The publication of
Crashing the Gates and the discussion on who should be the next wave of front page diarists seems as good a time as any to outline what we should all understand at a deep level: right now the progressive left is developing an ideology, that ideology is both a response to the failures of the present governing reactionary ideology, and a vision for a better world that comes afterward.
This is why I think that Hale Stewart and Jerome Guillet would both be excellent front pagers - they have devoted themselves to explaining immediate facts and long term issues to people so that people can understand that there is a massive failure in the system coming, and that people need to be able to understand, in their gut, how to respond. Hale is a front pager on bopnews precisely because of his smash mouth writing on economic events, and the ability both to see how the macro-numbers are good, while the fundamentals are bad. I endorse either or both for the front page.
Me? I have a different project - which is why I write the way I do.
What is going on is analogous to the period during the 1970's when the right began developing an ideology of why the privileged should run the government, the nation, the world and the world's economy. It began from outlets devoted to people who disliked the order from the beginning, and then spread outwards as it became better expressed. Some people have complained about my writing being hard to follow, and that I should not be a front page for this reason. They are probably right - my diaries are not meant to make the case for my being on the front page, but to make the case to progressives that we have an ideology and a vision, and that vision will lead the world out of the crisis that it is pushing itself towards. Issues such as energy, job creation and Iraq are merely the points of failure in what is a system that is dying.
This ideology is not based on specific policy demands, such as universal health care, but as Kos' book makes clear, a different relationship between the public, and the institutions that make up the society. What we are demanding - fiscal sanity, universal participation in civil institutions, universal access to the basics of affluent society, social and political justice, internationalism, and restructuring of the underlying economy - are the means to this different view of society. It is fundamentally a liberal and progressive view, and connected with the progressive moments in American history. It is not limited by them. This is not a demand merely to finish the agenda of Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, TR, FDR or JFK - but to carry forward the torch of human progress into a new era, making full use of the new abilities that we have, and meeting the challenges of the present and the future. We want a better world for ourselves and those that come after us, we are willing to make sacrifices to bring it about - because we realize that the alternative is to have those sacrifices forced upon us in any event. Change is coming, and we can be driving it, or pushed under by it.
This new world will work because it is not only emotionally coherent, but intellectually coherent, and politically coherent - which is the combination of the first two. It works because its ethics reinforce the morality which is needed to function in it. It rewards people for doing good, by allowing them to do well.
To outline this often requires joining very different ideas, and underlining how different problems have the same root cause. We have a problem with energy, not just because of technology - but because we reward people for using energy in various ways that create a vicious cycle - the more people waste, the more people have an incentive to waste more.
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So explaining the basic theory, and how it is supported by centuries of liberal thought - going back to ancient times, through humanism in the renaissance, through the Enlightenment, through the Romantic Revolutions, through the growth of Liberalism and Progressivism, through the great struggles against totalitarianism - producing an inevitable historical logic that draws in many different kinds of people and contributions - that is my purpose. If it is not always the most relevant to the event of the day, and to debunking Republican spin, that is all well and good - it isn't that the tactical cut and thrust isn't important, I've been in the middle of that, and feel it to be absolutely essential for our democracy. But there is another need, one of preaching what can be called "The Gospel of Liberalism".
The great struggle of the 21st century is different, but similar to, the great struggles of the 19th and 20th century. There will be those who try and, not merely lead or govern, but control and rule the society from a privileged position. These people will attempt to grab the levers of power and use them to extract yet more power, driving down the common good for their individual good. This basic drive towards oligarchy is not new, but it does take different forms at different times.
In our time there has grown up a system which extracts value, and then procedes to concentrate it, not just in the hands of people, but in structures that force people to support the very system which gives them less back than they put in. This observation was made by Machiavelli, Jefferson, Marx and Dewey. It is an old truth that the public needs to be constantly reminded of. Structures grow up because the work, and become corrupt precisely because there are, for a time, no good alternatives. At the point where there are choices again, the Jeffersonian right of revolution comes back into play - it is the right of the people to alter or abolish arrangements which are destructive to the ends of life, liberty and happiness.
So much is basic assumption, and is true at any moment in time. We must always be making the decision as to whether it is better to suffer the ills of the present system, while fighting to reform it - or to overthrow that system. revolutions - economic, social, political or cultural - are based on the assertion by people willing to accept the sacrifices of change, that the moment for change has come. Whether this is the American Revolution, the Post Civil War moment of universalizing, the "revolution at the ballot box" of FDR, the civil rights movement or the internal collisions over Vietnam.
What is our revolution? In a phrase, it is our job to knock down the pyramid.
