My high school government teacher would ask us, "what happens when you try to stay in the middle of the road?" And the answer is "you get hit by a truck" even more true 20 years later
This was a brilliant read - thank you for putting this case (reality!) so clear-sightedly. That left-right charade has completely hoodwinked voters in the UK, too, where our archaic first-past-the-post voting system reduces us only to two electable parties. Starmer’s Labour did the whole shift right to claim the centre thing, and now the UK has one of the most authoritarian, big-business-led governments we’ve ever seen. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn’s new party already has over 600,000 members, giving it the biggest party membership in UK politics!
Most people think they are in the center, just like people making $80k and $800k think they are middle class. LOL. I think I am the most reasonable thinker I know. And so do you. And so does our boss. And so does Jeff Bezos.
I was a Democrat until I could no longer stomach Clinton, then returned to support Bernie. But the stereotype for the middle for many years—fiscally conservative and socially liberal—is more or less what Harris, Biden, Obama, and the Clintons represent. Everyone is so divided by faction, though. This morning, NPR presented a story that pointed to the focus on DEI as a distraction away from electoral success, because we cannot address racism and the needs of “the working class” at the same time apparently. But if observing and defining the need for inclusivity is somehow too far left, then what the hell is the center? Pure conservatism? This is what we’re left with to counter radical populist fascism? Screw that. Define your values and explain them with clarity and passion. Define your enemies (billionaires, unchecked growth on a new domestic military, threats to the social safety net, etc.) and unload on them mercilessly.
If disillusioned voters who still believe the political process is salvageable in the US really want to get serious about left-ratcheting the system, they could split both parties and form a new actual left wing party. The resulting new party would be twice the size of either of the old parties, and the old Democrats would be able to coax right wingers across in order to attempt preventing the left-ratchet. Which would leave the Right-wingers standing in very lonely little groups that nobody would take seriously anymore.
This is just one option, but I would prefer if people let go of representative democracy entirely and went all in on creating a federated network of local councils with participatory direct democracy as a new standard... and then use this system to figure out where America really wants to go in the future once Capitalism's hold on politics is broken.
Great article - but isn’t what is missing from the debate in general that we need to reimagine what the centre actually is…? Not an attempt to triangulate to somewhere in the middle of the Overton Window at any one given time…rather - a metaphysical/meta-political centre which transcends it…? A centre built on values which don’t sway with the prevailing winds rather than one built on policy which seems expedient for electoral purposes…? And perhaps it will be whomever captures that position who will build a coalition that will shape the future…
It's hard to define a centre when the baseline of human social evolution is complete absence of private property and universality of resource access, which itself was restricted only by non-human obstacles. Thus, since the initial condition is pure communism, to stabilise the model means to return to a baseline at that end of system, rather than to oscillate around some mythical 'centre', which will always be unstable.
Sure - on a macro-historical level I don’t disagree with you. But I also wonder whether that ends up being a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Within a democracy, surely ‘the centre’ can be understood less as a fixed point on the spectrum and more as a set of values to which we all adhere at the fundament - principles embedded into the kind of society we want to sustain, rather than merely the arithmetic mean of competing ideologies…?
Agree. but the values platform needs to be established constitutionally and not subject to ambiguous interpretations such as the way the apparent virtues ‘freedom’ and ‘private property rights’ are subject to the vagaries of political winds. Of course this itself is problematic- what if you get a constitution that cements the primacy of private capital? My program would be:
1) Money creation to be a state monopoly. Banks to operate as ‘savings and loans’ (‘building society’ in UK parlance) institutions only.
2) Public utilities, essential services and natural monopolies to be state sector.
3) Small to medium businesses in other fields of activity. Of course some of these would contract to those in 2) Top-band personal taxation to be so high as to discourage distortionally large holdings of capital. Worker co-ops to be encouraged to disperse private sector capital.
4) Mandated and recallable delegate democracy to replace so-called ‘representative democracy’. Could be done bicamerally as a transitional program.
Surely the question is not which technocratic design we choose - there will always be competing blueprints - but what values guide us in judging them. To me, democracy’s core function is the continual expansion of agency and franchise. Any system that doesn’t serve that end is just another elegant arrangement of power.
Values are ambiguous, design technology is not. The arrangement of power has values embedded in it. I'm not an economic liberal- I see need for an authoritarian state that serves the majority not the minority- at least until greed and accumulation cease to be seen as aspirational. The old-fashioned term was 'dictatorship of the proletariat', though I realise that society is a lot more complex and individual perception of class is a lot more ambiguous than when Marx & Engels used the term.
But unless you establish the values how do you embed them within the design technology…? Surely - the most effective way to do this is to expand the franchise so that the values which are embedded into any framework serve to the many rather than the few…?
