Why Broken Feedback Loops Keep Winning, in Politics and in the Mind

Jun 28, 2026

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The Strange Power of Systems That Mean Well but Learn Badly

What if the most dangerous force in politics is not malice, but a well-intentioned system that cannot learn?

That sounds like a psychological claim, but it may be the best way to understand both our inner lives and the last decade of American politics. The mind contains parts that genuinely want to help us, yet are so clumsy they keep repeating the same error. They do not get feedback, so they double down on what failed. Politics works the same way when parties, coalitions, and cultures respond to pain by choosing the loudest available story rather than the most accurate one.

That is why Trumpism was never just one thing. It was not merely a set of policies, not merely a cultural revolt, and not merely a personality cult. It was a feedback event: a moment when large numbers of people concluded that the existing system was not listening, not correcting, and not learning. In that environment, even a flawed and often toxic response can look like relief, because it at least feels like motion.

The deeper question connecting all of this is simple: what happens when institutions, ideologies, and personal habits all stop receiving usable feedback? The answer is rarely collapse. More often it is something more interesting and more dangerous: repeated error, amplified by confidence, mistaken for strength.

The mind has troublesome parts that want the best for you, but are wildly dumb. That is not just a charming psychological insight. It is a miniature theory of history. The anxious part of the mind tries to keep you safe by making you avoid everything. The angry part tries to protect your dignity by making you attack everything. The shameful part tries to prevent rejection by making you hide. Each part has a sincere motive, but a defective model of the world.

Now translate that into politics. A coalition can also be sincere and stupid at the same time. It can identify a real problem, like outsourcing, wage stagnation, cultural dislocation, crime, family decline, or elite contempt, and then attach itself to a response that is partial, theatrical, or self-defeating. The more feedback it gets from fear and outrage, the less it needs correction. That is how a movement can be both diagnostically sharp and strategically reckless.

Trump understood this instinctively. He was not the first politician to notice that parts of the country felt abandoned, but he was unusually good at compressing multiple grievances into one emotional object. Outsourcing to China, demographic change, collapsing birth rates, the sense that the country was no longer being governed for ordinary people, all of it got folded into a single story of betrayal. That story had real explanatory power. It also had a malignant element because it offered emotional coherence without intellectual discipline.

The most powerful political messages are often not the truest ones. They are the ones that convert scattered pain into a single, actionable feeling.

That is why people who dismissed Trump as purely demagogic missed part of the story, while people who praised him as purely corrective missed the rest. He really did connect to economic and social grievances that elite politics had underestimated. But he did so in a way that made the grievances easier to feel and harder to solve. That is the classic signature of a bad feedback loop: a response that is rewarded for intensity, not for accuracy.

1970s Ghosts, Modern Politics

One of the most revealing ideas in this whole debate is that the 1970s briefly came back.

That is not just a clever historical comparison. It is a model of why political coalitions change. For years, many people assumed the old crises were gone for good. Crime had been tamed. Inflation had been subdued. The cultural radicalism of the 1970s had been replaced by a more managerial, post ideological politics. If that were permanently true, the right would need a forward looking agenda focused on growth, family formation, and institutional repair.

Then the world started to resemble the old world again. Crime spiked. Police retrenched. Inflation returned. Cultural radicalism reappeared in new language and new forms. In that environment, a politics that seemed backward looking suddenly looked predictive. People were not voting for a full theory of the future. They were reacting to the sensation that the old unresolved problems had returned, and that the people in charge either could not see it or would not name it.

This is the political version of an internal alarm system gone haywire. A healthy alarm should wake you only when there is danger. A broken one can go off too often or not at all. But when it does go off in a world that already feels unstable, it becomes persuasive even if it is crude. The same thing happened with Trump. He did not build a pan ethnic working class majority. He boosted one segment of the coalition, especially white working class voters, and won in the right states. But then the later chaos of the first term and the early Biden years made his framework feel, to many people, less like a tantrum and more like a diagnosis.

That is the puzzle: a bad messenger can become more credible when reality starts resembling his warnings. Not because the messenger was right in full, but because the world became legible through his vocabulary.

Why Running the Economy Hot Was Easier Than Rebuilding It

If feedback loops are the hidden structure here, economics is where the consequences become concrete.

The first Trump term did not produce the sweeping industrial reordering some hoped for. Steve Bannon imagined a right wing New Deal, with big infrastructure and a rebuilt working class. Instead, the more conventional supply side wing largely won. Tax cuts happened. Infrastructure became a joke. The administration ran the economy hot, which is a strategy, but not a transformation.

