We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.

George Washington

Last time, we explored how the radical break with the status quo that has been opened up by Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball lunacy might actually provide an opening for liberals to create their own bold project for transcending the self-destruction inherent in the dead-end of neoliberal plutocracy.

But that gets us directly to the burning question for the Democratic party or any other entity, like the DSA, that would seize the reins of power and start trying to undo the damage done by the current regime: “What kind of country do we want to be?”

This sounds like a simple question, and yet it has proved devilishly elusive for the triangulating, big-money-beholden Dems. And their lack of a convincing answer to this question is a huge piece of the puzzle that resulted in Trump’s ascension. People just aren’t buying what the Dems and many other libs are selling. It is commonplace by now to bemoan what Dem party operatives did to Bernie in 2016, and there’s a lot of truth in that analysis. The country was ready for a radical break with the powers-that-be, and if Bernie had been allowed to oppose Trump in the general election, we could be looking at a very different country today.

But that’s old news by now. Returning to our question of what kind of country we want to be, the easy answer is to stick to the poll and focus-group tested responses: “We stand for freedom and opportunity, for a nation that acknowledges its past mistakes, but uses those to strive for more perfect justice and wider access to the American Dream going forward…. etc.”

You get the idea here. The US was born in an environment of slavery, sexism, exploitation of indentured servants, genocide of indigenous people, and the disenfranchisement of the unpropertied. But the core tenets of America — freedom, equality before the law, rejection of tyranny — ensure that we’ll continue to expand people’s access to the good life by tearing down barriers to equal opportunity for all. In other words, the kernel of US greatness has been there from the founding, and that greatness can be continued if we just continually reaffirm those core principles.

This certainly makes for great speechifying, but it’s pretty bereft of specifics, which is why it’s the type of rhetoric that is so popular among establishment Dems. It is oratorically soaring, but easily reconciled with the usual economic ideals of neoliberal plutocracy: economic growth, low taxes, free trade, free markets for labor and capital, etc. This establishment version of the American future has not worked in the long term, because it doesn’t actually make people’s lives consistently better, or even just less sucky. As such, this rhetorical flavor of the Democratic party, best exemplified recently by Obama, is now under major assault from Bernie and his heirs, the DSA.

But despite all the bluster and breathless hand-wringing of conservatives over these socialists, Marxists, and/or Communists, what’s the actual DSA answer to the question about what kind of country we want to be? Well, it’s basically still the soaring oratory of establishment Dems, but then just piled high with anti-corporate and pro-labor specifics: tax the rich, MFA, reinvigorating unions, day care and eldercare assistance, more affordable housing, higher minimum wages, mandated paid parental leave, and a significant greening up of our infrastructure. Essentially, these are the kinds of things that FDR-style Democrats used to talk about before the Clintonian revolution. It is by no measure anything close to actual state socialism, true Marxism, or genuine communism. Indeed, Trump’s buying spree of significant shares in American companies is far more communistic than anything the DSA is proposing. [Luckily for Trump, MAGA folks, like Americans in general, don’t read a lot of, like, you know, books and stuff. So they have no clue what political labels actually mean historically; and it’s also not a subject covered anywhere in the Trump Bible.]

So as I have noted before on this blog, the DSA, while seen as “radical” by many conservatives and establishment Dems, is actually nowhere near radical enough to provide a vision of the future that makes sense in the big picture, which is that our whole civilizational system is unsustainable and needs to be utterly transcended.

So what are the other candidates for what kind of country we want to be? Well, despite the radical space opened up by Trump, I don’t think that anyone really believes that it’s a realistic idea to set up the third biggest country in the world as a giant Christian theocracy and/or a Handmaid’s Tale type of society where female fertility is despotically controlled by (male) religious zealots. Certainly these Christian Nationalists can do, and already have done, immense damage to many people’s lives. But a full-blown transformation of our country is just not in the realm of the possible. We are an incredibly diverse and largely urban nation, so a grand project to just magically make cities and minorities disappear, leaving a lily-white land of Cracker Barrels, Branson Missouris, and evangelical churches with no rhythm, is just not feasible.

