Our country’s political discourse is becoming more interesting. On May 16, Washington governor and presidential candidate Jay Inslee released a progressive $9 trillion-plus “Evergreen Economy” plan.
By proposing a dramatic response to the climate crisis, Inslee joins a few Democratic presidential candidates already supporting the Green New Deal. Both proposals challenge the Democratic leadership’s rigid adherence to incrementalism and their belief that — no matter how urgent the problem — it’s best to avoid offending the 1 percent with policies that can make a difference.
We saw that principle operating in 2009 when Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House. Their response to an economy heading for the cliff: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which focused on bailing out Wall Street.
When President Obama urged a second stimulus that would bail out Main Street in towns across the United States, his party refused. The Democrats thereby laid the groundwork for the Trump victory seven years later.
Incrementalism also stopped President Obama in relation to climate. The Recovery Act included some small support for renewable energy. President Obama asked then-Sen. John Kerry to put together a major climate bill. (The Democrats at that time had the majority in both houses of Congress.) Kerry tried, but could not get his Senate colleagues on board. The growing climate crisis wasn’t enough to risk their relationship with the economic elite.
How U.S. activists became so vision-averse
Historically, radical and progressive social movements that have made the biggest difference did their vision work — going beyond protest to describe the systemic changes that would result in more justice, peace and equality.
Even though the anti-vision “fearful ‘50s” had a hamstringing effect, the mass movements of the 1960s and ‘70s encouraged some growth of vision. School reformers re-imagined education, environmentalist and feminist writers generated utopias, black activists engaged in neighborhood renewal, community policing and alternative institution building. The vision work was not robust enough to stimulate a movement of movements, but growth did happen.
The widespread use of nonviolent direct action campaigns in the ‘60s and ‘70s put movements on the offensive and produced major victories. Alarmed, the 1 percent organized a counter-offensive.
In 1981 President Ronald Reagan fired a shot across the bow of the movements. He broke the air traffic controllers’ union, signaling what billionaire Warren Buffett later described to the New York Times as a “class war” that his class started.
In response, most progressive movements went on the defensive, trying to hold on to previously-achieved gains. Going on the defensive was a tragic mistake.
LGBTQ activists took the opposite strategy. ACT-UP led the charge with militant nonviolent campaigns against Big Pharma, hospitals and the federal government. These campaigns were followed by multiple LGBTQ demands including equal marriage, equality in the military and accessible toilets. While there has never been unity among us for a fully liberatory vision, a critical mass of LGBTQ people stayed on the offensive, with allies, for equal rights. We won victory after victory.
The sad story for most U.S. movements since 1980 has been defeat after defeat, which is to be expected when movements go on the defensive. The work of visioning correspondingly lapsed. Movements focused on protests instead of vision-led direct action campaigns, and popular culture trended toward dystopia.
The re-birth of visioning
The blockbuster “Black Panther” film signaled in popular culture a turn-around on vision. Artists created an Afro-centric utopia, and the popular response in 2018 was overwhelming.
Earlier, in 2016, social activists led the charge when the Movement for Black Lives issued its vision. Dozens of organizations signed on, even though the vision’s breadth and boldness meant that the signers wouldn’t necessarily agree with every sentence.
Also in 2016 came Solutionary Rail, envisioning a massive, solar-based reinvention of industrial transportation that would put new economic life into a rural America that the Democrats have abandoned. A year later, in 2017, Popular Resistance convened a gathering that wrote “The People’s Agenda,” which grew out of the work — and organizers involved in — Occupy Washington, D.C.
Those are just the ones I’m aware of. There may well be other collective vision-writing projects released in the United States that have escaped my attention.
Vermont initiates multi-level vision work
At about the same time, a Middlebury, Vermont “huddle” group concerned with climate was reading Naomi Klein’s book “No Is Not Enough,” which describes a Canadian visionary process known as The Leap Manifesto. The huddle turned to my book, “Viking Economics,” to learn about the role of vision in the Scandinavian social movements that waged successful nonviolent revolutions and are leaders in climate today.
The Nordics were emboldened by the early Nobel Prize-winning work of economist Gunnar Myrdal, who asserted that classical economics had its priorities all wrong when it came to capital and labor. Myrdal believed an economy should center ordinary people — workers, farmers and small shopkeepers — and use capital as a resource to further their well-being. His model was the opposite of “trickle down.” Take care of the grassroots, using capital for the common good. It’s OK to have a market, but regulate it highly and make sure a large part of the economy is owned by the people.
That’s the vision that makes the Nordic track record superior to free market capitalism, even in economic metrics: higher worker productivity, more start-ups, more patents, a higher percentage of the people in the labor force, and the virtual elimination of poverty.
In 2018, the Middlebury huddle group organized a Vision for Vermont Summit, and over a hundred people from all parts of the state gathered for a weekend at Middlebury College to launch a visioning process.
