A First Principles Approach to American Democracy
What Physicists and Entrepreneurs can teach us about securing American Democracy
For the next seven months of the 2024 election season, each week and day most Americans across the political spectrum will sink into pessimism, mired in fear of what their fellow citizens will do, worried about “losing American Democracy.”
But what if our commonly-held truths about American democracy’s peril were based on the wrong foundations? Most focus on American democracy’s ills concerns its political institutions: state electoral boards, federal agencies, political party nominations, mass media manipulation, and the courts. Yet this institutional friction, while problematic, is a symptom not the cause. Widespread distrust in our elections, for example, did not begin with Trump’s prevarications in 2020 and 2016; in 2004, 49% of Democrats suspected their votes were not properly counted.
Something deeper is wrong. Gaining insight – and finding solutions – demands a different approach.
As a social entrepreneur tackling environmental dangers, I often rely on methods I learned as a physicist. These methods are not technical equations, but rather first principles thinking: decomposing problems to their most important and most basic features. The methods that physicists – and entrepreneurs trained to think like physicists – use can help Americans think anew about our democracy’s instabilities.
Physicists are both famed and derided for reducing anything, whether a cow or an airplane, to a sphere. Such simplifications, however, illuminate key truths. Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Isaac Newton all made breakthroughs with basic thought experiments about time, probability, and gravity. Richard Feynman, one of America’s leading 20th-century scientists, prided himself on teaching students to approach all problems from first principles.
Image: John von Neumann
This approach pays practical rewards. Airborne radar, among other inventions, exists thanks to it. In November 1940, before America entered World War II, leading American physicists gathered at MIT to develop a radar system that could fit inside an airplane. These physicists initially used sophisticated math they’d been trained in. But they paused to ask foundational questions about what problem needed solving, and they rapidly identified the challenge was different than they first thought. What mattered was integrating nine pieces of hardware, seven of which already existed, into a working prototype. Within two months, their radar system sent and received signals across the Charles River. Airplane-based radar was born. Allied planes began sinking more than 40 U-boats per month, and Germany withdrew its remaining fleet from the North Atlantic, clearing the way for the Allied liberation of Europe.
The approach taken by the Jasons, provides another illustration. A group of eminent American scientists, the Jasons meet every summer to address urgent national defense problems. Since their foundation sixty years ago, the Jasons have, in four-month research projects, advanced solutions in: submarine communication, missile defense, nuclear test ban treaties, climate change, advanced nuclear reactors, biophysics, radioactive shielding, and many classified topics. How do the scientists solve complex problems in fields they barely know? They gather insight from experts, apply the fundamental laws of science, and quickly shed new light on problems.
First principles thinking is also an approach embraced by leading entrepreneurs (many of them adapting physicists’ methods). Frank Slootman, serial entrepreneur and CEO of $60-billion tech company Snowflake attests that whenever he receives a proposal, instead of rubber stamping it, he asks what to everyone else feels like painfully basic questions that slow progress. In the end, these questions provide new insight and spark better solutions. Slootman believes: “the most valuable leaders are those who… can set aside their experience when necessary, apply first principles, and think through situations in their elementary form.”
Similarly, the 21st-century boom in solar panels on American homes occurred because entrepreneurs asked foundational questions. Twenty-five years ago, only the wealthiest Americans could afford solar panels, and so just several thousand homes had them. Many businesses sought technological breakthroughs to decrease panel costs, but several entrepreneurs accepted the costs as a given. Instead, they identified the problem not as ‘expensive technology’ but rather as ‘a high upfront cost.’ This subtle distinction led to the power purchase agreement, a financial solution that made rooftop solar accessible to the middle class. Today, solar panels produce power atop four million American homes.
By identifying foundational truths that challenged the general wisdom, these scientists and entrepreneurs solved urgent social problems. Americans would do well to learn from their example.
We must disenthrall ourselves from the myopic focus on political institutions, and instead start from basics. Democracy is a civilization of free people voting their leaders into power.
When citizens wish to remain united as one nation, they will.
When they fear each other as rival factions, they will tear their country apart. Each citizen has a personal decision to make, every day, whether to remain committed to their country’s democratic endeavor. The problem of American democracy is in the minds of the American people themselves.
The solution therefore points us towards analyzing not political institutions but rather the American people’s thoughts, words, norms, and actions – the daily values that sustain or erode their affection for American democracy. This analysis requires an interdisciplinary approach across domains that can teach us what’s inside citizens’ heads. Psychology research like the Stanford Prison experiment shows us the human proclivity to destructive in-group behavior. Sociological studies like Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1831 America tour reveal the necessity of high-frequency group problem-solving to build trust. Political philosophy and history demonstrate that humans’ behaviors within democracy don’t change: even in the fourth century BCE, Aristotle’s study of 158 governments revealed that faction is the preeminent danger to democracy and that fostering a culture that loves its democracy is its greatest bulwark.
Image: Aristotle
These insights point us to the centrality of Americans’ shared political values. More than 80% of Americans of both political parties want to take care of the poor and expect people to support themselves. Large majorities want their leaders to find practical solutions to the country’s problems. The facts evince that Americans share a desire for an Equality of Dignity, for the Agency of Free Individuals, and for an Effective Association. Were Americans to actually live these values, they would create an impenetrable common ground upon which their republic would stand—and that no President, Supreme Court justice, or party boss could degrade.
Americans who love their democracy, therefore, should concentrate on their own minds.
Each citizen can deny rage-inducing leaders and media the profits they earn from manipulating her emotions into clicking, watching, doom scrolling, and following. Each citizen can instead master listening to the life story of an individual with whom they disagree. In doing this, we affirm our fellow citizen’s equal dignity and agency, and they in turn feel affirmed.
By practicing their shared political values, Americans secure their democracy.