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From quantum discoveries to the first AI-discovered drug candidates going into clinical trials, 2021 was a landmark year for deeptech in Europe.

Swedish battery maker Northvolt now has huge investment from companies like Volvo and VW to build gigafactories, and even ideas like Energy Vault (storing grid energy as huge stacked-up concrete blocks) which may have seemed out there a few years ago, are getting real investment.

Quantum computing took a big leap forward, with many top academics and even former White House officials, joining startups and a huge funding boost from the French and German governments. Even places like Finland built their first quantum computer.

So, what more will 2022 bring?

Investors believe that 2022 will be the year of deeptech with many more VCs and corporations jumping in to fund startups, especially as other sectors become overheated and overcrowded.

Ewan Kirk, tech entrepreneur and founder of Cantab Capital Partners, says that consumer tech like fintech, social media and ride-sharing has ridden a wave of interest, but that these businesses are hard to defend and new competition is entering the market all the time. Which starts to make deeptech look a lot more attractive.

Deeptech businesses are fundamentally different at their base, they are about leveraging a technological or scientific breakthrough, which is defensible through IP. Many VCs are starting to see that this makes them a very strong investment proposition.

Benjamin Joffe, partner at SOSV, says more funding will help startups overcome the multiple transitions they need to make from lab to market.

But what specific developments can we look forward to? Quantum computing, fusion energy and healthtech feature heavily in our experts predictions:

In 2022 we will see the first quantum computing companies demonstrating that they have solutions that are competitive with classical only computing clusters, for applications useful to society as whole even if its with a relatively narrow focus to start with. The metric is a mix of time to solution, accuracy and energy consumption. At a minimum we will have a clear vision of the requirements and scaling laws to make it happen within the next two years.

Christophe Jurczak, founder and partner at Quontonation

2022 will be a breakthrough year for quantum computing and we will finally develop material and technology enabling robust qubits. Quantum computing is a hot topic, but in reality we are very early in developing basic hardware required for the quantum computing dream to materialise.

Quantum computing depends on availability of very specific hardware and material that is able to maintain spin states of qubits for extended period of time. Due to lack of such material the qubits that we have at this point are unstable and highly prone to error, not capable of making more complex calculations with certainty. To unleash the massive potential of quantum computing we need systems with millions of stable qubits rather than the 10s of not-so-robust ones we have at this point.

Marcin Hejka, cofounder and general partner at OTB Ventures

As it stands, the most common approach to improving battery chemistry is through trial and error. Even AI and simulation technologies increasingly used to accelerate the process of identifying and cycling through potentially winning combinations are limited in their impact by the capabilities of computers.

In 2022, there will be huge steps forward as quantum computing begins solving key problems in battery materials modelling that are simply beyond the reach of standard computers, unlocking higher-performance and lower-cost batteries.

2022 will be the year in which government-backed funding will really take off

With significant capital now being invested in quantum computing, we will see more first case uses as innovation in hardware and software accelerates in 2022. As governments in the West begin to take notice of the huge potential applications of quantum computing, 2022 will be the year in which government-backed funding will really take off.

Moray Wright, CEO at Parkwalk Ventures

Nuclear fusion has always been a distant dream, always 30 years away from being ready to commercialise. But investors are starting to pay attention to nuclear fusion startups now, with US-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems raising more than $1.8bn in Series B funding led by Tiger Global. In Europe, nuclear fusion research has long revolved around the long-running ITER mega-project in the south of France, but now younger startups like Renaissance Fusion in Grenoble and Marvel Fusion in Munich are leapfrogging this with new approaches.

Ilkka Kivimaki, partner at Maki.vc

I think we are seeing the tail end of the AI and machine learning wave

I think we are seeing the tail end of the AI and machine learning wave. While it is incredibly important, it is now very much a part of modern technology development, rather than a special formula for the next big company. The focus will instead be on how we can neutralise the dual threats of climate change and future pandemics.

Ewan Kirk, founder of Cantab Capital Partners and tech entrepreneur

Chip shortages revealed the weakness of supply chains and tech sovereignty. It will become more crucial to have key suppliers located within your own country or region.

Benjamin Joffe, partner at SOSV

The light that Covid has shone on the health sector wont go away, and big investment will continue to be made here particularly in increasing the throughput of labs, from simple upgrades to the way in which data is collated, recorded and shared through to transforming the benchtop equipment itself with more flexible hardware.

