Four years ago progressives were rapidly responding to one after another outrage by Trump and the Republicans in Congress. Now Biden and the Democrats are attempting to wage their own blitz. But what does this flurry all add up to? Will it save us from climate change? Will it eliminate poverty? Will it preserve the Democrats’ control of congress and increase their numbers in state offices this year and next? We fight the same battles over and over again.
What is the vision? What is the plan that connects all the policies that progressives support? And what is the strategy for making real the promise of democracy, by which I mean not just voting, but continuous robust civic engagement by the people in their local, state and federal governments?
Throughout decades of issue and electoral campaign organizing I have struggled with getting people involved and maintaining that involvement. I’m obviously not the only one with this problem. Grassroots organizing took a big step forward with the 2008 Obama campaign and grew with the Trump resistance, but overall citizen engagement remains regrettably insufficient.
Many say that the whole system is broken, yet they mostly go at it bit by bit. What is needed is a complete vision and plan that includes all the people.
When I’m not knocking on doors, phonebanking, running events or lobbying lawmakers I’m an independent philosopher who has adopted Hegel’s view of the history of ideas. In every historical period people are animated by a particular big idea or zeitgeist. But the time always comes when that hits a wall of contradiction and a replacement arises. Now this moment has come for classical liberal political understanding based on the myth of the Social Contract.
The Enlightenment story of the social contract story is a chapter in the Western history of ideas. Its authors and our Founders were eminently rational, but their facts are now outdated. Uncritically applying Newtonian science to human beings they defined people as discrete individuals whose nature it was to seek their own self interest, possessing virtually unlimited God-given natural freedom to do so. The social contract imposed certain limits on this freedom to protect everyone’s life, health and property. At the same time it protected the rest of their natural freedom and forbade the government from imposing any limits on it except those which preserved the liberty of all and were specifically established by law.
Today Newtonian mechanics occupies only a limited place in the total world of science. Knowledge of living things now mostly concerns systems - the interconnections between organisms, their inorganic environment and among themselves. According to this model humans are not isolated beings strictly serving themselves but rather whole organisms which are also parts of larger living systems. As such their essential function is to sustain themselves while they sustain these other systems.
The science of that period provided the foundation for the social contract of the Enlightenment. Now the science of our time necessitates a 21st century update. People today are to be understood as living parts of their communities and political bodies, most directly as citizens in local participatory democracy.
Freedom: A 21st Century Update outlines government according to a living systems model and sketches a sustainable political economy which supports it. Together they constitute the ideal democracy that puts life first while it maximizes freedom for all. The plan unites progressive objectives into a single vision that can serve as the final goal of diverse efforts. That ideal is presently far off, but there are concrete steps toward it that can be taken now. As everything depends on people acting, these are especially aimed at building citizen engagement.
I am not posting the essay (a 60-minute read) here, but encourage folks to read the free ebook at freedoma21stcenturyupdate