Ditto for the somewhat similar dream of the manosphere, with subjugated trad-wives and awesome jobs for high school grads (as soon as all the feminists are jailed or forcibly converted to sense, and black and brown people are expelled or disappeared into camps of some kind). These desires are adolescent fantasies, completely detached from the socioeconomic reality of the modern world. They exist only because faux online communities create the sense that if you just say it loud enough and often enough, then reality will be magically repealed. It’s a kind of manifesting of delusional shit, which remains delusional and shitty regardless of how much high-T is behind it.

So the current domestic ideas about what kind of country we want to be are pretty discouraging, either trapped in the fever-dreams of polarized cultural warfare, or coiling around only slight adjustments to the very system that has failed us. But what about the global picture? There have been a lot of comparisons lately between the US and Europe, and between the US and China. European countries, and Scandinavian countries especially, have found a much different balance between capitalism and socialism, with the resulting social democracies of Europe being possibly the highest-achieving civilizational formats ever devised. Depending on political affiliation, Americans view Europe with either wistful jealousy (“Why can’t we have free healthcare and long paid vacations?”) or with cynical disdain (“They’re just living like freeloaders off the military might of America!” They’re cheating!”)

But regardless of your view of these societies, the American future cannot be European anyway. Our history, culture, and political machinery preclude any kind of Oslo-on-the-Potomac solutions for the US. No matter how much the DSA and NPR-set wants us to be Scandinavia writ large, it’s just not in the cards, or in our national DNA. Too many massive systemic faults would have to be undone from the top, and huge shifts in public sentiment would have to happen from below. It’s almost impossible to see how that would come about.

What about China? It’s becoming harder and harder to deny that China has made much better strategic decisions for long-term economic and even ecological success. The Chinese infrastructure explosion is almost miraculous: high-speed rail everywhere, massive transition to electric vehicles, support for green energy at home and around the globe, a home ownership model that is poised to outperform the American system, global leadership in solar panel production, etc.

Trump is currently trying to beat these Chinese devils (I imagine that’s one of the nicer things Trump calls them in private) by flexing military muscle and throwing down tariffs everywhere he can think of. But China’s response has basically been one huge shrug. They have made long-term decisions that limit their internal plutocratic development, while giving them maximum flexibility to just move wherever the winds of global trade and finance take them (a very Taoist strategy). The US will bluster and threaten, but China will just pivot to wherever they need to, to keep their long-term plan of global influence and internal improvement moving forward.

But let’s be honest: the Chinese model (high speed rail, e-cars, solar panels, no residential property taxes) is not really replicable in the US. China is, after all, an authoritarian state, and much of their “success” is built on robust repression of the private sphere, control of information available to its citizens, and a draconian dominance of the state over all smaller entities, including individuals. And their human rights record? Not great.

So while we might look at China as some type of techno-utopia that the US should copy, at least in some respects, we shouldn’t delude ourselves in thinking that it could be done here without a massive expansion of authoritarian control. I know it seems that we’re drifting that way anyway with Trump, but American plutocrats wouldn’t allow that kind of state suppression of corporate power.

One final contender for what kind of country we want to be: the techno-utopias of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and other silicon valley plutocratic gurus. I’ve discussed these delusional a-holes before, as they are just completely detached not only from economic reality (having lots of money paradoxically makes you virtually blind as to how things work for people who have to buy their own groceries), but from physical and ecological reality especially. Depending on which genius you’re talking about, you’ll discover that we must: establish colonies on other planets (because we’ve done such a great job with this one, what could go wrong?); accelerate the coming of the Singularity, where our human consciousness will merge with AI to create a hyper-awesome society of immortal hybrids (not sure who will pay to have Walmart stock clerks’ brains uploaded into the Matrix, but I’m sure we won’t leave anyone behind in regular flesh and blood reality); enact Universal Basic Income, so that AI can perform all our work and give us maximum leisure (now, of course, I’m all for UBI, but we don’t have a great track record for applying labor-saving technologies in ways that benefit regular workers instead of just enriching the already wealthy).

You get the idea. These rich pricks don’t really give a shit about mere mortals anyway, so it’s not surprising that their vision for the US is more tone-deaf than your drunk cousin at Thursday night karaoke.

Next Time – Part 3 – What kind of country could we be, and should we be?