Well also see more investment in further understanding complex and heterogeneous diseases; now we have the ability to retrieve and combine information from multiple genomics sources, we expect that machine learning algorithms will naturally have a bigger role to play in interpreting all the distinct layers of information and correlating findings with relevant medical knowledge (which will be particularly challenging when dealing with new variants or new genes not previously associated with a specific disease).

Zoe Chambers, partner at Frontline Ventures

The science equity industry is an emerging one but it is picking up pace. In 2022 it will continue growing since it is a main transformational engine for the European economy, and around 100 new industrial science-based companies will be set up in Europe.

Almudena Trigo Lorenzo, founding partner and chair at BeAble Capital

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2022 will be the year of deeptech say investors - Sifted

2021 was quite a year, and during the first few days of 2022, I suddenly realized something.

Even in the face of this centurys worst health epidemic, technological progress has hardly missed a beat.

The entire planet has been under threat of intermittent shutdowns for multiple years now. The economy has suffered incalculable losses, and the labor market has been thrown into complete upheaval.

But despite all this, the worlds spirit of innovation and discovery is flourishing.

The real agents of change out there haven't missed a beat. If anything, this new threat has reinvigorated some of the planets top minds.

For one particular field of science, this past year has been a blockbuster.

For the past decade or more, the tech itself has been locked away in the relative safety of university labs around the world. You might have heard of it before in passing, but very few people expected it to actually materialize.

Last year, that outdated perception was shattered.

At this point, its impossible for you to NOT have heard of quantum computing. The news has been full of real-world proof that this stuff works.

In just a few decades, quantum computers have evolved from the musings of a few ambitious physicists into the genuine article.

The 2000s and 2010s saw a lot of funding shuffled around, but very little real success came out of it. The long and tedious development phase tested the resolve of even the most committed researchers.

Without a tangible success story to rile people up, the public started to gradually lose interest in the technology altogether.

Then in 2019, when Google announced it had achieved quantum supremacy, the world quickly snapped back to attention. Several competitors have since dismissed Google's claim as bogus, but the idea of quantum computers becoming the new standard was firmly established.

After that, the race was officially on. The computing industry hasn't seen so much attention from the general public since Y2K.

Everyone was asking the same question: Do they work?

Luckily, Im here to inform you that the answer is still no.

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Sure, these machines function. But they operate similarly to our current best attempts at nuclear fusion: They cost far more input than they provide in output.

By my estimate, we are somewhere between a few months and a few decades away from building a quantum machine that can rival todays top supercomputers.

I know thats a vague timeline, and I wish I could be more specific. But in the world of quantum physics, there are very few definite answers.

There is one definite figure I can offer, however: $1.02 billion.

That's the total amount of private funding that went to the young quantum computing industry in 2021 alone. And it doesn't even take into account the amount spent by deep-pocketed tech giants like IBM or Microsoft.

Some market analysts are even taking it a step further. Recent projections from reputable firms are confident that the industry will hit $1 trillion by 2030. For perspective, thats around five times more than last years global computer sales.

The takeaway here is that even without a practical prototype, the quantum computing market isn't short on cash or confidence. Hedge funds and venture capitalists are finally feeling bold enough to take the plunge.

And why shouldn't they? Even with a few daunting engineering challenges facing them, the top researchers in the field unanimously agree that it will change the world.

It wont just become a new standard it will render any old-school machines completely obsolete.

There are currently hundreds of companies that claim to be in the quantum computing business. Very few of them pass a cursory financial analysis.

Fewer still seem to have any hope of bringing a real product to market in this century.

It took some serious legwork to narrow down the best stock plays in this sector. As expected, everyone claims to have found the Holy Grail without offering anything to back it up.

After weeding out the imposters, tech editor Keith Kohl and I only feel confident recommending one top pick for this industry.

Check out the free presentation here before the rest of the rabble climbs aboard and it becomes old news.

To your wealth,

Luke SweeneyContributor, Energy and Capital

Lukes technical know-how combined with an insatiable scientific curiosity has helped uncover some of our most promising leads in the tech sector. He has a knack for breaking down complicated scientific concepts into an easy-to-digest format, while still keeping a sharp focus on the core information. His role at Angel is simple: transform piles of obscure data into profitable investment leads. When following our recommendations, rest assured that a truly exhaustive amount of research goes on behind the scenes..