Thank you, I 100% agree! We need to hurtle toward egalitarianism at top speed, and that means moving the Overton Window far enough to start letting it into public consciousness. Universal healthcare, UBI, unions, living wage, signing the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child, ending war, taxing the rich, all of it.
Great insight. I don’t want something between these two broken, olde world groups of cronies. I want something new that puts humans and creatures and planet first. Something equitable, generative, just, and liberatory. Something where, from cradle to grave, we have our needs met, and decent resources, and opportunities to enjoy each other and this gorgeous planet.
The reason for this is AIPAC. They gave money to 347 congress members, both parties both houses. (per their reporting this cycle) There is a uniparty called AIPAC in our government.
This piece is excellent, and makes a point I think many of us grasp implicitly, but struggle to articulate usefully. You might think solidarity against billionaires is an obvious position, but it's certainly the case that too many folks are sure they're just temporarily embarrassed centimilionaires (nerdy side note: shouldn't that be "hectamilionaires"?), if not billionaires, and so want to make sure the privileges and immunities enjoyed by the current crop are available to themselves once they make that first hundred million. You'd like to think they'd mark their beliefs to market a little sooner, or at the very least have more compassion for folks outside their immediate friends and family, but all too often they instead see those failing around them as victims of their own flaws, not set up to fail and not be caught by an uncaring society. There is a stain of this in the path taken to destroy unions in the US. News in the late '60s through the' 80s. News coverage of union/business disputes so often focused on the more absurd (and to be fair, many of them were absurd) features of old union contracts, but would fail to give similar attention to the ways the companies wanted to cut workers out of the benefits of their labor. Were the workers bad at negotiating? Yes. Is that a good reason for companies to be given the benefit of the doubt in news reporting of their labor disputes. It is not. Did this drumbeat of coverage slagging unions cause their ultimate demise? I don't know, but it can't have helped.
I’m an independent and a radical Marxist, committed to the rights of women and redistribution of wealth. No normalization of the MAGA fascists. The elimination of the billionaire class who exploit the rest of our society. I am a veteran and proud of it. I believe everyone is entitled to medical care, as well as adequate food and shelter. Time to call bullshit to the way our country is run. Fuck ICE!
My high school government teacher would ask us, "what happens when you try to stay in the middle of the road?" And the answer is "you get hit by a truck" even more true 20 years later
This was a brilliant read - thank you for putting this case (reality!) so clear-sightedly. That left-right charade has completely hoodwinked voters in the UK, too, where our archaic first-past-the-post voting system reduces us only to two electable parties. Starmer’s Labour did the whole shift right to claim the centre thing, and now the UK has one of the most authoritarian, big-business-led governments we’ve ever seen. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn’s new party already has over 600,000 members, giving it the biggest party membership in UK politics!
MAGA keeps kicking our asses because they stand for something, odious as it may be.
“There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos” - Jim Hightower
Most people think they are in the center, just like people making $80k and $800k think they are middle class. LOL. I think I am the most reasonable thinker I know. And so do you. And so does our boss. And so does Jeff Bezos.
I was a Democrat until I could no longer stomach Clinton, then returned to support Bernie. But the stereotype for the middle for many years—fiscally conservative and socially liberal—is more or less what Harris, Biden, Obama, and the Clintons represent. Everyone is so divided by faction, though. This morning, NPR presented a story that pointed to the focus on DEI as a distraction away from electoral success, because we cannot address racism and the needs of “the working class” at the same time apparently. But if observing and defining the need for inclusivity is somehow too far left, then what the hell is the center? Pure conservatism? This is what we’re left with to counter radical populist fascism? Screw that. Define your values and explain them with clarity and passion. Define your enemies (billionaires, unchecked growth on a new domestic military, threats to the social safety net, etc.) and unload on them mercilessly.
If disillusioned voters who still believe the political process is salvageable in the US really want to get serious about left-ratcheting the system, they could split both parties and form a new actual left wing party. The resulting new party would be twice the size of either of the old parties, and the old Democrats would be able to coax right wingers across in order to attempt preventing the left-ratchet. Which would leave the Right-wingers standing in very lonely little groups that nobody would take seriously anymore.
This is just one option, but I would prefer if people let go of representative democracy entirely and went all in on creating a federated network of local councils with participatory direct democracy as a new standard... and then use this system to figure out where America really wants to go in the future once Capitalism's hold on politics is broken.
Great article - but isn’t what is missing from the debate in general that we need to reimagine what the centre actually is…? Not an attempt to triangulate to somewhere in the middle of the Overton Window at any one given time…rather - a metaphysical/meta-political centre which transcends it…? A centre built on values which don’t sway with the prevailing winds rather than one built on policy which seems expedient for electoral purposes…? And perhaps it will be whomever captures that position who will build a coalition that will shape the future…
It's hard to define a centre when the baseline of human social evolution is complete absence of private property and universality of resource access, which itself was restricted only by non-human obstacles. Thus, since the initial condition is pure communism, to stabilise the model means to return to a baseline at that end of system, rather than to oscillate around some mythical 'centre', which will always be unstable.
