ferrebeekeeper

As of this date at the end of February, Anno Domini 2025, the United States of America is swiftly becoming a totalitarian failed state.  One of our two political parties, the conservative (Republican/GOP) party has abandoned all political, personal, legal, and moral scruples and set out to install a narcissistic cretin as dictator for life.  Although the majority of American citizens, narrowly (!) disfavor throwing away our rich, prosperous, law-abiding democracy to live in a capricious and cruel dictatorship where everyone is starving, dying of diseases, and being disappeared by brownshirts, events are starting to roll down an ineluctable political doom loop towards self-annihilation.  The Democratic Party has broken into two feuding camps: the moderate wing, which favors sensible self-defense measures…but also strongly backs the plutocrats, monopolists, and business criminals who have been looting society; and the progressive wing which believes that the only path to democratic reform and renewal is to reform the corruptions of capitalism, break up monopolies, and return some of America’s looted wealth to its struggling citizenry (alas, the progressive wing also ascribes to every hard-to-explain post-structuralist critique of power…and is also historically very adverse to acknowledging the cold realities of national defense or the grim calculus of international politics).  

Plus, right now the information zone is well and truly flooded (it is a part of the fascist playbook: so don’t get distracted by stupid AI videos of Trump’s Gaza resort no matter how many digitally-generated bearded ladies the president shows grinding against his flabby orange form!).  It is hard to even tell what is going on in a land awash with terrifying headlines, weird scary firings, strange lawlessness, and endless fast-moving lies.  Wow! How did we ever get from being the “world’s sole superpower” to this self-inflicted disaster in a few short decades? Well actually we know what happened because we lived through it.  Big businesses (monopolies and cartels…and the rich people who own and operate them) have worked hard to either corrupt the government to serve big business interests, or to hide/obscure the countless important things the government does to help people and keep them safe [“Stealth government”].  Now voters don’t believe in the government (which, thus hollowed out, has underdelivered to working people for years) and are being further fooled into voting for the interests of the business criminals who broke government to begin with. Gah!

So what story could we tell about the future to break out of this doom loop? Well I have some ideas! But first let’s summarize the three dominant narratives we have right now.

The fascist/GOP story is the same simple stale tale that Hitler told:  Devious foreigners have infiltrated society and are trying to steal ancestral greatness with their dirty foreign tricks (somehow diabolically disguised as diversity initiatives, clean water rules, LGBTQ literature, school lunches, and rules against molesting women).  Only by expelling (or killing) these sinister outsiders, conquering lesser nations, and living in accordance with the dictator’s every insane whim can we move back to a glorious fatherland of endless “purity” and tribal dominance over others.  Businesses can pursue their own ideas of “efficiency” and steal whatever resources they need (by bribing the dictator) or overturn any regulations they dislike.  This “bad autocracy” plan is a surefire recipe for getting something like Germany in the 1940s, Chile in the 1970s, or France in 1770s (i.e. a surefire disaster for everyone except for the richest parasites…and then disaster for them too, a few years later).   Despite these drawbacks, a lot of people are still attracted to this narrative because it is simple.  It seemingly promises a return to the 1950s (when America’s rigid caste society involved fewer confusing choices or options…and also offered some measure of prosperity even to the people at the bottom).  Additionally, it seems like there are a shocking number of monarchists, know-nothings, confederates, and other broken losers from long-ago eras who just think that most people are disposable slaves.  These anachronistic anti-humanists are naturally drawn to the “crazy dictator kills everyone and ruins everything” model of government which the GOP now advocates.

Yeesh…So if you dislike the Republican governing philosophy of infinite bondage and suffering for everyone (except Trump and Putin) and destruction for all living creatures until everything fails and the world dies, you are stuck voting for Democrats.  The Democratic Party though is split.  Elderly and out-of-touch institutionalists like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the DLC (and, most, especially these 10 pro-Trump, pro-corruption Democrats who need to be given the bum’s rush) have fully imbibed the lessons of “Citizens United”, a Supreme Court decision–apparently named using Newspeak!–which says that corruption and bribery is perfectly legal [this terrible ruling lies at the heart of many of America’s current woes].  Centrists believe that serving monopolies and Big Business is the first duty of the Democratic Party and then, if any resources are left over, they can be funneled towards loudly performative “diversity” initiatives which help minorities in very limited and patronizing ways at the cost of alienating everyone else.

