Kristof and WuDunn’s “Tightrope”: an Essential Book

“Whether one agrees with none, some, or all of their policy prescriptions, Tightrope approaches the status of a must-read.“

The connection between American politics and reality has been fraying for some time. Sizable segments of both the Right and the Left have been openly flirting with unreality more and more. In the wake of George Floyd’s death this past summer, some on the Left advocated the patently absurd policy of police abolition. This fall, much of the Right has descended into laughable (albeit dangerous) conspiracy theorizing regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Time will tell whether our cross-ideological foray into unreal politics will continue to proliferate and usher in real-world, truly destructive consequences. As Ross Douthat recently wrote at The New York Times: “…it’s reasonable to wonder how long this can go on—whether dreampolitik and realpolitik can continue permanently on separate tracks, brushing up against each other from time to time without a serious collision, or whether eventually the dreamworld narratives will force a crisis in the real one.”

Whatever the ultimate consequences may be, the blame for American politics and reality’s descent into breakup territory does not reside solely with left-wing activists or the Republican Party. Many of the key institutions that inform and shape the terms of our political debate—like newspapers, television media, and academia—have also played a most unhelpful role. By bending to certain capital-N Narratives—like woke orthodoxies on the Left and “Trump can do no wrong” knee-jerk thinking on the Right—these institutions have also weakened their grip on truth and reality and have helped push citizens and politicians to do the same.

To regain trust in one another and our political system, Americans of all partisan and ideological persuasions must wean themselves off the dopamine rushes that they derive from social distancing themselves from reality—from simplistic policy thinking and demonizing the other side without reckoning with the potential merits of their values and principled policy stances. The only way to begin ridding ourselves of binary thinking and “simplism” is by elevating examples of those who are already doing so. To once more reckon with our political and socioeconomic realities as they are and not as we wish them to be, we must turn to those who are expending the time and effort to do precisely that—who are engaging with the real world.