response paper

Gar Alperovitz

HAT - STRAIGHT TALK

THE ABOUT THE NEXT

UST AMERICAN REVOLUTION

E DO? Chelsea Green Publishing

White River Junction, Vermont

A Note About What Can Be Talked About, and in What Ways

J\ s is pretty evident, or will be in a few pages, this book is written in a very .1"'1.informal, conversational style-especially for someone like me, who is an academic and a former Washington insider (also an activist on things that matter).

The reasons are several.

First and foremost, I've been talking to lots of people the last few years about these things, all around the country, and I've found that it is possible,

easiest, and best to discuss the really important points about our crumbling American system, and what to do about it, in language that is understandable and accessible .

Second, many of the really big issues covered in the pages ahead can't be

handled in any way other than what is best termed informed speculation. In other words, judgments about what it makes sense to actually do politically

all depend upon ( usually unspoken and unacknowledged) assumptions about what is possible in the future.

And the problem-as historian Lewis Namier once quipped-is that we all tend to "remember the future." By which he meant that we don 't and can't

document what will happen in the future. Instead, most of us unconsciously project forward assumptions about what is possible based on our actual

experience of the past. We "remember" forward that which we unconsciously take for granted.

This works most of the time, but it works terribly in times of great change. Most academics and Washington insiders-like most people, including

most activists-aren 't much better than anyone else about avoiding this pitfall. They also tend to "remember " the future, projecting ( often telling us,

with seeming academic or political authority!) what is and is not possible. So a really big reason to write the way folks talk when they're relaxing over a

couple of beers or a cup of coffee is to break out of this particular foolish spell.

ix

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

I'm from Wisconsin . I recall the 1950s when Senator Joe McCarthy had everyone trembling for fear of being called a Communist. It was pretty dark in Wisconsin in the 1950s. And accordingly , at the time ordinary citizens and

academic scholars alike knew that if you remembered the future, nothing could ever really change .

Then , of course, came the 1960s-and the explosion of the civil rights

movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, the anti- Vietnam War movement. All largely unpredicted, and especially by those

who claimed academic or political-insider authority to forecast what is, or was, possible.

So not only is it more enjoyable to try to write the way we talk, and even to play with the language-especially when we're facing a pretty dire and

profound set of issues-but doing so is a not-so-subtle hint that it is time to stop taking seriously the people economist Paul Krugman wryly calls "Very

Serious People ." These are the people who by tone and language and a seem- ingly knowing stance try to contain and constrain what can be talked about

in polite circles .. . and what we really shouldn't say. (And for those of you who do like academic references, see the endnotes

and the afterword.)

X

INTRODUCTION

What Then Must We Do?

I 've borrowed my title vVhat Then Must We Do? from Tolstoy, and the profoundly disturbing 1886 book he wrote once he began to dig below the surface of what was happening in late-nineteenth-century Russia-a time when the system was in decay, the aristocracy enjoyed extraordinary luxury,

and the peasants endured lives of hunger and pain. As a person of privilege he began to understand something deeper about his time in history: "I sit on a

man's back, choking him and making him carry me;' he wrote, "and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all

possible means-except by getting off his back."1

Most ofus do not literally sit on men's backs, making them carry us. We do,

however, often uneasily look the other way, satisfying ourselves with modest changes that reassure us all is well while millions are in despair. ''We've done

the best we can do;' we might say, "given the realities." Still, many sense, as did Tolstoy, that to actually do something serious would require us to confront

much deeper problems than we are commonly willing to. ''What then must we do?" is not shouted in the streets, but it is a question

that more and more Americans-young and old, liberal, radical, and conserva- tive-are quietly beginning to ask themselves in much more penetrating ways.

So let us begin. My starting point is the obvious fact that despite its great

wealth the United States today faces enormous difficulties, with no easily

discernible political answers that even begin to offer strategic handholds on a truly democratic future. Elections occur, and major fiscal debates ensue, but

many of the most pressing problems facing ordinary citizens are only mar- ginally affected (and in many cases in ways that increase burdens, not reduce

them). The issue is not simply that our situation is worrisome, however; it is that there are growing reasons to believe that in fact we face systemic prob-

lems, not simply political problems.

xi

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

Systemic problems in the fundamental, not the superficial , sense . In the pages ahead I will suggest that our nation 's truly critical problems are built

into the very structure of the economic and political system; they are not something passing in the night that will go away even when we elect forward-

looking leaders and actively pressure them to move in a different direction. I won 't load you down with statistics at this point. (I'll provide many more

details in due course.) A couple of obvious reminders, however: Not only has the economy been stagnating for a long time, but for the average person-and

the average family-things have been bad for a very long time .

Real wages for 80 percent of American workers, for instance , have not gone up more than a trivial amount for at least three decades. 2 At the same time, income for the top 1 percent has jumped from roughly 10 percent of all

income to roughly 20 percent. 3 Put another way, virtually all the gains of the

entire economic system have gone to a tiny, tiny group at the top for at least

three decades.

Worth pausing to think about that one. What is going on when virtually all the gains in the entire economic system go to the top? I'm not interested here in criticizing those at the top (we can deal with that later). The question is: What

is going on with the system when this kind of thing happens-and continues to

happen in an ongoing way , year by year, decade by decade over time?

Another reminder: Almost fifty million Americans live in officially defined

poverty. The rate is higher, not lower, than in the late 1960s-another dis- turbing trend marker. Moreover, if we used the measuring standard common

throughout the advanced world (which considers the poverty level to be half the median income level), the number would be just under seventy million,

and the rate almost 23 percent. 4

This is to say nothing of steady increases in global warming and an

unemployment rate that , if properly measured , is stuck in the range of roughly 15 percent. 5

At the most superficial level, Washington-as the saying goes-is broken.

Give or take an occasional gain in selected areas, the political system is simply incapable of dealing with the deeper challenges. It focuses on deficits, not

answers. Long trends that don't change are a clear signal that it 's not simply the "modern" period of partisan bickering and congressional stalemate that

is causing the problems. The trends were moving steadily downward long before the Tea Party and the recent partisan foolishness , long before the Citi-

zens United Supreme Court decision allowed corporations to put big money

xii

INTRODUCTION

directly into politics, and long before many events that have been heralded as

tipping points of one kind or another. Nor are people stupid. More and more have a sense that something dif-

ferent is going on-both with the economy and, more fundamentally, with democracy itself. A few more bits of information just as reminders, again,

of something we are all beginning to sense: A mid-2011 poll found that roughly 80 percent of Americans believe their congressional representatives

to be "more interested in serving the needs of special interests groups" than "the people they represent." 6 Another poll found that almost four out of five

believe a few rich people and corporations have much too much power. 7

And only 37 percent-not much more than a third of the population-have confidence in the most solemn and august of American institutions, the

Supreme Court. 8

I'm going to dig much, much deeper into all this, of course. But for now let's

leave it at this: When critical long, long trends do not improve-when they steadily get worse, year in and year out-it is clear that we face deeply rooted systemic problems, not simply political problems in the usual sense of the

term . Moreover, as those polls suggest, people increasingly understand that something is really wrong.

The question is: How do we deal with a systemic crisis-something built in to the way the political-economic world works-rather than a simple political crisis or economic crisis?

