[Brookings panel Update: According to one source
Ruy Teixiera and
Laura Rozen have been invited to the panel. Serious people with serious things to say from the left - and to no small extent there because of your phone calls and emails, and the work of
Sean-Paul of agonist and
Steve Gilliard.]
There is a chasm between the old and the new in the Democratic Party. Our elected officials see themselves as defenders of an old way of life of consumption, and the props of a consuming society - where as those who write see a new heaven and a new earth, a different society based on different norms and ideas. The old sees itself as supporting a few pillars of the old, and their work is done when they have slowed the Republicans a bit here and there. They have surrendered the initiative, and the vision, to the right wing.
And what we want? We want a revolution, not a violent revolution, nor yet a velvet revolution - but a revolution in thought, a revolution of thought - a revolution of reflection, which joins both the deep human longings and the power of human reason. The right wing is attempting a revolution, not of feeling but of rage, a revolution of revenge, a revolution of rationalization - which, even when it should cloak itself in reason is unreasonable, one which even when it cloaks itself in nobility is ignoble, one which even should it cloak itself in humanity, is inhuman. The moment of change is upon us, we will have one or the other. The stasis of the past is closed, and open only is the ek-stasis of change. We will then have one or the other, a liberal revolution of construction, or a reactionary revolution of destruction.
That the reactionaries are intent on destroying is known by their deeds. They rhapsodized over the invasion of Iraq - and have ignored the reconstruction. They have not built a new Iraq of new cities, but, instead laid waste to them. They have ignored the building of civil society there, and cannot even supply the most basic necessities of modern life - power, water, education, communication.
That the reactionaries are enraptured by devastation abroad is matched by their lust to level the New Deal. Nothing so engages them as destroying old programs, destroying old protections, and removing old and honorable compromises and mechanisms. Any party that waxes poetic about a "nuclear option" in any context, is one which is motivated by primal blood lust and worship of the all consuming appetite for carnage - political, military, economic and social.
Their entire economic structure is to strip mine the world bare now, crediting the profits, while proffering only the debt to those who come afterward.
What has angered liberals is that it seems that this clear and obvious truth, enumerated by a long train of abuses of power by the reactionaries - is lost on those who are elected to office as Democrats. One may have to deal with the devil, but one should never let him stack the deck. What has angered us is the folly of faux realism, and the rewarding of failure.
Let us begin from the obvious truth: there are a billion people who seek to join the affluent society, primarily in China. Our current means of extracting this life from the fruits of the earth requires oil. Right now, the developed world outside of the United States supports 500 million people on 25% of the world's capacity for oil. A simple multiplication - there are 6 billions in the world - means that we would have to produce 3 barrels of oil for every one we produce today. There is no such capacity available, and even if it were, the pollution would cook the world and flood almost every ancient capital and booming new metropolis on the planet. This is the overwhelming fact from which there is no escape, not in this world, nor to any other: we cannot support the population of the world at a tolerable standard of living with the society and technology we have. The economy we have is inadequeate to the challenges we face.
Faced with this reality - that we can neither suck nor sink the carbon we need from the earth with the knowledge we have - there has been a vast culture of denial errected around it. Because here, in America, we have not yet paid the price for this reality, it is assumed that this reality does not exist. In other nations the pressures have already become noticeable - Europe deplores American policy, and increasing deplores the American capacity for self-delusion, because they, now, are being forced to make difficult choices between harsh alternatives.
America is preëminent for two reasons. The first is the matter of good fortune: we have the most fertile and fecund swath of land in the world under our national control. It was taken by fair means and foul, by enterprise and guile. That it is our good fortune to have it, and to be isolated by mighty oceans from the old wars of the old war is the luck of inheritence, we came to its posession by means that would not be permitted today.
The second, however, is that the United States, for over a century, has placed itself on the vanguard of change. From the turn of the previous century forward, no nation has so consistently allied itself with the future, and displayed a willingness to make sacrifices to promote the future, rather than defend the past. While the old world burned itself with carnage and holocaust, the United States looked forward, and by acting on this vision, created the life that others wanted to live.
Over time, the manifest destiny of the first, has been replaced by the manifold destiny of the second. We are less and less the people who conquered and colonized, and more and more the people who conceptualize and create.
But that is not the society that the reactionaries foster - nor can the Conservative impulse in the Democratic Party protect it, because it does not exist - it is not made, but constantly remade.
Instead we are becoming a society of stars and the drudges that labor for them. Instead of a society which brings forth the flower of each person's abilities, we treat most people as mere manure to fertilize the enterprises of the wealthy few. Such a society cannot continue to attract the best and the brightest, and it cannot compete against numerically superior nations. There are 1.2 billion in China, and 250 million in the US. We must, therefore, be five times as efficient in finding our talent, simply because we have so much smaller a pool to draw from.
We cannot continue to waste creativity, intelligence and vision as we do. How many people of ability are now shovelling in the grease mines of McDonalds, or engaging in data entry - simply because we do not have the ability to identify them and promote them? Many, many times many, many times many times many.
Our anger at the reactionaries who destroy, and the conservative impulse in the Democratic party which does not advance is not rooted in jeuvenile angst, but because we have lived with the ecology of technology. In this ecology there are three simple concepts which govern all: a successful ecology must be accessible, scaleable and sustainable.
It must be accessible: people must be able to teach themselves to use it, it must provide benefit which is abundant and obvious, and must be able to grow into the richness of its application. It is only in this way that a technology spreads.