Sure - on a macro-historical level I don’t disagree with you. But I also wonder whether that ends up being a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Within a democracy, surely ‘the centre’ can be understood less as a fixed point on the spectrum and more as a set of values to which we all adhere at the fundament - principles embedded into the kind of society we want to sustain, rather than merely the arithmetic mean of competing ideologies…?
Agree. but the values platform needs to be established constitutionally and not subject to ambiguous interpretations such as the way the apparent virtues ‘freedom’ and ‘private property rights’ are subject to the vagaries of political winds. Of course this itself is problematic- what if you get a constitution that cements the primacy of private capital? My program would be:
1) Money creation to be a state monopoly. Banks to operate as ‘savings and loans’ (‘building society’ in UK parlance) institutions only.
2) Public utilities, essential services and natural monopolies to be state sector.
3) Small to medium businesses in other fields of activity. Of course some of these would contract to those in 2) Top-band personal taxation to be so high as to discourage distortionally large holdings of capital. Worker co-ops to be encouraged to disperse private sector capital.
4) Mandated and recallable delegate democracy to replace so-called ‘representative democracy’. Could be done bicamerally as a transitional program.
Surely the question is not which technocratic design we choose - there will always be competing blueprints - but what values guide us in judging them. To me, democracy’s core function is the continual expansion of agency and franchise. Any system that doesn’t serve that end is just another elegant arrangement of power.
Values are ambiguous, design technology is not. The arrangement of power has values embedded in it. I'm not an economic liberal- I see need for an authoritarian state that serves the majority not the minority- at least until greed and accumulation cease to be seen as aspirational. The old-fashioned term was 'dictatorship of the proletariat', though I realise that society is a lot more complex and individual perception of class is a lot more ambiguous than when Marx & Engels used the term.
But unless you establish the values how do you embed them within the design technology…? Surely - the most effective way to do this is to expand the franchise so that the values which are embedded into any framework serve to the many rather than the few…?
Thank you, I 100% agree! We need to hurtle toward egalitarianism at top speed, and that means moving the Overton Window far enough to start letting it into public consciousness. Universal healthcare, UBI, unions, living wage, signing the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child, ending war, taxing the rich, all of it.
‘The center cannot hold’ and ‘there’s no there there’, also come to mind.
Great insight. I don’t want something between these two broken, olde world groups of cronies. I want something new that puts humans and creatures and planet first. Something equitable, generative, just, and liberatory. Something where, from cradle to grave, we have our needs met, and decent resources, and opportunities to enjoy each other and this gorgeous planet.
The reason for this is AIPAC. They gave money to 347 congress members, both parties both houses. (per their reporting this cycle) There is a uniparty called AIPAC in our government.
This piece is excellent, and makes a point I think many of us grasp implicitly, but struggle to articulate usefully. You might think solidarity against billionaires is an obvious position, but it's certainly the case that too many folks are sure they're just temporarily embarrassed centimilionaires (nerdy side note: shouldn't that be "hectamilionaires"?), if not billionaires, and so want to make sure the privileges and immunities enjoyed by the current crop are available to themselves once they make that first hundred million. You'd like to think they'd mark their beliefs to market a little sooner, or at the very least have more compassion for folks outside their immediate friends and family, but all too often they instead see those failing around them as victims of their own flaws, not set up to fail and not be caught by an uncaring society. There is a stain of this in the path taken to destroy unions in the US. News in the late '60s through the' 80s. News coverage of union/business disputes so often focused on the more absurd (and to be fair, many of them were absurd) features of old union contracts, but would fail to give similar attention to the ways the companies wanted to cut workers out of the benefits of their labor. Were the workers bad at negotiating? Yes. Is that a good reason for companies to be given the benefit of the doubt in news reporting of their labor disputes. It is not. Did this drumbeat of coverage slagging unions cause their ultimate demise? I don't know, but it can't have helped.
I’m an independent and a radical Marxist, committed to the rights of women and redistribution of wealth. No normalization of the MAGA fascists. The elimination of the billionaire class who exploit the rest of our society. I am a veteran and proud of it. I believe everyone is entitled to medical care, as well as adequate food and shelter. Time to call bullshit to the way our country is run. Fuck ICE!
bought this shirt. Big fan of the work, despite disagreeing with some stances on faith.
https://lovealco.com/products/pre-order-people-over-profit-t-shirt
Beautiful piece.
Spot on, and beautifully put. Dr George Lakoff and Gil Durán wrote a piece on this last year that comes to mind now:
https://www.theframelab.org/moderate-weasel-word-masking-authoritarian-politics/