That matters because it reveals a deeper truth about political ambition: systems prefer low friction moves over high coordination moves. Cutting taxes is easy relative to rebuilding institutions. It rewards donors, satisfies ideological reflexes, and produces a visible win. Industrial policy, community reconstruction, and family renewal are harder. They require sustained competence, trust, and administrative seriousness. Those things are exactly what broken systems lack.

At the same time, the economy itself changed. Working class Americans were doing better in the 2010s and early 2020s than they had in the George W. Bush era. Upper middle class professionals were no longer pulling away at the same pace. Inflation made recent years painful, but the longer arc was not simply one of unbroken decline. That means something important: the case for purely activist redistribution is weaker than it once appeared, while the case for competence, dynamism, and selective state capacity is stronger.

This creates a paradox for the right. A populist right can be intellectually serious about inequality and deindustrialization without becoming left wing. But if it imports the left’s assumption that the main task is to redistribute rather than to build, it risks becoming a dead end. Tariffs become a symbol because they promise motion. Yet tariffs alone are only a door, not a destination. They can open onto industrial policy, or onto theater.

A political movement is not defined by its diagnosis alone. It is defined by whether it can convert diagnosis into institutions that actually learn.

Culture Is Not a Luxury Good, It Is the Operating System

Here is where the synthesis becomes sharper. If you think all social healing comes from policy, you will overestimate what the state can do. If you think culture alone can do everything, you will ignore the need for competent institutions. The real answer is that culture is the operating system and policy is the hardware.

A tax credit cannot resurrect communal life. A subsidy cannot manufacture trust. A speech about family values cannot substitute for a civilization that actually rewards marriage, work, childrearing, and mutual obligation. This is why some political projects feel so disappointing. They treat symptoms as if they were structures. They try to fine tune behavior with money, while the underlying norms keep eroding.

But the reverse mistake is just as dangerous. Culture does not float free of institutions. If crime is out of control, if borders are chaotic, if schools fail, if scientific ambition stagnates, if basic administration is incompetent, then cultural exhortation sounds hollow. People do not become more virtuous because they are asked nicely. They become more open to virtue when the surrounding environment makes virtue livable.

That is why the most interesting vision on the right is not a state that does everything, but a state that is highly effective inside a narrow domain. Control crime. Support breakthrough science. Make the bureaucracy competent. Create room for families, neighborhoods, churches, networks of kin, and forms of belonging that cannot be centrally engineered. In other words: stop asking government to be a substitute for a culture, and stop asking culture to survive without decent government.

This also explains the attraction of Muskian dynamism and even lunar scale dreams like terraforming Mars or Nevada. They represent a different kind of political imagination, one that celebrates building rather than merely managing decline. The appeal is not just economic. It is moral. People want to live in a society that still believes creation is possible.

The Real Lesson: Feedback Needs Truth Before It Needs Energy

The deepest connective tissue across psychology, economics, and politics is this: energy without feedback becomes compulsion.

An anxious mind repeats a protective strategy that does not work. A political movement repeats a grievance story that mobilizes but does not govern. A coalition repeats a tax and tariff argument without asking whether it is building durable institutions. Even a culture can repeat gestures of virtue while its actual patterns of family formation, trust, and civic life continue to deteriorate.

So the important question is not whether a movement is populist, conservative, or innovative. The question is whether it can hear correction. Can it distinguish between a signal and a mood? Can it tell the difference between a real constraint and a symbolic enemy? Can it admit when the old fix is not working, even if that fix once provided relief?

That is the lesson of the bad parts of the mind, and it is also the lesson of modern politics. The parts that seem most protective are often the most repetitive. They keep doing what once felt right, even after the world has changed. When that happens at scale, nations start mistaking emotional coherence for competence.

Key Takeaways

Look for feedback loops, not just ideology. If a person, party, or institution keeps repeating the same move without learning, the problem is structural, not merely rhetorical.
A good diagnosis can still produce a bad politics. Trump connected real grievances, but often in ways that intensified conflict rather than resolving it.
Do not confuse motion with progress. Tariffs, tax cuts, and culture war victories can feel decisive while leaving the underlying system unchanged.
Culture and policy are interdependent. Government cannot manufacture communal life, but it can create the conditions in which families and communities can flourish.
Prioritize competence inside narrow domains. Crime control, scientific breakthrough, and basic administrative seriousness matter more than grand promises that cannot be sustained.

The Final Reframe

The old political question was: who has the best ideas?

The better question is: who has a system that can tell when it is wrong?

That question applies to the anxious mind, to the Republican Party, to populist economics, and to the broader culture. A healthy order is not one that never errs. It is one that can receive feedback, update its model, and stop rewarding its own mistakes. The reason that matters is simple: the future will always punish systems that keep mistaking self reinforcement for wisdom.

The real divide in our time is not between left and right. It is between those who can learn and those who can only repeat.