How do we really confront that question squarely? The traditional (very general) answer has been to "organize a movement"

to build political power and pressure leaders to act, and I certainly agree

that this is necessary. But urging this in general terms is hardly a strategy, much less, if taken seriously, an answer to the question of how serious trend-

shifting change can be achieved. Rather, it is a general call to arms with little more in deeper strategic understanding than a recognition that we had bet-

ter begin, somehow, to act, or we are in trouble. (But not, for most people, more than that.)

No, a serious answer demands both a call to arms and a clear strategy. This book does not claim to answer every question. It will, however, urge an

explicit strategy-one that I hope is sufficiently well developed that at least a beginning answer to the que~tion "What then must we do?" will be on the

table-one that I hope may be improved by ongoing debate and dialogue as we go forward.

xiii

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

It will also suggest that our emerging historical context is both radically

different from that of the Great Depression and New Deal era and different, too, from the postwar boom era of progressive change. Which means that

it may now be possible to develop very different organizing and system- changing strategies than many have thought seriously about in recent years.

For this reason, I am going to put off for just a bit some traditional ques- tions of political tactics, organizing, and even vague rhetorical calls for "revo- lution:' We'll get back to them after we have dealt with the system-related

issues and the question of what the unusual nature of the emerging historical

context might make possible. Finally, by the way, as a historian and political economist, it is obvious

to me that difficult historical times do not always or even commonly persist forever. In my judgment "we shall overcome" is not simply a slogan but in fact

the likely, though not inevitable, outcome of the long struggle ahead.

It is possible, quite simply, that we may lay the groundwork for a truly American form of community-sustaining and wealth-democratizing trans- formative change-and thereby also the reconstitution of genuine democracy,

step by step, from the ground up.

xiv

PART I

THE SYSTEM PROBLEM

CHAPTER ONE

How to Detect a System Problem Without Really Trying

People toss around the phrase It's the system pretty loosely in everyday language. Usually they mean that things are sort of set up, by either design or accident, to run the way they run-and that the game is pretty well

rigged so that those at the top (and their organizations) control the action. You can't really buck the system : Too much power, too much red tape , too

much bureaucracy-they'll wear you down. And so on.

That's not a bad way to start thinking about the big system that defines

the overarching contours of our national life-namely, the large corporate- dominated economic system and the heavily constrained political system that

set the terms of reference for almost everything else. I want to push a bit deeper, however. Here 's the essential point: A system

problem-as opposed to your usual garden-variety political problem-is one that isn't going to go away through politics as usual. It will require somehow

changing the way things are rigged deeper down in the machinery of institu- tions, corporations, bureaucracy, and all the other elements of the system that

produce the outcomes we experience. A system problem is difficult. It runs deep.

Everyone knows we have problems in the United States: unemployment, poverty, environmental decay, global warn:iing-to say nothing of whole cities

like Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and many others that have essentially been thrown away. If you are black or brown, your prospects are far worse. And

wars keep happening, with little positive outcome and lots of dead American kids (to say nothing of dead Iraqis, Afghanis , and others). Civil liberties decay,

day by day, year by year. So much is obvious . Moreover, this wealthiest of all wealthy nations has

been steadily falling behind many other nations of the world. Consider just

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

a few wake-up-call facts from a long and dreary list: The United States now

ranks lowest or close to lowest among advanced "affluent" nations in connec- tion with inequality (21st out of 21), poverty (21st out of 21), life expectancy

(21st out of 21), infant mortality (21st out of 21), mental health (18th out of 20), obesity (18th out ofl8), public spending on social programs as a percent-

age of GDP (19th out of21), maternity leave (21st out of21), paid annual leave (20th out of 20), the "material well-being of children" (19th out of 21), and

overall environmental performance (21st out of 21). Add in low scores for student performance in math (17th out of 21), one

of the highest school dropout rates (14th out of 16), the second-highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions (2nd out of 21), and the third-highest eco-

logical footprint (3rd out of20).

Also for the record: We have the worst score on the UN's gender inequality index (21st out of 21), one of the highest rates of failing to ratify international agreements, the highest military spending as a portion of GDP (1st out of21),

and among the lowest spending on international development and humani-

tarian assistance as a percentage of GDP.1

Such facts are pretty hefty elbow nudges in the direction I'd like you to think

about, but they aren't (yet) much more than that. Everyone knows that if you don't like the way things are turning out, the thing to do is to "get involved"-

elect a congressman, or senator, or president. We've all been told (and maybe even told others!) that things aren't going to change unless we all roll up our

sleeves and get into the game. I don't have any problem whatsoever with that kind of advice-nor, as I

mentioned in the introduction, with advice suggesting that we need to build a political movement. The problem is not with what is being said, but with

what is not being said. What is usually being said is this (in only slightly oversimplified language):

We know that the economic system is dominated by large and powerful cor- porate institutions-and we know that the political system is dominated by

money and lobbying, and also, in practice, by large corporate institutions. The fundamental judgment, however, is that it is possible (without alter-

ing "the above") to organize enough political power so that "the above" can

be made responsive to the concerns of the vast majority of people in these United States.

Usually the way politics does this trick, it is hoped, is that enough power

can be put together to tax "the above" and then spend for good things like

2

HOW TO DETECT A SYSTEM PROBLEM WITHOUT REALLY TRYING

schools, roads, bridges, and maybe even health care. Also, politics, it is hoped,

can put together enough power to regulate "the above" to achieve health, a

clean environment, safety, and other outcomes of importance to the people. Now, it's surely possible that this can be done sometimes. Moreover,

almost certainly something like this (give or take some difficult questions we will shortly come to) has worked (sort of) in the past.

But there is a really interesting and challenging-and also profoundly important-matter I'd like you to ponder. Things seem to have changed. It no

longer seems that "the system" can be managed in the old way. It is possible, of course, that this means that maybe it can't be managed at all. Alternatively,

clearly some way other than the above formula must be found to get us out of the box we are in.

The best way to ponder this matter at the outset is to take a look at some of the long, long trends documenting the outcomes flowing from the traditional

assumptions and traditional political theory of change. Then we can consider what they tell us about whether the underlying system is being managed or

if it is managing us. Note carefully: Here and in what follows, I am not saying that traditional

politics never works, or has never worked in the past. That is a different ques- tion. Nor am I suggesting (yet) what might be done about the way the world seems to be proceeding. (More on that later , too.)

What I'm asking you to ponder with me is the simple fact that the system

(the way underlying institutional power is currently arranged) seems now to be producing outcomes, year in and year out, that do not much respond to the old theory of politics . Something deeper is going on.

For instance:

• AB noted in the introduction, the share of income taken by the top 1 percent of Americans has gone from 10 percent to roughly 20 percent over the last three decades. (The top 1 percent now

has more income than just about the entire bottom 180 million Americans taken together. )2· 3

• At the same time, self-evidently, the share of the rest of society- the bottom 99 percent-has dropped by a corresponding amount, roughl y 10 percent of all income.

