It’s Always Wrong to “Wait and See”

The Left just experienced a marginal loss with disastrous consequences.

Since the election, if you’re anything like me, you’ve been mired in tactical “What now?!” conversations anchored in grief, rage, fracture, fatigue, and uncertainty. The fatigue and uncertainty often lead to sober, level-headed, adult-in-the-room assertions such as:

“We don’t know, let’s wait and see.”

“We have limited resources. We need to be efficient.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Stay the course.”

These are all wrong. Disastrously wrong. They represent wishful thinking, inexperience, and a failure to do the math.

The correct response in these moments is to do everything you can, right away, in parallel, in coalition, and in coordination.

Consider an XY graph of three things over time: harm, advantage, and cost.

The more time passes:

• the greater the harm, violence, and human toll;
• the greater their advantage, momentum, and head start;
• the greater our cost to reclaim the advantage, seize the momentum, and undo the harms; and
• the lower their cost to make things even worse.

Let’s pretend there are five potential responses, each varying in difficulty, time, and resource requirements.

Each response has vocal champions and a dedicated community. Each response has historical precedent where it has proven to work. And each response is compelled by an analysis anchored in the zeitgeist.

The key myth to dispel is that it’s possible to know, in advance, which tactical intervention will work.

We don’t and can’t know which is right. It changes every time. The other side learns and adjusts, just like we do. Synchronicity, trends, and luck all play outsized roles in eventual victories. Massive political, social, and economic moments are the result of countless and compounding variables that are impossible to unwind and understand, even in retrospect.

No one knows what will work. We only know what has and can work.

Given the uncertainty and lack of agreement, reasonable people usually arrive at the decision to try the easier things first. “Easier” can mean different things: cheaper, faster, an existing strength, already underway, more comfortable, etc. When/if the first intervention proves insufficient, they move on to the next, and so forth.

They’re hoping for this:

What actually happens is this:

There’s only one way to win by going strategy-by-strategy, tactic-by-tactic, and that’s by luck. By happening to pick the right tactical intervention at the right moment. But the cost of being wrong is too significant–in real, human terms–to leave it to chance.

We aren’t trying to win in the most efficient way. We are trying to win before the harms become irreparable and the advantage insurmountable. We need to be certain, not efficient, reasonable, trusting, precise, elegant. And that means doing this:

An effective response follows these design principles:

• Comprehensive: You need to stack as many interventions on top of each other as possible.
• Disproportionate: Your response should be outsized and premature. You need to be both early and substantial enough to withstand the impact and dispel the momentum of their advantage at some moment in the future, when they are stronger than they are now.
• Coordinated: They need to happen all at once, reinforcing each other’s strengths and holding together as a singular force. This is where you can find efficiencies.

Abandon the need for greater certainty. No clarity is coming. Do not let any more time elapse. Do not critique or attack other ideas as being wastes of time. Do it all. Right now. Before you know if it’s useful or effective. Being early and disproportionate is even more important in a resource-constrained environment.

Just start moving. Encourage each other to move. Divide the labor amongst yourselves. Talk, coordinate, and make the most of what each other are doing.

Mostly, be very, very happy if everything you did was a waste of time and energy. Celebrate that someone else was right and it turned out to be easier than or distinct from what you expected. Because that means we won. And that’s all that matters.