It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Fredric Jameson

I am writing on the last day of 2025, a year that has been truly breathtaking, in its pace of social and political upheaval. The sheer breadth of offenses churned out by Donald Trump and his Project 2025 ghouls is staggering, leaving libs, Dems, and the American populace at large limping and groaning to the annual finish line. For many, it is not an exaggeration to say that our country has become virtually unrecognizable, transformed from a flawed-but-respectable republic into a shameless, cruel, and tacky combination of plutocracy and kleptocracy.

Depending on who you listen to, the party of Trump could be in for an electoral bloodbath in the upcoming midterms. MTG seems to have started a semi-tsunami of Republicans choosing to retire early or seek state-level offices, rather than face the wrath of voters who have wearied of Trump’s all-hat-no-cattle campaign of ICE-terror and middle-school name calling. At this point, as the frenetic redistricting battles have roughly netted out to a stalemate of potential seats, it is probably still in the cards that Trump does everything in his power to stop the election and/or steal it, considering that electronic voting irregularities from 2024 do not seem to have been fixed.

But let’s say that the midterms go off relatively without incident, and the Dems make great headway, retaking the House and bringing the Senate closer to parity. What is the takeaway, and how should Dems attack the future? The party’s old guard will likely say, “Hey, this is just the usual midterm revolt against the incumbent, only with added intensity because regular folks have had enough of Trump’s extremism. Let’s capitalize on that by stressing our common sense support for middle-of-the-road, non-extreme policies. And let’s not go crazy with more identity politics, more transgender lunacy, and above all, no radical socialist stuff.”

The younger Democratic contingent will respond, “Are you joking? The future of the party is with Democratic Socialism! Mamdani is in charge in NYC, Bernie and AOC are drawing huge crowds with an anti-oligarchy platform, and young people are more likely than ever to identify as socialists.”

This battle inside the Democratic party has been getting a lot of traction lately. Establishment pundits continue to pound the idea that Dems need to move to the creamy center, where all good, honest Americans should be and want to be. As I covered in this piece on Bill Maher, these folks are basically doing Trump’s work for him, over-emphasizing and cherry-picking the same rare examples of liberal overreach that faux news outlets like Fox News and OAN present as evidence of how loony-toons the libs have become. This is not the real world that the vast majority of Dems and liberals live in, and the establishment water-carriers like Maher just come off as entitled jerks, more interested in pulling up the ladder behind them than in actually doing something that could address systemic injustice and exploitation.

While I am not actually a registered Dem (I’ve been Green since 2000), my personal sentiments lie more with the social democratic wing, especially considering that what is termed “radical” in America would be middle-of-the-road in almost every other democratic country in the world. And when you look at the actual policy platforms of Mamdani, AOC, and Bernie, it is clear that they are much more closely aligned with the current zeitgeist than either Trumpism or the establishment Democrats. Medicare for all, affordable housing, tuition-free public college and trade school, more robust taxation on corporations and billionaires, revitalization of labor unions, assistance with child care costs — these are all high-polling policy proposals that don’t come off as radical, but more as “radically sensible” ways to ease the brutal side-effects of unfettered capitalism.

So 2026 would appear to be, especially if the midterms go as expected, the moment for democratic socialism to really take flight. This would be even more pronounced if Mamdani is able to make some decent headway in NYC by the fall, so that people could actually see some concrete examples of how democratic socialism could work in practice, on the ground, in real life.

But is democratic socialism even enough? There is no doubt that its policies are incredibly attractive on paper, and in the hands and mouths of charismatic advocates like Mamdani, AOC, and Bernie, democratic socialism can be amazingly inspiring, harnessing much of the same populist energy and passion that Trump has tapped into at the opposite end of the spectrum. But are the basic assumptions of democratic socialism rooted in reality, and can they actually achieve the main goals they set out to achieve?

