The Progress Report: Calm Amidst Chaos

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Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And this is our weekly progress report, where we take a look at some of the stories of the week that you probably didn’t notice in the fray of all the negative, negative, negative, negative news.

And this week in particular, On the heels of the assassination attempt of Donald Trump and all the attendant rhetoric of society coming apart at the seams. Maybe society is coming apart at the seams, but for now it is rhetoric about it. I say that only because society has yet to come apart at the seams.

There are a lot of seams. Any one of them could come apart at any given time. That doesn’t mean the whole thing is going to unravel. But I digress. The Progress Report is our attempt to look at the things that we have not been looking at. We being the collective us, obviously some of us individually have, and Emma, who remains the master of all news, has indeed.

scoured the planet for stories that most of us would have missed.

Emma Varvaloucas: So today we’re actually going to start with a story that unless you have been living under a rock, you are surely not to have missed. Um, and that is the assassination attempt on Trump. As you say, Zachary

Zachary Karabell: That blows out my introduction totally there. The story that you may have missed is actually the story that none of you missed.

Emma Varvaloucas: No one you missed, I know. The thing is, though, we have to address it, right? Like, we have been taking a Trump vacation for a really long time. A Trumpcation. We’ve been taking a Trumpcation. A Trumpcation. Yes, I think a lot of people wish that Trump himself would take a Trumpcation, but anyway, we have been taking a Trumpcation, and I think that when something like this happens, like, we cannot in good faith say that we are advocating for something that’s not just turning your face away, right?

Like, we have to meet the moment here and talk about what happened, because it’s pretty major. So, as we said before, the seams of society have not yet come apart. I think that there was that very quick worry after the assassination attempt, right? There’s always the talk afterward of, okay, this is going to pit more Americans against each other.

This is going to beget further violence. We haven’t seen that, by and large, the response, I think, from both leaders. I mean, there’s been some notable exceptions to this. Like, there was a lot of pointing at J. D. Vance, now Vice Presidential Candidate and Senator Tim Scott were doing the finger pointing, blaming game, but by and large, actually both Democrats and Republicans waved the unity flag, the calm down, the rhetoric flag, and that’s the response that seems to be coming from ordinary Americans as well, right?

Like, It’s a fundamentally decent response. It’s not like a, let’s attack each other response. So I, you know, the most basic test I think that we’ve passed and that’s might seem like a low bar, but I think it’s a very important bar.

Zachary Karabell: I would agree. I, this is, yeah, who knows if the worst had happened, whether there would have been riots and huge, like that room might’ve opened up more of a.

a violent fissure in society, but thankfully for all sorts of reasons, we avoided that particular fate. And the temperature online was certainly more heated than the temperature in real life or IRL as the, I guess the kids say these days. I think that that bears just looking at, you know, it is hard to pay attention to the dogs that don’t bark.

And that’s one of the of what we’re doing, because for all the cliched reasons that that statement is oft repeated, and therefore there’s much less news about the absence of news, or the absence of all the things that were forecast as being potentially explosive, and everything is provisional, everything is just wait and see, everything is not yet, of course, but all we do is live in the present that we know, and the future that we don’t, and the past that we think we might.

So therefore, we have this. Reality, we’re recording this on Wednesday the 17th, that for the time being, the center has hold, the society has cohered, we have survived or we’ve managed through the worst of this. And in many ways, at least for the time being, this particular event, as traumatic as it is and will continue to be, was not nearly as divisive as January 6th and not nearly as traumatic.

In the sense of the public temperature. In the days following.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. And to that end, fundamentally fortunate that it was not a successful attempt. And also, uh, fundamentally fortunate that the shooter himself, Thomas Crooks, did not seem to be, you know, like a really intensely left Democrat, for instance.

’cause we could be in an entirely different situation now, but. The facts as we know them so far is that he was a registered Republican, made a small donation to a progressive organization, I think a few years ago, and other than that doesn’t seem to be like strongly involved.

Zachary Karabell: There was no manifesto saying, you know, and now AOC is president, you know, thank God.

Whatever the, whatever the manifesto would have been that would have energized people in all the wrong ways.

Emma Varvaloucas: Exactly. So, try to stay away from the silver linings talk on this podcast, I think it’s like an easy way to just kind of like justify everything, but I think those are two pretty major silver linings.

