Great diagnosis, and you hint at the root cause of the problem, but don't directly name it: The Republican Party and the rightwing in America. They are the ones who have dismantled the key institutions, redistributed income upward, and repealed or made nearly impossible, the material conditions upon which dread can be addressed. And a population in which 1/3 votes for a traitorous sociopathic racist lunatic and 1/3 sits it out, is not a society up to the task.
I'll just make this note about timing. The swing to destroy social institutions is remarkably similar to the timing of the loss of white supremacy as institutional policy - a loss that is now returning in the form of cruelty against immigrants, and more. If my memory has gotten the timing wrong, feel free to correct. I lived through the 50's, 60's, 70's, and more. As a white woman my life was more comfortable in the 50's but my rights were fewer.
Mos def! I'd take it a step further. The rise of the AmeriKKKan fascist idiocracy corresponds almost precisely with the diminishment of three primary hierarchies--white supremacy, Christian supremacy, and male supremacy. Either one on their own would likely generate a massive backlash, but all at the same time has resulted in the degenerate and grotesque moment this country is in. That said, it has revealed in many ways the true underlying character of the nation more than anything.
Its certainly not just the Republican Party, who have long since not been a republican party, who are solely responsible. The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized and pluralized system that had legal and regulatory variability, policy variability, an intentionally diffused and pluralized private sector, and local fiscal dominance. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, genuinely participatory governance structures even for very serious policy matters with real participation, and a level of public accountability in political, economic, governmental, financial, and scientific decision making.
However, after WW2 a long multi decadal transformation began due to the dirty deeds of a convergence of several interests and an assortment of powerful special interest groups, and then our parties were transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they don't offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This transformation of the parties has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
We can just agree to disagree. There is absolutely nothing conservative about the GOP--it's a fascist theocratic crony capitalism party with not a shred of true conservatism, and it's run by evil sociopathic lunatics. The Democratic Party is by no means perfect, but it's basically a center left party by US standards that would be closer to center right in Europe. I'll take the latter over the former 1,000,000 times out of 1,000,000. Cheers.
I'm using an older definition of conservatism, perhaps I should clarify that. But outside of that, whether or not someone prefers one of those parties to the other doesnt really relate to my comment. I was making a structural comment, this is after all the Structural Lens page. Neither party is a lower case "r" or "d" republican or democratic party and havent been for a very long time, if one wants to argue they retains some aspects, thats fine, and I would agree, but what are they primarily? Every real big party in a large complicated system has different words that can be used to describe them in one regard or another, but if they have one descriptive in their name then that should be what they primarily are, and they did used to be, believe it or not, long, long ago...
Actually, it's not that new. I think the book called "Gaveling Down the Rabble" discusses the use and misuse of the Constitution, mostly the Commerce Clause, from the beginning. And of course that railroad decision in the 1800's, in which the railroad won, and a side note by a clerk identified it as corporate personhood (14th amendment) and all the evils that has caused. But it goes back.
Gibbons v. Ogden was *maybe* the biggest commerce clause case in the 19th century, for generations they used to wave it around like a flaming sword to try and centralize things. But the pre 1960s/1970s American system (at least in the NE, Mid-West, and West), even with its exclusions, contradictions, abuses, and constitutional inconsistency still had substantial distribution of power and decision making, significant policy variability, local fiscal primacy, and publicly accessible institutional participation
This essay is well written, articulate, and well structured. Good job. However, I would not that it does not actually do much structural analysis at all, in fact it seems to almost entirely just comment on aggregated outcomes, selectively chosen policy case studies, and cross-national comparisons that never look at the broader dynamics of the foreign countries and never look at the institutional architectures either the foreign countries or the USA.
