You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

Angela Davis

What lies ahead? Reimagining the world. Only that.

Arundhati Roy

As Donald Trump sinks further into his dementia-addled, narcissistic hate bubble, and the Democratic would-be king breakers cross their fingers, toes, and every other appendage, hoping that a midterm blue wave can overcome the actual election-stealing tactics of the feckless GOP, it is becoming harder and harder to maintain a grip on our national sanity. Tumult and chaos stalk the land, only somewhat offset by a general catatonic state of shell-shock that has gripped large segments of the populace.

We’re left to wonder, “What comes next?” Will it be an AI job-pocalypse, or is AI just a giant bubble that will crater the illusory, over tech-dependent growth of the last few years? Will there be more wars, against Cuba, Greenland, or maybe San Francisco? Will the forced removal of undocumented workers and other generally over-hued folks finally tip over into economic disaster, as millions of disappeared jobs are just not replaced, further driving up the cost of food, medical care, construction, because there are labor spheres that middle-aged rural whites somehow just can’t bring themselves to join?

Which ecological catastrophe will fatally gouge humanity first? The high-profile global warming disaster gets most of the press, but collapsing biodiversity could sneak in at the tape, creating a cascade of mega crop failures that would kill hundreds of millions, while emptying the pockets of the survivors. Or maybe the crisis of access to fresh water will unleash massive regional conflicts that could tip over into all-out world war, with nukes thrown in to spice things up.

Economically, we’re on a razor’s edge. As with every administration, Trump churns out rosy pictures backed by cherry-picked or flat-out fake numbers. Hey, unemployment is still low, so who cares if household debt of all kinds is at record highs, and that the labor force participation rate is as low as it’s been in 50 years (excluding the pandemic)? There are more job openings than ever, so what does it matter that most of them are fake, never intended to actually be filled? And of course, corporate profits and the stock market are in the stratosphere, so never mind that most households live paycheck-to-paycheck, have no retirement savings, and would be wiped out by one unforeseen illness or layoff.

In other words, the health of the plutocracy is portrayed as the health of society as a whole, and all the rage that results from this this profound untruth is shunted into the demonization of one’s fellow citizens. We’re duped into looking and punching sideways and down, instead of up.

What’s really at stake here is the future of our nation, and thus the soul of our country itself. I realize that this description is pretty cliched, but I’m not using it out of laziness or for lack of a better metaphor. No, we really do seem to have been forced into a choice between three fundamentally different paths, like racehorses pushed into the gates with doors slammed on our asses, preventing any turn back to a useable past. We thus have an epic choice in front of us, one that will determine the survival or extinguishing of our civilization.

As I see it, in the United States, there are three possible ways forward into the future, and two of them, I fear, will lead to disaster, a kind of meta-collapse of natural, economic, political, and psychological support systems. And these two bad trajectories just happen to be the two main ideological camps that currently control our government, media, and economic infrastructure. So let’s start with those two courses.

TRUMPISM

As much as people like to predict that the Trump “cult” will fall apart when the Orange One is carried down or up to his eternal fate in a gold-plated golf cart, the roots of Trumpism run much deeper. As Trump has mercilessly carried out his evisceration of the old guard GOP, what has emerged in its place is nothing that could be called ‘conservative’ in any real sense. Free-floating rage over change is not conservatism. The true conservative spirit wants to preserve institutional stability, not force artificial stasis for its own sake. Older conservatives, at least on paper, distrusted all forms of centralized power, both governmental and private. But with the rise of Reagan and neoliberalism (which is not liberal, we must always remember), private wealth fused with government power, and the old version of conservatism was ditched. Sure, the language of distrust of government is still there, reaching its zenith in Deep State paranoia, but that is just a smoke screen. Plutocrats don’t spend billions on elections because they want to drown the state in a bathtub. They only want to drown the parts that serve those people who are already underwater, while massively beefing up those authoritarian parts of the government that enhance and expand the plutocrats’ position.