• During the last several decades top marginal tax rates for the top

bracket have been slashed by more than 50 percent-from 91 percent in 1950 to 70 percent in 1980 to 35 percent in 2011, with

3

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

modest and mostly temporary upticks during the Johnson, Bush (I), Clinton, and, recently, Obama eras. 4 • 5

• For more than forty years there has been virtually no change in the

percentage of Americans in poverty. If anything there is evidence of a worsening trend-from a historic low of 11.1 percent in 1973 to 15 percent in 2011. (The percentages for African Americans and

Hispanics are almost double the national average: 27.6 and 25.3 percent, respectively, in 2011.)6

• Again, as noted in the introduction, for almost forty years there has been only a minuscule, token change in weekly earnings for

most Americans-approximately one-tenth of 1 percent per year

for roughly 80 percent of all wage and salary workers. Private pro- duction and nonsupervisory workers made an average of $18.74

per hour in 1973 (in 2011 dollars); by 2011-thirty-eight years later-this had edged up only to $19.47.7

• Corporate taxes have steadily declined: from 32.1 percent of fed-

eral revenues in 1952 to 15.5 percent of such revenues in 1972 to 10.2 percent in 2000 to 7,9 percent in 2011.8

• Corporate taxes as a share of GDP declined from a modest 6.1 per- cent in 1952 to 2.1 percent in 2000 to a mere 1.2 percent in 2011.9

• US output of CO2 and other global-warming greenhouse gas emis- sions has risen steadily-by 1 O .5 percent over the last twenty years.10

CO2 emissions alone are up 30 percent over their 1970 levels.11

• The proportion of the population in federal and state prisons and jails in the United States has gone from 93 (per 100,000) to 500 over the last forty years. When prisoners held in local jails are

included, the 2010 rate totaled 743-a figure far higher than that of any other European country (Russia included) and more than

eight times higher than the average for Western European coun- terparts .12 (This , by the way, is a very concrete test of the degree to

which "systems " do or do not deprive people ofliberty.) • The amount of money spent to sell candidates in presidential elec-

tions has gone from around $92 million (1980) to $1.1 billion (2008) in the last three decades. (It reached around $2 billion in 2012.)13

By the way: I assume you noticed that the above trends involve some of the

most important American values-including equality, liberty, and ecological sustainability. But they also involve democracy itself, as we currently know

4

HOW TO DETECT A SYSTEM PROBLEM WITHOUT REALLY TRYING

it, and force us to ask whether our democracy in its current form can achieve outcomes in accord with such basic American values .

(Also by the way: Note that I haven't as yet even mentioned the fiscal crisis, congressional deadlocks, or "the economy" and its stagnating, painful fail- ings. We'll come back to all of this, big-time, in due course.)

5

CHAPTER TWO

But Hasn't What We Normally Call Politics Done What Needs

to Be Done in the Past?

I 'm not trying to be a contrarian. Just trying to stare some pretty nasty reali-ties in the face. Indeed, if it's already obvious to you that we face a systemic problem that

traditional strategies clearly don't deal with very well-and if you want to get on with how we might nonetheless proceed with building a positive different

way forward-it's fine with me if you jump over to part 2. On the other hand, if you stick around, I'm going to ask you to dig more

deeply into what ordinary politics can and can't do (and how perhaps to clarify this for folks we work with and talk to and maybe even hope to

convince). And if projects, locally or nationally, are your thing, I'm going to ask you to think about what I call "projectism," and what it can and can't

do, as well. Again, to be clear about it: I think projects and organizing and demonstra-

tions and related efforts are important. However, down deep most people sense-rightly, in my view-that those big trends aren't going to budge much

in the most powerful corporate capitalist system in the world unless we come up with something a lot more serious and sophisticated than what most

people have been talking about so far.

I'm also not saying that nothing useful can be done through traditional political efforts. The 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which makes it

harder for employers to pay women less than men for equal work, is a clear

example of forward movement-and there are many more in many areas. Nonetheless-and the point is always to keep your eye on the overarching reality-those powerful downward-moving systemic trends continue.

6

WHAT WE NORMALLY CALL POLITICS

Also, even some of the useful things that get done are inadvertent remind-

ers of the big picture of decay. For instance, in 2007 many people got excited

about having passed legislation to raise the minimum wage in three stages from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour. Again, great so far as it went. However, the larger, longer-term negative trend pretty much continued nonetheless: The

minimum wage adjusted for inflation was more than $2 higher in 1968. * The great environmentalist , the late Donella Meadows, once titled an

article "Things Getting Worse at a Slower Rate:' However, that was before they

started getting worse faster again.1 Clearly, when great victories don't even get us to where we were more than forty years ago, we need to pay close attention. We are being reminded that something more profound, something systemic,

now has to be confronted and dealt with in ways different from what most

people have been talking about if we want to start getting serious about mov- ing the trends, positively, in the direction of a decent and democratic future.

(And by the way, think again a bit about most of the projects, and organiz-

ing, and demonstrations, and even bits and pieces of civil disobedience-all

of which are important-and ask yourself whether they look to be making a serious dent in the systemically generated trends producing global warming.)

Sometimes, exceptions prove the rule. In the next chapters I'll take up some major modern policy achievements that seem to challenge the judgment

that what we call traditional politics no longer has much capacity to alter the

negative trends, that either something deeper and systemic must be changed or the trends will continue.

I'll suggest that even the most promising modern exceptions to the rule, in fact, are exceptions in that only very, very special and likely nonrepeatable cir-

cumstances explain them. Also, on close examination they tend to document other aspects of profoundly disturbing systemic power relationships-even when they seem to move in a more positive direction.

* The increase to $7.25 was completed by 2010. Had the 1968 $1.60 minimum wage kept up with inflation it would have been an estimated $10 in 2010 dollars-that is, $2.75 higher than what the much-heralded law requires . See: Oregon State University, "Minimum Wage History; ' OSU, November 9, 2011, accessed August 28, 2012, http:/ /oregonstate .edu/instruct/anth484/minwage.html. Inflation calculated using MeasuringWorth.com: Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, "Annual Inflation Rates in the United States, 1775-2011, and United Kingdom, 1265-2010;' MeasuringWorth, 2011, accessed October 25, 2012, http: // www.measuringworth.com/inflation; Office of Communications, "Changes in Basic Minimum Wages in Non-Farm Employment Under State Law: Selected Years 1968 to 2012," US Department of Labor, December 2011, accessed August 28, 2012, www.dol.gov/whd/state/stateMin WageHis.htm .

7

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

For the moment, however, let's probe a bit more deeply into the problem of systemic change in general.

The traditional theory of change (and of democracy) many Americans

have been working with is that politics in the usual sense (augmented by projects, movement building, and so on) can, in fact, achieve major trend

shifts in outcomes that uphold important values.

Actually, however, on examination, when you study things a bit closer, there have always been some rather large systemic flies in this ointment,

especially as it applies to modern experience (the experience most ofus have in mind when we think about these things).

The first theoretical fly has to do with whether what we mean by "politics"

in the usual sense of that term is what, in fact, has produced some of the most

important modern outcomes-or whether something else really did the job. For a start, many progressives hark back to the great days of the New Deal

to recall how politics demonstrably can impact the underlying system, can achieve great results, can alter profoundly important trends. After all, many

of the most important things we take for granted-like Social Security, labor laws permitting union organization, banking reforms (including deposit

insurance and Glass-Steagall banking legislation, for example), agricultural programs, and many, many more specific legislative achievements-were, in fact, enacted because politics brought together an alliance (the New Deal

coalition) capable of dealing with the underlying systemic power relation-

ships. No question about it-except one that is pretty obvious: Would any of the above have been possible in normal times? Or was what happened in large part the result above all of the Depression crisis creating a highly unusual opportunity allowing for unusual changes that normal politics could not achieve on its own?

No way to answer that question definitively, of course. But for openers,

it's useful to recall that in "normal times"-the preceding decade of the 1920s- Franklin Delano Roosevelt was campaigning as a budget-balancing fiscal conservative, and nobody in their right mind would have believed that

anything like what became the New Deal agenda was feasible.

