The basic idea of the Democratic Party - through its best incarnations - is that creating abundance is the solution to most problems. Do more with more. The Republican Party's conservative wing - which after 100 years finally managed to chase out the last elements of Progressivism - has always been about enforcing scarcity. Do less, with less. Eventually, they say, there will be more, and you will get some of it. Often very eventually.
http://keenmeme.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_keenmeme_archive.html#107256875776514042 Remembers Wilson's way of phrasing it...
The success of a party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose. No one can mistake the purpose for which the Nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party. It seeks to use it to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view. Some old things with which we had grown familiar, and which had begun to creep into the very habit of our thought and of our lives, have altered their aspect as we have latterly looked critically upon them, with fresh, awakened eyes; have dropped their disguises and shown themselves alien and sinister. Some new things, as we look frankly upon them, willing to comprehend their real character, have come to assume the aspect of things long believed in and familiar, stuff of our own convictions. We have been refreshed by a new insight into our own life.
The American nation is beginning to work through progressive politics and the Democratic Party - given all power in government, the Republicans have not created great entrepreneurial structures or reformed the Federal Bureaucracy - they have merely packed it with party hacks, and enlarged it, since they seem to have even more party hacks than the Democrats ever did. They have slashed labor costs - by devaluation and by laws and by increasing the real tax burden on people, while cutting what the people get from government. The realization is that the Republican used car - special Hoover era reconditioned - is a lemon.
The problem we face is very simple, it is that there are huge untapped markets of labor that are now coming on line, and the very aspects of computers which made them attractive - namely that the capital is cheap and once a person is trained they can work long hours - have made it an attractive industry for people to enter. Most programming isn't that much harder than running a sewing machine - I've written code for 25 years now, most if it is "sewing machine code". With more and more code available - as open source, one doesn't even need to code well.
Our problem is abundance - abundance of capital, of source material (refined code) and of people. Our problem is abundance of bandwidth, and of the availability of training. In short, we have more. The Republicans only know how to turn more into less, so that all of the tools they understand - fear, ignorance and greed - work.
The other solution is to drastically expand the consumer base. Think about it, there are, roughly 1 billion high value consumers in this world. When they were also the only high value producers, they lived well. When they were most of the high value producers, they lived less well. Now that they are less than half of the high value producers...
The bottleneck is simple: energy. There is only so much of it produced in the world, and that means that there is a limit on total affluence. At which point, it is a race to the bottom: workers accept less and less affluence to keep what they have. The result: the wages of half of the US professional class are about to be slashed in half. In fact, they almost have been already. They are probably going to be slashed in half again.
The industrial class, which was slashed in size, and is also seeing real wages slashed, thinks that if labor costs go down, they will get cheaper everything - which isn't the case. Programming was cutting the cost of electronics faster by abundance - improved technology - than slashing wages has. My four year old laptop still competes against more recent machines - the pace of technology has slowed, while few have noticed this.
What is the solution? There are two simple points: first, we must reduce dramatically the energy cost of an affluent life style - much of the technology is here, and it can be made use of. It will mean overcoming long standing social habits - every house should have solar power as a matter of course, and we must design and build a new generation of nuclear power plants - ones which do not create weapons grade fissiles - which is where 80% of the waste comes from and all of the difficult to dispose of waste comes from - as well as move to fuel cells, hybrid cars, heat pump based cooling systems - wind generation on tall buildings. All of the above, and more.
A lower energy cost of affluence means that we can expand dramatically the size of the knowledge workforce - and apply technology to a host of problems which, currently, are left unmet.
Abundance is the key - break the bottleneck, and it becomes possible. The money we have squandered in search of one last hit of cheap oil could have been put to better use. John Kerry has proposed energy independence, and if he truly can push the packages of changes through the Congress - to wage war on energy dependence, which is the great drug of the American economy - then all else is possible.
Without it, nothing else is possible.