For example, lets look at some of the specific foreign (and one US city) policy examples you cite. Vienna and Singapore successes on those areas happen in certain architecture that rely on decades-long, path-dependent political economies are 1) by definition non-reproducible by close to all cities or the US as whole in regards to their specific story they would have to be swapped with something else and 2) are the result of highly extractive processes that are quite harmful to lost of other places/people; Minneapolis rent dynamics are debated and either way are tied to broader regional supply/demand shifts; the IRA buildout truly seems to have not much happened at all under the Biden admin and it seems most of its money assignments were being lost to structural corruption (and know smart people who really care very, very deeply about environmental stuff who've really looked at it and said that, there was relatively tiny creation after 3.5 years under the Biden admin and its not legitimately explainable)
In my opinion, we should all look at things like the history of how US mediating institutions were dismantled, how its broader institutional spaces were centralized and made publicly inaccessible, how fiscal authority and capital allocation were moved upwards and then centralized, how local civic-operational systems were dismantled. And the current state of organizational affairs in regards to what the current decision making architecture actually is, how are its processes formed and structures, who has access to those processes, and by what means do they access those decision making processes
You might do well to reread this essay and read other essays by the structural lens - particularly in light of your third para which is well covered by the essay. Whatever the limitations of analogy, the point remains is that a lack of political imagination (Fisher) and entrenched path dependency (upward wealth accumulation) that will keep the US tethered to dread and drag the globe into desperate and antagonistic ideological exhaustion, thrashing about in paroxysms of imperialist grandeur whilst trust in civic institutions continue to wither.
Hi, thanks for the reply! The essay points out bad things that are derived from structural matters, like, so "dread" is being generated by the loss of participatory. But then barely does any looking at the structural stuff itself or what structural event caused the losses, when was access to decision making and authority was lost and in what ways, where did fiscal authority etc moved to, how capital allocation and decision making was reorganized, what governance nodes replaced local ones, how access pathways were closed, etc
Then the essay describes bad outputs of the current system. But then without ever proposing any structural changes to restore agency, it just asserts policies that the current existing decision-making architecture should do and asserts those would have better outputs. No structural change
There is a sort of of paradox of the essay, it basically says (in my view, correctly) that people feel powerless because agency has been stripped form them, but then it proposes responses that leave them with at least as little agency as they have now (I say at least, because that whole sweet of policy proposals, well if all are enacted the various rubber-meets-the-road practical effects in regards to decision making would likely actually leave people with even less agency than they have now) and basically just treats people as receivers of the benevolence of groups/organizations that are/woould be so distant from them as to be alien, and leaving them with no say in matters
After World War II, we had about 40 years where the middle class was allowed to prosper. But since Reagan was elected in 1980, the 1% with the cooperation of both parties, has made an unrelenting effort to claw back, whatever progress the working class and middle class had made. We are now at the tail end of that 45 year project where are all the spoils went to the one percent and the rest of us are pretty much out of luck to have any hope for a better future.
Like a thousand other problems, it’s not that we don’t know how to solve them. It’s not that we don’t know how to make the world a better place. Nor is it that we lack the wealth resources, expertise, human potential, and public demand to implement the changes.
The problem underlying all other problems is the elite who control everything want to maintain a system of harm to keep the masses oppressed, exhausted, sickly, impotent, demoralized, etc. It’s working by design. That’s the nature of authoritarianism.
A strong essay. A fine overview, with critical analysis, including suggestions for change, with examples and critique to support it. It may be I’m suffering from dread but why does this very fine, well researched and analyzed essay leave me no more hopeful than I was when I started reading an hour ago?
I have read a few of the books and am familiar with others, still you suggest several directions a reader might go. Permaculture had me smiling. I have been into fermentation lately, especially kimchi — microbes can be friendly! — the funk that brings taste to food — and music (though that is something else.) And fungus. Mycelial networks as analogs for human organization. I hear echoes of that in your suggestion intentionality can reside in the universe somewhere other than human community.
My public library has a copy. I’ll check it out. Thx. I’m a theologian, so think the way out is to engage, organize, and pray. Ask for Grace. Add some singing. Lift up your voice.
Well, I do feel better. Maybe because of the significant list of things that actually could work because they did. Although my dread is based on the rush toward climate change and the other rush toward fascism, I think I'm helped by the knowledge of possible solutions by my own investigation into human nature, through history and archaeology. Instead of naming my favorite book, I suggest looking at the bibliography of my 2025 book"Open Reality" .
You have interlaced a vast amount of survey data, connected it with existential political philosophy, worthy albeit partial assessments of cause and proposed some robust and pressure tested remedies —one wonders how to scale political engagement beyond assemblies to legitimize and embrace what are increasingly coded as ‘communist’ interventions in the failed and embarrassed experiment that is terminal late capitalism. Thoroughly enjoying your efforts.