Another way to get at the underlying point-namely, that a highly unusual context (rather than politics in the usual sense) allowed for or produced

changes not otherwise possible-is this: What do you think might have happened if a Democratic president had by chance been in office in 1929

when the Great Depression hit , and ifhe, instead of Herbert Hoover, paid the political price for the crisis? How likely is it that a hard-charging conservative

8

WHAT WE NORMALLY CALL POLITICS

challenger would have responded by putting forward the kind of program that Roosevelt actually did put forward in response to the collapse?

You only have to look to Europe to understand how differently things could have gone. There, the hard-charging conservative challengers who responded

to severe economic distress put forward authoritarian regimes-and made them stick-in more than one country. 2 (And even highly respected Ameri- cans like George F. Kennan, an important figure who was to play a major role

in Cold War strategy, thought that some kind of authoritarian regime might

be the answer in this country. 3 ) No, I am not trying to rewrite all this history. My point is a very simple

one: Many progressives look to the New Deal era for a precedent suggesting that "politics" in the usual sense of what we mean by the word can, in fact,

alter the big trends. Yet on examination everyone knows that this is not what happened. This argument, by the way, is not really very controversial, though

the point is painful. Everyone knows that the achievements of that era were very, very much dependent on highly unusual circumstances. 4

Why bother with all this? Why focus on this particular fly in the ointment-or the argument that politics in the usual meaning of that term (plus organizing,

movement building, projects, demonstrations, civil disobedience, et cetera)

may not have the capacity to achieve trend-changing outcomes? I'm not at all interested in pouring cold water on progressive hopes. Quite

the contrary. I'm trying to put something else on the table in clear terms-

namely, that if we are to get anywhere in the future, we had better think twice

about one of the most important precedents many people rely on when they hold (implicitly or explicitly) that politics (again as we usually understand

that term) can alter the profoundly powerful trends emanating from much

deeper systemic processes. If it takes the collapse of a massive worldwide depression to do the trick-

along with the good luck from a progressive point of view that a conservative happened to be in office to take the blame when everything fell apart-then

either these circumstances must prevail in the future, or the long, painful trends outlined in the previous chapter are likely to continue.

Note carefully in the above the words if it takes the collapse-especially the word if.

There have obviously been other modern periods of great progressive achievement that were able to alter painful underlying systemically produced

trends. The question, again, is whether the most important of these also

9

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

depended upon highly unusual circumstances-or whether or not they offer hope that systemic trends can be reversed through normal political processes.

We'll come back to these questions, and also to the question of whether we

should expect another collapse or maybe something different in the future- matters that are not quite so easy to chew on as many on the left, right, and

center sometimes suggest. Before we move on, it's probably useful also to mention something obvi-

ous. Even though the New Deal passed a considerable amount of progressive legislation, it did not, in fact, solve by far the most important problem of the

Depression era. Unemployment still plagued 17-2 percent of the civilian labor force and 23.8 percent of the non-farm workforce in 1939.5

World War II solved that problem, which leads us to other flies in the ointment.

10

CHAPTER THREE

Flies Number Two and Three in the Traditional Theory of Politics

The most important period other than the Great Depression that most people hark back to in holding that systemic trends can be altered by ordinary politics (in the usual sense of that term) is obviously the modern

postwar era, and especially the 1960s (and to a degree, the early 1970s). For those of you who care about the environment, also time to listen up!

I don't particularly like pointing out flies in ointments, but there are two big ones here that also make past precedents a bit dicey if we are looking for

arguments about whether the long trends we looked at in chapter 1 can be

altered by traditional approaches. And whether, accordingly, we might need to begin to develop different

(system-changing) strategies.

And, further, how this might be done . . Which brings us to big fly number two: The postwar era in general, and

the "postwar boom" in particular, were extremely unusual in a way that is

pretty much the polar opposite of the special conditions of the Depression. The years 1945-70 define the most powerful economic boom in modern history-a time when the economy grew at an annual rate of 3.05 percent

per year and median family income came close to almost doubling (from

$27,000 to $48,300 in inflation-adjusted 2011 dollars). 1

Again the thing to note about this unusual moment in history is how truly

ex~eptional were the circumstances that produced it-the most important of which was a massive, global, industrial-scale war and its aftermath, a war that was not fought on American soil (something very different from what

happened to many other nations at this point in twentieth-century history).

Federal military spending skyrocketed to 37.8 percent of the economy in 1944 (and 37.5 percent in 1945), producing a massive economic stimulus six and a half times that of the recent Obama effort relative to the size of the economy. 2

11

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

World War II not only ended the Depression and put everyone back to work; it also produced wartime savings for millions of workers, and this in turn helped fuel the boom when the savings were turned into new postwar consumer purchases. Moreover, the high demand for unskilled workers dur-

ing the war made labor union organizing much easier; National War Labor

Board regulations also helped raise wages and reduce inequality. The war also gave rise to a temporary postwar politics that allowed for enactment of special programs for returning veterans, further fueling the boom. One of the

most significant was the GI Bill, which paid for college educations or training

programs for 7.8 million World War II veterans. 3

Most important of all was that World War II radically impacted the industrial capacity of America's most important competitors and potential

competitors-including, but not limited to, Germany, Japan, Great Britain,

France, and Italy. Not only did the US economy benefit from Marshall Plan and other spend-

ing to help rebuild these nations (as funds were used to purchase American goods, which were shipped overseas on American merchant ships), but for a substantial (boom) period the United States had very few major global

competitors-until they came back. Bottom line: The first essential condition in which the most important

trend-shifting programs of this era were enacted was a massive and highly

unusual economic boom that both created something approaching full employment and was accompanied, not incidentally, by a flow of significant

fiscal revenues. Among the big programs enacted were a large housing program and Social

Security expansion under Truman, the Interstate Highway System under Eisenhower, and above all Medicare and Medicaid, the War on Poverty, and

education programs under Johnson. The minimum wage was increased repeatedly. In addition, civil rights legislation moved onto center stage. That

milestone followed a different dynamic, but also in part depended for its tim-

ing on the fact that black Americans had fought in the war-and also that wartime industry had disrupted the South, sending a huge migration north. 4

We'll come back to this shortly. Some of our most important environmental legislation-including the

Clean Air and Clean Water Acts-was also part and parcel of the boom era.

(Economic booms are good for environmental legislation: They tend to

reduce the fear of job loss that often comes with regulation. Unfortunately, the same fear, as now, conversely, keeps those negative trends moving right

12

FLIES NUMBER TWO AND THREE IN THE TRADITIONAL THEORY OF POLITICS

along in the wrong direction when the economy falters and decays. One

recent analysis shows that just four of the main environmental laws were

passed when annual unemployment was greater than 7 percent , and none when unemployment was over 7.5 percent. 5)

So, again, a very, very unusual context. If the New Deal was in large part

made possible by a massive global depression (and luck that a Republican was in office at the moment of political danger), the postwar achievements

were in significant part made possible by the ongoing impact of a massive (and highly unusual, global-scale) war and its extraordinary aftermath.

Also, the economy was further boosted by big , big military spending-dur-

ing the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War especially-from the

early 1950s through the early 1970s. Such spending hit 13.2 percent of GDP in 1952 during the Korean War (and 14.2 percent in 1953); it peaked at 9.4

percent in 1968 during the Vietnam War; it's less than 5 percent now-even with the large commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. 6

All very, very unusual when viewed in a longer-term historical perspective.

