Beware: Exploding Politics: Hybrid Solutions

When the U.S. military trains fighter pilots, it uses a concept called the OODA loop. It stands for observe, orient, decide, act. The idea is that if your ability to observe, orient, decide and act in a dogfight at 30,000 feet is faster than the other pilot’s, you’ll shoot his plane out of the sky.

.. Our OODA loop is busted right when the three largest forces on the planet — technology, globalization and climate change — are in simultaneous nonlinear acceleration. Climate change is intensifying. Technology is making everything faster and amplifying every voice. And globalization is making the world more interdependent than ever, so we are impacted by others more than ever.

.. what will be required to produce resilient citizens and communities, are forcing a politics that is much more of a hybrid of left and right.

.. The G.O.P. fell into the grip of a coalition of far-right media and money people who have created a closed loop of incentives for bad behavior and never getting to hybrid: Deny climate change. Spurn immigration reform. Shut down the Congress. Block Obamacare (even though it was based on an idea first implemented by a Republican governor).

.. because of the way congressional districts have been gerrymandered by both parties to produce either more liberal Democrats or more conservative Republicans, we’ve shifted to a system that nationally incentivizes polarization and prevents hybrid solutions.

.. What is fascinating about Donald Trump is that he is blowing up the Republican Party by offering a totally new hybrid politics. In that regard he is a pioneer — socially liberal in some ways, isolationist in others.