Great diagnosis, and you hint at the root cause of the problem, but don't directly name it: The Republican Party and the rightwing in America. They are the ones who have dismantled the key institutions, redistributed income upward, and repealed or made nearly impossible, the material conditions upon which dread can be addressed. And a population in which 1/3 votes for a traitorous sociopathic racist lunatic and 1/3 sits it out, is not a society up to the task.
I'll just make this note about timing. The swing to destroy social institutions is remarkably similar to the timing of the loss of white supremacy as institutional policy - a loss that is now returning in the form of cruelty against immigrants, and more. If my memory has gotten the timing wrong, feel free to correct. I lived through the 50's, 60's, 70's, and more. As a white woman my life was more comfortable in the 50's but my rights were fewer.
Mos def! I'd take it a step further. The rise of the AmeriKKKan fascist idiocracy corresponds almost precisely with the diminishment of three primary hierarchies--white supremacy, Christian supremacy, and male supremacy. Either one on their own would likely generate a massive backlash, but all at the same time has resulted in the degenerate and grotesque moment this country is in. That said, it has revealed in many ways the true underlying character of the nation more than anything.
Its certainly not just the Republican Party, who have long since not been a republican party, who are solely responsible. The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized and pluralized system that had legal and regulatory variability, policy variability, an intentionally diffused and pluralized private sector, and local fiscal dominance. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, genuinely participatory governance structures even for very serious policy matters with real participation, and a level of public accountability in political, economic, governmental, financial, and scientific decision making.
However, after WW2 a long multi decadal transformation began due to the dirty deeds of a convergence of several interests and an assortment of powerful special interest groups, and then our parties were transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they don't offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This transformation of the parties has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
We can just agree to disagree. There is absolutely nothing conservative about the GOP--it's a fascist theocratic crony capitalism party with not a shred of true conservatism, and it's run by evil sociopathic lunatics. The Democratic Party is by no means perfect, but it's basically a center left party by US standards that would be closer to center right in Europe. I'll take the latter over the former 1,000,000 times out of 1,000,000. Cheers.
I'm using an older definition of conservatism, perhaps I should clarify that. But outside of that, whether or not someone prefers one of those parties to the other doesnt really relate to my comment. I was making a structural comment, this is after all the Structural Lens page. Neither party is a lower case "r" or "d" republican or democratic party and havent been for a very long time, if one wants to argue they retains some aspects, thats fine, and I would agree, but what are they primarily? Every real big party in a large complicated system has different words that can be used to describe them in one regard or another, but if they have one descriptive in their name then that should be what they primarily are, and they did used to be, believe it or not, long, long ago...
Actually, it's not that new. I think the book called "Gaveling Down the Rabble" discusses the use and misuse of the Constitution, mostly the Commerce Clause, from the beginning. And of course that railroad decision in the 1800's, in which the railroad won, and a side note by a clerk identified it as corporate personhood (14th amendment) and all the evils that has caused. But it goes back.
Gibbons v. Ogden was *maybe* the biggest commerce clause case in the 19th century, for generations they used to wave it around like a flaming sword to try and centralize things. But the pre 1960s/1970s American system (at least in the NE, Mid-West, and West), even with its exclusions, contradictions, abuses, and constitutional inconsistency still had substantial distribution of power and decision making, significant policy variability, local fiscal primacy, and publicly accessible institutional participation
I’m impressed with this and restacked two paragraph — I could have restacked a dozen more.
This may well be the most interesting thing I’ve read so far this year. I need to sit with it for a while and let it marinate in my brain.
This essay is well written, articulate, and well structured. Good job. However, I would not that it does not actually do much structural analysis at all, in fact it seems to almost entirely just comment on aggregated outcomes, selectively chosen policy case studies, and cross-national comparisons that never look at the broader dynamics of the foreign countries and never look at the institutional architectures either the foreign countries or the USA.
