Ideas of the Year, 2017 Edition

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How do you summarize a year like 2017?

Paraphrase Bart Simpson, perhaps?

In conclusion, 2017 is a land of contrast.

Okay, we can do better than that.

We asked journalists across the Atlantic to help us look back on the year that that was, not just the people or the events that defined it, but at the ideas that drove it.

Our closing question for 2017?

What were the ideas of the year?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hello, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

And once again, I'm here with my esteemed co-host, our editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Hi, Jeff.

Hi, Matt, and Merry Christmas.

And Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you.

You don't even have to say happy holidays anymore.

There are so many people.

No, it's actually next year.

It's going to be illegal to say happy holidays.

I can't even wish you a happy new year?

Nope, just Merry Christmas.

Dang it.

Free expression really is dying in America.

Exactly.

Now,

we are going to hear a little bit from our other esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner, in a minute.

But she is not with us in person this week.

She is with us in sound.

For our last episode, that is so freaky sounding.

What you're trying to say is she's on vacation.

Yes, exactly.

That's what you're trying to say.

Yes.

For our last episode of the year, Jeff, I wanted to do something a little bit different.

Kevin Townsend, our producer, has recorded some answers from our colleagues to a question.

What are the ideas of 2017?

Not the best ideas, but the ones that resonate in some special way with this year.

Ideas that fascinate us, that challenge us, advance human progress, prevent human progress.

But

by the way,

had a great idea.

You know how we have the Aspen Ideas Festival?

We co-sponsor that.

It's not called the Aspen Good Ideas Festival.

So I was thinking that next year we pivot and just have a bad ideas festival.

I think that would be brilliant.

That'd be great.

Yes.

I think it would be more.

I think it could be really exciting.

There's quite a boundary.

It could be really strong.

It could be really bad too, but it could be really, the upside is potential.

The potential is great.

So we asked our colleagues about some ideas that in some way capture the spirit and nature of 2017.

And this, of course, is a big, broad, hairy question.

I have no idea how any of our colleagues have answered this question.

So we will listen together, along with you, the listeners, to Radio Atlantic, at what they said.

Let us start, in fact, with our esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner, who brought us an idea of the race parable as genre film.

Culturally, I thought one of the best ideas slash inventions this year was a race parable disguised as a horror movie, and I am speaking about get out.

What a great way to get people talking about the black experience without understanding they were talking about the black experience in America.

I mean, I think we,

thanks in large part to people like Tana Hasse Coates, are talking more about questions of identity and race and ethnicity in a more straightforward sort of kitchen table fashion than we ever have.

But I thought what Jordan Peele did so brilliantly is kind of give us our vitamins and I don't know that it's vitamins, but make us tackle tough subjects in an entertaining way.

And perhaps in a way that we didn't realize we were even tackling them.

So I thought that was a totally brilliant maneuver.

And I would love to see Hollywood and maybe it's just going to be independent Hollywood, but I'd love to to see more movie makers take on heavy, thoughtful issues in unpredictably entertaining ways.

Yeah, Get Out was huge this year.

And I think what was brilliant about it, as Alex says, is exactly that.

It was a lot of folks went to Get Out thinking that they were going to a thriller, just like a horror movie.

And they walked out with this.

They walked out woke.

Yes.

Extreme wokeness.

That might be overstated.

You told me never to say woke again.

I'm a favorite of free expression.

That's what you say about Nazis and Skokie, too, so that's not really a high bar.

So that was the first from Alex.

We'll hear from Alex again in just a few minutes.

Next, let's go to Uri Friedman, who is our staff writer who covers global issues.

Uri is going to tell us about

history.

When I think of 2017, I think of the beginning of history.

And here's what I mean by by that.

After the Cold War, this little-known State Department official named Francis Fukuyama proposed a theory, and he famously called it the end of history.

And the idea was, you know, humanity is leading to an endpoint of liberal capitalist democracy.

The wars of ideology are over and the West has won.

I think Fukuyama at the time thought he was describing a new rule.

But I think what the past year has shown is that he was actually describing an exception.

