We are Still Living in the Doom Loop

And it will almost certainly continue to get worse before it gets better.

I was deeply sickened by the murder of Charlie Kirk last week. Absolutely horrible and despicable. And I hate that this needs to be repeated, over and over again, but repeat it we must. Political violence is never acceptable. Never ever. Murder is always wrong.

I am also horrified and sickened by the growing calls for escalation and revenge from too many on the political right. Something has gone very wrong in our collective psychology right now. I fear this will not end well. Too many people have convinced themselves that we are on the verge of a civil war. At some point cosplaying becomes showing up with guns.

I cannot say I am shocked or surprised that we are entering what is now being described as a “new age of political violence.” After all, I’m the guy who wrote the “doom loop” book (published in 2020), in which the final chapter is speculative fiction that envisions a period of political violence in the 2020s. (I first wrote about the doom loop in 2017 in an article that opened with a hypothetical then-future scenario about how Trump would refuse to concede and stoke violence if he lost in 2020.)

I’m obviously biased, but I think the doom loop remains a useful way of thinking about the moment that we’re in, and why it’s so hard to break out of the binary “left” vs “right” trap. Re-reading my work this afternoon, I was struck by how accurate it felt.

Of course, I acknowledge self-serving confirmation bias and motivated reasoning may cloud my judgment. Our brains are naturally drawn to the most self-serving, “I was right all along” explanations. Which is, of course, a core problem in this moment. Those who expect to see the other side as blood-thirsty ghouls will find enough random freaks and weirdos posting awful things to justify their expectations. Doomier and loopier indeed.

Because it seems relevant, I reprint a short section of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (pages 26-30) below that explains the concept of the doom loop. I hope it proves useful.

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DOOM LOOP: WHEN BAD THINGS SPIRAL OUT OF CONTROL, REINFORCING EACH OTHER

A few words on the concept of the "doom loop." This idea goes by many names: Reinforcing feedback loop. Vicious cycle. Downward spiral. Death spiral. It's a kind of trap where once you get stuck inside, it's tricky to spring loose. Once you think about it, you'll see it lots of places. Often it starts small, and then multiplies out of control.

A classic example of this kind of reinforcing feedback loop is a microphone facing an amplifier. The microphone picks up a whisper. The microphone connects to the amplifier. The amplifier makes the whisper a little louder. The microphone picks up the noise from the amplifier. The amplifier makes the noise louder. Soon, what began as a whisper becomes a deafening howl. The amplifier blows a speaker tube.

This is a simple doom loop to break: unplug the microphone, or turn off the amplifier. But few doom loops have a simple on/off switch. Most doom loops are harder to break.

Here's a trickier one: a personal debt doom loop. You fall behind on your credit card payments. Now you are facing late fees and high interest. And what if you have no savings? You can delay your monthly car payment to pay off your credit card bill. But it's a month later. Now the car payment is late, with fines and interest. Do you delay your rent to make the monthly car payment and risk eviction? Or do you sell your car and take public transit to work? You sell your car. But public transit is unreliable. You're constantly late to work. You lose your job. Now you can't pay your credit card bill or your rent. Once you fall behind, it becomes harder and harder to catch up.

Life feeds on itself. The choices you made yesterday influence the options (or lack of options) you have today. And the choices you make today influence the options (or lack of options) you have tomorrow. And so on, backward and forward, ad infinitum. If you're born into a poor family, you're likely to stay poor. When you're born poor, you are also born without the resources and networks to pull yourself out of poverty. You are born into a community where other people are poor, where crime is rampant, and schools are poor. This is true for nations, too. Poor countries tend to stay poor.

Arms races are also doom loops. Stock market crashes are doom loops. Gambling and social media addictions are doom loops (the more you give in, the worse you feel; the worse you feel, the more you crave the intermittent reward of random highs).

It's hard to get out of a doom loop by following the same rules and patterns of thinking that got you into the doom loop. But the problem is that once a doom loop gets going, it's hard to change the logic and thinking. In a stock market bubble, greed triumphs over fear. In a civil war, nobody wants to be the first to lay down their arms.

TODAY'S TOXIC PARTISANSHIP IS A DOOM LOOP

Toxic partisanship is also a doom loop. When the parties sorted into distinct coalitions in the 1990s (more on this in the pages ahead), they took stronger and more visible national stands on the polarizing moral issues animating the divides. Voters noticed and shifted. Liberal Republicans lost or retired and were replaced by liberal Democrats. Conservative Democrats lost or retired and were replaced by conservative Republicans. Politicians and voters found themselves surrounded by more and more like-minded partisans. The stakes felt higher. And the emerging culture-war conflict further intensified and polarized political allegiances, forcing more politicians and voters to choose clear sides.