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The Next Great Upgrade: 2022 and Beyond - Energy & Capital

Every year, scientists undertake some truly baffling experiments, and 2021 was no exception. From growing mini-brains with their own eyes in petri dishes to reanimating 24,000-year-old self-replicating zombies from the Siberian permafrost, here are the absolute weirdest scientific experiments of the year.

In August, a group of scientists made news that was equal parts fascinating and horrifying when they announced they had successfully lab-grown a tiny human brain with its own pair of eyes. They made the Cronenberg-esque mini brain, called an organoid, by transforming stem cells into neural tissue, then stimulating the cells with chemical signals to form tiny rudimentary "optic cups" filled with light-sensitive cells.

Thankfully for our collective sanity and for the mini-brains themselves, the tiny organoids don't have nearly enough neural density to be conscious so they won't be asking themselves anytime soon how they awakened as a lost pair of eyes sliding around a petri dish. They are, however, incredibly useful constructs for studying brain development and potentially creating cures for retinal disorders that cause blindness something that the researchers want to study.

Read more: Lab-made mini brains grow their own sets of 'eyes'

If the Cronenburg body-horror of the last entry didn't move you, this year also saw scientists reveal an experiment more in line with Hitchcock's classic horror film "The Birds" proving that crows were smart enough to understand the concept of zero. The concept of zero, ostensibly developed by human societies somewhere in the fifth century A.D., requires abstract thinking. So it came as quite a surprise when a June paper in The Journal of Neuroscience revealed that crows not only picked zero as distinct from other numbers, but also associated it more readily with the number one than with higher numbers.

Scans of the birds' brain activity during the experiments showed that crows have specially tuned neurons for understanding the null number, but what they use those brain cells for (besides potentially plotting to take over the world, of course) is a mystery. The scientists were amazed that both human and crow brains can compute zero even though we shared our last common ancestor with birds well before the extinction of the dinosaurs; this shows that evolution takes multiple routes to create brains with the same higher-level functions.

Read more: Crows understand the 'concept of zero' (despite their bird brains)

April saw researchers finally finding the answer to one of humanity's most pressing questions: Why do Brazil nuts rise to the top of the bag? The nutty mystery was resolved by shaking a mixture of peanuts and Brazil nuts, with the Brazil nuts placed at the bottom, and taking a 3D X-ray scan of the bag after each shake. It turned out that successive shakes eventually moved the larger nuts into a vertical orientation, after which every shake forced them upwards. The scientists believe their research could help engineers design better ways to prevent size segregation from occurring in other mixtures something that, while vitally important for bags of nuts, could have essential applications in medicine and construction.

Read more: 'Brazil nut puzzle' cracked by researchers

By switching off certain genes in the daddy longlegs, scientists created a stunted "daddy shortlegs" version but why? By shortening the famous arachnid's legs, the researchers hoped to reveal the secrets behind its body plan as well as its unique method of locomotion: walking with three pairs of legs and waving the longest pair about to feel its way around.

After the gene tweak, the legs of the stunted daddy shortlegs had not only changed in size, but also in shape; they morphed into short food-manipulating appendages called pedipalps. This offered the scientists a glimpse back in time at the kinds of creatures that daddy longlegs could have evolved from 400 million years ago. And this isn't the last mutant arachnid the scientists want to create; they also plan to mutate spider fangs to glean similar insights into their evolution.

Read more: Mutant 'daddy shortlegs' created in a lab

From early antiquity all the way to the 17th century, alchemists were obsessed with the philosopher's stone: a mythical substance with the power to transmute lead into gold. In July, scientists reported an experiment that looked a little like the fabled process: for just a few fleeting seconds, they were able to transform water into a shiny, golden metal. The researchers achieved this by mixing the water with sodium and potassium metals which donate their extra electrons to the water, and therefore make the water's electrons wander freely, rendering it metallic. The briefly metallic water they created could provide scientists with some key insights into the highly-pressurized hearts of planets, where water could be squished so intensely that this process occurs naturally.

Read more: Scientists transform water into shiny, golden metal

In July, researchers working with Google revealed that they had created a time crystal inside the heart of the tech giant's quantum computer, Sycamore. The crystal was a completely new phase of matter that the researchers claimed was able to evade the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that entropy, or the disorder of a system, must always increase. Unlike other systems, which see their entropy increase over time, the time crystal's entropy did not increase no matter how many times it was pulsed with a laser. The truly remarkable thing about the weird quantum crystals is that they are the first objects to break a fundamental symmetry of the universe, called discrete time-translation symmetry. Scientists are hoping to use the otherworldly crystals to test the boundaries of quantum mechanics the strange rules that govern the world of the very small.