We're seeing the return of kind of national competition, pitched national rivalry, and the resurgence of kind of a populist nationalism.

We're seeing, you know, organizations like Freedom House talk about how democracy is in retreat around the world.

And we're seeing these democratic institutions and norms that we often took for granted being challenged.

You don't have to look any further than

declining trust in the news media and this concept of fake news being thrown around by political leaders who don't like the coverage they're receiving.

We are at a moment right now, I think, where

not only are democratic institutions buckling, but we're also seeing the renewed talk of nuclear war, this time between the U.S.

and North Korea.

I was at an event recently where H.R.

McMaster, Trump's national security advisor, said, you know what?

Geopolitics are back with a vengeance.

The holiday from history after the Cold War is over.

And I think what we're finding is we're feeling like historical forces beyond our control are shaping the future in ways that we haven't felt in a while.

And that's why I see that as like the beginning of history, or maybe even more precisely, the resurgence of history.

So, the interesting thing about Fukuyama is that

for those people like Ori who've read to the end, Fukuyama actually undermines this whole thesis by noting that humans are allergic to boredom in a kind of way.

And that history, he predicts, might just get started again because

we find liberal orderly democracy just stultifying and we like chaos and conflict and big ideas and causes worth fighting for and so Fukuyama does a very interesting thing and he doesn't get credit for it he basically says he he basically builds for himself an escape hatch which he says I don't know after a while maybe history will just restart itself because we're all so bored with the end state so the end state in fact is not an end state at all and and I think that's where we're at Orwell wrote, when Orwell wrote a review of

Orwell's review of Mein Kampf is very interesting.

It makes the same point.

He said, you know, the truth is, trying to explain Hitler's popularity, he says, truth is, sometimes people like big marching bands and battles and rallies and fighting

and drama.

And as the Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Chris Hedges put it, war is a force that gives us meaning.

All right.

Next, we're going to hear from Adrian Green, the managing editor of The Atlantic, who is going to talk about politics and pop culture.

An idea of 2017 is politics weaving its way into the core of all of these areas of pop culture, be that film and TV with the sexual assault allegations against people like Harvey Weinstein in sports with Colin Kaepernick and the protests and his inability to find work after that.

There are a bunch of instances like the presidency of Donald Trump that has, you know, this incredible entertainment and pop cultural element of of it because he was a former reality star.

Yeah, Jeff,

has the line between politics, the blurred, always blurred line between politics and pop culture, been as blurry as it feels at the moment?

No,

as she was talking, I was thinking this, that there's something interesting about my Twitter feed and other people's Twitter feeds, right?

Which is that it's all a mashup now.

It's culture and politics and people from culture commenting about politics, politicians weighing in on culture.

It's all there's this big oneness to everything.

And I actually thought

when culture, when popular culture especially had been depoliticized in the 80s, the 90s, I regretted that.

I wanted more Gil Scott Herons coming in with some consciousness, saying something interesting.

Now it's

now sometimes I just like to watch a movie or listen to something that doesn't touch on this overwhelming reality.

Yeah.

Or

reality show,

as the case may be.

Good point.

All right.

Next, we're going to hear from Andrew McGill, our senior product manager and data journalist, who's going to talk about the internet as a utility.

So I think one of the defining ideas has been the question as to whether the internet is a utility or not.

This question came up late last year and early this year over Facebook and the role that it played in our election and people asking whether a social media company should have the power to essentially help determine who our president is without facing extra regulation because of that influence.

There's also this question of net neutrality and viewing the internet legally as a utility, like you would view it as a power company or a water company.

That's kind of come to a head just this month with the FCC deciding to do away with regulation that would have regulated internet service providers more heavily and essentially forced them to treat all traffic equally online.

So, this question as to how we relate to the internet, is it just some sort of kind of amorphous entity that's vaguely capitalistic and doesn't deserve or doesn't need to be regulated, exists?

Or is it actually an organism and

a structure that is so important to our lives that it really cries out for closer scrutiny and closer control.

This has been a long-standing question that I feel like is essentially unresolved.

Is the internet at this point

a utility?