It must be scaleable: it must grow as its community of users grow. That which does not scale, will not survive. It must develop in people the talents and abilities needed to deal with the challenges of its growth. It must never reach the point where adding the next person costs logarythmically more than adding the one before.
It must be sustainable: it must not burn through the capital which creates it, the people who maintain and develop it, the resources which supply it.
Our present economy, of slash and burn mass agriculture, resource raping extraction and gross inequalities of affluence meets none of these criterion on the scale of the next century. We will not quadruple the bandwidth of oil that we extract within the two generations we have to extract it. We cannot reach thermal equilibrium by trying to bury carbon in caves. We will not feed, cloth and educate the world, in a world where the entry to affluence requires more per week to maintain than many people earn per year.
These three principles: accessible, sustainable and scaleable - must governing all thinking in a technological ecology. The thinking of hit and run extraction, however, is what is rewarded. How many companies have been shells for an IPO? How much productivity has been wasted, not reducing our dependence on oil, but to entice us to buy more that is made with, and which consumes for its continuance - oil. It would be as if a man who had been poisoned, rather than reaching for the emetic, reaches for another dose of the poison.
To create a society on these principles requires a fundamentally different series of rewards. Now we have created a kind of technological fuedalism: where patents, copyrights and monopolies serve as fiefdoms, gates over bridges where all who pass are charged a toll. We have created a vast class of the idle rich, whose primary gift is that they can strip mine consumers - selling cancer, fat and fatuousness, leaving behind people who are ridden with disease and obesity. Even if Americans desire to live this way, the rest of the world does not. Even if the United States wishes to make a virtue out of grease, goo and greed - does not mean that the reek of decay can be perfumed away.
And thus we want a revolution. Many of the individual demands are set aside, because there has been no defense of the pattern that the whole makes. We demand universal health care: because people must be fit and healthy and free of the burden of worry of catastrophic illness so that they may focus on the great work that must be done - and because the should not profit by collecting taxes on acts which pollute the air, our bodies and our minds. And if the state no longer profits from selling obesity, it will end the incentives to do so in the economy. The wealthy, many of whom have gained their privileged position by doing exactly this, understand on an intuitive level that a healthy people are no longer easy targets for a consumerism that consumes them.
And thus we want a revolution. Progress is thwarted by deceptions and dissembling: the right wing is already attempting to convince Americans that we will simply substitute oil for hydrogen, and thus there is no problem. The problem is that unbound hydrogen is found in quantity only on the Sun, and we are not landing there any time soon.
And thus we want a revolution. The myriad of changes which must take place demand selfless, rather than selfish, attention and devotion. We must act, not because it is to our present advantage, but because it is to our future necessity. We must realize that we cannot lock billions in poverty without an inevitable and violent upheaval when they choose to take what we will not give. We must realize that the oceans which protected us from the last two great global conflicts, will not protect us from the next. We must realize this before it is too late.
But it is almost too late: human capacity for destruction is much farther advanced than for creation. We can more easily destroy a life than save it, we can more quickly demolish a city than build it, we can more easily overthrow a government - than creating a new government to replace it.
It is almost too late, but everywhere we are told to wait. And as long as temporary prosperity remains with us, the leadership of the Democratic Party has paid homage to complacency. They seem to feel that having turned back one of the myriad Republican attempts to shred the society, that they have earned their keep for the next two years, and can spend the rest of the time permitting the bankruptcy bill and anti-American restrictions on our civil rights to pass. They feel that having done three months of work for the people, that they are now free to go back to working for the lobbyists.
It is folly, and it is a folly whose magnitude will only be appearant later. There is a sense among many in elected office that the next down turn will restore them to power. But, in fact, the reverse is the case, having not warned of impending collapse, they will not be entrusted with government on the day that collapse finally arrives.
And so I say again: we want a revolution. One which creates a society that works for the benefit of the future, so that there will be one. One that rewards selfless action with more than a flag and a coffin. One that raises up those who improve the quality of people's lives, rather than strip mines people so that they might make a living.
We must make a world which is accessible to people's understanding, and is yet both scaleable and sustainable. We must cease to reward the process of burning more oil to avoid cost in the present. We must cease to throw away the vast crop of talent which America produces, because it is the fruits of this talent that we expect to harvest. There is only one vehicle in American politics to achieve this: the Democratic Party, which by its inevitable purpose and political logic, is the party of the people, and of organizing the people to meet the crisis in the present, without creating catastrophe in the future.
And thus, before all else, we demand a revolution in political affairs, beginning with the Democratic Party, and endowing each of its parts and all of its representatives with an iron sense of purpose and determination. The course we are on leads into the abyss, it cannot be sustained, and therefore it will not be. The lesson of history is that nature delivers only a final decision, from which there is no appeal, and it does so without warning and without mercy. Growth continues, until collapse begins - it is the record of the fossils of previous ages, and the record of the stock market - dizzying peaks followed by devastating collapses.
It is difficult to argue in the face of complacency, and it is impossible without having a deep seated belief and impenetrable faith. But no writing on the wall of the past is clearer than the results of a people that live behind their means, we find their ruins scattered through out the global, and mighty glyphs carved in dead statues about their empires that could never fall. The right wing wishes to deny evolution, because they know the what it would tell us: adapt or perish.
And so we demand that our leaders have faith in revolution, faith in the ability of the American people to remake themselves and society. Faith in the ability of human reason married to human intuition to come to the best decision. Faith that the future can be an American future.
Because the day will be seized, if not by us, than by others.