This May, a year later, I went to Middlebury to join the Vermonters as they reviewed and celebrated their work. We heard from Middlebury professor Jon Isham’s students who interviewed small farmers, racial minorities, migrants and others who can easily be marginalized in the visioning process.
Their draft vision is broader than the Green New Deal but, in my view, the two are compatible. Middlebury’s Sunrise Movement is proposing to work with the Vision for Vermont group to go to the Vermont legislature with specific proposals related to the Green New Deal.
The Vermont process generated synergy from an activist/academic collaboration. Community organizer Fran Putnam, along with members of the huddle group, worked closely with faculty and students. The students found that the project built their skills and conceptual grasp, and realized their results have policy implications.
Activists and academics in other states may want to experiment with the model that seems to be evolving in Vermont. Not only are local thought leaders brought together on a state level to draft a vision, but an extra effort is taken to include marginal grassroots voices, through interviewing. The interviews can lay the foundation for relationship and further movement-building.
The state-level vision can be refined with an eye to the visions being developed on a national level, like that of the Movement for Black Lives. One question the drafters can ask is: “Now that we have our principles clear, what are the structures that need to be in place to implement the principles? For example, if we assert that health care is a right for all, what is our preferred structure to get that done?”
Some already-developed national visions will help to answer that question.
Vision work leads to even more practical outcomes when, as in Vermont, advocacy groups begin to generate specific proposals to take to state legislators. Legislative outcomes are often inadequate, the result of “sausage-making.” If, however, the proposals come from a larger, coherent vision grounded at the grassroots, and are backed up by a movement that knows the value of nonviolent direct action, they can accelerate to a living revolution.
A PERFECT MARRIAGE OF Freedom with an eye for Justice & Justice with an eye for Freedom, Woman & Man, Frugality & Liberality, Red, Brown, Black, Purple & Yellow, Tradition & Modernity, Young & Old, Rich & Poor, Left & Right, Self-interest & Idealism, City & Country, & Palestinian & Jew, Women’s Equal Representation, PRACTICABLE, Instant, FULFILLED Democracy EVERYWHERE, Creativity, Consistency & Direction, A Head for the Headless (Tech) Beast, an Ecological Politics & All Powers to their Lowest Appropriate Level: A HOW TO
Because it gives an equal chance of winning to not just all parties, but all combinations of programs, Ranked Ballot, voters ranking candidates in order of preference, is simultaneously both most Just AND most Free. Because of this great light in the eyes of the world & cause it always takes its majority from the middle (while giving an equal chance to all PROPOSALS, on a case by case basis & to all VIEWPOINTS to sway the mass in their direction) RB is more top-dead-center counter-extremist than all the many recent retrenchments combined. The (simplest to explain & sufficient for all good purposes, requiring no legislation to accomplish) “Additive” form of RB is counting the first choices & then, if no-one has 50%, adding in the next, & so on, til someone finally does. Running on the single issue of RB, promising an RB/”Organized Communications”-based Citizens Advisory Board, will give us instant practicable fulfilled Democracy everywhere (& could even make insecure electronic voting unnecessary, ten levels of groups of ten being sufficient to organize the entire world). OC is randomly assigned discussion groups electing reps (by RB) to higher & higher random levels, til one small group remains, most in the middle.
Here’s a HOW TO:
Let everyone for Ranked Ballot write it in, in EVERY election, leastwise for their least significant contest. Let all for RB, particularly students, professors, churches & other local associations, with their great proximity & pre-existing democratic organization, install RB internally (no matter how absurdly unneeded), try to get on the ballot to run on the single issue, ask those who’ve signed their petition to petition for them as well, promise a RB/OC-based CAB, do local bulk postcard mailings, demand a response from office holders to RB, vote for those supporting RB, tell all their friends about RB, help publicize RB (a full page US national ad would be sufficient to put RB to all the world, assuring that everyone knows that everyone knows about RB, making it impossible to ignore (as big media did in the case of the 2016 victory in Maine (including NPR & PBS) &/or see Preferentiality on Yahoo Groups. (PREFER-entiality. PREFERENTIAL-ity.) for what RB might & might not accomplish). RB being the Top-Dead-Center perfect compromise, these are things you can do without going outside your comfort zone.
SHOULD THE PEOPLE SO DECIDE, RB will give us truly anything, all the way FROM Sharing The Work (the workweek attached to the unemployment rate), THROUGH Women’s Equal Representation (one of each district’s (2) reps a woman), ALL THE WAY TO reforming education with having to prove literacy to vote (now that literacy is universally valued, freeing teachers to make all their charges into independent learners, besides the usual babysitting role) now that there’s 5G, 24/7, infinitely reiterative teaching machines, aka cell phones).
