Manifestos for a new America

We have no choice but to think big.

The ongoing reälignment of American politics which produced the Trump regime is already at least as profound as the emergence of the New Deal administrative state. Given the course I imagine for the Trump regime, we will need a reconstruction as profound as the unfinished reconstruction after the Civil War. Not just policy. Not even just governance or an economic system. A full new social vision with its own ethos.

I’m starting to see manifestos, so I’m going to index them here.

Working On Our Ism

Timothy Burke has not so much a manifesto as a manifesto-for-a-manifesto.

We are against Trump and Farage and LePen and Orban and Weidel, but what are we for? What do we call it, if “socialism” is either hopelessly abstract or tied to references that don’t translate into the present? Could we give a positive, e.g., not defined by negation, description of what electoral majorities want other than fascism or ethnonationalism, and from that granular description, coin a new ism?

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What I think we need is something like a list of propositions that many of us agree with deep in the bone, that we feel, without any attempt to specify implementations, laws or policies. If we do this right, I think we can find some basic ideas that a very substantial majority agree on, even including some people who might right now be voting for authoritarian or ethnonationalist parties.

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But somewhere in all of that is not so much an anti-capitalism, defined by negation, but a vision of shared social life that is other than capitalism. Something other than liberal modernity or mass society. To give whatever that it is a name of its own and a pathway to concretization I think involves more conversations about these ideas before we try to make parties or movements or policies.

Reforging America

A word from Samantha Hancox-Li of Liberal Currents, where people are thinking about the muscular, radical liberalism I yearn for.

The mainspring of governance

1. Congress must be revitalized internally
2. Congress must reassert itself vis-a-vis the other branches
3. Most importantly, the link between the Congress and the people must be reforged

A world of abundance

1. We must clear out regulations that serve only to create artificial scarcity
2. We must run a hotter economy than the neoliberals allowed
3. We should invest in basic public goods
4. We should re-found the world trade system

America for all

1. We must invest in public and higher education
2. We must finally arrive at a new settlement on immigration
3. We must prosecute all the criminals of Trump II.
4. We must rebuild our public sphere