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.
The little pocket Constitution from which I gathered the above quote is one that the government prints for free distribution (Twenty-Fifth Edition). On the back of the cover is a quote from John Marshall, who first put real power behind the idea of judicial review by the Supreme Court; “a constitution, intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.” This would appear to be a very early summary of the argument against originalism and textualism. We shall soon see if the United States government is capable of saving itself from some of its worst habits, and if the as yet unmet promise of ‘consent of the governed’ and ‘majority rule with full minority rights’ will be honored in fact.
Those barriers which hinder or obstruct our progress can be called the primary impediments to creating a republican form of socialism. By republican socialism I mean a version of popular government that has impartial, open elections with results that can be verified as the actual will of the people, not a gerry-rigged farce that has excluded many of the countervailing forces that democracy encourages. The socialist element comes from the fact that socialist leaning voters of many strips see the redistribution of the benefits and amenities of a complex modern economy as pieces in the negotiable social contract that determines who our representatives are and how the fruits of our labors are apportioned through taxes and programs that are created to benefit everyone. The cant and lie of the current formula is that ‘the job creators’ or the investment and banking elements deserve the bulk of society’s wealth as they are, to use the old rubric of the Chinese imperial dynasties, ‘the masters of the earth’. Under that system those arrangements would continue to apply as long as the leadership enjoyed ‘The Mandate of Heaven’, which usually came to mean that as long as there was stability and the sense of forward progress and social order, the group in charge should continue to rule. In the United States today it’s apparent our masters have lost their mandate. It is our task to replace them by way of the ballot box.
Labor Day in the fall is an artifice of American culture born of the concern of the political leadership that allowing the celebration of working people to occur on May 1st, in solidarity with those who toil across the world, would only enhance the power of the international forces trying to reform capitalism. That fact, the importance of May to the forces of revolutionary action, is one big reason why I began my campaign on May Day. Now though, it is also true that our fall celebration is the official start of the final round leading up to the elections at the beginning of November, “the first Tuesday after the first Monday”, and signifies the moment of truth for the many years of planning, organizing and fund raising that those who aspire to be elected have undertaken. Therefore, because of the tremendous stakes of the next sixty days in this historic Presidential contest, the need for all citizens and voters to be alert, hard working and diligent in their scrutiny of the facts and their pursuit of the reality in regard to our pressing problems is particularly intense. If we are lazy or duplicitous the entire matter may slip out of our hands. Powerful forces seek to neutralize the power of workers, farmers, students, homemakers, and aggrieved minorities of many stripes, most acutely by manipulation of the narrative concerning this historic moment and then the actual results of the hard vote on November 3rd.