The Greatest Shortcoming

n. A political operation: the deployment of numerical instruments to foreclose political deliberation by converting contested claims into apparent technical necessities. It operates through three reinforcing patterns — the will to simplify (compressing complex social processes into a single governing metric), the rule of expertise (insulating quantified claims from democratic scrutiny through credentialed authority), and the politics of inevitability (converting conditional projections into mandates that foreclose political choice).

n. Organized visions of environmental futures that naturalize hierarchy and exclusion as ecological necessity. ecofascist imaginaries become analytically recognizable through four diagnostic elements:

Threat objects are the entities cast as sources of ecological and social danger — overpopulation, immigrants, racial minorities, fertility decline — and what unifies them is that each is rendered as a demographic category rather than a structural condition.

Moral warrants are the justificatory frameworks that convert coercive governance into ethical obligation, as when Bartlett’s freight-train metaphor positioned collateral harm as the reluctant response of realistic stewards to a physical constraint.

Action repertoires are the policy instruments these imaginaries authorize, ranging from coercive fertility controls and exclusionary border regimes to family separation, managed abandonment, and mass violence presented as defense.

Aesthetic signatures are the visual, temporal, and affective markers — countdown charts, threshold rhetoric, emergency metaphors, the tutorial register — that train audiences to read deliberation as dangerous delay.

Made durable though imaginaries and the laws, infrastructures, and administrative routines that enact them.

The Greatest Shortcoming traces a hundred years of American demographic and environmental governance — from the Olmsted Report’s grammar of scarcity to climate triage as administrative routine. It identifies the actors who built the instruments, the organizations that circulated them, the metaphors that made them persuasive, and the political projects they served. And it asks whether measurement can be redirected: whether the same quantitative tools that narrowed the circle of concern can be rebuilt to widen it.

Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D. is a computational social scientist and an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received undergraduate degrees from MIT, M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern University’s School of Communication, and completed post-doctoral training at Northeastern University and the Harvard Business School. He currently resides in Boulder, Colorado with his wife and two sons.

Selected works referenced in chapter 1: Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers; Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism; Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception; Emily Klancher Merchant, Building the Population Bomb; Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs; Sheila Jasanoff & Sang-Hyun Kim, Dreamscapes of Modernity; Roger Griffin on palingenetic ultranationalism.