“If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens.” James Madison, Federalist Papers 10
I’ve reached the conclusion that Madison’s prescience warning has been fulfilled. It seems we’re not really being governed anymore. Not in the long-term, stable, future-oriented sense of that word. Instead, politics increasingly resembles day trading—all about the now, the reaction, the headline, the poll bump. Maybe the ancient Greek proverb is correct: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” Today, it seems clear that no one in government is planting such trees. They’re checking the political stock ticker every five minutes and selling the moment something spikes.
Kahneman and the Collapse of the Future
The Trump era didn’t invent this behavior, but it certainly perfected it. Watching politicians operate like emotional day traders—riding waves of outrage, fear, or triumph for immediate gain—makes me wonder whether something deeper is going on. Maybe the shift isn’t just political. Maybe it’s neurological.
Daniel Kahneman, the behavioral psychologist who won a Nobel Prize for helping us understand how our brains deal with uncertainty and value, laid the groundwork for understanding why long-term thinking is so difficult. In his framework, we operate with two systems: System 1 is fast, intuitive, emotional. System 2 is slow, deliberate, rational (Kahneman, 2011). Unfortunately, System 1 usually wins—especially in politics. People don’t respond to spreadsheets. They respond to stories and threats and certainties, even when they’re wrong.
One of Kahneman’s most important contributions was in exploring temporal discounting—our tendency to prefer immediate rewards over delayed, even when the latter are much larger (Frederick, Loewenstein, & O’Donoghue, 2002). It’s why we fail to save for retirement. It’s why we eat the donut now and promise to diet tomorrow. And it’s why climate change, infrastructure, and generational inequality are losing political battles to slogans, border walls, and performative governance. We’re biologically bad at caring about the future—so politicians stopped pretending they do.
Later research by Kahneman and colleagues also found that we tend to ignore how long an experience lasts and instead judge it by its most intense point and its ending—a concept called the peak–end rule (Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993). Applied to politics, this means we remember the drama of a policy’s rollout or its emotional climax, not its measured impact over time. This bias makes long-term governance nearly invisible—and unrewarded.
Neuropolitics: Threat, Loyalty, and the Present Moment
But it goes deeper than just preference. There’s mounting evidence from neuropolitics that brain structure correlates with political orientation. In a 2011 study, researchers at University College London found that people with conservative beliefs tend to have a larger amygdala, the part of the brain involved in processing fear and threat. Liberals, by contrast, had more gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with detecting and managing uncertainty (Kanai et al., 2011).
What does this mean in practice? It suggests that conservatives may be more attuned to immediate threats, while liberals may be more comfortable with abstract or future-oriented risk. This could explain why conservative messaging so often leans on urgency—crime, immigration, “American carnage”—while liberal messaging flounders when it leans on policy white papers or 2050 carbon targets.
Trump: A Political Operator of the Amygdala
In this light, Trump’s genius was neurological. He bypassed the rational mind entirely and went straight for the amygdala. His speeches didn’t appeal to reason or long-term benefit; they lit up the parts of the brain wired for threat detection, loyalty, and in-group/out-group processing. He wasn’t crafting legislation—he was hitting dopamine levers. And it worked.
But while that may explain voter response, the truly disturbing part is how elected officials themselves have adapted to this environment. Congress no longer legislates in the classic sense—it performs. Press conferences replace policy briefs. Cultural grievances get more airtime than zoning laws. Infrastructure is boring; banning books gets retweets. As a result, we’re in a governing feedback loop of performative short-termism, with leaders incentivized to chase clicks rather than consequences.
The Left Struggles to Sell the Future
I don’t think this is unique to one party or one country, though the Trump era has made it unmistakably visible. The left struggles, too, with delivering emotionally resonant narratives that motivate people to make sacrifices today for a better tomorrow. Climate activists speak the truth, but the truth lands like a spreadsheet: abstract, statistical, and temporally distant. “Two degrees Celsius by 2100” just doesn’t hit the same as “They’re coming to take your guns.”
Reframing the Long Term for Short-Term Minds
So how can liberals sell long-term ideas in a short-term world?
First, they need to lead with stories, not spreadsheets. Emotional narratives about real people impacted by policy work better than abstract projections. Instead of “net zero by 2050,” tell someone how their child’s asthma improved after local coal plants shut down.
Second, they must shorten the perceived timeline. Research in behavioral economics shows people are more motivated when future benefits feel closer (Trope & Liberman, 2003). “Lower energy bills next year” is more powerful than “climate resilience in 2080.”
Third, progressives can borrow from the conservative playbook by framing their values using broader moral foundations: security, loyalty, stewardship. Climate can be about patriotism. Universal healthcare can be about protecting families.
And finally, they need to mark milestones, celebrate visible wins, and make slow change feel fast—because the brain rewards feedback, not theory.
Liberals don’t need to become demagogues. But they do need to communicate like humans, not white papers.
Final Reflection: Making the Future Feel Real
So where does that leave us? Honestly, I’m not sure. But I do think that recognizing the problem is the first step. We’re not going to logic our way out of short-term politics with more data and better facts. We need stories that rewire emotional and neurological circuits—the same way populists do, but toward sustainable ends. We need to make the future feel present, tangible, urgent. Otherwise, we’ll keep trading away tomorrow for a rally today.
Sometimes I think back to the saying, “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” These days, I wonder if we’ve become a society that rips those trees up because they block the view of the press conference.
And that’s the tragedy. Not that we’ve become governed by short-term thinkers, but that some of our brains are anatomically and physiologically configured to reward them for it.
References
- Fredrickson, B. L., & Kahneman, D. (1993). Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(1), 45–55. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.1.45
- Frederick, S., Loewenstein, G., & O’Donoghue, T. (2002). Time discounting and time preference: A critical review. Journal of Economic Literature, 40(2), 351–401. https://doi.org/10.1257/002205102320161311
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C., & Rees, G. (2011). Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults. Current Biology, 21(8), 677–680. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.017
- Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2003). Temporal construal. Psychological Review, 110(3), 403–421. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.110.3.403
Confronting Mediocrity 