I was alive in the 90s when Clinton pushed NAFTA (it had been passed years before but Dems refused to ratify it!). It destroyed local economies, undercut worker power and wages locally, exploited workers in other countries, and made rich people richer:
That’s a reality the far left AND the far right can agree on.
Of course, there’s a destructive way to fix NAFTA and a LESS destructive way:
I use this example because I often see camps decide that whatever person x does is insane and has no basis in reality and so why would anyone ever support that? They must be mad! And when I do that (because I do it all the time too), I find myself ALSO denying or refusing to understand WHY someone would support that idea… except because they’re a Nazi.
And while that may be true, it isn’t useful.
Yes, the far right literally got us into this mess (NAFTA was their idea!). But it was Clinton who surrounded himself in libertarian economic wonks and bought their bullshit enough to enact it.
NAFTA and the corporations that supported it aren’t here to save workers. We know that. But here we have a crazy yahoo in office willing to upend a system that nobody else would admit was a shit sandwhich. Shit, dems are so weak in the face of their own rich donors that they literally kicked out their incumbent presidential candidate because their rich donors told them to. And if we’re going to be fair, we need to say out loud that that’s not super democratic, either.
I’ve been working hard last few months to understand how we got here. I remember thinking, when I first saw Project 2025 manifesto, “Well, at least THEY have a PLAN.”
Because the left did not have a plan.
The left had “we’ll work to give you some rights back and also we aren’t Nazis.”
And yes, that was good enough for me, because jesus – Nazis, man.
But ultimately, the left put itself in a position of desperately trying to preserve and defend the status quo, holding back a fascist tide. There was no plan for overcoming that tide, to do a full FDR, to rewrite the narrative and fix the failure of reconstruction and out of control techbros. No one had the balls for full socialism.
The whole plan was, let’s just be Hodor at the door. We’ll just stand here while the fascists pound on the gates. The problem is – as we saw! – Hodor can’t hold the door forever.
We all know this shit is broken. Everyone in America knows it. It’s been breaking since Reagan. We’ve been fleeced by rich people and wild-eyed evangelicals. But I’m tired of just endlessly complaining about it.
So how do we fix it? How do we unshackle the left from its own problematic rich people? How do we get a ballsy FDR, the FDR who called an emergency session of Congress as soon as he was elected and started firing off policy faster than this yahoo, and with a similar intent: to transform the system as quickly as possible. The difference is only in the vision of what that America on the other side is going to be.
While one leader meant to literally save democracy and the other is here mostly to enrich himself and his friends, the method works either way: move so fast that change comes hurling through the door. And that change – whether it’s a far right or far left shift – starts with a plan.
We know this from FDR. And the current regime (know thy enemy! Use his tools against him!): create a vision of the world we want and a PLAN for how we’ll get there (The current regime LITERALLY has spreadsheets they are checking shit off on!).
So why don’t WE have a blueprint for OUR future?
Of course we won’t all agree on everything, but a blueprint, a manifesto, creates a SHARED VISION that people can talk about, debate, that sets a tone, that puts the goal posts as far out to the radical side as you like, because anything short of that looks like a compromise (one reason we ended up with the milquetoast ACA deal we did is that the initial plan needed to be FAR MORE RADICAL, not just a rehash of Romney’s centrist plan from MA. The further out your goal post – as any negotiator will tell you! – the more likely you are to get what you actually want, which will be far more toward the middle. Negotiation 101, dems!).
Obama spoke during his farewell tour in 2016 about the lack of a shared American story. Without a shared story, there’s nothing to bind us together. We don’t agree on who we are or what we stand for, let alone where we should go. But hippies and evangelicals have some key shit in common.
I spend a lot of time watching homesteading, gardening, and self-sufficiency “content,” and let me tell you, it’s always wild to hear the same shit from the eco hippies in Oregon and the Mennonites in Ohio. And it’s this:
we all want safe air, safe water, safe food, safe kids
Those are the intersections.
How we ACHIEVE those things, and what those things MEAN can be wildly different (“safe kids” means “protect your queer kids” to one group and “protect your kids from being queer” to another group, but we saw with gay marriage that a concerted messaging push and visibility can move this needle. WE need to lead the messaging on what “safe kids” means).
I remember an article where a staunch supporter of dumblefuck in 2016 was listening to Bernie or someone talk about free college, free healthcare, safer food, and she said, “I’m really struggling with this, because when he says it out loud I think, ‘well, that’s a world I want my kids to live in.”
And that world – that vision of an American socialist utopia where the world is safer and more humane and we care for each other – gets lost when all we’re doing is constantly reacting to somebody else’s talking points. We fall for them setting the tone and topic of the day… Every. Single. Moment. Of. The. Day.
I don’t want to hear more hot takes about what dumb shit the dumb fuck said today. I want to hear about what the VISION and the PLAN is to get us from this hot disaster to the Star Trek future on the other side.
I got into writing science fiction and fantasy for the same reason Joanna Russ says she did, which is that I wanted to explore how shit could be REALLY different.
The POWER in what we do, as storytellers, is to paint that future. People WANT to be inspired. They WANT to share a vision.
But REACTING isn’t a vision. Being frozen by fear and anxiety isn’t a story… It’s the START of one.
So what’s the story we’re telling? What’s the America we want to build? THIS is the conversation I’m most interested in having. It’s the road from here to there that I’m thinking about every day.
The present is ephemeral: What we NEED is a future.