But all this is still only fly number two. That we learn very little from either the New Deal or the big postwar and

Great Society boom-era programs about what politics in the traditional sense can do about deep system-related trends in non-special times is even clearer

when we look at fly number three. This is the simple fact that a capacity to alter big trends in virtually all

advanced nations has almost always depended in significant part on the strength not simply of politics in general, and not only of movements in gen-

eral, but also on the existence of powerful institutions-above all, labor unions. Indeed , in all of the postwar boom programs, labor played a major, major

role-especially with regard to the Great Society programs. Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein observes that by the end of World War II, the AFL and

CIO had both ''built political machines that gave labor a distinctive, well- defined political profile at both the national and local levels. The unions

invented the political action committee in the 1940s: during the 1944 elec-

tion the CIO-PAC proved the backbone of the Roosevelt Reelection effort in the urban, industrial North ... Unionism boosted turnout and Democratic Party loyalty for fully a third of the electorate :'7

The new power oflabor organizations, in turn, was critical in the political

effort that produced passage of the Medicare and Medicaid legislation, the true

13

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

powerhouse funding programs of the era. Studies by Yale public policy expert Theodore Marmor and others reveal a legislative battle over the two major Johnson-era achievements dominated, on the one hand, by labor and labor-

based organizations and, on the other, by the American Medical Association. When Medicare was first proposed, the American Association of Retired

Persons (AARP) was not yet a large organization and at the time was far less

supportive of government insurance. A new organization launched by the AFL-CIO-the National Council of Senior Citizens-became critical in the push for Medicare. Largely made up of union retirees, it held "giant rallies,

organiz[ed] major letter-writing campaigns, [and] vigorously picketed oppo-

nents." In the 1964 election cycle, the AFL-CIO spent a then extraordinary $I-million-plus (over $7million in 2011 dollars) on contributions and political

education efforts in support of its successful Medicare/Medicaid campaign. 8

Labor was also central to environmental successes. The UAW hosted an

important early conference on water quality issues and subsequently, in 1965, added a Conservation and Resource Development Department to work with

environmental groups. Among other issues, the union fought for the banning of DDT and even advocated tougher automobile emission standards. And

although they often fought with environmentalists, in general labor unions were essential to the election of many of the liberals who voted for environ-

mental legislation. Senator Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, for example, had initially worked as a labor lawyer and always relied on unions for political support.* 9

The first truly big difficulty to get your mind around here (for our own time in history) is that the institution of the labor union has declined radically, and is

likely to continue to decline. This in turn means-critically-that any serious future politics will have to find some other way-if it can!-to do what labor once did.

The second difficulty for anyone who hopes to build a serious future politics and may be thinking about a genuine rebuilding oflabor is that there is pretty strong evidence that union building itself was in significant part impacted by

the two big crises we have been discussing.

* By the way, the important 1960s and especially early-1970s environment laws (the latter passed when Nixon was in office) occurred at a time, note carefully, when the Republican Party was entirely a northern party, and the central problem it faced was how to attract white suburban voters. After adoption of its "Southern Strategy," a very different , more conservative, and implicitly race-related politics became the norm.

14

FLIES NUMBER TWO AND THREE IN THE TRADITIONAL THEORY OF POLITICS

Labor union membership stood at roughly 11 percent in 1929. The Depres-

sion made possible passage of the Wagner Act and section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which guaranteed labor organizing and collective

bargaining rights. Union membership more than doubled-to 28.6 percent in 1939. The openings for labor made possible by World War II ( especially in

defense-related industries) brought union membership to a record high of

35.4 percent in 1945.10

Scholars now debate the many diverse reasons for what happened there- after, but for our purposes the critical point is that it has been pretty much

downhill ever since-and labor's power in politics (though clearly still very important) is not likely to come back in trend-reversing ways:11 Overall union

membership declined to 11.8 percent in 2011 (and a mere 6.9 percent in the

private sector.)12 Not only are we now back down to roughly the 1929 level but-aided and abetted by corporate and other conservative attacks-the

trend is going in the wrong direction.

So ... Massive crisis, on the one hand, and massive global war and its aftermath,

on the other: two overarching history-shaping elements at the heart of a once powerful, trend-altering progressive politics. Also, the political impact of

once powerful labor unions, whose strength was in significant part related to the two big crises-and is now declining rapidly.

It should not be surprising, accordingly, that an important recent study by historians Nick Salvatore and Jefferson Cowie sees the progressive gains of the middle third of the twentieth century, quite simply, as largely an aberration.

"Absent major national shocks, the capacity for fundamental political change is limited in the American context. Our founding mythos of individualism

has ... become so intimately intertwined with the very essence of the nation

itself that its limitations become most difficult to perceive."13

Former labor secretary Robert Reich has also concluded (in some writings) that "the period extending from 1933 to 1965-the New Deal and the Great

Society-was an historical aberration ... animated by the unique crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and the social cohesion that flowed from

them for another generation. Ronald Reagan merely picked up where Calvin

Coolidge and Herbert Hoover left off."14

However we come to terms with these judgments, another way of under- scoring the critical challenge is simply to note that if we hope to deal with

the systemic issues, we had better think much more deeply about what it

15

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

will take-and "what then we must do"-ifwe want to get beyond occasional

token protests and the election of people who posture as the long, long trends

continue to decay.

I know this is pretty dreary stuff-especially for a book that in the end (as

you will see) offers a reasonably hopeful sense of the future, and a strategy aimed at possibly getting there. (Moreover, except in passing I haven't even

discussed race, and how racism was used to suppress votes in the South and to divide potential progressive constituencies, including labor, in the North.)

Unfortunately, however, I don't think we are going to get anywhere with- out getting some myths out of the way. To put it simply: On the basis of the

evidence (so far) it appears unlikely that strategies hoping simply to revive politics in the traditional ways-even intensified by movement building, and

especially given the decline oflabor-are going to get us very far in address-

ing some of the profoundly depressing system-produced trends we are facing. The trends are likely to continue-give or take a minor uptick gain-unless

we come up with something different.

16

CHAPTER FOU·R

The Fading Power of Traditional Politics

Just a couple more things before we can really get going-and to wrap up this question of whether or not change along traditional lines (I mean trend change, of course) is likely on our current path.

Isn't the fact that Obama health care legislation passed evidence, after all,

that if you really work at traditional politics it will all work out in the end? Well, maybe.

This is another case where digging a bit deeper into how things really worked in the era we are coming out of helps clarify our own challenge-the

era, that is, most people have in mind when they remember the future. Americans have talked about universal health care for a long, long time-

way back, indeed, to the time ofTheodore Roosevelt. If you look closely at the historical and institutional foundations that created the preconditions of the

Obama health care legislation, however, what you find is a tale most people simply don't know much about-a tale that puts recent events in a somewhat different perspective.