Read more: Otherworldly 'time crystal' made inside Google quantum computer could change physics forever

If you were to find a group of zombies from the Pleistocene epoch frozen inside Siberian permafrost, reviving and cloning them is probably not high on your agenda. However, that's exactly what scientists described in a June paper published in the journal Current Biology. Thankfully, these zombies aren't the shambling, fictitious brain-eaters popularized by George Romero, but are instead tiny multicellular organisms called bdelloid rotifers. Once thawed, the tiny creatures began reproducing asexually through a process called parthenogenesis, creating perfect clones of themselves. Remarkably, analysis of the soil around the creatures showed that they had been frozen for 24,000 years, and they had survived by putting themselves inside a protective stasis called cryptobiosis. Scientists are hoping to study this clever trick to better understand cryopreservation and how it could be adapted for humans.

Read more: 24,000-year-old 'zombies' revived and cloned from Arctic permafrost

In May, scientists working off the coast of Japan used a long, thin drill called a giant piston corer to drill a 5 mile (8,000 meter) hole to the bottom of the Japan Trench. The scientists then extracted a 120-foot-long (37 m) sediment core from the bottom of the sea, hauling it all the way back up to their ship. The researchers wanted to examine the sediment core because they were searching for clues into the region's earthquake history the drill site is located very close to the epicenter of the magnitude-9.1 Tohoku-oki earthquake. The 2011 quake caused an enormous tsunami that smashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and caused a devastating meltdown.

Read more: Scientists just dug the deepest ocean hole in history

A July study published in the journal Molecular Biology revealed that an already weird past study had produced even weirder unintended consequences. Decades ago, the Finnish scientist Ilkka Hanski introduced the Glanville fritillary butterfly onto the remote island of Sottunga, planning to study how a population of one species placed inside a harsh habitat could survive. Little did he know, the butterflies harbored a species of stomach-bursting parasitic wasp, and those wasps also carried their own, smaller, stomach-bursting hyperparasite itself a parasitic wasp. Once the butterflies were released on Sottunga, the wasps erupted, spreading across the island with their hosts. This experiment provided later scientists with not only a fascinating ecological study, but also a clear warning that we must understand the ecological webs that form around endangered species before introducing them into new environments.

Read more: 'Russian doll' set of stomach-bursting parasites released inside butterfly on remote Finnish island

Okay, so this one wasn't done by a scientist, but it's by far one of the weirdest amatuer experiments we've heard this year. A January study in the Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry revealed that a man who had brewed a "magic mushroom" tea and injected it into his body ended up in the emergency room with the fungus growing in his blood. After injecting the psilocybin tea, the man, who had hoped to relieve symptoms of bipolar disorder and opioid dependence, quickly became lethargic, his skin turned yellow and he started vomiting blood. The man survived, but needed to take antibiotics and antifungal drugs to remove the psychoactive fungus from his bloodstream. He also had to be put onto a respirator. A growing body of research indicates that psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms, could be a promising treatment for depression, anxiety and substance abuse but only if taken safely.

Read more: 'Magic mushrooms' grow in man's blood after injection with shroom tea

Originally published on Live Science.

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10 of the weirdest experiments of 2021 - Livescience.com

For most of my adult years, I have been registered Republican.

There were pragmatic reasons for that to a professional reporter. A GOP registration allowed me to get mailings from the Republican Party and Republican candidates that I would not otherwise have received. And the registration gave me some access to things like Republican meetings, in the event my reporters job didnt do that.

Also, it allowed me to say Well, Im a registered Republican when someone would say, All you reporters are Democrats.

As Republicans came more and more to dominate state elections, getting a glimpse inside the party operation was useful. And beyond journalism, being able to vote in GOP primaries which are closed to all but registered Republicans often meant being able to help choose the eventual winner in the general election, if the Democrats even had a challenger in the general, which they dont always have in all races.

And there are a couple of issues, one that my Catholic faith promotes (perhaps too) relentlessly that makes the Republican registration a bit more comfortable for me.

Or at least it has at some times.

But mostly, I am and have been a Republican In Name Only, or RINO, and dont argue much when Im referred to as such by another Republican with, perhaps, more traditional credentials.

I am more than anything a believer in a healthy two-party system with a significant body of independent voters. I think thats a good mix, and one we havent had in South Dakota for some time.

Im a centrist by nature who probably leans left on all but a few issues, including the big one mentioned above.