In that sense, Trump is not a repudiation of Reaganism, but its very fulfillment, a gilded oligarchy cosplaying as populism. Even after the demise of Trump himself, this “plan” for America will continue. It is a two-sided strategy, and ultimately very simple: the leaders get their beaks wet — very, very wet — while the rabble are fed rage, paranoia, and every -ism that can be microtargeted by the Polarization Industrial Complex, that network of media outlets, think tanks, and other organizations that keep regular people at war with each other instead of the system itself.

Unfortunately, as we have discussed many times on this blog, this Trumpian pathway leads to somewhere worse than nowhere, because it is utterly detached from ecological, economic, and social reality. You can’t rage away the collapse of our global natural support systems. All the DEI rollbacks in the world are not going to force women back into the kitchens and birthing chairs. Nor will people of color just say, “Yeah, we didn’t really want those rights anyway, no big deal.”

As the gerrymandering battles demonstrate, the red-blue split is built on simple urban-vs-rural lines, and Trump’s desperate attempts to weaponize rural areas against everything else will simply not work at scale. No matter how many elections are tainted and stolen, urban and suburban areas are not just going to wither up and die, especially considering that this is where most of the country’s GDP actually resides.

The Trumpian future is a delusional fantasy, increasingly coming to match the various mental illnesses of its founder. It is a concoction of plutocrats, a tool to keep the Masters of the Universe in power while feeding the masses the gruel of cruelty. It just won’t work in the long run, but it is doing incredible damage in the meantime. If we dive headlong into the waters of perpetual Trumpism, the future of the United States is bleak, with plutocrats enshrined as gods while the rest of us wither away in a threadbare faux theocracy.

LIBERALISM

The second main way forward for America is the Democratic/Liberal option, which is presently besieged by a factional battle between the older, established wing and the ascendent Social Democratic group. But despite this very real conflict of ideologies, nether faction actually represents a realistic way forward, either in the mid or long terrm.

Much as Trumpism is an delusion that can still do incredible damage, liberalism is a delusion that can do a lot of good in the short term, while still navigating to a dead end. That is certainly better than the Trumpian alternative, but nether establishment Democratic nor social democratic programs will turn the overall system onto a sustainable trajectory.

Wait, why is that? After all, when you lay out the full menu of liberal policy proposals, they sound great, and they largely line up with popular opinion: tax the rich, make healthcare affordable and universal, enact sensible gun laws, recreate a commonsense road for legal immigration, upgrade our infrastructure to reduce energy and transportation costs, reinvigorate labor unions to increase workers’ bargaining power, raise the minimum wage, help people pay for college, vocational schools, and job retraining, etc.

This is what large swaths of the American public want, so why would I call it delusional? Well, firstly, by ‘delusional’, I don’t mean completely crazy or psychotic. I simply mean that people are not understanding that their perspectives don’t really line up with what is actually possible. And then more specifically, the main problem is that liberalism assumes that our overall system is still salvageable, roughly in its current format, if we can just sand down some of its pointier corners. Fundamentally, liberals are okay with full employment, the micro-household, and using the controlling metaphor of a household budget to understand and shape federal spending.

In other words, for liberalism, the basic validity of consumer industrial civilization is a given, and we just need to guide it into greener and nobler grooves. The core of our society and economy is still solid, and we’re on the right arc, bending towards justice and plenty (if we can just get rid of the pesky Trumpists).

As we have noted on this blog ad nauseum, this is no longer a realistic vision of the way things are. Now, I certainly don’t cast too many aspersions on politicians for not seeing this as they are locked INSIDE a system that is totally controlled by the plutocrats — so they can’t get too wild.

Nonetheless, the truth is the truth. Our entire civilization, as an overall system, is unsustainable in the deepest sense, in that IT CANNOT CONTINUE AS-IS for much longer. Every bandaid and gerry-rigged, duct-taped patch will not hold. Free daycare, job retraining, a green new deal, carbon taxes, ESOPs, rural broadband, tree planting, Medicare for All — these all sound great, and many would be great if enacted. But even if these policies could get past the hyper-polarized political landscape we’re in right now (a huge IF), they would still not disprove these basic facts:

• Full employment is dead — economic forces relentlessly reduce the economic value of human skill and labor — and this is not just AI. Businesses will continue to shed these costs, and labor unions will not bring things back from the dead. We’ve been avoiding and evading this reality over the last 40 years by massively expanding household debt and federal transfer payments, but eventually we’ll have to face the music.
• The basic relationship between money, morality, and hard work has utterly changed. As our incredibly lopsided, plutocratic distribution of wealth and income demonstrates, playing by the rules, being a good person, and contributing positively to society have virtually nothing to do any longer with how much money you make and have. And this will not change under the current arrangement.
• Perpetual growth on a finite, collapsing planet is pure insanity, and cannot persist.
• The micro-household (average US household size is now 2.53, which includes the 29% of households that are now comprised of a single person) is profoundly unnatural and destructive, and is the basic building block of ecological destruction, economic precarity, and psychological unhealth.

And of course, the overall big picture goes far beyond the shores of the US. What we’re really faced with is the viability of the human species itself, an existential if not spiritual problem. Can we continue much longer as a biological entity, when our immense power is shattering the natural organs of the planet that gave birth to us? In essence, our current global civilization is just a manifestation of this overweening power, which can be life-enhancing at best but is unquestionably cancerous in its present incarnation.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a liberal, and almost all of my friends are as well. And in general, I find libs to be great folks, seriously and sincerely concerned with the future we’re leaving to our descendants. But as Billie Jean King noted, “You have to see it to be it.” And all we really know as a people is what we have around us right now. All the skids — cultural, economic, political, psychological — are greased in such a way that it’s easy for people to see what exists now as the only viable prototype for the future. Of course we’re going to continue to see paid work as mandatory. Of course we want to keep money scarce so that people can’t be lazy and get ‘something for nothing’. Of course the couple and the nuclear family, including its modern, alternative formats, are the gold standards for domestic bliss and social normality. Of course it’s perfectly natural for people to strive after these micro-dwellings, which can then be filled with the bounty of consumer capitalism. Even if unfortunate, we will forever line up politically against our benighted foes, fellow citizens who threaten our liberties and lives. And of course, maybe most importantly, no matter what else we might want on our laundry list of improvements, we must always, always, always put growth above all other priorities. There can be no social improvement, liberal or conservative, regardless of our noblest intentions, if we’re not growing.

Well, to quote somebody great and famous: “Fuck all that!” Yes, the weight of history, biology, and institutional continuity make the status quo seem to be eternal truth, somewhat flexible through time, but still unshakably solid. But if we’re going to find an actual way forward that could work, and is not devoted to illusions and delusions, then we’ll have to melt much of that solidity into air.

INSTEAD

That brings us to the third horse in the race to win the soul of America. And at this point, I don’t need to drone on, as the post is long enough already, and you can read about my dream “project” in almost any other entry on this blog. Suffice it to say, in twenty years (or sooner), we’ll be living a drastically different lifestyle, a massive downscaling or downsizing, when looked at by today’s definitions. The only question is, “Will this change be wrought only by ecological collapse, or will we find a way to partially guide and direct the transformation?” If things are done only on nature’s terms, via food chain collapse, a cataclysmic oceanic event, continental macro-drought, a new and more-virulent pandemic, or some other Roland Emmerich style occurrence, then things will be grim. But if we can get ahead of things a bit, and the United States is in a good position to do so, then we could still save the world, and ourselves.

In this scenario, our greatest asset will not be our military, our AI, our satellites, our billionaires, or our charismatic political figures. Rather, our youth as a nation, our history of perpetually remaking ourselves, and our willingness to break with tradition and experiment robustly could still save us. But we’ll have to jettison much of what our current “leadership” camps take for granted. We’ll need to remake our dwellings. We’ll need to scrap the unquestioned virtue of labor. We’ll need to decamp from cities and suburbs to repopulate our rural areas. We’ll need to eat lower on the food chain, living in larger domestic groups that reconnect with horticulture and permaculture. Our view of money and morality will have to change, and we’ll need to turn fiat cash loose to serve all people instead of using it only for the plutocrats’ further enrichment.

And there will be a lot more involved in this transformation, with the overall goal of shrinking our detrimental impact on the planet. Call it right-sizing or degrowth or just simple contraction. If we’re to survive, the old order will eventually need to be replaced with something else. Something not completely different, but a society and a culture dedicated to actual sustainability.