Marx famously once said about sincerity in politics, “Once you learn how to fake sincerity, you’ve got it made” . . . that would be Groucho Marx, not Karl Marx. I must admit I never really mastered the faking of much of anything; and the only other advice from Groucho that I remember offhand is that outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend, and inside a dog it’s too dark to read. Some of my analyses are informed by dialectic materialism and the concept of class conflict, and there is no reason why we should not put to use European ideas that have been in circulation for nearly 200 years if they help us to straighten our paths to political success.
The more extensive rendering of my concept of socialism with republican values as its backbone is stated in the book I wrote under the pen-name of Jean Valjean, titled Delusion and Abandonment, and the 2nd Edition published last year includes a postscript delineating the strategy for my campaign that has been referenced in these posts at this site. Specifics as to the direction that the 117th Congress will need to take are there as is some philosophical background to bolster my attack on binary thinking and the danger we face from reducing complex problems to a false dichotomy by getting muddled up and tied down in oversimplifications. I believe what you have read at this site is not over-simplified; and, yes, it’s a description of the monopoly in the political arena of United States government through the bifurcation of political alliances into only two groups in such a fashion as to be injurious to our future as a country and more broadly to the survival of our species and planet.
If we are not able to stage an advance on those issues that I referred to as ‘low hanging fruit’, progress on the life and death challenges related to managing climate change will escape us through lost time. We know the basic facts about increasing global temperature and what that indicates about the adjustments that we need to make in a world economy that runs on fossil fuel. The evidence, of course, is more broadly registered in worldwide occurrences such as melting glaciers and ice shelves, collapsing species counts for creatures as diverse as large mammals and amphibians, and catastrophic events such as wildfires, hurricanes and floods. But putting actual numbers to the phenomenon is not hard. We are already over 400ppm in carbon dioxide and we do not seem to be gaining ground on stopping temperature increases. Limiting an increase to 1.5 degrees C above the pre-industrial levels between now and end of the century seems out of reach as we could double that barrier over the next 20 years unless we do better than the 2015 Paris Agreement from which we have conspicuously withdrawn. With world population over seven billion the impacts to peoples all over the world will be such that we need to craft worldwide approaches to public health, education and statecraft that are not based on permanent warfare and economic exploitation and extraction of natural resources. In other words, we need to act even as we talk and plan if we wish to survive as societies that enjoy the benefits that civilization has brought to many all over the world over the last 500 years of history.
It would appear that the Age of Trump has run it’s course as the man himself has been totally unequal to the job. While playing to the cameras the heavy lifting has not been done. In addition, things like logging the Tongass National Forest, opening the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to drilling, and destroying Alaska’s Bristol Bay are suicidal miscalculations. We need to leave all of the man and his approach behind. I always liked Billy Connolly’s take on the old saying, “Don’t criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes”. He adds, “and then after you have, what’s the point ? . . . he’s a mile behind you and you have his shoes”.
In a very real sense the corona virus pandemic has given the world opportunities of time, space and focus to recalibrate and to alter significantly the way that the world has organized itself in the modern age. For me this tempers the pain of my defeat in this election and leaves me optimistic over what we can next do to address our problems. But act we must, and with some urgency.
