, because you're hell bent on GDP growth, you know that by definition means no concern for posterity. And if you're untruthful about it at the same time, well, that's what Trumpism was. It was worse than just the growth at all costs approach, because the growth at all costs approach can be honest, but Trump was dishonest even in the way he went about it, making it seem like it's not going to harm the environment and, you know, we're still going to have better international and all that. It was just a horribly misleading form of growth at all costs. So at the other end of both spectra, in other words, in the upper right quadrant where you have a lot of concern for posterity and it's an honest assessment an accurate and honest assessment, that's what we call steady statesmanship. And that's where we want to see politicians landing in the future. And that reflects our efforts on the Hill with our Full and Sustainable Employment Act, with our mingling with candidates like Cory Booker, you know, we're trying to help move that system into the quadrant of steady statesmanship. Joe Biden probably is going to be primarily in the thing where, yes, there is a lot of concern for posterity, but unfortunately, not because of him so much as because of his background and his party's background, there is not an accurate assessment about limits to growth. And that quadrant, that I think right now is probably best called the Green New Deal. Even though Joe Biden makes a distinction between his approach and the Green New Deal, we can basically call that quadrant the Green New Deal. All right. Well, Rick, thanks for filling in at the very last second for today's show. I think it worked out pretty well and, you know, if we have to throw somebody in cold, the communications specialist is a pretty good bet. Let's do it again sometime, but hopefully not because of technical difficulties like we had earlier today.
Richard Tibbetts 27:46
Right. Well, thank you for having me.
Brian Czech 27:54
All right. Well, folks, that about wraps her up. Our regularly scheduled interview had to be rescheduled due to a technical glitch in the studio, so I've been talking with Rick Tibbetts, our producer, about the 2020 presidential election. We'll be back to the normal routine next week and by then hopefully, the path to the White House will be paved, and not with piles of lawsuit papers. I'm Brian Czech and you've been listening to The Steady Stater podcast. See you next time.