It has become such a fact, a dominant factor in people's lives.

It's like the electric company.

If the electric company had no oversight and no transparency and it could cut your electricity off whenever it wanted and wouldn't tell you why and then just charged you random prices every day.

Yeah.

And this was the year.

strong feeling about this, but this is the year where its dominance was just made evident in domain after domain after domain.

Yep.

And I'm curious as we look ahead what the implications of that are.

Dystopia leading to apocalypse.

Merry Christmas.

Speaking of dystopia and apocalypse, let's hear next from Julie Beck, whose idea of the year concerns facts and whether or not they actually matter.

One of the big ideas of 2017 for me was not that facts don't matter, but that facts often don't get people to change their mind.

Facts will retrench people, but it's also that facts are kind of beside the point sometimes.

When people are talking about facts, they are a lot more often talking about their identity using the language of facts.

So, you know, when like Donald Trump's supporters supporters believe things that he says that are provably false, it doesn't really matter, like getting them to believe that he is wrong does not matter.

Even if they take the information, absorb the information,

are comprehended and can repeat it back to you.

That information comprehension was never the problem.

It was always about using that fact as a way to signal that they side with him.

Yeah, this always reminds me of the quote by the legendary psychologist William James, or it's been credited to the legendary psychologist William James.

Sometimes people think they're thinking when all they're doing is rearranging their prejudices.

I think it's particularly material to us journalists, given our mission, our founding principle of the search for truth and facts, of finding and presenting the truth to the public.

That

we have never, I think as an industry, have had to confront that question as much as we have this year.

Okay, fine.

We've got the facts.

We all know what they are.

But to what end?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, I don't even know if we all think that we have the same set of facts.

I mean,

this is the core of the problem, right?

That there are some people who seem to be rejecting the idea that there's empirical reality, observable, quantifiable reality.

I get this question all the time.

You know, what does the Atlantic do to convince the 30, 40% of Americans who seem to be living in the alternative fact universe?

How do you bring them back to data?

I mean, real data, not their fake data.

I don't know the answer.

And I think

I don't want to spend 2018 finding the answer.

There's a flip side to that question, too, which is: how do we serve our loyalists, the core, perhaps even our listeners, who take the facts that we present and use them as a way to reinforce the ideas and identities that they already hold.

That

all of us, just human tendencies and thinking, are we going to choose among the facts that best reinforce our conceptuality?

But we all do that.

I want the Atlantic to present all of the facts, and I want different interpretations of those facts, and I want it to be argued out.

That's the way democracy is saved by having space for legitimate argument.

But at a certain point, you got to come down and say, this is the tax cut.

This is how much you will save if you're in this category.

And let's now debate whether this is right or wrong, or the best use of our money, or the best policies.

But it's not been a great year for facts.

It's been a great year for journalism, weirdly, but it hasn't been a great year for facts.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So, let us hear from our colleague, our staff writer Ed Yong, about another profession that is concerned with the quest for truth, scientists.

So, I think for me, it's about scientists really grappling with

their role in politics and the way in which politics impinges upon their work and their lives.

And I think the recent election of Donald Trump made that very clear.

Now we have this new administration that is

far less charitable to the scientific enterprise than the previous one.

There have been talks of massive cuts in funding for lots of scientific agencies.

There are signs that the administration takes a dim view of the very importance of empirical evidence and has put people without qualifications in important positions, has appointed climate sceptics and deniers to high ranking positions in climate agencies.

So I think a lot of scientists have felt under threat.

And I think it's mobilized a lot of them to take political action in a way that they never have before, to get involved in protests, to actually run for office themselves.

I've written stories about several people who have chosen to run for office in 2018, largely on the back of this wake-up call generated by the incoming administration.

And I think a lot of this came to a head with the March for Science, which took place earlier this year, a mass demonstration where scientists got to stand up and sort of unitedly find this political voice.

I remember being on the march on the day, and

it was quite unlike a lot of other protests.

People didn't sort of chant naturally.

Everyone was sort of a little bit awkward.