I will take them. My last point about that is that I hope people are not fundamentally exhausted by the climate right now. I feel like this is another. Log to add to the fire of just like, oh my God, things are crazy and I don’t want to deal. And I think this is the exact moment where we really need to deal.

I think we all need to think about how we want to contribute well to this moment and contribute to the election, um, which has not happened yet, despite lots of predictions that Certainly, yes, with 100 percent clarity, it’s going to be Trump.

Zachary Karabell: So I think we’re going to have more on this later, right, Emma?

We’re going to do a special interview episode talking a little more about the Republican Convention and the post talk of the assassination attempt. But for now, what else do you have for us?

Emma Varvaloucas: Okay, so I have good news out of Gambia, a West African nation. Good news out of Gambia. Good news out of Gambia, great alliteration.

I know you’re an alliteration fan, Zachary. Not a nation that we often talk about. They did jump into international news, I think it was about a year ago, because they began discussing and in fact advancing a bill that might have reversed a ban on female genital cutting. That would have been the first time that has happened that a country has passed a ban on it and then reversed the ban.

However, that has not happened. They have officially decided to uphold the ban on female genital cutting. The activists are extremely happy about this, and I think that it is another potential future outcome that we are happy to have averted. It

Zachary Karabell: did not have the wrong moment. of overturning a precedent in a direction that many people would think was not the precedent that you should have overturned.

Emma Varvaloucas: Big, big hurrah to people in Gambia that, you know, fought for the past 11 months or so to make sure that that happened. Really, I think we could take a lesson from them. Next on the list, the newest wealth report from UBS is out. And had this really astounding fact in it, which is that in 2000, 75 percent of the world had a net worth of less than 10, 000.

And in 2023, that’s now less than 40 percent of the world, which might not seem particularly impressive to you, but I think Axios in their, their article about this put a really fine point on it. They wrote, never before in human history has there been any meaningful migration out of that lowest income bracket of 10, 000.

So like, I was like, yeah. Yes, people getting richer, like ordinary people getting richer. I’m totally here for that.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. I mean, one of the things we’ve tried to highlight a few times, which Hans Rosling and then Our World and Dad, I have been highlighting for years has been the trend over the past decades has actually been decreasing inequality between nations, meaning more and more countries and more and more people around the world are rising up out of poverty and into something called the middle class.

Even as inequality within nations has tended to increase, i. e. the rich in many societies have gotten immeasurably richer relative to the rest. And like both things are true, you have to hold both of those things simultaneously as facts, even though they point in somewhat different directions and somewhat different conclusions.

But we should never forget the fact that the trend continues to be really powerfully away from intense poverty,

Emma Varvaloucas: There’s also a trend away from inequality. There are some places where inequality is increasing and, you know, that takes up a lot of attention, but actually the worldwide, it’s going away from it.

So last but not least. Let’s go with one more small piece of positive American news, because I think that we need it right now. This is one of those things that’s going to seem like, okay, great, but we’re, we’re going to share it anyway. Um, this year on Independence Day weekend, which according to The Trace, which is an outlet that just focuses on gun violence, that’s usually the time of year that gun violence is at its highest.

So you see the most shootings over July 4th weekend. We had the fewest shootings. This year since 2019. So it’s just one more data point in this trend of like the social unrest that occurred during the pandemic years and a little bit afterward is really finally coming down. Now we’re looking at numbers that we were seeing before, which are certainly not great.

Certainly still a problem, but at least we’re not in a continually, you know, increasing reality of gun shootings anymore. They have started to come down.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I mean, of course, it will take much longer for people’s perceptions of shootings to go down than the numbers to go down, right? When numbers spike, people are acutely aware of things getting worse in real time.

They’re almost never acutely aware of things getting better in real time. That’s It has been true for decades. It will be true now as well. Like it will just, it will take longer for those facts to settle in. It will take, I mean, that’s the old adage of bad news travels quickly and good news travels slowly, same principle.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Well, we’re doing our part here to, uh, Spread the slightly positive message that shootings are still high in the U. S. in general, but lower than they used to be, so.

Zachary Karabell: Correct. All right, so that’s it for us. That’s it for us this week. Tune in to our special episode, and to all the other ones, thank you for joining us.

We will be back with you soon, and thank you, Emma.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks, Zachary, and thank you everyone for listening.