Indispensable Newsletter #7

Great to see you again!

It’s been a busy summer, and I’m excited to catch up with all of you.

In this issue, I dive into how the Republican nominees are shaping up ahead of the 2024 Presidential election, my wonderful experience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and a roundup of some of the great things I’ve been reading and watching.

Let's get started!

Deep Dive: Primaries 2024: Win at All Costs

“Great ambition is the passion of a great character,” Napoleon said. “Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.”

Ambition can be a wonderful thing. See, for example, the excellent book The Arc of Ambition by James Champy and my friend Nitin Nohria, which argues that ambition is central to most human achievements. Ill-directed ambition, however, can be a dangerous thing—and not just because it might mean that you end up in Slytherin. As the candidate field shapes up ahead of the 2024 Presidential election, it seems like the Republican Party may have a problem of MacBethian proportions.

It’s become clear to me over the last few years that very little is driving too many Republican leaders other than the desire to win. Party leaders will sell out just about anyone—including their own families.

On the road to the 2016 election, Republican candidate Donald Trump made pointed (and absurd) attacks against Texas Senator Ted Cruz, including accusing Cruz’s father of aiding John F. Kennedy’s assassination, criticizing Cruz’s wife’s physical appearance, and threatening to “spill the beans” about her on Twitter.

How did Cruz respond? By endorsing Trump in the general election.

Even though we’ve had plenty of time to process exactly what happened during the Trump regime, it seems like Republicans are still unwilling to distance themselves from The Donald in any meaningful way for fear of being alienated.

Take Mike Pence, for example, the former Vice President who threw his hat into the ring last month. Pence’s announcement was not a surprise—he’s basically been ramping up to a presidential run since he left office—but his motives are a bit of a head scratcher.

It’s impossible to forget that Pence’s largest moment came on January 6, when a mob of attackers, urged on by Trump, stormed the Capitol chanting “hang Mike Pence.” Yet except for a few jabs at this year’s Gridiron Dinner—which is typically a humorous affair—Pence has not been particularly critical of Trump’s hand in the January 6th attacks.

Few experts outside of Pence’s team think he has a snowball’s chance to take the nomination. Polls have him hovering around 5 percent, while Trump commands 10 times that. So why would a leader be so willing to take such abuse in exchange for the dubious honor of coming in ninth in the Iowa caucuses, far behind someone who literally tried to have him killed?

The answer is that Pence—along with the majority of Republican hopefuls—will do anything to win. There’s no value other than ambition that is animating these candidates.

You could argue that this is what voters want. After all, 75 percent of Republican primary voters are supporting candidates who want to pardon the January attackers. But while it’s true that followers choose their leaders, their choices are also shaped by their leaders. It’s a political science concept called “elite signaling:” Most voters do not follow politics closely, so a lot of what they think is acceptable and reasonable behavior is driven by signaling from their leaders.

If you look at the Republican Party’s elite signaling right now, the real messaging is “nothing matters except winning.” Candidates are fine with having their families attacked or their lives threatened, and they don’t care as long as it advances their power.

This scares me. It should scare all of us. A significant portion of the country is selecting candidates whose entire skill set appears to be telling their base what they want to hear. This radicalizes the base further, and suddenly we have a House Republican majority where Marjorie Taylor Greene is considered a leader instead of an embarrassment.

It’s not entirely surprising. Republican strategy in the last 20 years has tended to lean toward talking big and governing small. Ron DeSantis and his mission to “destroy Leftism” is a great example of this. His support doesn’t derive from policy (except abortion); it’s about symbolism and provocation. Disney will likely pants him in court because the goal of his policies wasn’t the result—it was the rhetoric the policies produced.

The reason this strategy has been successful is that by and large, Republican voters are broadly conservative and narrowly liberal. Studies show they are in favor of cutting government spending and intervention, but when it comes to defunding specific programs, they are against it. Republican voters like the idea of massive change, but few support the steps necessary to accomplish that vision. The changes their leaders are pushing for are symbolic.

The problem is that when you rally your base to care about nothing but symbols and rhetoric, the leadership selection process is fundamentally hollow. You get candidates who are empty vessels, whose only response to “you’re trying to kill me” or “you’re attacking my wife” is submission.

So what’s the way forward for the Republicans? It would take a fundamental shift toward getting things done.

I have my differences with Winston Churchill, but in May, 1940, when Germany was on the verge of defeating the Allied forces, Churchill didn’t address the British public by saying this is going to be easy and we’re going to win. He said, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

The truth is that the test of a leader is not just their ability to win. It’s their ability to tell people what they don’t want to hear and get them to go along—a concept best embodied by former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, when she said “A leader takes people where they want to go; A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.”

And when it comes to candidates like Pence—if they really wanted to make a difference — they’d be better off following in the footsteps of Carter’s husband. Jimmy Carter wasn’t a very good president, but he’s spent every waking moment since he left office bettering humanity. That would channel ambition in a way that bettered all of us.

In the Arena

Aspen Ideas Festival

I was deeply honored to be a part of this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival! Not only did I get the chance to give a talk on the concepts in my book, Picking Presidents, but I also met some of the best and brightest minds our country has to offer.

Here are two things that really struck me:

1–It was really noticeable how much emphasis they put on making the festival more bipartisan. I, for example, had a wonderful - and frank - conversation with former Arizona governor Doug Ducey, one that’s continued since.

2–Given how long the festival must take to put together, I was surprised to see so many presentations centered around the future of AI.There has been a huge recent wave of attention and hype surrounding AI, but it’s clearly been building for a long time.

My takeaway from these presentations was that many of us are thinking about AI the wrong way. We are asking when AI will be as smart as a person instead of understanding how it will think DIFFERENTLY than the human brain.

We’re already seeing remarkable effects. For example, Google Senior Vice President James Manyika said that in the near future, most people should not bother learning how to code because AI is already just as good at writing code as Google’s average coder. That blows my mind!

All in all, it was a wonderful initiation to the festival, and I can’t wait to go back next year.

Mukunda's Media: What I'm Reading, Watching, and Listening to

The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey

This series, collaboratively written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pen name James S. A. Corey, is by far one of the best mashups of sci-fi and politics I’ve ever read. The nine novels and nine short stories won a Hugo Award for best series in 2020, and it was made into a TV series that ran for six seasons. I’ve never seen the show — but the books are so good that it’s hard to see how the show could live up to them.

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