The Democratic Party has been in the wilderness for a long time now. Perhaps the consequences are stark enough, the excuses flimsy enough that we can finally embrace real transformation.
This is all lovely sentiment, but it feels to me very disconnected from where we are in this moment and how we got here. Therefore, I can’t see how one could begin to enact anything like what also feels like a highly idealized fantasy of what is possible and why or how. And I think you might want to think about how your fantasy might itself be rooted in privilege and elitism and a likely only tenuous relationship with working/middle class life — not to mention that of the urban and rural poor.
At the very least, it seems that one has to factor into where we are not just cultural issues, but also the fact that neoliberal economic policy has spent the last 40+ years engineering the vast enrichment of a relatively small elite at the cost of the economic evisceration. Almost nothing “trickled-down.” Millions of lives and thousands of communities were wrecked. Disaffection, (deaths of) despair, and resentment skyrocketed at what was a bipartisan usurpation of the American Promise. Trump recognized this and declared, eventually, a “plague on both their houses,” and started burning them down.
One can dream of a lot of cathartic soulful efforts to bring together people who love Monster Truck shows with people who love nights at the opera. Lovely thoughts.
The thing that needs fixing first, though, is our national economic policy. Neoliberalism is an ongoing policy structure that is specifically designed to transfer and maintain wealth and prosperity to/for a relatively few people at the expense of everyone else. As long as this continues to be the nation’s economic policy, not much can or will change with respect to the privileged and under/non-privileged.
The Democratic Party, in this diagnosis of the problem, must first and foremost redirect and reconstitute itself as the party that denounces and deconstructs neoliberal “trickle-down” economics and embraces and builds an economic policy framework that returns to some strong semblance of one that prioritizes “the common good.”
This means reinstating something like the Glass-Steagall Act, restructuring the tax code back to prior levels of progressiveness, and much more. And once people begin to feel that they and their wellbeing are valued and supported, one stands to be amazed by how much more readily and easily they will be inclined to share and/or temper their cultural enthusiasms, and best of all, “live and let live.
I couldn't agree more about the need for a fundamental shift in our economic foundation. And I also believe that if we don't actively do some of this work of reweaving the social fabric of the country, the kind of foundational economic systems change I suspect we agree on won't be possible or will result in the country shearing apart. I think there is a both-and to a lane of work oriented toward small "d" democratic cultures and another connect/related lane of work on a new social contract and political economy that values human contributions in terms other than wealth.
This is all lovely sentiment, but it feels to me very disconnected from where we are in this moment and how we got here. Therefore, I can’t see how one could begin to enact anything like what also feels like a highly idealized fantasy of what is possible and why or how. And I think you might want to think about how your fantasy might itself be rooted in privilege and elitism and a likely only tenuous relationship with working/middle class life — not to mention that of the urban and rural poor.
At the very least, it seems that one has to factor into where we are not just cultural issues, but also the fact that neoliberal economic policy has spent the last 40+ years engineering the vast enrichment of a relatively small elite at the cost of the economic evisceration. Almost nothing “trickled-down.” Millions of lives and thousands of communities were wrecked. Disaffection, (deaths of) despair, and resentment skyrocketed at what was a bipartisan usurpation of the American Promise. Trump recognized this and declared, eventually, a “plague on both their houses,” and started burning them down.
One can dream of a lot of cathartic soulful efforts to bring together people who love Monster Truck shows with people who love nights at the opera. Lovely thoughts.
The thing that needs fixing first, though, is our national economic policy. Neoliberalism is an ongoing policy structure that is specifically designed to transfer and maintain wealth and prosperity to/for a relatively few people at the expense of everyone else. As long as this continues to be the nation’s economic policy, not much can or will change with respect to the privileged and under/non-privileged.
The Democratic Party, in this diagnosis of the problem, must first and foremost redirect and reconstitute itself as the party that denounces and deconstructs neoliberal “trickle-down” economics and embraces and builds an economic policy framework that returns to some strong semblance of one that prioritizes “the common good.”
This means reinstating something like the Glass-Steagall Act, restructuring the tax code back to prior levels of progressiveness, and much more. And once people begin to feel that they and their wellbeing are valued and supported, one stands to be amazed by how much more readily and easily they will be inclined to share and/or temper their cultural enthusiasms, and best of all, “live and let live.
I couldn't agree more about the need for a fundamental shift in our economic foundation. And I also believe that if we don't actively do some of this work of reweaving the social fabric of the country, the kind of foundational economic systems change I suspect we agree on won't be possible or will result in the country shearing apart. I think there is a both-and to a lane of work oriented toward small "d" democratic cultures and another connect/related lane of work on a new social contract and political economy that values human contributions in terms other than wealth.