First, the very idea that there should be any serious kind of health insur-

ance for Americans (beyond tiny elites) simply did not have much reality until World War II-and it was (again) the war that gave it reality. With war-

time labor scarce , wage-price controls were enacted to keep bidding wars in check. Corporations, unable to offer more pay, tried to compete with benefits instead. The modern idea of widespread employer-provided health insurance

developed as a strategy to attract wartime workers, and continued in many

industries after the war, especially during the boom era. 1

Although it is possible (perhaps even likely) that a serious demand

for health care would have occurred sometime in American history, the widespread general idea that health insurance should be provided to large

numbers, in fact, was-and is-a creation of the World War II moment in

17

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

history. Second, as we have noted, one of the key constituencies that built upon this new health insurance idea and helped lead the fight for the first

modern public extensions of the concept-Medicare and Medicaid-was obviously organized labor. And again , the strength of organized labor in the

postwar period is inseparable from the two major system-shaping events of

the twentieth century: the Great Depression and World War II. Third , the other important constituency that helped establish Medicare

and Medicaid was and is obviously the elderly. And in many ways the elderly

as a political constituency (rather than an age class) was largely brought into

being by Social Security and the events of the Depression. Fourth, the context in which Medicare and Medicaid became possible

was also-as we have seen-the special context of the postwar boom, and the

financial flows it produced. Fifth, it is upon the institutional structures, as well as the political-

economic constituencies established by these processes, that further exten-

sions were added-especially support for HMOs during the Nixon era, COBRA legislation during the Reagan administration, the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCRIP) in the Clinton years, and also the mas-

sive Bush-era drug program (Medicare Part D).

And sixth, it is upon this long-developing political-economic scaffolding of institutions and constituencies-ultimately explainable only by reference

to the Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and the postwar boom-that Obama legislation even became imaginable.

You can't just say "Obama .care passed, and therefore all we need to do is get organized and get to work :' (We do need to do that; but as the above

suggests, that is only part of the story, looking back-and especially looking forward, as we ask what it will take to achieve large-order trend-changing

politics in other areas. )2

So, again it may in theory have been possible to get to this point in some other way, but what in fact got us here was very, very dependent on a long series of

highly unusual prior changes, the most important of which were anchored in those odd mid-twentieth-century global crises called the Great Depression

and the massive global Second World War. Bottom line again: I am certainly not advocating a return of either of the

above. Just trying to clarify that our theories about the power of traditional politics in this particular corporate system often ignore some very important things as people grasp for hope-or perhaps wishful thought-that traditional

18

THE FADING POWER OF TRADITIONAL POLITICS

strategies might somehow alter those big trends and that we really don't have to deal directly with the system that is generating the trends.

What about civil rights, feminism, gay rights? Don't the transformations on

these fronts tell us the system is capable of changing course by reacting to traditional politics and movements?

Yes and no. There have clearly been political successes in these areas, extremely important

successes-and, thankfully, we are indeed on the way to one day genuinely achiev-

ing a society of individual respect and equality. Moreover, the kind of political

activism that most people associate with progressive causes-demonstrations, movement building, civil disobedience, but also electioneering, canvassing, and

all of the traditional political models-has been effective for these causes. But there are a few obvious points (and one not so obvious that we'll come

to at the end) to consider here.

One: What this has all been about is getting into the existing system.

Not changing it. The battle for equality on all these fronts has largely been about rights, and

about fulfilling the enduring elements of the individualist American culture.

(I in no way mean to denigrate the drive to full equality. My concern is

simply to keep the critical questions in focus and to remind you of those big, big decaying trends that continue on their way even as more and more people find that personal discrimination is slowly-all too slowly-declining.)

Professor Michael Kazin underscores the obvious point in his recent book on the left in American politics: "Radicals in the U.S. [he might well have

added "progressives in general"] have seldom mounted a serious challenge to those who held power in either the government or the economy. But they have done far better at helping to transform the moral culture, the 'common

sense' of society-how Americans understand what is just and what is unjust

in the conduct of public affairs. And that is no small thing."3

Two: World War II obviously also played a role here, helping accelerate things a great deal, producing some (not all) of the conditions that permitted

successful activists and activism. Many women , for instance, were drawn deeply into the industrial workforce-and then sent back to suburban homemaking,

an experience that they and their daughters found world-shaking. Black

Americans were drawn north, out of the cotton fields, into a different economic and ultimately social and political world, and many entered the military. The postwar world was never the same-for them and for their sons and daughters.

19

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

At the same time we rarely consider fully the implications of the simple truth that it was not until the two-thirds point of the twentieth century(!)

that black Americans were able to vote in most parts of the South-in a "democracy" that looked the other way while terrorist groups like the Ku Klux

Klan enforced the old order, in a vast region of the nation home to 30 percent of the entire population, with violence and murder. 4

Three: There has also been backsliding in several areas, especially as the decaying social and economic trends have continued their powerful impact. Schools, for instance, are now as or more segregated than before civil rights

legislation spurred serious desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s.5

And as the black professional middle class has left the city, the remain- ing neighborhoods have become less, not more, stable. Correspondingly, poverty trends for black Americans have reversed in recent years: The rate

has increased steadily from its historic low of 22.5 percent in 2000 to 27.6

percent in 2011. 6

Four: The modern achievements of the gay rights movement, and the

equality of marriage effort, are clearly also on a trajectory to achieve full acceptance in American society-and again, with great difficulty and much pain. And also with not much impact, one way or another, on the larger eco-

nomic and social trends that define the system problem in its larger dimen-

sions. Indeed, even as the major trends are getting worse. Martin Luther King Jr. confronted the depth of the systemic challenge in

the mid-1960s and again shortly before his death in 1968. The fight to end discrimination was one thing; challenging the economic system was another. Speaking to his staff, one member recalled, King "asked us to turn off the tape

recorder ... He talked about what he called democratic socialism, and he said, 'I can't say this publicly, and if you say I said it I'm not gonna admit to it .. : .

. . and he talked about the fact that he didn't believe that capitalism as it was constructed could meet the needs of poor people, and that what we might

need to look at was a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism.',._7

Let us leave aside the word socialism for the moment. The challenge, King declared shortly before he was assassinated, was structural and systemic,

* King evidently was of two minds about whether it was right to think these thoughts but not speak them publicly. In a 1965 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, he reportedly stated: "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children:' See: May 1965 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, quoted in Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press , 2007), p. 230.

20

THE FADING POWER OF TRADITIONAL POLITICS

not simply political in the traditional sense: 'We are dealing with issues that

cannot be solved without the nation ... undergoing a radical redistribution

of economic power."8

King's final judgment stands as instructive evidence of his understanding of the nature of systemic challenge-and also as a reminder that given the

failures of both traditional socialism and corporate capitalism, it is time to get serious about clarifying not only the question of strategy, but what , in fact,

the meaning of changing the system in a truly democratic direction might

one day entail.

21

CHAPTER 23

The Prehistory of the Next American Revolution Toward a Community-Sustaining System

H istory has a way of surprising us, especially in times when serious change seems impossible. The modern civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, even the modern conservative movement (which was modest in the early postwar era), all rose to major

power without benefit of pundit prediction. Indeed, the success of all these movements was quite contrary to the conventional wisdom at the time, which held that nothing serious could change.

Nor did anyone predict the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East, or

the radical shifts in power that have overthrown conservative and authoritar- ian governments throughout Latin America in the last two decades. Farther

back, how many people in 1989 predicted that the Berlin Wall would fall, or that within two years the Soviet Union would dissolve, or that within five

years apartheid would finally end in South Africa? The American Revolution itself stands as a reminder that a small and

totally outgunned group of determined people could defeat the then most powerful empire in the world.

I am no utopian; I am a historian and political economist. I am cautious

about predictions of inevitability-including the assumed inevitability, dic- tated.from on high, that nothingfundamental can ever change.

It is possible-indeed, perhaps likely-that at some point the pain, ten-

sions, loss of belief, and anger building up in America will lead to something

far more explosive and transformative than business-as-usual politics. And it is our responsibility-yours and mine and other Americans '-in advance of

such a time to openly consider what might make sense, how to proceed, and what our role in the matter might be.

