More, more advanced, mass transit means less concentrated transportation, which is less vulnerable by nature. And in design, can be far less vulnerable. Of course it also means less fuel consumption, whatever its origin.
I am confident our science and industry can create high-speed trains which are more secure along the length of their journey because they ride in a vacuum tube. Bomb sniffers that are affordable enough for every turnstile, every airport gate. Planes that are capable of deflecting surface to air missiles, and that are incapable electronically of flying into targets protected by electronic beacons as well as GPS-tracked infrastructure topology models.
Now, I'm not talking about Howard Dean cooking this up on his laptop in CAD and Excel while he commutes on the DC subways every day. What I am talking about is planning big; making PNAC seem like a bunch of zitty kids playing hex-based war games in a basement apartment. I'm talking about undertaking real, but quite possibly radical, problem solving for the future. Yeah, the out-there future. More info in this diary:
PNAC Alternatives (On Energy)
Wait... What does that have to do with race and class?
Simple, if indirect. It redirects the hemorrhage of US tax dollars toward military toys we don't want to be using, back into the nation's circulatory system. It doesn't alienate the business sector of the "military industrial complex." It creates lots and lots of domestic jobs. It makes us not only safer, but faster, cleaner, more productive. We commute less so we get more work done and spend more time with our families for a stronger "values" society.
We look to power generation and hazardous waste production as a serious terror threat and actually address that problem.
We look to concentrated office buildings, and concentrated housing developments, as a potential threat, as targets but also as causes for the reliance on transit, itself a target. We use tax incentives and infrastructure planning to make telecommuting real. We create a system through which people and businesses are able to swap jobs around so that people can live much closer to work when they wish to. In lower economic strata this would have a dramatic effects, as transit costs can be immense, as can the social impact on families from long hours coupled with long transit.
On to "how." The only way to dominate is by eschewing the "politics of opposition" which both parties practice. Never mind fantasies of crushed Republicans feeling the agony of defeat before they repent their political sins. No, they need to be on our side. But our side will have to change before that happens... Just not the way "centrists" think it should.
We need to give up the politics of opposition. Stop fantasizing about making the other guys cry into their Budweiser. Stop fantasizing even about making them see the error of their ways more than is reasonable to hope for. Instead, let's look to a joint evolution of our shared goals leading to results we all want.
If you want to know more about this, you can start here in my recent diary,
"...Overcoming Party Symmetry." The half that is not about Paul Hackett! Or you can accept this summarized premise: Both parties have sought to satisfy their base by sticking it to the other guy. They have tried to moderate and by unrelated additions, make more viable that core service, by cobbling on planks to try to achieve over 50% of votes.
Politics as usual is not the politics of the 21st century, as BushCo are showing through bad example. We can do better. Not with old thinking though. We can observe, and we can lament, that our societies worldwide are waxing totalitarian. We can try to finger the people who are orchestrating this. But we have to understand that many people in the general population are agitating for that, without being coached. Many of them are Democrats.
Okay, if you are willing to give up all of your privacy to authorities and corporations... Are you willing to impose some order on those corporations and authorities? Are you willing to create a society, and infrastructure, in which individuals can be safe, and free?
Forget about plans cooked up by politicians in office dealing with pork issues, or plans during elections aimed at good press. We need to dominate politics in this country, in every part of this country, in every race and class and ideological sector. We need to do this to save the world. Not only from the Republican Party, but from forces that neither party is currently adequately addressing. Those range from ecology to Al Qaeda, but I trust you agree enough that we should not need to get too deeply into the details of "why."
Background on Losing The Class War
But how did we get here? How did we lose our economic party parity? That's the answer to all the other problems. We face terrorism because of a foreign policy that the wealthy military/industrialist favored. We have people thinking the Republicans, and their police-state ways, make us safer from crime and terror and pestilence and locusts only because those people are increasingly predisposed toward identifying with Republicans.
Our class war dynamic is gone. Don't be expecting a "let's turn back the clock" or "let's convince people they are wrong" conclusion. Don't even expect me to blame the Clintons, since they were a product of the times; of what most others in the party did too. This is about facing facts, in support of the point above.