And then, as the day went on and people actually got on with the business of marching, rather than hearing lots of talks about marching,

I think they actually gained a lot more confidence.

It was really interesting to see just a group of people sort of starting to quite literally find their political voice.

It's interesting.

I feel like there's been a way in which the domain of science has come to think of itself as being almost outside of politics.

But I question how much that's true.

I feel like I observe more and more scientists as ed states finding a political identity and trying to find a voice within the political system.

But science, like sports, like pop culture, has always been political.

So, next, we're going to hear from our education editor, Aaliyah Wong, who left us a voicemail from the airport on her trip to Hawaii.

Hey, Matt and Jeff, this is Aaliyah.

I apologize in advance for all the background noise.

I am currently at JFK awaiting my flight for beautiful Hawaii, where I'll be spending the next few weeks back home for the holidays.

I know my life is really hard.

Anyways, one of the ideas that really stood out to me this year was that there's this really rigid dichotomy between school choice, whether it's charter schools, private schools, vouchers, open enrollment systems, and so on, and public education.

I think this is a year in which it really became crystal clear that these two are seen as being at odds with one another.

even maybe you know in war against one another.

And it's not new to 2017.

This has certainly been a battle that's been waged for a number of years, but I think this split really did seem to emerge this year in a really entrenched way.

I think that's because of Betsy DeVos in many ways, who, you know, Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, she's really positioned herself as an advocate of school choice, as someone who, in the eyes of many teachers and public education advocates, wants to annihilate public education.

And so in turn, she has really added fuel to the fire.

I'm not saying this dichotomy between school choice and public education is real, that it needs to or should exist, but it's certainly been a very real perception this year.

All righty, aloha.

I mean, I'm just going to say, I mean, to this point, if our listeners haven't, then they've got to listen to your interview with Nicole Hannah Jones on our other show, The Atlantic Interview.

Yes, they should.

Yes, they absolutely should.

And while they're at it, if you haven't listened to our What Are Private Schools For episode, what are public schools for episode on Radio Atlantic?

What are private schools for and what are public schools for?

Yeah, absolutely.

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next we'll hear from joe pinsker who has been thinking about monopolies.

One big idea in the world of what I cover is something that economists refer to as market power, which is basically referring to the problem of monopolies, right?

So if a company has an unfair amount of power, they can, for instance, raise prices as high as they want, and nobody can really do anything about it.

And of course, the idea that it's dangerous to have companies be too powerful isn't at all new to 2017.

But what is new is that there are a lot of economists researching this question.

There was a big paper published by two economists named Jan, and damned if I can pronounce their last names, but they were making the case that

this consolidation of power is something that actually might be responsible for a lot of the problems in the economy of 2017.

So, income inequality, stagnant wages, productivity growth not picking up as people want it to.

It's an unresolved question at this point, but the interesting thing is that it's being asked.

And one of the sectors that this is applied most often to is tech.

There are all these big platforms like Facebook and Google, and they're so dominant.

And there are obviously other political concerns this year that made people focus on these companies a lot more and maybe be skeptical of them.

But their market power was to an extent shaping that because there really just isn't an alternative to using Facebook, for instance.

So it is a big problem if it does bad things for society.

And looking ahead to next year, one of the big questions I'll have is whether politicians, as they're campaigning for midterms, will focus on this issue.

And if they do, I'll be very interested to see how the successful ones will do it because this idea of market power is a really abstract one, but it's also one that research is saying might actually turn out to be a pretty big problem.

Yeah.

As I listen to Joe speak, I kind of wonder if there's a tension between these two notions, Andrew's idea of the big tech companies as utilities and Joe's

summoning the argument that they're monopolies.

I guess they can be both.

I mean, Mobel was a utility that was broken up as a monopoly.

Right, right.

I just feel like like we're in the impossibility of this situation.

Facebook is the behemoth.

It's the behemoth.

Everybody voluntarily attaches themselves to Facebook.

There's no

local electric company to provide me electricity.

I just feel like we're in an impossible moment.

This always makes me, what always makes me laugh is the idea that we're under threat from government surveillance.

It doesn't make me laugh because I think we are under threat from government surveillance.