The pyramid is the world we live in, it is based on the ability to cheaply extract value and repackage it. Over time it has been enormously successful. We should not forget that it is in place precisely because it was the best compromise to meet the problems of the 20th century, and it has brought enormous affluence to roughly two billion people. There are some problems. First, the very extraction that it uses is both morally questionable, and physically limited. To bring affluence to two billion people, it must keep an even larger number in poverty. If there were an unlimited amount of oil in the world, and the atmosphere could soak up an unlimited amount of carbon, and there were an unlimited amount of certain other goods - water, arable land and so on - this system, for all of its problems, could bring prosperity to everyone. This is why so many people cling to it - it has delivered a great deal, and if we lived in a different world than the one we live in, could work. The other reason, of course, is that it is a world that has become tremendously corrupt and unequal, and people will not give up unearned advantages.
This reality - that the pyramid cannot, physically, bring the world into affluence, but will run out long before it has brought prosperity to all - is the root cause of the series of growing crisis points. The one we face is not the first, nor will it be the last, and it is not the worst. Instead, like the pre-crisis points in the past, it is a fight over who has to accept less to keep the current system going for a bit longer.
Thus, scientifically and morally, the present system is unacceptable, because it forces us to accept a morally untenable world. This is a practical, not emotional, objection. If there is a limit to how much affluence there is, people will kill to get inside the golden circle. When enough people are willing to do this, then movements and later governments will rise that will organize them to do this. Whether the objectives of these movements is good, or evil, is much less important than the reality of their coming. Immoral systems produce misery, misery produces either extinction or violence, and these put an end to the immoral system one way or another. But they do not always replace it with something better. The Russian Revolution did not usher in a government that was, in the long term, better than the one that it replaced.
We see this in terrorism and in Iraq: the reactionary ideology is not morally coherent. It has resulted in giving millions of people no real choice - either live under autocracies that we like to do business with, or rebell violently. Some have chosen to strike at the affluent world as a whole, with any means in their hands, and in the name of any ideology that will end their moral suffering. Even if this will not end their physical suffering, even if those who lead them are no better than those they attack. I am against terrorism and the rebellion in Iraq, but I recognize that the people involved in them are doing so because they feel they have no other choice. The way to end the cycle of violence, and prevent it from escalating, is to change the landscape.
But these are merely the ones we obsess over. In Zaire millions have died in a resource war, in Darfur millions have been killed by genocide. The flip side of desperate people engaged in violence is even more grotesque state violence - terrorism by the powerful against their own populations. This, not the Sunni rebellion, Osama bin Laden is the great danger. Saddam, Mugabe and others are again, merely the worst examples. This sets the stage for ever growing cycles of violence, until "an eye for an eye" has left the whole world blind.
The second step is to argue that progressive and liberal values are intellectually coherent. That is there is a theory of how to run the world in a new way. This is one of the hardest steps to take, in no small part because theory is not tractable to our immediate desires. There are going to be things we want that we will not be able to do, or at least not as fast as we would want to do them. We are going to be forced to accept policies and decisions that we do not like - in return for the much greater gains that are offered. To be the governing ideology means making hard choices, deciding morally grey areas, and between the lesser of two evils.
The other reason that theory is hard, and intellectual coherence is hard, is because it requires a change in outlook - a change in the way people think about things. In dealing with an old system, every decision is what an economist would call a "marginal" one - that is, a decision as to what is on the table, and how much of it each side gets. When a system is failing, one of the first signs is that the least that there is no way to keep everyone at the table playing. Systems at their end "vote people off the island" - the squeeze people out, and take the benefits and redistribute them. Often this is a nasty process, and it accelerates, the next round of the game sees the same question, and more people are pused out. As long as most people don't feel that misfortune will fall on them, they will keep doing it.
But in dealing with a change in society, the questions are different, the way of looking at problems is different. One must look deep into the structure of society, and find systems that are fundamentally wrong, wasteful, or do not produce as much value as they consume. Economics has "creative destruction", politics has "reform", technology has "re-engineering" and so on. One concrete example of this is the health care system. We don't have enough capacity to give everyone the care they want, and produce the profits that a private system demands. There is no way to distribute the surplus, because there is a deficit. Thus we have the following options: force people out of the health system - which we are doing - and take surplus away from other things to pay for it - which we are doing - or change the system. The latter is hard because it means that many people who are doing better than they should will fight it.