(Meanwhile, party &/or public funded campaigns will undermine all rationale for lingering authoritarianism, by removing all cause for fear of usurpation by monied interests. Publicly financed campaigns might be difficult to accomplish, but there is nothing preventing left-leaning &/or other “Democracist” parties from doing so in THEIR own primaries. Running it on the web would save tons & result in more largely text based campaigns with all contenders in CONSTANT debate with all others. Right now, this, along with RB would help the Dems make the best choice among the large # of hopefuls.)
Ironically, (state-diminishing) STW, will make politics way less relevant (& maybe even end the simmering neo cold war through its marriage of community & free market). STW is what’s best for BOTH all workers & all bosses. The legislature might, for instance, set a small % by which the pay for each additional hour beyond the first hour’s agreed upon rate would be increased, making employers give less OT & hire more new workers so as to spread the work around, thereby sharing it. This will end both too-big-to-fail & any need for make-work or foot-dragging, motivating maximum productivity, giving us TRUE full employment & making workers so earnestly productive as to also end the need of lots of management. It will free the compulsively careerist from having to pursue studies perhaps better left alone.
FDR (or Bismarck?) gave us the 40-hour week, so this is not unprecedented. The % difference between a 40 & 35-hour week is greater than the unemployment rate at the depths of the recent Great Recession. Workers, always having the prospect of more work, would, with a minimum of PR, take to being as (creatively!) productive as possible, eliminating large parts of the welfare state & lots of management, maybe even the need for standing armies, with all the consequent savings. Had we had such a scheme, at the start of the recent Great Recession, no-one would have seen any need for spending trillions to save giant corporations. Perhaps STW would make government so small it might be hard to find volunteers to do the job. It will cause other countries to adopt a similar plan to stay competitive (& drop costly plans to dominate the world) & the current US duopoly to let go of their own (structural) authoritarianism. Whoever adopts STW first will outstrip all others. With STW, employers would still have the right to fire for laziness or incompetence & hire for less or more than the standard work week. There’d soon be more free time, greater productivity & wealth, as well as more opportunity for individuals to start their own businesses &/or improve their skills. (Meanwhile everyone works hardest when they work for themselves.) STW is not mere “full” employment, or just a workers’ job market, but an actual Commonwealth. We’d be working half as hard for twice the wealth in no time. It will be the end of poverty. Once the rich realize they don’t have to pay all that freight for exclusivity, & that RB will give us All Powers To Their Lowest Appropriate Level, they’ll be leading the parade.
The recent win for Ranked Ballot in Maine USA, the FIRST RIGHT-LEANING PLACE to adopt it, will be transformative. RB is the answer to all things. It will give us the breathing room to sit back & work out all the details at our leisure, secure in the knowledge that whatever the result, there will be maximum Freedom AND maximum Justice, but it will not change the essence of anyplace that adopts it, only give it more nuance. No program could possibly be worth more. Men do not light a light & set it under a bushel. The lodestar of RB must be kept in mind in relation to all individuals, advocates, politicians & policies. RSVP. Tell us where we’re wrong.
zoe morgan sydney
movement for ranked ballot
USA, Planet Earth
PS:
Glad to see that Trump appeared to have favored Free Trade with the Democracies of Western Europe, way back at the start of THAT tango, but we have to hope all those “individual” deals with all the TPP members are going well. It would serve to strengthen Democracy in both SE Asia, & the world. The biggest thing wrong with it was making the court of final resolution the corporations themselves & not the signatory nations & also its lack of strong environmental & health & safely rules. Meanwhile, the only tariff there SHOULD be (outside of MATCHING those of all other nations (on a case by case basis) & enough to cover the cost of customs) is a small, GRADUALLY increasing one, on all imports, country by country, based on their ranking on a Freedom & Democracy index (with 100% only for PREFERENTIAL Democracies), to eventually pay for the entire defense budget. Probably just announcing the intention should be enough to change things a lot.
At the time of the Russian Revolution, there were only a handful of democracies in the world, all of them English speaking (outside of France) & all falling short of the ideal, in their relations to others, both inside & out, & the result was dictatorship OVER the proletariat, not OF it, which ought to give rise to SOME compassion among current day DEMOCRACISTS. Likewise, the Democratic Centralists need to recognize the Democracists as representing another side of the same impulse toward Justice. The Democratic Centralists, at best, have confused form & substance & become locked in fear. Both sides need to recognize themselves in the other. The original vision of the first communes, SELF-EVIDENTLY, must have involved democracy. All things being equal, nothing the collective does should prevent private individuals from doing the same & nothing the collective does should prevent private individuals from entering into contracts with each other. What is necessary is for the collective leaderships to be true to the original vision of “commune-ism” (with an E) & leastwise adopt thoroughly publicly financed campaigns (on the internet!) so as to remove the effects of money from their politics & completely prevent all possibility of usurpation. This also removes the rationale for staying authoritarian. It is not too likely that modern peoples will not be completely capable of recognizing their own interest, especially now that education is universally valued. Publicly Financed Campaigns, by themselves, make Ranked Ballot, Organized Communications, Women’s Equal Representation & Sharing The Work seem like overkill. Yet they SHOULD & no doubt will do all these things, merely as a result of having Publicly Financed Campaigns. Let all Democracist Parties, INCLUDING the USA Democratic Party, adopt party financed campaigns in their own nomination processes & promote (internet based!) Publicly Financed Campaigns for all elections everywhere, so as to undermine all rationale for continuing authoritarian Democratic Centralism.