There is that that possibility.

But at the same time, we worry all day long about the government spying on our email or on our texts.

We willingly turn over our privacy to companies, Facebook and Google in particular,

for whom we are their products.

You know, and

the limit of the utility model here is

that we don't have this experience yet of a company that has turned companies that have turned us into the things that they sell to other people.

Sounds very matrix-y, and it feels a little bit matrixy.

I think this is just the beginning.

This is yet another example of the technology enabling things to happen for which we are not ready.

Yeah.

For another perspective on technology, we're going to hear from a former technology reporter who is now the editor of theatlantic.com, Adrienne LaFrance.

One of the big ideas that I've been thinking about in 2017 is actually not a new idea, but I think it's newly appreciated by people, which is this idea of algorithmic accountability, something that we talked a lot about in the abstract, sort of what does it mean when algorithms are the ones surfacing information for us and sort of shaping and contextualizing the world for people who rely on Facebook largely for their informational streams.

That's something that people have talked about for a while, but I think only in 2017 have the stakes become clear to many major decision makers and sort of people who are in a position to change it.

So, the thing I'll be looking for in the year to come is how this conversation continues,

how lawmakers think about accountability for tech companies in this regard, is one.

And also, just how the tech companies themselves address the very real questions that people have about how algorithms rule our lives.

Yeah.

How do you hold an algorithm accountable?

I think about algorithms all the time because we,

as a mainstream media company we we live on we live on someone else's farm right now to a large degree and uh

you know it's amazing to me the power of the keepers of the algorithms who all live within a 30 mile radius of each other south of san francisco right go to the same restaurants kids go to the same school they're they're they're they're shaped by the same forces and their algorithms, which are humanly influenced algorithms, obviously, are shaping our lives in ways that we don't truly understand.

And at this point, they are so complex that I think the engineers themselves are near the limits of how I'm actually convinced that there's a guy in the basement of Facebook named like Sven or something who has a bunch of dials and could like open up a spigot and, you know, turn off traffic to different websites and turn it on.

They're just a guy.

It would be a guy because Silicon Valley is sexist, so it wouldn't be a female engineer.

Oh, man.

Speaking of sexist

female engineers, California, let's hear from Lenika Cruz, who has some thoughts on the moment that we are in at hashtag me too.

I think you can't really talk about the world of entertainment and culture in 2017 without talking about this huge discussion we're seeing with about sexual misconduct in the workplace.

And this conversation was triggered back in October by reports from the New York Times, the New Yorker, on allegations against the Hollywood mega-producer Harvey Weinstein, but the story hasn't really ended with him.

While the stories themselves have been shocking, I think others, including a lot of women, have been even more surprised to see how powerful accused predators are being met with such swift consequences now, losing their jobs, being kicked off the boards of their companies, off their movies, being denied office.

And I think it's been surprising because the norm for so long has been that credible accusations of sexual misconduct have been overlooked and forgiven and forgotten, forgotten, at least in the court of public opinion.

And I think if there's a broad takeaway from this so-called Weinstein moment and the Me Too movement, it's that this is much more than a moment.

And I think the outpouring of stories from women about sexual misconduct have been a powerful reminder that this is really a systemic issue.

The word complicity comes to mind and that crosses the lines of gender and race and sexuality and certainly industries.

And we've seen like political institutions and media organizations and huge companies and movie sets and TV sets all grappling and reckoning with this issue.

I think there was a very real sense of doubt early on that this wasn't going to last and people, there was going to be some sort of backlash coming and the tide would turn.

But I don't think anyone's doubting at this point now at the end of 2017 that something really big has been shaken loose and it's going to be something we're going to be thinking about going into 2018.

Aaron Powell, maybe the biggest idea of the year is that men can't do all the things that men thought they could do.

Absolutely.

Or some men can't do.

A lot of us, I speak for us here, a lot of us

don't do those things.

Yeah.

But a lot of people, especially in domains in which they were the king, a restaurant kitchen, the set of a morning talk show, TV show,

where they ruled the roost, it was just...

De rigueur.

