I don’t know how to say this.
So I’lll just start. Because I’m going to talk crazy.
We are doing this wrong. Our party. Our ideology. We’re doing this wrong. We are trying to get back to a world we can’t go back to.
This year Wendy’s is putting self ordering kiosks in their stores. Self driving cars are on the road RIGHT NOW, and self driving trucks threaten to put 3.5 million truckers out of work. Online services are taking on attorney services. Automated algorithms write sports and financial articles.
When the Internet blustered into our lives, Newspapers simply couldn’t adapt. And all at once, throughout the nation, newspapers around the country collapsed. The Muskegon Chronicle that once employed 400 people in Muskegon for a hundred years folded. It now employs about 12 people. And it happened all at once.
We are not prepared for this world we’re moving into.
And our liberal leaders aren’t promoting any ideas or plans for the reality of the future. We’re playing defense on progress we made in the 20th century without advancing ideas for the 21st century.
I’ve watched for years, for decades, as the Republicans have set themselves to the task of dismantling the system while we play defense. While we battle around the edges to preserve the gains we’ve made over the 20th century.
But for a few victories and notable advances, we’ve mostly spent our time trying to hold ever-shrinking ground.
We’re playing defense.
We’re playing defense on trying to cling to a world we inherited from a World War II era. From a civil rights era.
Sure, sure, we joke about how Repubicans are trying to bring us back to a world from 100 years ago. But really…..the world they envision never existed. We never were a libertarian nation. We never were a Christian dominionist nation. We never were based on Ayn Randian principles.
These are all experimental ideologies. Privatized schools? Privatized prisons? A corporately controlled government? Rule by Christian dominionist ideals? These are all experimental. These arell ideals concocted from the imaginations of conservatives.
It’s not what America is like. It’s not what it used to be like.
Conservatives are pushing us toward their experimental vision.
And in some ways, I envy them. In some ways, I think they’re right.
Their ideas aren’t right………...but their push to defy history and create a new ideology is right.
The old world is gone.
The old world order is gone.
We are no longer attached to the post WWII world we had…...where the US was the one and only industrial power because every other nation in the world was either too backward or TOO BOMBED to have industrial capacity. We’re no longer united as a people who fought together, side by side against a common and truly evil entity.
That world no longer exists.
Sure it sounds crazy. But it’s all actually happening right now and it’s going to hit us all at once.
Liberals can’t keep talking about the strategies that helped us in the past.
We need to start radically re-thinking the future and our ideal approach to it. We can’t play defense for the old ideas that served us well in the past. We need to promote, full throatedly, a 100% renewable energy future. We need to promote the universal income for a future when productivity is unhooked from access to the basic necessities.
We need to radically rethink the future and stop looking toward the past, and promote brand new concepts.
This is the only way forward.