To answer these questions, let’s start out with the matter of diagnosis. How do the main political parties understand our current predicament? What is their political theodicy, so to speak? For Trumpism, it’s pretty straightforward: Libs have fucked everything up, full stop. All of our troubles can be laid at the doorstep of Dems and libs, and anything that doesn’t fit into that framework (global warming, systemic racism, biodiversity crash, microplastic and forever-chemical buildup, deforestation, etc.) is not actually a problem at all, and is instead just a liberal hoax. In this view, fixing everything is easy, because you just have to get rid of the libs and their lazy clients, and all will be magically restored to greatness. Establishment Democrats and liberals in general have not historically had such a tidy explanation of why things are so f’ed up. But as the Polarization Industrial Complex has worked its magic over the last 30 years, and as the Democratic establishment has been captured by plutocrats, liberals have become more and more comfortable with this dualistic blaming of the other side for all our troubles. While more nuanced than Trumpism, certainly, there is still no sense in mainstream liberal and Democratic thought that the entire system itself is faulty at its core. The idea that capitalism, or consumer-industrial civilization writ large, is fundamentally unsustainable, is not something that is entertained, even in passing. While there are, of course, inefficiencies and injustices associated with our current system, these are not fatal flaws, and can thus be corrected by defeating Republican opponents and implementing better policies.

In this same sense, there is nothing in the platforms of the prominent social democrats that casts intrinsic doubt on the system itself. There is only a list of policies to improve the inefficiencies of capitalism, gap-fillers that can humanize the system. So Mamdani is not calling for a radical overhaul of the NYC economy. He wants to increase small business support, build affordable housing, raise corporate taxes to match the New Jersey rate, raise the minimum wage to $30 by 2030, make city buses free, and so on. The goal here is not radical social change, but just the creation of support mechanisms to make life easier for workers and their families, so that the free-market system becomes more benign. Similarly, Bernie and AOC call for more affordable housing, more taxes on the rich, more support for unions, medicare for all, and even (from AOC) a federal jobs guarantee. Again, the goal is not to transcend or replace capitalism, as you might suspect by the “socialist” tag, but simply to smooth out its rough edges and make it work for regular people. There is no sense that consumer-industrial civilization and capitalism are irredeemably flawed, just that they need to be injected and imbued with more fairness and justice.

As such, even Democratic Socialism is not radical enough to derail the actual structural faults in our system. This is not really that surprising or damning, because there are no working examples of how things could be radically different. In politics, you have to meet people where they are, and the people in the United States are still trapped in a cage with these material and mental bars:

• Single-family houses and apartments as the markers of “success”
• One-Person/One-Job economic structure
• The artificial creation of money-scarcity for regular individuals and families
• Conveyor belts of debt-repayment, where people spend their entire adult lives servicing debt at interest
• Overall dependency on the fortunes and whims of the wealthy and powerful
• Precarity in both job security and health security

And because we are in such an existential state of dependence and uncertainty, we are all still in a position where we expect government to do something to fix it all, despite the plutocracy’s dismal track record in sharing the wealth, and our increasing sense/dread that nothing can actually be done anyway to turn it all around. Conservatives are waiting for Trump’s massive Project 2025 social engineering scheme to really kick in, which will eventually expunge all the defective people and ideas from America. And libs want government policies to bring overall fairness and justice to the system, even though it is obvious that capitalism has never allowed this happen, except around the fringes, at least in its American format. Neither of these expectations will bear fruit. Godot is not coming, at least via our main political parties as currently configured.

The different approach is bottom-up, using model Bigger Home Bases to generate overwhelming popular demand for Universal Basic Income and logistical support for building larger households. This demand would then compel the US government to get on board with these specific actions, or be removed from office,

Only the fundamental reconfiguration of the household into much larger units, buttressed by Universal Basic Income and implementation of Modern Money Theory at the federal level, can undermine the excessive exploitation of capitalism, by removing two of its main pillars: artificial money scarcity and compulsive paid labor. Removing those two shackles can transform things from the bottom up, while leaving the free market in place for the usual allocation of products and services, albeit in a more limited sphere of influence, as the market for labor would be sharply curtailed by design. And these changes would fundamentally change the nature of government, both expanding its direct scope via UBI, but shrinking its actual size, by eliminating a myriad of programs designed to interfere with and alter the labor market. Instead, the government’s main mandate would be to directly help individuals via a UBI, without having to run everything through the demands and needs of business and the plutocracy. In essence, a radical change wold take place, with the plutocracy being replaced by an actually responsive democracy.