The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing

E.F. Schumacher

First things first: let’s remind ourselves of the (seemingly) unassailable nature of the current American plutocracy.

• The US has faulty, anachronistic electoral mechanics, which locks in the purely adversarial, two-party duopoly (mainly, we’re talking about single-rep, winner-take-all Congressional districts, and winner-take-all allotment of electoral college votes, except for Maine and Nebraska, which serve as a reminder that no constitutional change is needed for states to change over to proportional allotment)
• Largely thanks to Citizens United, but certainly well-enshrined before that, money has virtually unlimited access to the US political system, made even more horrible by the recent upholding by a Delaware court that business entities are entitled to vote in municipal elections, like flesh-and-blood (i.e., mortal) people
• The plutocracy has purchased virtually the entire ecosystem of traditional media outlets, think tanks, PACs, lobby-shops, astroturf advocacy groups, and social media platforms.
• Building on this monopolized ecosystem, the Polarization Industrial Complex has been deployed to keep people looking down at scapegoats and across at basic geographical differences (i.e., rural vs urban) as focus points for their anxiety and discontent, instead of upwards at the plutocracy itself.

This plutocratic infrastructure is so tightly sealed that seemingly nothing can crack it. The two main parties take turns at the reins of power, mostly burning their time in office just undoing what the prior regime established. So the promised land of each competing ideology never comes, and whole generations are lost as salvation is forever fleeting, mirage-like on the eternally-receding horizon.

In the current moment, it seems that actual human and ecological flourishing are as far away as they have been in decades, as Trumpism rampages across the smoldering wreckage of our institutions and our very humanity. And the reality is that help is never going to come from above anyway. Trumpism has simply beaten liberalism to the punch in recognizing that our entire system is unsustainable.

In essence, Trump and his supporters have given up on America as an overall idea, even as they proclaim its greatness. But their resignation to the demise of our society takes a very primitive format: kleptocracy (“get what you can now and get out”), cruelty, and a vicarious pleasure at the lib-owning actions and antics of only those plutocrats who are on “their team.”

Democrats and liberals, by contrast, still have one foot in the playing field of seeing the current system as salvageable. If they can just get rid of Trumpism and some bad CEOs, make some overtures to the forgotten working class, and get a Green New Deal up and running (with reinvigorated unions), then we can still save consumer-industrial capitalism, delivering the amazing jobs of the future and creating a Lake Wobegon future, where everyone is above average.

To all this, I would just say to Dems/libs: “don’t bother.” Like Trumpism, liberals must recognize that the current system is toast. It cannot be salvaged. But instead of retreating into the criminal cruelty and monumental greed of Trumpism, libs need to swing for the fences, with as big and radical a break with the system as Trumpism represents.

To regular readers of this blog, it may seem that my push for Bigger Home Bases — reconfiguring the household into much larger groups of 100-150 people — as a replacement for the current format is just a childish, idealistic fantasy, a campfire-plus-edibles concoction that has as much chance at enactment as a government run by prairie dogs. But I honestly believe that BHBs are not just a “nice-to-have” feature of a wondrous green America. Rather, I see them as our only actual chance at avoiding a cascading series of disasters — ecological, political, cultural, and economic — that will soon decimate not just the US, but most, if not all of, the planet. Because against plutocracy, the only avenue of attack is from below. The only strategy is to sap its energy, which can only be done, I am convinced, by creating a much larger household format, supported and energized by a Universal Basic Income.

Why? Well, here is a incomplete list of the problems and issues that can be attacked, all at once, by reformatting our society into Bigger Home Bases:

• The Crisis of Work
  • Just consider these developments: AI killing jobs, especially entry-level and “lower-skill”; disappearance of job stability; stagnant wages; empty promise of careerism; proliferation of “bullshit jobs”; rise of unbenefited, unreliable gig and contract work; the inability of laid-off older workers to find new jobs of commensurate value; the lack of advancement opportunities for younger workers
  • All of these issues would be substantially minimized by BHBs, as people would be able to voluntarily withdraw from the workforce, as the collective stability of the group would reduce the economic compulsion for outside labor.
• Millennial, Gen-Z, and Gen Alpha hopelessness
  • Younger people would be able to get off the work/debt treadmill, and devote themselves to a much more stable, welcoming, and financially viable social format
• Crisis of the Elderly
  • The lack of retirement savings, the exorbitant cost of care facilities, and general detachment and loneliness have made the lives of elderly Americans precarious and dangerous
  • Incorporating our elders into BHBs would provide financial stability and social connection for them, making the end of life a joyful and peaceful time
• The Toxic Manosphere
  • Most of the issues with our young men in the US are simply due to the disappearance of good places for them to live, work, and interact with other people
  • Reintegrating men of all ages into intergenerational social groups, places without the relentless financial pressure to make a lot of money to “earn” women, children, and status, would immediately start to heal the wounds inflicted by the toxic manosphere culture
  • The physical building and maintenance of BHBs would also allow men to enact their innate urges to perform meaningful, embodied labor
• Unplugging from social media
  • It does not need belaboring how bad social media addiction has become for all of us, but mostly for children and adolescents.
  • BHBs would provide intense, real human interaction which would easily replace and displace the toxic online life we increasingly inhabit
• Children
  • To use the cliche, it really does take a village. A larger household group would provide in-house daycare, and would take the immense pressure off parents to constantly be supervising their kids 24-7
• Ecological Impact
  • BHBs would trigger a massive reduction in consumption, bending the curve on the ecological damage our current lifestyle spawns
  • “Therapeutic consumption” would be curtailed, as people would be more emotionally and psychologically stable and healthy. As social primates, we are built to enjoy other people in tribal groupings. BHBs would create that atmosphere.
  • BHBs would also reduce the pressure for every couple to have children. Children could really belong to the whole community, and numbers could be drawn down while still fulfilling the intergenerational care dynamic we all crave.
• Financial repair and health
  • UBI and collective living would sharply reduce people’s need for the parasitic debt industry. Repair of personal finances would happen very quicky.
  • Retirement landscape would change completely, as the need to “leave home” would largely be eliminated, as many elders would simply remain in their BHBs for life, barring severe medical disability.

All of these features of BHBs, and others, would erode the power of the plutocrats from below. Our current system wants people as dependent as possible: on businesses (for jobs), on banks and other lenders (for money because our jobs don’t pay enough), and on government (for ameliorating the worst aspects of capitalism, so that we’re not all destitute in the streets). The system wants to keep money scarce for regular people, so that we have to approach the plutocracy with humility and deference, to get their table scraps and to not die.

The plutocracy wants us angry at each other, isolated in our information silos of grievance, raging against immigrants, trans people, and bad-apple CEOs, while ignoring the actual agents of our oppression, the masters of the universe at the top of the economic pyramid.

And perhaps most of all, the plutocrats want us to only see a future that looks like the present, only more so: more growth, more jobs, more consumption, more profits, more products, more information, more AI — always more, and always bigger.

But the only MORE that actually has a chance to save us is Bigger Home Bases. Only a larger household format can serve as a vehicle for shrinking the plutocracy, while increasing our freedom, our agency, and our dignity. And only the bigger household can catalyze the reduction of the key things that have to be downscaled: labor, consumption, transport, and all manner of economic activity. Contraction, which must happen (and will happen, one way or another, either on nature’s terms only or partially on our terms) is a complete non-starter in today’s landscape — unless we transition to BHBs.