The verdict is in and the evidence all around us, especially in the obsession to move towards an austerity economy. We lost. They won. Now we must rebuild again. The progressive, liberal vision of a society striving towards an egalitarian state must be born again, and must move beyond the nostalgia of FDR, and the flowering of labor unions.
The Reagan revolution was a worldview shift. After Reagan, government became an enemy as corporate globalization, the iron fist inside the velvet glove, became invisible. After Reagan, the wholesale bribery and financial corruption of government was "game on," leading to the self-fulfilling prophecy that government should not be trusted and is incapable of governing. That's our context today. Thirty years of corruption has hollowed out governing institutions. Nothing works anymore. The Reagan revolution poisoned our worldview with cynicism even as it set out to dismantle institutions through incompetence. The revolution is almost complete. Corporate victory is at hand. The class war is basically over. They won; we lost. Now we must rebuild again.
We must rebuild progressive and liberal institutions and ideology. We have to start at the beginning. It's going to take decades of hard, difficult struggle. It will be like moving into a new house and discovering the foundation cracked and the infrastructure infested with termites. We have to tear down with a new vision of what we will build up. The vision of what will be cannot emerge from the cobwebs of that which has been. We need new vision, new perspective, and new ways of imagining. And this will require new leadership.
The Reagan revolution, armed with unlimited amounts of cash, invested itself in the step by step development of new leaders. Through the use of think tanks, a new media infrastructure, a strategic alliance with politically conservative Christians, and a willingness to fund young people in conferences and retreats, the ideology of corporate fascism emerged as a plausible alternative to a liberalism corrupted by money. This revolution is so complete that we currently have no alternative other than our own delusions that the Democratic Party speaks for citizens rather than the evidence that it, too, is a front for corporations.
I'm part of a group bringing Democracy Schools to Seattle. We must begin again building up from the perspective that human rights trump corporate rights, and that the earth itself has rights and an integrity that trumps our attempts to extract resources from it. The democracy that we seek demands respect for commonwealth, insisting on a cooperative, sustainable economy no longer rooted in the militarism of empire building. Come learn more about this, learn how to design alternatives to corporate governance. The first Democracy School is in a few weeks and you can register through www.peoplefirst.us
Together -- actually it is only together -- we can be born again.