And I have friends I respect across the political spectrum.

From the party of Lincoln and Reagan to the party of Trump

Thats a roundabout way of getting to my increasing concern over the state of our dominant party my party, if we go by registration in South Dakota.

Over the years, in my case meaning more than half a century, that I have covered and followed South Dakota politics, most of the Republicans I have known have been rational, fact-based people, generally committed to lower taxes, smaller government and more personal freedoms, except in some instances of apparent contradiction, such as abortion.

They have been science-based people with a general respect for educational systems and educators and healthy but not angry or demeaning or threatening suspicion of government. They believed in the Second Amendment but didnt wear that belief, literally, on their hips, nor want to wear it in public places to show, well, I dont know what such actions are intended to show.

They were generally respectful of others even others of different beliefs in the way they conducted themselves. Most of them were pretty well informed. Some were very well informed.

Names like Joe Barnett and George Mickelson, Debra Andersen and Mary McClure, Steve Cutler and Larry Gabriel and Mike Rounds and Dennis Daugaard all come to mind among elected officials. And I could name many, many others.

And, yes, Bill Janklow. Oh sure, he could seem irrational. He could be unreasonable on some things, with some people. But he was a fact seeker who believed in science and studied it, along with studying just about anything else that crossed his desk.

Those Republicans and so many others like them believed in their party. But they always seemed to believe first in their state and their nation.

They also believed in facts, and in essential truths based on facts.

So none of them would have believed or do now believe the Big Lie that the majority of Republicans across this state and nation say they believe. That is that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump and given to Joe Biden.

It was not, of course. Competent, experienced elections officials Republican, Democrat and independent across the nation have verified that.

Stating the simple truth instead of the Big Lie

Trump lost, Biden won. Just like in 2016 when Clinton lost and Trump won.

There was no widespread fraud in either election. The results were legitimate as certified by Congress, including our three-member delegation Congressman Dusty Johnson and Sens. John Thune and Mike Rounds.

Although it offended some in their party and enraged others, they voted to certify the 2020 election because they dont believe the Big Lie. Thats because they are rational, fact-based people.

Some Republicans are not, including some in Congress. They even join national Republicans in promoting another big lie about the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump-inspired lunatics a year ago on Jan. 6 as being an FBI operation or an ANTIFA operation or, what, Klingons maybe?

That dangerous Jan. 6, 2021, act of insurrection and disrespect for the center of our nations government is distorted and minimized by some in the GOP, including some here in South Dakota.

When I first saw the insurrection being covered on cable news last Jan. 6, I texted Dusty Johnson: Are you safe?

I thought hed respond with: Sure. Capitol Police have us protected.

Instead, I got: Honestly, I dont know. Police have been overrun. They cant hold them.

Now, the deranged mob that attacked the Capitol and attacked Capitol Police that day, threatening to hang Mike Pence and do harm to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, didnt represent the average Republican or the average Trump supporter.

But they were Trump supporters, those thugs. They said so. And they were there to fight the Big Lie and the legal transfer of power because Trump wanted them there. They said so.

Devotion to Trump means accepting the crazy

Crazy stuff. Dangerous stuff. And these days, Republican stuff. And while the average Republican might not have approved of the attack on the Capitol, a majority of Republicans in this nation believe the Big Lie.

Which is more than just disappointing. Its scary.

Because Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, across the nation and here in South Dakota.

And that means Trump-like behavior.

So how do we get from a rational, fact-based party to a majority of Republicans and what seems to be an increasing number of Republican office holders and candidates in South Dakota who believe the Big Lie, or at least promote it?

Well, a lot of its Donald Trump. Nobody in my lifetime or probably in the history of this democracy or democratic Republic, if you prefer has promoted as many lies and successfully with a large segment of the population, particularly his own party, as Donald Trump has.

He is a master at manipulating his people into believing or pretending to believe whatever lie he decides to present.

He is also pretty good at dumbing down the language and demeaning political rhetoric to a childish, petulant and often profane level.

Which is, I guess, how you get a governor our current governor showing up on social media grinning at a slogan that, while it doesnt say it in so many words, means in code: F Biden.

Its how a businessman from a long-respected family in Winner ends up using that childish, thinly hidden vulgarity about the president of the United States in a newspaper advertisement. And its how a newspaper publisher decided it was appropriate to run.

I assume the same paper and same publisher would not have run that ad if it had been directed at Donald Trump. And I believe there was a time when no credible publication in South Dakota would have run that ad at all. Period.