Besides ALL POWERS TO THEIR LOWEST APPROPRIATE LEVEL (which ought to have something for both sides) RB will give us, a CONSISTENT foreign policy, useful in the struggle for Democracy (with their “presidents” for life in distinction to our own drunken stumbling back & forth between extremes). RB will give all the Movements for Democracy a common point of agreement & something worth fighting for, give the Parliaments a chance to do away with the last vestige of Biggest-Gang-On-The-Block-Ism by choosing their Prime Ministers by RB & Presidential systems the means to end the last vestige of King-Of-The-Hill-Ism by choosing their Presidents by RB, give both a shining example to show the world, give the Arabs a means to choose their leaders from the great non-violent mass in the middle, give collective leaderships a means to avoid adventurism & subjectivity & save all that so very much needed money being wasted on dead-end war & war preparations. Yet how can we ask it of others if we do not have it? Would it not be a great sign of optimism for the planet were all the collective leaderships to double the size of their true ruling bodies by having an equal number of women?
If the populous & territorially huge Arabs will not accept the the Jews (& their original responsibility in the contest, for having invaded the newly declared independent state, which caused the refugee problem to begin with) then let the WORLD give the immigration quotas of all such nations to the Jews. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. If the seller of some land comes to take it back by force, how can he be in the right? How is it that the Palestinians could not have just traded places with all the Jews leaving their homes in the Arab world for Israel? Perhaps the Arab people need to reconsider who they follow in this (dictators?).
PPS:
While, reportedly all the world has effectively achieved zero population growth (the continuing increase in population due to better health care) & immigration & integration with all the world would help in the struggle for Freedom & Democracy, thanks Hillary & all for having to have to be for open borders (“citizenship”) (after she had already secured the nomination!) not just BENEVOLENCE, throwing the doors wide open & otherwise failing to sufficiently support IRREPLACABLE Democracy. Granting even only residency, without stopping all FUTURE DACA awards amounts to unsustainably throwing the doors wide open. We just can’t have them all. Nor will RB result in normalizing deceiving self-mutilation. (Nazi human-skin lampshades were agitprop for the Allied cause.) Have I got it right, they want to give free 5-star health care & college to all, premature uber minimum wages & guaranteed annual income, all the while throwing the doors wide open? Don’’t nobody tell the Republicans.
With all those guns & bombs & lives, aid & money, sacrifice & suffering & sex & drugs & rock n roll, had we been on any sort of correct side, we could not have help but turn the Ho Chi Minh Trail completely around. Lost a more than fair fight back there. Gave them a choice & they didn’t take it. In a Democracy the question of violence is an absurdity, so it is the willfully ignorant who are the ones needing to be shunned, harassed & investigated, if anyone does. If you have the #s to achieve your will by force, you don’t need to. No such thing as a bad war?
SINGLE (not multi) MEMBER district) RB is simplest to explain, human scale, Women’s Equal Representative (one of each district’s reps a woman), SUFFICIENT for all good purposes, ideologically neutral, (not structurally pre-determining the result), not based on unnecessary & divisive identity politics & INSTANTLY doable (not requiring legislation to accomplish). With really only three general issue areas (economic, social & foreign policy) & three general directions (left, right & stay the course), its unlikely MMDs would be needed, even if their proponents are correct in their descriptions (as if there would be no ethnically liberal candidates along the entire length of all three spectrums, what with all the candidates there’ll be).
Each President should get to name only one SCOTUS Justice, OF EACH GENDER per term, a super majority should be required for confirmations so as to prevent the too extreme getting picked (as well as for important positions, such as the secretaries of defense & law enforcement) & the Chief Justice should be chosen by the Associates, not the President. Could we even possibly get THAT much out of them? So what, if there ended up being more or less than the current artificial number of justices. SCOTUS nominations are not the same thing as a President having an administration of his own choosing. Guess the Founders just ran out of steam by then.
Should have thought about all this ahead of time? (Unless you couldn’t bear the thought of getting Justice (or Freedom), if it meant letting the other side get Freedom (or Justice).