Trib Fest is an annual festival hosted by The Texas Tribune and can be thought of as a sort of Burning Man, but for people who obsess over journalism and politics in lieu of music and drugs. While the panels were often indistinguishable from those at any other conference, outside it was clear that this really was a festival, from the tents spanning several blocks to the outdoor music to the lively protestors, to the occasional unhoused person peacefully soliloquizing far enough from the main traffic that security was unlikely to bother them.

My primary takeaway from Trib Fest was reassurance that our politics are still more or less normal. In a world of supposed existential risks and Fiight 93 elections, or portended civil wars and societal collapse, the powers that be, at least those that attended Trib Fest, are firmly convinced that things are going to be fine. Three panels in particular make this point.

First, in the panel entitled “Why we should be worried about AI,” there was a juxtaposition between mundane and existential risks, with the panelists, law professor Robinson Everett, US Representative Ro Khanna, and NBC tech correspondent Jacob Ward, generally focusing on the first. While there was general optimism that AI could, and will, do good things for society, the primary focus was on the mundane harms caused by AI, such as those related to data privacy, misinformation, and algorithmic bias. Near the end of the panel, when existential risk was brought up in an audience query, the panel generally framed it as a distraction by tech CEOs, who wanted to avoid highlighting the mundane dangers of their products by distracting everyone with discussions of what one panelist called the “terminator scenario.” Whether or not this is true, this has got to be the first time in history someone has been accused of seeking to avoid regulation by saying their products, if unregulated, will destroy the world.

For the second panel, I had to leave the Omni Hotel which served as the main center for the festival and head over to St David’s Episcopal Church. The building was stereotypically Episcopalian, from the decor reminiscent of a 19th-century parlor to the prominently displayed pride posters. This panel was entitled “Florida Man,” and was a discussion of Ron DeSantis’s campaign. The conversation was fairly standard punditry, with an analysis of his campaign strategy and the hurdles he faces with voters. There was the obligatory lampooning of his posture and shyness, with one panelist also noting that Trump had once again shown his mastery of mockery with the epithet “DeSanctimonious,” but otherwise the conversation remained fairly focused on the mechanics of his campaign. All throughout there was a general assumption of “politics as usual,” and many comparisons to the 2008 and 2012 primaries. These were brought into sharp contrast by the occasional questioner, in one case a Florida “refugee,” asking about the future in hyperistic terms, with the implication that a Trump or DeSantis victory would lead to the end of democracy, a sentiment with which the panelists generally avoided engaging.

The final event I want to highlight was a one-on-one with Ted Cruz, an event which put on full display his rhetorical dexterity. The audience was almost uniformly progressive, and yours truly did get dirty looks when he made a point of clapping when everyone else was booing, but even this hostile audience often found reason to laugh or clap at something Senator Cruz said. One line in particular was illustrative, where he noted that the hundreds of millions of dollars donated to Beto O’Rourke in 2018 had significantly boosted Democrat turnout. This led to audience cheers, which turned to laughter when he quipped that half of said Democrats were probably in the room. This good spirit largely dissipated during the discussion of abortion and gun policy but returned near the end when the questioning moved to his vacationing habits.

One key theme that ran through Cruz’s conversation was an implicit embrace of the philosophical position known as mistake theory. Broadly speaking, political positions can be analyzed as falling into two groups: mistake theorists and conflict theorists. Mistake theorists are those who maintain that the main divide between oneself and one’s opponents is primarily a factual dispute — that one or both of you are making a mistake, and when that mistake is corrected the political conflict will be ended. Conflict theorists are those who maintain that the main divide between oneself and one’s opponents is clashing interests, that you want one thing, and they want another thing, and that the way to resolve political disagreements is to fight them out. Cruz was an unapologetic mistake theorist. One of his favorite lines, particularly during the questioning on gun policy, was that we need to start from the assumption that both we and the other side want to save lives, with the implication that we factually disagree on how, and the further implication that he is right on the factual issue and the Democrats are mistaken. He went on to argue that, if you start from the assumption that one or the other side wants people to die, then no political resolution to your problem is likely to be possible. 

The unifying theme between all of these panels is an embrace of normalcy. From the AI panel, which focused on the particulars of mundane benefits and harms while dismissing more transformative scenarios, to the DeSantis panel, which gave standard political analysis that could have just as easily come from 2008 or 2012, to Senator Cruz’s interview, where the implication was that if we just sat down and really talked things out, man, we could finally resolve our differences and see eye to eye. Implicit in all of these is a belief that our problems are not existential, that minor policy mistakes or minor victories for our political opponents are not the end of the world, and that the general political landscape will remain balanced for the foreseeable future.

Whether this is a good thing is dependent on your estimate of the likelihood of the underlying assumption being true. If transformative AI really is at least decades away, then worrying about mundane benefits and harms is probably the optimal use of concern, but if it is not, then it is rather silly to spend all our time talking about how to keep AI from spreading misinformation when the world itself may be in danger. Similarly, suppose Donald Trump really does pose a critical threat to American democracy. In that case, one might have expected this to be reflected in the tone of the panelists, and perhaps for them to have been more sympathetic to DeSantis, whose campaign may be the best shot at avoiding a second Trump presidency. Similarly, if our political parties really do have incommensurable differences, then Senator Cruz’s admonishments to engage in dialogue with the other side will prove fruitless at best, and outright counterproductive at worst. 

Generally, it is a good sign that, in the midst of our hyper partisan moment, Trib Fest was able to take a step back and act as if it will all turn out all right. However, this choice carries with it certain risks, and so we must explicitly acknowledge the choice we make, and accept the potential consequences. The assumptions behind this position may be valid, but it is necessary to explicitly acknowledge which assumptions are being made.