Political eras in America tend to cycle every 36-48 years diverging suddenly and in unexpected ways. Each of these eras has a clear starting point based on signature group decisions end of the previous cycle. America has gone thru both Progressive and regressive periods and this weather gauge tends to move at these points of cyclical change. Currently the United States is approaching the end of the Neo Liberal/Neo Conservative Period a period started in 1980. It’s been a pretty regressive period dominated by conservatism, corporate power, buffoonery, reactionary policy, environmental destruction, intense partisanship, general idiocy, cultural liberalism and particularly political rule by an ultra-elitist popular minority. All of this has been pretty terrible for the average America but I don’t really have to tell you this since it’s the system that has screwed you over. That shouldn’t be a surprise since the Neo Liberal/Neo Conservative Period was designed to do just. It has also been a period that has also been run by buffoons that don’t understand governing and don’t even understand the movement they represent.
Like any other era the last 40 years have operated according to a set of rules, a spectrum of policy that marks what is acceptable and what is not. Often codified in academic journals, technical manuals and across the mass media these ‘rules’ have guided a majority of the policies authored during our time. The list of these rules is legion but includes things like the concentration of power in the hands of elites or the polarization of politics. What is less numerous are the driving national ideals that justify the ‘rules’. Every age has to have guiding ideological constructs and in our age those ideals can be termed with 2 statements: ‘what we can’t do’ and ‘what ought to be.
The concept of ‘what we can’t do’ is fairly simple and quite obvious for the reader to understand. All too often policy makers have been guided by the concept of what they cannot do. This judgement has not been based in physical reality (aka we can’t eat the planet Mars) but in ideological reality. For 40 years most of the leaders of the Western World have divined policy based on what cannot be done as defined by elites. Elites in one form or another have established our age, defining what policies we can enact and justifying that with an army of straw men.
I know basing a society on ‘what we can’t do’ seems silly but that’s exactly what has happened but that’s exactly what has happened. Time and time again leaders have opted to respect the lines drawn by elites and ignore very attainable things like Single Payer Health Care (Democrats 2009) or internet video (Microsoft 2001). This has all been terrible and has led to leaders recycling the same failed policies over and over again while being insane and expecting a different result.
Alongside the concept of ‘what we can’t do’ has been the rather dictatorial concept of ‘what ought to be’. Traditionally or at least when traditional policy makers are behaving intelligently, useful public and private policies are based in the realities of what actual is. That reality is often carefully calculated using a mix of metric data and a gut feeling that factors in the intangibles of human irrationality. It makes sense right? Well tell that to the Neo Conservatives/Neo Liberals because they have been doing the exact opposite for 40 years.
The policies of ‘what ought to be’ have been guided by the idea that certain elites or fringe ideologies ‘know better’ and should dominate the uninformed majority. In this the Neo Conservatives/Neo Liberals crafted policy based on how they thought things should be and not how they were. Depending on who we are talking about this means policy has been crafted in a range that stretches from ‘off-center’ to complete flying monkey super plum faire fantasy land. Whether it be private companies suing the government to shut down the internet (Blockbuster/Comcast) or bankers trying to conjure risk free assets (Credit Default Swaps) the politics of ‘what ought to be’ have failed for everyone except a few elites.
Watching Trumps speech only reinforced to me the idea that we need wholesale change in our political system. Not incremental change or a strategic shift that will win 3 more votes per precinct in Michigan. But it needs to happen.
In the last 15 years we have seen a tremendously negative shift in America but beside it we have also seen a building strain of resistance and hope. A building tide of reform spearheaded progressive minded: activists, pastors, corporations, businessmen, politicians, farmers a few fat cat tycoons, civil rights activists and workers of all types. Americans of all types and backroads and of all ideologies that want to see fundamental change in how things are done.
I would never be so vain as to say I speak for the coming Revolution but I can certainly be a voice for it and it will need many competent voices to succeed. In the modern era political movements of change don’t just happen. They require substantial planning and sustained effort directed at meaningful seats of power. To have lasting consequence they must involve a wide variety of people drawn from as big of the population as is possible. They require money, means, resources and the willingness of members to sacrifice their comfort and potentially themselves.
Rebel Headquarters I am reporting for Duty.