Admittedly this is a pretty grim assessment—but it mirrors the assessment of most middle class Americans, stuck working as cogs in big monopoly/cartel type corporations.  Hard working people are worried that if they push back against our world of corporate malfeasance they will be jettisoned from employment by the robber-baron crooks at top and soon be starving to death in front of 7-11.  This is probably a fairly accurate perspective in our “Right to work” era (“Right-to-work” is yet more “up-is-down” Newspeak which really means modern robber barons can fire you for no reason and send gun-thugs to break up trade-unions).  

So we are left with the political narrative of the Progressives. This is frustrating because Progressives know the solution to Americas most-pressing political problem (we need to successfully fight back against monopolies corrupting legal, political, and economic systems), but they have trouble articulating this in tiny bite-size quotes. Also, monopolies (and the oligarchs who own them) were yesterday’s most pressing political problem. Today’s most pressing political problem is constraining the corrupt and anti-American president who was installed by monopolies (and the oligarchs who own them), so that nobody would be able to interfere with their anti-competitive schemes. Unfortunately, it is a boring spreadsheet-intensive task to even figure out how colossal multinational corporations are breaking anti-trust rules…much less to explain all of this to “MAGABanana78” on Reddit or Twitter when they are yelling about how pronouns don’t apply to them. Likewise, much of Progressive political ideology comes from critical writings of the sort written by Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and other post-structuralist social theorists. Their work ultimately belongs the great enlightenment tradition of philosophical liberalism and egalitarianism! But the egalitarian insights are couched in complex twisting modern language of critical theory and feminism. It does not readily compact down into tweetable form….and the insights about human rights and systems of oppression themselves tend to be fundamentally anti-hierarchical. [Also, sadly, modern Progressives are so involved in critiquing domestic politics that they misunderstand foreign policy and underestimate our national adversaries–but this critique does not apply at all in a world where the GOP president is an unabashed Russian agent trying to destroy the country to help Putin].

So we have three political narratives each of which contain some political truth. Unfortunately the current presidential administration has twisted and weaponized the biggest GOP truths (that America has remorseless national enemies who wish us ill, and that our expensive choices are becoming unsustainable debts for the future) into nativist poisons and political cancers which are being used to tear down the democracy. Through lies, coercion, fear, and bribes, our national enemies have Republicans doing the work of destroying America’s alliances and institutions for them! Centrist Democrats have become so comfortable with corporate cash that they have become blind to how big business has torn down democratic and social safeguards to create this crisis and immiserate society. Progressive Democrats understand that the crooked practices of monopolistic corporations have broken capitalism and are destroying society, but they can’t seem to communicate this except to people with post-graduate degrees in feminist philosophy.

How can we say this in a short tweet? What stories about the future should those opposed to eternal political control by and for the morbidly rich tell? What stories even can we tell, in a world where the monopolists own or control most big media corporations or communications platforms? I have ideas! But the first idea is that Progressives and centrists must find a way to unite so that the Republicans don’t claim immediate victory. If that means pretending to enjoy listening to Mark Cuban condescendingly tell Democrats how he is always right and how he should be given more money and more power, then we can politely listen and make use of his resources (but we must not give him even more power to build out his own corrupt monopolies). We must make powerful progressive ideas of egalitarianism more clear to poor straight white guys in Kentucky (who need these ideas just as much as other struggling underprivileged groups). We can reform capitalism so that it becomes a horn of plenty for all as it once was. We can explain that self-government is better than misrule by twisted autocrat. We can show that fair laws fairly applied to all is much better than corruption (which is really what Republicans and centrist Democrats have been imbibing from their ever-so-monied donors). The country can be saved, but we have to stop taking billionaire’s specific instructions not to save it (although we can still take their donations so long as there are no strings attached).