Once the parties polarize in a two-party system, polarization becomes a self-reinforcing dynamic. And the more parties take strongly opposing positions, the more different they appear. The more different the parties appear, the more the other party comes to feel like a genuine "threat," demanding vigilance in response. The more extreme the other party seems, the greater the need to defeat it. The more extreme the other party, the more vindicated your side feels in taking strong, even radical, action in response. Both sides fall into their own separate worlds of facts, full of reinforcing us-versus-them narratives. The more totalizing partisanship becomes, the more totalizing it grows.

In contemporary American politics we have what I'll call "toxic partisanship," which generates "toxic politics."

Toxic politics stand in contrast to healthy politics. In healthy politics, different sides may disagree (as they should), but they are not dug in so far as to equate any compromise with surrender. In healthy politics, the opposition is never the enemy. In healthy politics, partisan loyalty exists, but it has limits. In healthy politics, the different sides can be far apart on specific issues, but they do not see politics as a zero-sum, binary, us-against-them contest for the fundamental character of the nation.

In healthy politics, democratic norms can change and evolve, but everybody can agree on what is "fair." In healthy politics, neutral arbiters resolve disputes. Competing parties agree to disagree, and then agree to abide by the resolution. A healthy and stable democracy depends on healthy politics.

Toxic politics is the opposite. In toxic politics, compromise is a dirty word; it is concession, it is weakness. In toxic politics, the political opposition is the enemy. In toxic politics, all political thinking filters through a simple partisan calculus: Which party benefits?

In toxic politics, even the smallest disagreement can become an existential character-of-the-nation question. In toxic politics, earnest problem-solving is irrelevant. Toxic politics is above all about winning and losing. It is about whether "people like me" are in charge or whether "people like me" should fear for our lives because we will live in a country we don't recognize anymore, and that no longer recognizes us. Toxic politics destroys trust in institutions and in fellow citizens. Unremedied, it kills democracy.

Some doom loops exhaust themselves and eventually return to normal. Some doom loops are more intractable and cause considerable damage. The more complex the doom loop, the bigger the intervention required to break it. But the more complex it is, the harder to envision a way out, even if you can somehow elevate your perspective above the lunatic passions of the moment.

THE FRAMERS WERE RIGHT TO WORRY. DEMOCRACIES DIE WHEN PARTISAN CONFLICT BECOMES TOO INTENSE AND NOTHING SEEMS FAIR ANYMORE

In their 2018 book How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt identify two master norms of democratic stability, what they call "mutual toleration" and "forbearance." Mutual toleration means political opponents recognize the legitimacy of each other: you can be a Democrat or a Republican and still be a patriotic and decent fellow citizen. Forbearance means political leaders agree not to abuse their powers, even if they legally can.

Once mutual toleration disappears, forbearance seems foolhardy. If you believe the other side is an illegitimate enemy, not maximizing your power is a sucker's game. If they get into power, they will abuse their power. So we must do everything we can to stop them. And once that mindset takes over, it echoes and amplifies until democratic processes break down.

Democracy depends on a baseline agreement to disagree, and then to agree on a fair process to resolve the disagreement. It depends on electoral losers accepting their losses, and on electoral winners giving the losers the freedom to dissent and criticize, and a fair chance to compete in the next election.

When all political conflict collapses into a binary high-stakes battle for the fate of the nation, it becomes harder to agree on a fair process. Complexity and nuance disappear. Eventually, the only fair processes are the ones where your side comes out on top. In such a politics, the line between dissent and treason blurs; the line between legitimate criticism and inciting violence seems fuzzy.

Democracies "die" when the winners become so anxious about ever losing that they capture neutral "referees" (like the press and the courts), deny the legitimacy of their political opponents, tolerate and encourage violence, undermine basic civil rights, and shut down unfriendly media. It has happened repeatedly throughout history, justified by ruling parties based on the alleged existential threats posed by their political opponents. Look to Turkey or Hungary to see this breakdown in real time.

Democracy depends on the losers, too. They must accept the results, confident they'll have a fair chance to win again in the next election and their way of life won't be threatened. Democracies descend into civil war when the electoral losers refuse to accept the rule of the winners. In 1936 Spain, the left-wing Popular Front won the election, but the losing right-wing National Front refused to accept defeat. Three years of civil war followed. In 1861 America, Republican Abraham Lincoln became president. Afraid Lincoln's victory signaled the end of slavery, Southern states began seceding. A four-year civil war followed.

Toxic politics leads to a breakdown of both mutual toleration and forbearance. Escalation begets escalation; norm erosion begets norm erosion. Partisanship becomes everything. All of this operates as a reinforcing cycle—a doom loop.

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I wish I weren’t spending my weekend thinking and ruminating on this.

But here we are.

(And if you want more on the doom loop, I made this page on my personal website, full of articles and interviews.)