It was just accepted that they would operate as not-so-benevolent dictators.

And I think these stories are going to continue to come out for a while.

But I have to imagine that men in powerful positions today

are

trying in new ways to check themselves before they wreck themselves.

Here's hoping.

Here's hoping.

I don't know.

Maybe humans are humans.

This is one of the questions of the moment.

Is this a moment or has a norm shifted?

Oh, will this not be

a shift?

Don't you think?

Yeah, I hope so.

I hope so.

I think so many women are so scared still to come out and say what's going on, but there are now many more role models than there were even two months ago, three months ago.

We got three more.

So

next, we're going to hear from a listener.

We threw the call out to listeners, and we had a listener call in from Fort Lauderdale with his idea of 2017.

The article in this year's March-April issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine titled How America Lost Faith in Expertise by Tom Nichols is the most interesting idea I've read this year.

It is a provocative article about ideas themselves.

We all know that alternative facts have become popular today, but I was struck by the comment that these days, quote, ignorance is a virtue, unquote.

In this new age of nationalism, if we are all created equal, then the next logical step is that all of our ideas and quote facts are also created equally and all have equal equal weight.

Expertise

is now perceived as an elitist construct.

If you call yourself an expert, then you're automatically implying that your idea is more important than mine.

That's insulting in the populous times we live in and causes people to, quote, reject the advice of experts as a way to assert autonomy, unquote.

I wholeheartedly agree, period.

I'm a physician.

That was a great Tom Nichols piece.

The way I know it was great is because I was jealous that we didn't publish it.

And

the caller is correct.

I think about this in the framework of the quote-unquote mainstream media.

For all of our sins and faults, and there are many,

we are trained to collect information, filter out true information from untrue information.

explain it in ways that actually communicate the the core of the idea, the core of the information.

And the great flattening of

media has had benefits.

It's democratized that people can say things who couldn't have previously said things.

But we have expertise.

We do.

One of the things we're good at, we, the mainstream media, filtering out really bad ideas from the discourse.

Russia would not have been able to try to influence the election, the campaign, absent the internet, because the mainstream media would have played a filtration role.

And

that's a developed skill.

And again,

we screw up all the time,

as do doctors and lawyers and everyone else, by the way.

But there's something to be said for

10,000 hours.

There's something to be said for respecting people who have actually earned their expertise.

Yeah, expertise is a real thing.

I mean, I think that there's always a danger in overweighting expertise, in just kind of blindly deferring to.

You don't want your doctor telling you to shut up because he knows and you don't.

You want an explanation.

But I don't think that's where we are right now at this moment.

So for a penultimate clip, let's hear from Van Newkirk, who has some thoughts about healthcare.

For me, one of the big things that I think is bubbling up through 2017 and probably through 2018 as well is a resurgent call for universal health care.

I've been following this for years.

And I think you can see, although it's been hidden behind all of the repeal and reform efforts from the GOP, I think everybody's been talking about these bills that were advanced to repeal Obamacare, to

roll back the Affordable Care Act, but also on the converse, you've seen this year was one of the first times we've seen support for universal health care reach a level where it seems to be politically feasible at some point.

You've seen people respond to these rollbacks, not with acceptance, but with defiance to it.

And they've embraced the idea, the very radical idea for much of this nation's history that most insurance for most people should be covered by the government.

And I think that's a very important thing that you might miss if you only cover the repeal efforts, the obstruction efforts, if you only cover what's happening in Congress and don't talk to people.

And people, I believe, are largely coming around to the idea of some sort of universal health care.

That is the

test of seriousness now for Democrats is if you support universal health care or not.

And it does seem to be that the field of proto-2020 candidates that is developing, the one thing that seems to be in common between them is the fact that they support universal health care.

Yeah, I think one of the things that's been interesting about this moment has been how much

it feels like the healthcare approaches that the U.S.

has settled on are only tentative, that we're in a status quo at the moment, sort of a holding pattern when it comes to healthcare, but that everyone expects that the future of healthcare in the U.S.

is going to look different.

Do you think there's a technological out here?