Whatever happened to the place I knew?

We dont live in that time anymore. I wrote in a Twitter comment about the advertisement that my state is becoming a place I no longer recognize. And not a better place.

I suppose we all have to take some responsibility for that. Democrats do dumb things too. They say dumb things. Sometimes inappropriate things. But most of the responsibility for the mess of rhetoric and the attack of facts in our nation today goes to the Republican Party, its members and leaders.

In a runaway.

The Republican Party is a different party than it was. So is the Democratic Party, perhaps. But in South Dakota, its not very significant. And whatever differences todays Democratic Party demonstrates from the party of the past might be, they pale compared to the abandonment of fact and truth and reason that a majority of the Republican Party are demonstrating these days.

And far too many office-holding Republicans are either supporting it or tolerating it.

A newspaper editor I worked for years back liked to say about himself, other editors and other people in positions of authority: You either made it happen or you let it happen.

Either way, its on you.

The Big Lie is on Donald Trump and his immediate circle of minions, of course. But its also on any Republican and especially those in positions of authority and prominence who either make the Big Lie live on in the Republican Party or by their silent tolerance let it live on.

Either way, its on them, too.

Thats something Republicans should ponder any day, but especially on Jan. 6.

Read more from the original source:
Considering Jan. 6 and what the Republican Party wants to be - SDPB Radio

This might sound alarming to inland Republican voters who imagine themselves besieged by a permanent coastal majority. But in a working democracy, there are no permanent majorities or minorities. Forging partnerships in a truly democratic system, inland conservatives would soon find new allies just not ones determined to break democracy itself.

Some of these changes probably require amending the Constitution. Hard changes have come through constitutional amendment before: Shortly before World War I, activists successfully pressed state legislatures to ratify an amendment giving up their power to choose U.S. senators. Maybe we can revive mass movements for amendments, starting with one that would make the amendment process itself more democratic. If the public supports a constitutional amendment to limit money in politics, restrict gerrymandering or enshrine a core abortion right, a committed majority should be able to say what our fundamental law is by popular vote, rather than having to go through the current, complicated process of ratifying amendments through state legislatures or dozens of constitutional conventions.

This may sound wild-eyed. But it would not always have. James Wilson, one of the most learned and thoughtful of the Constitutions framers, believed that as a matter of principle, the people may change the Constitution whenever and however they please. This is a right of which no positive institution can ever deprive them. Even Madison conceded that if we thought of the Constitution as a national charter rather than a federal arrangement among sovereign states, the supreme and ultimate authority would reside with the majority, which had the power to alter or abolish its established government. It is hard to deny that, since 1789, the Constitution has become a national charter in the minds of most Americans.

Do we really think that establishing fundamental law is too much for us, something only revered (or reviled) ancestors could do? More likely we are afraid of one another and the decisions majorities would make. Thinkers like Madison associated democracy with majority tyranny, but history tells a different story. Even our terribly flawed legacy is rich in examples of majoritarian emancipation: New Deal programs, the Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act and Medicare. Majorities can change the world for the better, when they have the chance. Giving one another that chance, over and over, is how equals share a country.

But are we willing to give, and take, that chance? Maybe more than fearing majority tyranny, we suspect that the country is already too divided and mistrustful to make basic choices together at all. One thing Democrats and Republicans share is the belief that, to save the country, the other side must not be allowed to win. Every election is an existential crisis. In our current political climate, any proposal to democratize the system would immediately be coded as partisan, and half the country would reject it from the start. In such an anxious and suspicious country, the current system can be seen as a kind of peace treaty. Maybe that was what Mr. Biden meant when, just after taking his oath of office two weeks after the Capitol riot, in a Washington guarded by 26,000 troops, he praised the resilience of our Constitution.

But the Constitution is not keeping the peace; it is fostering crises. Far from being resilient, it is adding to our brittleness.

Resilience would come from a shift to more constructive politics. Majorities should be able to choose parties and leaders to improve their everyday lives, starting with child care, family leave, health care and the dignified work that still evades many even at a time when employers are complaining of difficulty hiring workers and there is upward pressure on wages after decades of stagnation. Democracy matters not because there is something magical about 50-percent-plus-one in any given vote but because it gives people the power to decide how they will live together. If we dont claim that power, the market, a court or a minority government will always be pleased to take it off our hands.

Continued here:
Opinion | The Republican Party Is Succeeding Because We Are Not a True Democracy - The New York Times