In this context it wouldn't matter who you had out front trying to rally the troops; even if it were a dream team composed of front people with stellar positives as far as the public is concerned. And the reason is as it has always been: A party, just as steeped in the morass of money making the wheels go round as the Republicans, trying to pretend that paying lip service to a few hot button cultural, or moral issues, is enough to keep a splintering base happy, even as they have no real clue about how to make corporate Capitalism behave in any way that would give them the ability to solve the pressing problems that made middle class white folks abandon them in the first place.
The problem here starts with Liberals being too impractical on the social issues, and way too practical on the corporate side of things, and very few people on any side yet ready to step back and see the bigger picture: that trying to do things as simply a rehash of strategies, to keep an unworkable operating system going long enough to get past the current crises of the week, isn't working any more; not stopping long enough to realize that it is the operating system itself that makes everything worse; not only in frustrating solutions to whatever the current problem is, but in structurally mandating that more crises situations keep coming at us.
Just as there must be a new economic operating system, there must also be a new political party. A party that recognizes that we have a nation now that sees a lot of issues quite differently. A party that will have the intestinal fortitude to give people a lot more slack to run their communities they way that they see fit, as long as we change the nature of work so that it is not the skill that is the sole determinate of value (within wildly arbitrary markets that seem to create the very instability that makes the uncertainty they deplore so much), but that it is work itself that has value; especially as it relates to participating in the running of a community.
If we valued work, in and of itself, everybody would have a living wage regardless of what the work actually constituted. But then that makes market economies have even more problems than they already deal with, now that Capitalism has been mutated beyond all recognition from what it started out as back in the haydays of typographic man (remember, Capitalism was the product of the typographic mindset, brought on by the advent of repeatable type, and the printing press). All of which is to merely reiterate the need to start over with a new system.
A new party, as I have already outlined, would give us the means to apply the unbelievably abundant creativity this country has in coming up with a combination that would have a more loosely configured federation of communities, able to live as they deemed right, but with the added ability of the individual to go and live where they wanted, without it being an economic catastrophe for them; because participating in the upkeep of any community would give you the means to have a healthy, prosperous life. All you should have to do is find the one that's right for you.
The one thing that is sure to happen, however, if we do nothing but continue with business as usual, is that we are going to keep getting ever more of the crazy that has become the one, clear, winner of our now disastrous political process. More crazy as even less actually gets done, or is resolved in any lasting, and meaningful way. So, if that's what you truly want then just sit back and enjoy the ride to that hard landing we're heading for. After that it won't matter, right?
Can Bernie Sanders Save the Democratic Party?
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