Do you think that, well, go to this point, the democratization of medicine, that somehow we're going to get costs under control because your local CVS is going to have a full body scanner and just be able to read what's wrong with you.

And you're going to get dispensed drugs through a chute and then walk out.

I don't know.

This feels like one of those moments where the adage about technology holds true that we overestimate the

speed at which technological innovation will take root, but underestimate the effect of it in the long term.

I know a lot of adages.

Basically,

that's my expertise.

That was your major expertise.

Now, let us hear once again from our esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner, who has a thought about, among all things, special elections.

So politically, I think the special election, which granted is not an idea that came up in 2017, but was put into use.

numerous times in 2017 is a great idea, not just because I'm a political junkie, as we all are at this point, and who doesn't want more election madness even in an off off year but also because they give us a window of insight into voters feelings their desires their angers their you know retributions and um we have i think a better sense of at least what's happening at the state and local level than we usually do and and that's kind of the second part of this is for the moment a whole bunch of people from all over the country turn their eyes towards various municipalities in a way that I think actually promotes a lot of civic civic engagement.

You know, on election night a few weeks ago, the whole country was getting fluent as far as which Alabama counties leaned which way.

Now, some may say that's too granular, but anything that I think connects us with communities, especially smaller communities in parts of the country that we might not know much of anything about, I think that's fundamentally good in terms of strengthening the bonds.

between us as citizens.

It forces us to turn our eyes to parts of the country that we just don't look at anymore because of the way that national elections are conducted.

You know, blue states kind of look at blue states, but mostly they look at swing states.

Same with red states.

So much is so baked in the cake that rarely do you ever see blue state coastal liberals looking to the deep south for a win or with any amount of sort of like hope for vindication.

And

I think that's really exciting.

I mean, I think in a way it's kind of like the Massachusetts special election where you had conservatives looking towards Massachusetts and finding a win there with Scott Brown.

So special elections are good for us.

They remind us that there are 50 damn states in this union.

What if every election in the U.S.

were a special election?

Every child is a special child.

Every election is a special election.

I mean, that sense of sort of security that our politicians have because they've gerrymanded themselves into districts that are safe for years on end.

What if there was this sort of perpetual peril?

And also, what if just elections happen on a rolling basis?

Perpetual peril is a terrible idea.

What you want, I mean, the Madisonian concept is you want politicians not to have to be

subject to the whims of the mob, except rarely so that they can actually cogitate in peace, assumes a level of quality in politicians that we might not have today, though.

Yeah.

Now, Jeff, as we come to the end of our Ideas of the Year episode.

I've got no ideas.

I just have a staff.

That's true.

You're the editor-in-chief of the idea.

No, I mean, I have the,

you know, the key to being the editor-in-chief of something is to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are and then just bask in their glory.

Nevertheless, nevertheless.

Thank you for indulging me.

No,

I will indulge it.

No, I would go back to Ori Friedman a bit.

It's not.

The idea is

the idea that I've been thinking about or the...

The problem in society I've been thinking about is that the things that I thought would be perpetually true are not true.

This is a broad idea, and no human being should ever believe that just because something is true today will make it true tomorrow.

Or just because some condition obtains today, the condition will obtain tomorrow.

But our tendency, our brains trick us into thinking that the present is a profound indicator of the future.

What I'm talking about specifically, and why I referred back to Uri, is this idea that liberal democracy

the norms, not the laws, but the norms that govern political behavior in this country country are forever thus.

I think about it in this framework of Fukuyama because he does say at the end of his essay that, I don't know, maybe people get bored and we'll just chuck over liberal democracy for whatever, and then we'll start history again.

I find myself agreeing more and more with our colleague, Tana Assi Coates, who tried throughout the Obama administration to refute the Obama slash Martin Luther King vision of the world, which is that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

And he said, there's no pattern.

You know, maybe it's a circle.

Maybe it bends toward chaos.

Maybe there's no arc whatsoever.

And the big idea, I guess, if you wanted to operationalize this set of observations, the big idea is that we have to work much harder than we do to explain to the next generations why our situation here in America is not so bad, that the systems that have been built over the last 200 plus years have been continually refined and improved.