139

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

The place to begin is with the profound challenge now confronting us in

connection with the truly fundamental American values-equality, liberty, and democracy; and with the ongoing loss of belief in the corporate system's

capacity to achieve and nurture these values, not to mention those involv-

ing global sustainability. I am not talking, simply, about the need to address social and economic and climate change pain, as important as they are. I am

talking about addressing something much deeper. A nation that proclaims a creed based on centrally important values but

continues to violate them in practice is setting itself up for challenges much more serious than the problems of "normal" politics. If the trends continue to decay-and there is every reason to believe that most, in fact, are likely to-we will clearly be entering what social scientists term a ''legitimation

crisis": a time when the values that give legitimacy to the system no longer can, in fact, be achieved by the system.

The late Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider, cautious research-

ers studying the loss of belief in American institutions during the 1980s at a time even before the economic and social pain had begun to deepen, concluded:

The situation is much more brittle than it was at the end of the

1920s, just before the Great Depression, or in 1965, immediately preceding the unrest occasioned by the Vietnam War and the

outbreak of racial tension . . . The outcome could very well be substantial support for movements seeking to change the system

in a fundamental way.1

Their conclusion, though premature, stands as a warning-and a chal-

lenge-to our own time. At minimum it is another reminder of the importance of considering strategies beyond the usual political routes to change-an

"Option Six;' if you like.

Put another way, the deepening difficulties also suggest the possibility that

we may now be well into the prehistory of the next American revolution, that Option Six may ultimately involve longer-term changes much greater than

many have contemplated. It is never possible to know in advance what may or may not occur. Nonetheless, such a time is a time when it is also our respon-

sibility to begin to consider the fundamental question of how a "next system" might and should be organized, a time to begin to explore new ways to achieve

the great American values that can no longer be achieved by the dying system.

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THE PREHISTORY OF THE NEXT AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Understood in this larger perspective, the various efforts under way that

offer the possibility of democratizing the ownership of wealth may not only help bolster traditional progressive political strategy, but also help lay down

critical building blocks for something far more fundamental. Which also means it is time to begin to get serious about the question: If

you don 't like corporate capitalism and you don't like state socialism, what do

you want? It is time to throw off the blinders that suggest we must always and

forever be constrained by systemic alternatives whose main lines of develop- ment can be traced back more than a hundred years-indeed, far longer back

in historical time. That the question may be of more than passing interest is also suggested by the fact that the words capitalism and socialism were the

most-looked-up words in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary in 2012 .2

A good way to start answering the question is to confront the profound

challenge of community, and its practical requirements and systemic implica-

tions. The institutional requirements of community pose fundamental issues that neither corporate capitalism nor state socialism ever took seriously . The critical point of departure is the question: Can you ever have Democracy with

a big D in any system if you don't have democracy with a small din the actual experience and everyday community life of ordinary everyday citizens?

Especially at a time like ours when corporate power and money dominate? I'm talking about genuine democracy, not just voting. Real participation,

the kind political theorist Benjamin Barber calls "strong democracy:' The kind where people not only react to choices handed down from on high, yea or nay,

but actively engage, innovate, create options-and also decide among them. There are increasing numbers of experiments with what this means-

some that we've visited in earlier chapters, and many others in the United States and around the world that point to a new direction, building from

the bottom up. In such efforts the outlines of a very different, more vital, more engaged democracy for the next system are beginning to be forged,

developed, expanded-starting in specific communities.

There are also new, related theoretical outlines being generated by our leading scholars. The president of the American Political Science Association, Harvard professor Jane Mansbridge, writes: "Without an extensive program of decen-

tralization and workplace democracy, few people are likely to have the political

experiences necessary for understanding their interests:' As she also observes, "They are most likely to come to understand their real interests in a small democ- racy, like a town or workplace, where members make a conscious effort to choose

democratic procedures appropriate to the various issues that arise:'3

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WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

Other scholars-including Barber, Stephen Elkin, and Robert Putnam-have

elaborated on similar themes. The spirit of such a vision, however, can be traced back to Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, who best _understood the

importance of getting things right at the community level. Here is Tocqueville: "Local assemblies of citizens constitute the strength of free nations. Municipal

Institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it:'4

And here is Mill: "We do not learn to read or write, to ride or swim, by being merely told how to do it, but by doing it, so it is only by practicing

popular government on a limited scale, that the people will ever learn how to exercise it on a larger.""5

I need to stop the flow here to sharpen a critical point: It is not enough to

urge such change, even to experiment with it, though both are important. A systemic challenge goes deeper, much deeper, and it brings us back full circle

to who controls wealth-and for more than one reason. First, anyone who has considered the matter for more than five minutes

knows that money influences elections big-time, that the distribution of power is intimately related to the distribution of income and wealth, and that

democracy remains superficial and essentially compromised so long as this is so. But the hard place in the argument about how to achieve real change, the

place that underscores the need for systemic change rather than mere policy and political change, is that the old system, the one dominated by corporations

with the hope that traditional politics can significantly alter the distribution of income and wealth (hence democracy!), no longer can achieve such change.

Which means that either the next system will be built upon different ways

to organize the ownership of wealth, or the ongoing trends will continue (with

or without minor adjustments around the edges).

Another way to say this is that there is a difference between an abstract

vision of democratic practice and the value of democracy, on the one hand,

and what is best termed a systemic design capable of achieving and sustain- ing that vision and that value, on the other.

Which means, again: If you don't like state socialism and you don't like

corporate capitalism, what do you want?

* The challenge such a vision presents to weak democracy understandings-and also to abstract slogans of "participatory democracy"-was captured by a wall poster during the 1968 uprisings in Paris: "Question: How do you conjugate the word 'participate '? Answer: I participate, you participate , we participate . They deci,de!"

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THE PREHISTORY OF THE NEXT AMERICAN REVOLUTION

And if you aren't willing to answer that question, or even engage it, why

should we listen to your concerns about the failings of the current system?

Just to dig a bit deeper into the difference between defining our values and vision and creating a serious systemic design capable of achieving and sus- taining them, here's a second challenge:

You can't have a genuine experience of meaningful local democracy if com- munities are continually disrupted, the people moved hither and yon, and municipal government so dependent on corporate help that there is no room

for any serious form of democratic choice. 6

Accordingly, if the next system takes community and democracy from the ground up seriously, it will have to deal with stabilizing the local economies of our communities.

And this in turn takes us back again to how wealth and capital are owned and

organized. I have noted in chapters 6 and 17 several ways to think about this, based in part on how cities like Cleveland are exploring new models, but also on

how large-scale industry might be organized to help stabilize communities as well (in chapter 17). As we have also noted, there is also plenty of room in such a vision for small business and for high-tech intermediate-scale enterprise.

I remind you: We are not "merely" talking about nurturing democratic

community practice; we are talking about community practice as the basis of fundamental experiences of critical importance to the nation as a whole and

of democracy in general. The answer to the question "Can you have genuine Democracy with a big Din a continental nation if its citizens have little genu-

ine experience of democracy with a small din their own lives?" is simple: No. And turning this around requires structural and institutional support to

reorganize how wealth is owned and controlled.

Beyond this, and again critically, if we are to counter the dangers both of

corporate domination and of traditional forms of socialist statism, decentral- ization is essential-both of economic institutions and of political structure.

