This is a desperately needed explanation of how politics actually works:
So that's where American politics stands today: on one side, a radicalized, highly ideological demographic threatened with losing its place of privilege in society, politically activated and locked into the House; on the other side, a demographically and ideologically heterogeneous coalition of interest groups big enough to reliably win the presidency and occasionally the Senate. For now, it's gridlock.
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While it may be true that government cannot force major innovations, as Musk and Urban agree, it is still very much the case that government can help or hinder innovation. Tesla got off the ground in part because of US policy, including an early Department of Energy loan and an ongoing electric vehicle tax credit. SolarCity got off the ground because of policies like state renewable energy standards and net metering, and has gotten some of its biggest contracts with the US military. The incredible surge of innovation in clean energy in recent years has largely been driven by rising deployment, which in turn has been driven by (inconsistently) supportive policy.
Urban supports what Musk is trying to do, which is accelerate a transition away from fossil fuels. As it happens, out of America's two major political parties, about a half of one of them supports that undertaking. That half a party is concentrated on the Democratic Party's left flank, over in Urban's crazy zone. Turns out he's in that crazy zone too, but he doesn't realize it.
For some reason, tech nerds seem to like to think of themselves as pragmatic,above it all know it alls who just want politicians to get out of the way and let reasonable people -- by which they mean well of technical people, and by well off technical people, given the terrible levels of diversity in Silicon Valley, they seem to mean white males -- do the job of running the country. This is nuts, of course, and just sets people up for complete failure to achieve their goals.
Its nuts first, as noted above, because the two parties are not equally partisan and do not have equal number of extremists and do not have an equal number of extremist beliefs in their mainstream politicians.
Second, it is lazy. Being smart does not mean that you understand every system you come across (as XKCD so eloquently demonstrates). You wouldn't dream of diving into a production application wihtout taking the time to understand how the system worked, what language it was written in, what assumptions and decisions the original programmers had made and what the benefits and problems of the system currently are. Politics and how to achieve political goals are the equivalent of a complicated legacy system. You aren't going to get anywhere until you understand how the whole thing works.
Third, it is contemptuous of the users. You would never try to create or fix a system without listening to the users of it. If you find yourself thinking that the voters are "sheeple", or that "partisians" don't care about the country, or that people who care about the issues are "crazy", or that "both sides do it" you are not listening to the users. If your brilliant idea is being rejected by the voters, chances are they aren't stupid, crazy or extremists. More likely is that your idea isn't very good from their perspective and/or you haven't explained to them why your idea is worth supporting. You haven't taken the time to listen to the users of the system, and so you have a product they reject.
This belief that politics and governing can be made simple is pernicious. It leads to a set of false assumptions that work against achieving policy goals. It leads, in fact, to counter-productive, quixotic grand gestures like Lawrence Lessig's run for president. I should pause here to say that I generally admire Prof. Lessig. His Code completely changed how I look at policy and engineering. But his "hack" of presidential politics is the perfect example of how otherwise intelligent technical people completely bork politics.
Prof Lessig's presidential campaign consists of one plank and only ne plank: he will pass a law that effectively corrects issues with election voter suppression, unequal funding of elections, and gerrymandering. Once this is passed, he will resign the office of the Presidency. And how will he entice Congress to pass this law? By insisting that his election is a referendum and, through some mechanism not specified in the Constitution, this mandate will force Congress to bend ot his will.
The bit about not being in the Constitution is important. In 2008, Barack Obama won a sweeping victory. He won more votes that any candidate in history, he was given a Democratic House and 60 seats in the Senate. He won Indiana. Winning Indiana was the equivalent of Bill Gates beating Steve Wozniak for mayor of Cupertino. Obama, by any reasonable definition, had a very strong mandate. And the Republicans still opposed him at every turn. Why? Because they represented people opposed to Obama's goals. Lessig provides not one iota of reasoning beyond "because I say its a referendum!" to explain why this time would be different.
Lessig's crusade is also contemptuous of real voters. Being President is a fairly significant job. People who vote for the president want that person to deal with economic issues, with social issues, with environmental issues, with foreign policy. Why would anyone vote for a goober who promises to ignore all of those issues and then quit the moment he gets one bill passed?
Politics is hard. It should be hard; it is the expression of the collective will of a huge, diverse country. Pretending that there are easy, simple solutions that everyone agrees on and could be implemented if the politicians got out of the way is so far from reality as to be delusional. Acting on that delusion isn't smart or centrist, or serious. It is just ineffective. You wouldn't trust code to people who didn't bother to try to understand your system. Why would we trust our politics to those people?