For example, lets look at some of the specific foreign (and one US city) policy examples you cite. Vienna and Singapore successes on those areas happen in certain architecture that rely on decades-long, path-dependent political economies are 1) by definition non-reproducible by close to all cities or the US as whole in regards to their specific story they would have to be swapped with something else and 2) are the result of highly extractive processes that are quite harmful to lost of other places/people; Minneapolis rent dynamics are debated and either way are tied to broader regional supply/demand shifts; the IRA buildout truly seems to have not much happened at all under the Biden admin and it seems most of its money assignments were being lost to structural corruption (and know smart people who really care very, very deeply about environmental stuff who've really looked at it and said that, there was relatively tiny creation after 3.5 years under the Biden admin and its not legitimately explainable)
In my opinion, we should all look at things like the history of how US mediating institutions were dismantled, how its broader institutional spaces were centralized and made publicly inaccessible, how fiscal authority and capital allocation were moved upwards and then centralized, how local civic-operational systems were dismantled. And the current state of organizational affairs in regards to what the current decision making architecture actually is, how are its processes formed and structures, who has access to those processes, and by what means do they access those decision making processes
You might do well to reread this essay and read other essays by the structural lens - particularly in light of your third para which is well covered by the essay. Whatever the limitations of analogy, the point remains is that a lack of political imagination (Fisher) and entrenched path dependency (upward wealth accumulation) that will keep the US tethered to dread and drag the globe into desperate and antagonistic ideological exhaustion, thrashing about in paroxysms of imperialist grandeur whilst trust in civic institutions continue to wither.
Hi, thanks for the reply! The essay points out bad things that are derived from structural matters, like, so "dread" is being generated by the loss of participatory. But then barely does any looking at the structural stuff itself or what structural event caused the losses, when was access to decision making and authority was lost and in what ways, where did fiscal authority etc moved to, how capital allocation and decision making was reorganized, what governance nodes replaced local ones, how access pathways were closed, etc
Then the essay describes bad outputs of the current system. But then without ever proposing any structural changes to restore agency, it just asserts policies that the current existing decision-making architecture should do and asserts those would have better outputs. No structural change
There is a sort of of paradox of the essay, it basically says (in my view, correctly) that people feel powerless because agency has been stripped form them, but then it proposes responses that leave them with at least as little agency as they have now (I say at least, because that whole sweet of policy proposals, well if all are enacted the various rubber-meets-the-road practical effects in regards to decision making would likely actually leave people with even less agency than they have now) and basically just treats people as receivers of the benevolence of groups/organizations that are/woould be so distant from them as to be alien, and leaving them with no say in matters
After World War II, we had about 40 years where the middle class was allowed to prosper. But since Reagan was elected in 1980, the 1% with the cooperation of both parties, has made an unrelenting effort to claw back, whatever progress the working class and middle class had made. We are now at the tail end of that 45 year project where are all the spoils went to the one percent and the rest of us are pretty much out of luck to have any hope for a better future.
Like a thousand other problems, it’s not that we don’t know how to solve them. It’s not that we don’t know how to make the world a better place. Nor is it that we lack the wealth resources, expertise, human potential, and public demand to implement the changes.
The problem underlying all other problems is the elite who control everything want to maintain a system of harm to keep the masses oppressed, exhausted, sickly, impotent, demoralized, etc. It’s working by design. That’s the nature of authoritarianism.
A strong essay. A fine overview, with critical analysis, including suggestions for change, with examples and critique to support it. It may be I’m suffering from dread but why does this very fine, well researched and analyzed essay leave me no more hopeful than I was when I started reading an hour ago?
I have read a few of the books and am familiar with others, still you suggest several directions a reader might go. Permaculture had me smiling. I have been into fermentation lately, especially kimchi — microbes can be friendly! — the funk that brings taste to food — and music (though that is something else.) And fungus. Mycelial networks as analogs for human organization. I hear echoes of that in your suggestion intentionality can reside in the universe somewhere other than human community.
I got the book at the library. Your annotated bibliography is my favorite kind of bibliography.
My public library has a copy. I’ll check it out. Thx. I’m a theologian, so think the way out is to engage, organize, and pray. Ask for Grace. Add some singing. Lift up your voice.
Well, I do feel better. Maybe because of the significant list of things that actually could work because they did. Although my dread is based on the rush toward climate change and the other rush toward fascism, I think I'm helped by the knowledge of possible solutions by my own investigation into human nature, through history and archaeology. Instead of naming my favorite book, I suggest looking at the bibliography of my 2025 book"Open Reality" .
You have interlaced a vast amount of survey data, connected it with existential political philosophy, worthy albeit partial assessments of cause and proposed some robust and pressure tested remedies —one wonders how to scale political engagement beyond assemblies to legitimize and embrace what are increasingly coded as ‘communist’ interventions in the failed and embarrassed experiment that is terminal late capitalism. Thoroughly enjoying your efforts.