Another problem is that theory often emerges in pieces. Often the intuitive notions of one era become the mathematics of the next. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote on institutional forces in economics. He didn't use math, because there was no math to handle what he saw going on. Slowly the math is becoming available. This is why I talk about mesoëconomics, it is the term that I and some others coined to describe the growing body of economic and social theory which describes effects that we have seen, and often for a long time, but did not have the ability to rigorously model and measure.
On top of these two pieces - that the progressive left is a morally coherent ideology, and an intellectually coherent ideology - I argue that there is the need to make it a politically coherent ideology. That is, capable of winning elections and governing. Political coherence comes from joining moral coherence - "mandate" - with intellectual coherence - "mechanism" - to produce a means for people to argue out issues of the day, come to consensus and enforce consensus - "meaning".
This is why many of my diaries are not about economics, but about political structure and rhetoric. People live and act within their frames - to change action requires changing the frame. A ball bounces differently depending on its shape and size, to change the game, one must change the balls and bats and goals that people use. This rhetoric must be grounded in our moral reality, but also in our political reality. The two must be made to move in synchronization - that is, a rhetorical argument must often produce the same result that someone would come to grinding the numbers out by theory. The two reinforce each other, and allow people to make decisions that can be made to work.
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The fundamental basis for unifying these aspects is people's understanding of the society they live in. This has been called their "consciousness", though I am not really a believer in that as the right way to describe it - we are often unconscious of the boundaries of the world we live in. Instead I prefer to think of it in more hard to name terms - because the names have not yet been attached to concepts we can easily feel. But think of it this way. In most people's brains there is a center that "knows" where your body is, and where the boundaries are. This is described as your "periperipheral" sense. People don't just use this for physical things, but abstract ones. Other parts of your brain "know" where moral boundaries are, and when you try and do something that breaks one, you feel them push back. When you discover that a limitation is no longer there, there is a freeing sense. The day you discover you can flirt and not be struck by lightning is one such day. On one hand the barriers are important, they keep us from pissing on each others cars. On the otherhand, they are oppressive - they make people feel they can't walk into stores, cross certain streets, listen to certain music, say certain things. Rousseau observed this tension, and it is with us still. I call this the "peripolitical" - that is, what is "around" politics - but that term is still unique to my own writing and thinking. If I have to use a paragraph to describe it, it makes my writing seem dense and difficult - even though it is a simple concept that has a long history.
This sense of "public space" is the one that we must change. Right now people organize in pyramids because pyramids are all around them. Some of those pyramids grow, and feast on the surplus of society. Since what does this is mysterious, people, even powerful ones, become superstitous about it. We invent magical thinking about "tipping points" and "buzz" and other unmeasurable, and indeed often non-existent, entities to explain why some pyramids grow row by row, and others don't.
The way to change the society - and make it stick - is to get people out of the sense that they are consumers of the benefits of a pyramid, whether as employees of a corporation, members of a party, citizens of a country or what have you - and see themselves as participants in a sphere. This change - a change in the sense of public and social space - is backed by cold equations, but also by living people - given a chance to participate in a sphere, people leap at it, even if, at first, it does not pay as well. Over time, as more and more people are forced out of the pyramid, and the pyramid pays less and less, more and more people will make the jump.
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So this is why I write as I do - because there is a big picture. That big picture isn't the price of a barrel of oil, or whether votes are being counted, or whether people of the same sex can get married, or internet politics - but encompasses all of them. We are not a collection of quarrelling interest groups fighting to get our micro-issue to the front of the line - but a movement which is reaching for a coherent society. Ultimately we won't fix the energy crisis unless elections elect the right people, ultimately we won't have this without internet politics, ultimately people have to be able to participate in all aspects of society. The reality is that the same mentality that makes unequal access to marriage the law of the land, also restricts access to the ballot box, to economic opportunity, to social acceptance.
Ultimately if someone is blocked from doing what they should be allowed to do, we are all blocked from doing what we should be allowed to do. Whether that is trying to get creative work through the filter, vote, get married, move, get an education or anything else. Every time people give up on participating, and become members of the sheeple, we are all herded a bit closer to being shorn.
Explaining this is the work of many years, but then 14 years ago, there were very few people who even got what I was talking about at all - the spheres have grown, gotten better, and as people experience them, they begin to sense that yes, a better world is possible, and it stems, not just from a change in party, or policy - but from fundamental changes in how we view ourselves, how we organize ourselves and how we act within the public sphere. This is one of the reasons why Crashing the Gates by Kos and Jerome Armstrong is another important step forward, it explains in concrete terms how spheres are created, draw people in, and harness that energy for practical effect. Someday it will be a common place thing, for the moment, it is often hard to explain and requires more working in the creative vineyards.