There are also important questions of function: Manufacturing involves different issues than dealing with land use or finance, health care, and many

other city, state, and national level political economic matters. I won't go further with the challenge of community and the challenge of

genuine democracy at this point. * However, if you care about these matters,

come on in: Get in the game. It is time (in this possible prehistory of the next

* See the afterword for furth er discussion.

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WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

American revolution) to get serious about systemic design. Especially, again, if you don't like corporate capitalism and you don't like state socialism.

The same challenge faces us in connection with one of our most vexing global issues. For anyone interested in climate change, halting ongoing global warm-

ing and creating a new ecologically supportive culture is not exempt from the system-change challenge. It is not possible to do more than marginal "sus- tainability planning" to achieve greater resilience in cities that are continu-

ally tossed hither and yon by uncontrolled economic pressures. Moreover,

when-as is now common-we throw away cities like Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and many others, having to rebuild them someplace else, it is not only

the capital and human costs that are huge, but also the carbon costs. We are back again by another route to the question of community-and

communities. And back again to the requirement, in the new era, that we go beyond simply urging a mere "politics" against the power structure (important

as that is), back to getting serious about creating the building blocks of what a different and practical systemic design that might do the job will entail.

The great Jewish theologian Martin Buber adds one further element that underscores a deeper point. It is not simply democracy in the abstract that is

at stake; it is also the principle of community-of whether we see and under- stand each other, and our nation, as a community. The dying system gives lip

service regularly to this idea, but in practice its institutional structures serve to divide and conquer. (And its traditional political capacities no longer serve

to "overcome.") . Just after World War II, Buber offered his own approach to dealing with the

issue, emphasizing wealth democratization, too, starting from community (and bringing together both worker and consumer cooperatives). "By the structure

of a society;' he wrote, "it is to be understood its social content or community- content: a society can be called structurally rich to the extent that it is built up

of genuine societies.''7 We may or may not embrace Buber's particular formula, but the challenge he presents is the same: A systemic design that builds upon

the principle of democratization of wealth opens up the possibility not only of democracy with a small d locally, and with a large D in the system as a whole,

but ultimately also of slowly nurturing a new culture and rebuilding the essen-

tial understanding of ourselves and our nation as a community. In so doing, perhaps we also may begin to create a new moral "North Star,"

a direction that is logical and developed in its structural argument, but also

inspiring and empowering in its vision and hope.

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THE PREHISTORY OF THE NEXT AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Elsewhere-as described in the afterword-I have suggested other elements that any serious systemic design based on principles of democracy, individual

liberty, community, and ecological sustainability must begin first to debate, and then to implement. Among the most important and challenging in the coming era is how a very large nation like our own (you can tuck Germany

into Montana!) might ultimately be reorganized to give more power to various

regions. There is a long history of regional thought to build upon, beginning with serious research done during the 1930s, and with the New Deal-era

plan for seven TVAs, but there have also been several proposals with regional decentralization during the Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton administrations.

Quite apart from the fact that Congress is increasingly stalemated at the

national level, and especially as population increases toward a possible Cen- sus Bureau ''high" projection of around a billion by 2100, it is highly unlikely

that a systemic design that aspires to meaningful democracy can be managed from Washington. And if most states are too small and the continent too big, the (intermediate-scale) regional question will also inevitably be on the table

for anyone serious about the future of democratic participation.

We have also touched on the importance, for large industry, of moving beyond corporate structures that must inherently grow. 8 All in all a new overall systemic model might be called "a pluralist commonwealth" to

capture the plural forms of common wealth-holding institutions it affirms.

These include not only communitywide stabilizing efforts but also coop- eratives, worker-owned companies, neighborhood corporations, small- and

medium-sized independent firms, municipal enterprises, state health efforts, new ways of banking and investing, regional energy and other corporations,

and in certain critical areas national public firms and related democratic

planning capacities. 9

Yes, of course, the possibility that we have entered the prehistory of the next

American revolution is just that: a possibility. And for most people-as is the

case, always, historically-such a possibility is too distant, too abstract, too far from ongoing experience to deal with.

No problem. It would be surprising if more than a small number of people were able and willing to engage seriously at this level. Moreover, it is possible, as I have argued in the preceding chapter, that at best the ongoing wealth

democratization buildup will serve only to help bolster traditional strategies

that reduce pain. Which itself is a positive step forward, no matter what. (And in any case, there is plenty of work to do in movement building, creating

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WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

important projects, demonstrations, politics, and, in appropriate cases, civil

disobedience and direct action.) On the other hand, what is already happening is all but certain to con-

tinue to happen: first, a deepening of the fast-developing legitimation crisis and a loss of belief that the core values can be sustained; and second, the

ongoing slow democratization processes (evolutionary reconstruction, checkerboard municipal and state development, crisis transformations, big

crisis transformations). Because other strategies are failing, and because the

pain is increasing.

Like a picture slowly developing in a photographer's darkroom, the potential elements of a new system, of something meaningful and very American, are

beginning to emerge. At the same time, three recent national surveys have found Americans

under the age of thirty-the people who will build the next system-largely indifferent as to whether capitalism or socialism is better, and if anything

slightly more favorable to the latter term. 10

What confronting the possibility that we are entering the prehistory of

the next American revolution offers is a chance to get serious about thinking through what we really want, and this itself may help us clarify new options

for the long haul.

It is ultimately also likely to offer us new ways to deal with others around the world. It is unlikely that we will be able to significantly alter ongoing

policies that do and do not contribute to global peace and the development of other nations until we become a different community ourselves, until the

power structure changes, until we change. 11

We may also gain perspective another way. America is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. Over the course of the twentieth century alone,

real income per capita (adjusted for inflation) increased roughly sevenfold in the United States. 12 As we have seen, so wealthy is our nation that were

income divided equally today, all families of four would receive almost $200,000. (Alternatively, of course, the workweek could be cut in half, with

family income reduced on average to $100,000-roughly two times current median family income.) 13

We do not know the course of future change . It will almost certainly be determined by the direction taken by two powerful trends. On the one hand,

the long trends of technological change, if continued, may be promising.

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THE PREHISTORY OF THE NEXT AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Indeed, if ongoing technological change continues to sustain the previous century-long sevenfold-increase trend, potential real (inflation-adjusted)

income for families of four could in theory exceed $1 million per family (or,

more likely, a radical reduction in the workweek). The other trend involves resource limits, and it is a powerfully constraining

trend, especially with regard to energy, but also many other things globally (including basic grains, water, fisheries, and arable land). All this will also be

impacted by global population growth-or its reduction, as is happening now throughout Europe and Russia, another unknown. And, again, also by spe-

cific technologies that may potentially open new directions in certain areas, especially with regard to energy, but also, at this point, to an unknown extent.

What is striking is that in either case, the reconstruction of an American community is clearly the precondition for a decent and meaningful outcome:

either to build forward in hopeful new ways on the basis of technological

change, or, critically, to work together to manage, as a community, the chal-

lenge of resource constraints.

Fi_nally, a place to end and a place to begin-and maybe to help us remember

who, in fact, touched off the explosions that helped fuel the modern civil rights, feminist, gay rights, and other movements, to say nothing of the long

history of work to make American democracy meaningful that goes back to

before the Revolution itself. As the late Margaret Meade famously reminded us, we should "never

doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the

world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has:' 14 And, of course, everything done in the new direction and to establish the fundaments of a new American

community is positive no matter what.

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