...Of course, the Democratic Party's base was the poor in the past. Working poor, but poor. Remember, there was (almost) no middle class until FDR's accomplishments allowed one to spring up in the fifties. And gradually the poor lost favor in the party, while more and more people, erroneously and with increasing desperation, identify themselves with the rich and powerful vicariously.
In part by succeeding in elevating the poor, through unions, higher education, and simply through enhanced aspirations... We succeeded so much we eroded our base. It takes a lot of poor to counterbalance the interests of a few rich, and it takes great self-aware discontent on the part of that poor to make the rich uneasy enough to agree to help serve them.
But let's not oversimplify. For much of that period, clean through FDR, the Republicans had the votes of a significant part of the poor population: The black part. They traded that for the whites, once we got around to servicing the blacks on matters of their rights post-FDR. Confusing, isn't it, because it is contains these contradictions. But my thesis here is not that the Dems are the party of the poor and the party of the rich. Rather, rich and poor are just one facets.
The point is that they are parties which have evolved into their symmetry by opposing one another's constituents. We scarcely need to rattle off the list of fiercely contested issues that the parties oppose one another on. Nor should we need to rediscover here the fact that it is a fallacy that right to lifers are necessarily pro death penalty and pro war, or that Teamsters are necessarily in favor of gay marriage and spotted owls.
The point is also the "why" of this opposition. On the face of it, we can see that the Republican Party, to serve the rich, took southern evangelicals on for votes, the better to serve it's core constituency. And we can say the same of the Democratic Party, once less concerned with humanism than now, becoming home to a philanthropic spirit as a way of moderating what the wealthy feared was proto-socialism under FDR. We saw under Bill Clinton the total reorientation of the Democratic Party away from the disenfranchised.
There is a little grain of truth in the Republican meme that the Democratic Party is the party of the liberal elite. Because when is the last time the Democratic Party was in any rush to be the party of welfare mothers? Or treat union workers as if they were a philosophy rather than something like gaiety which the candidate would never want to appear to push to others in the party.
As far as I can tell, Clinton and Democrats increasingly following 1980, vied for Reagan's constituency and appeal. (In fact, while Kerry comes from a different place ideologically, as did Reagan, there is a decent case to be made that all Kerry sought was a return to Reagan's 1984. Not in terms of what Reagan's people hoped to do, but where they were at then.) In terms of a base though, Dems knew they couldn't match Republican appeal to most big money. They did try to appeal, but many cared enough philosophically not to cater too much. So they tried to become the party of the middle class. The first party of the middle class, the whole thing, with that as its core.
But this had a disastrous and short-lived result. Cut off from any political reminders that they should care about let alone identify with the poor, the middle class had no anchor to prevent their allegiances from drifting upwards. A great many things contributed to this, and not a few of them were plotted by Republicans, in part by accident but also by design. We need look no further than Rove's plan to make more Republicans by giving the middle class a petty amount of stock investments to know they know how this works.
The middle class, increasingly cut off from life long careers, from lifelong community residence, from extended family, from any connection to agriculture, from geographical proximity to the poor....
...The middle class, tutored to view labor unions as pariahs, to view the welfare safety net as a cesspool, to fear intellectuals as communist sympathizers and now islamo-fascist sympathizers, had the view instilled in them that the only acceptable way out of wage slavery was striking it rich...
...The proliferation of state-run lotteries, the saturation of once-evil casino gambling, the street-corner discount and now internet stock brokerages, franchise-oriented entrepreneurship...
...All of this provided a foundation for Republican rule. They own the middle class, in this way.
Only certain people in the middle class will fail to fall for this. Only people with a certain kind of intelligence are still "Liberal Democrats." That makes us prone toward humanist empathy with the poor, to the oppressed, gives us ecological concern, and leads us to freethinking. And yet it is not exclusively the kind of intelligence that becomes focused, successfully or not, on making money and actually joining the wealthy elite.
Now, for the one hopeful point. People can't all "win the lottery." But we can somewhat satisfy that urge by radically improving the experience of the lives they do lead, at their economic level. Plentiful and powerful consumer items have already proved this; infrastructure can follow. This also can cater to the "Big America" itch that so many people find militarism to be an outlet for. It's very Disneyesque, too. But this is about improving lives, "securing freedoms," not selling empty dreams.
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