Rights have been expanded

and the norms have become settled norms.

And these are all good things.

And people who want to mess with the basic formula

are very, very dangerous.

I spent a lot of my career overseas covering countries that

don't live under the rule of law.

And I never imagined that the rule of law would be under threat in America the way I see it today.

Yeah.

Sorry for that downer.

No.

My idea of the year is also something of a downer.

So for much of the year, I've been turning over and over this story in my mind.

It unfolded in New Hampshire back in the spring and didn't draw that much attention.

In late April, a journalist at the Daily Beast reported that a New Hampshire state representative, guy in his early 30s, two-term Republican, was the founder of one of the Internet's most notorious forums for virulent misogyny and just vile misbehavior towards women.

Reddit's the Red Pill is the name of this forum.

If you've never been to this place, don't go.

I would just describe it as a haven for evangelical misogyny, a chasm of lost men, convinced that they've stumbled on some great unspoken truth about the innate inferiority of more than half of humankind.

This quote from the Daily Beast is kind of an understated, if anything, glimpse at the loathing that

this fellow expressed online.

Quote, in hundreds of online remarks, the legislator espoused a belief that women had inferior intellects and were useful only for sex.

According to his comments online, he also believed that feminists used false rape accusations as a weapon and that men should protect themselves by recording sexual encounters.

I'd known about the red pill, and I found it such a glimpse into one of the ugliest aspects of all of humanity, the way that we can just rationalize our most evil ideas to ourselves.

But then I learned that the guy who created the cesspool was an elected representative.

And the phrase that kept throbbing in my head was, they're all around us, aren't they?

They're everywhere.

Over the course of the year, though.

Okay, so I was a little bit depressing, but now you're just like invasion of the body snapshot.

But here's the turn, though.

Over the course of the year, I came to feel like that's not right.

To imagine guys like this as they,

as a them,

is in some ways to let myself and to let us off the hook.

And there's been this other phrase,

a kind of incantation that has been included in many of the pieces that we've run in the last year and change.

This is who we are.

And that's my idea of 2017.

This is who we are.

When people say this, usually they're conveying pessimism, resignation, or acceptance.

But

I think I view it as a charge.

This is who we are.

As Jonathan Larson wrote in a very different context, musical rent, there's only us, there's only this.

If this is in fact who we are, then we have both the responsibility and the agency to change it.

There's something powerful in that.

I have no idea whether or not we'll step up to that responsibility, but it is, I think, who we are.

Deep.

There is one last idea of the year that we'll play for the last time in 2017.

Oh, wait, can I say the next to last idea?

Yeah.

The next to last idea is subscribe to The Atlantic because you have to support quality journalism in 2018.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Yes.

Okay.

And you go to the last, last idea.

And the last, last best idea of 2017, I think, is a brilliant musician by the name of John Batiste stepping into a studio and recording the freaking Battle Hymn of the Republic in the best way ever.

And so, once your best idea, by popular demand, we will play the Battle Hymn of the Republic in full after the closing credits conclude.

Happy 2017.

Hmm.

Better yet, happy 2018.

Happy 2018.

Everybody.

We will see you next year.

And that'll do it for this year's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Diana Douglas and Kim Lau.

Thanks to my co-hosts, Jeff and Alex, and all the Atlantic staffers who shared their thoughts.

Burry Friedman, Adrian Green, Ed Yong, Andrew McGill, Julie Beck, Van Newkerk, Lena CaCruz, Joe Pinsker, and Adrienne LaFrance.

Thanks also to all of you who called in.

Got a thought to add?

Leave us a voicemail with your contact information.

202-266-7600.

Check us out at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most important thanks, as always, is to you for listening.

May your fortunes the year ahead exceed your grandest hopes.

We'll see you in 2018.

Lord

glory

eyes glorious of the coming of the Lord.

He is trampling, defended with red and rattling sword.

Can lose the faithful lighting of the terrible blissful.

His troop is marching on

my Lord.

Glory, glory,

hallelujah.

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

everything,

hallelujah.