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I think the ultimate success of the reaction to Trump is dependent on the Left positing a new, viable economic alternative. Neoliberal Capitalism has failed to

I think the ultimate success of the reaction to Trump is dependent on the Left positing a new, viable economic alternative. Neoliberal Capitalism has failed to create the circumstances necessary for large swathes of the population to survive, and any attempt to return to it is just going to create the same crisis of democratic institutions we have now. Marginally cheaper consumer goods, easy access to opiates, and temp work as an app-directed member of a servant class can't replace being able to afford a place to live, healthcare, or to take care of your children. Right now, I don't see anything like a new vision of the future coming out of the Left, just (in my view)a justified horror at the direction the country is heading. I've been trying to think about what something better might look like, and I hope people more versed in these subjects than I are doing so as well.

euyyn 10y ago
I think that the plenty of industry jobs in developing and manufacturing renewable energy systems that Clinton proposed is a pretty nice vision. Blue collar jobs where the coal industry was gone, pushing America to be the world leader in these technologies which are arguably the future.
qnix 10y ago
If you go look, you will have a hard time picking a 50 year period in history, where everything was going well, a nice clean "vision" was neatly laid out and everyone got on board and did their bit. Just ask your parents and grandparents. It never happened. And they didn't have to deal with zillion different over-optimized, hyper efficient propaganda machines pumping fear into the ether 24*7, and they will still tell you times were chaotic. But they survived and things got better.
- refurb 10y ago
  This is a great point. It seems like human nature to look back with rose colored glasses. I hear people say how great the US was 20 or 40 years ago. Do a search for news back then and you'll see the same doomsday news article and constant fretting for the future of the country. It was so bad you'd think the world was falling apart. I always liked this view: "The world is falling apart!" "When was the last time it wasn't?"
- api 10y ago
  You are excluding the middle. It wasn't perfect back then by any stretch, but it was possible to make a good living and all economic growth and innovation was not hyper concentrated in less than five unaffordable coastal cities. If you live in one of these places and have not spent time in the interior you don't get it. For an example look into the first, say, ten companies to offer viable home computers. They were in places like Albaquerqie (MITS), Dallas (Tandy), Philadelphia (Commodore), Atlanta (Compucolor), Boca Raton (IBM's PC group), etc. as well as Apple and a few others in the Bay Area. Today they would just about all be in SF/SV with maybe one token in Seattle. Everything is like that. Regular jobs leave the interior for other countries or are replaced by automation, while high end jobs all go to to LA, NYC, SF, Seattle, and Boston. I am in LA and grew up in Cincinnati and am as guilty as the next person. It's hard to swim against a torrent. When I go back there I see people stockpiling guns and talking about the new record for heroin deaths. Young people talk about escaping. This is also bad to a degree for people in rich coastal cities since all this is driving real estate hyperinflation there. No jobs or unaffordable housing: pick one. For average people things have become tangibly worse. It started in the 70s, accelerated after 2001, and became a visceral downward spiral after 2008. Trump and Sanders talked about this. Nobody else cares or even sees the problem.
  - breatheoften 10y ago
    Colorado is pretty nice. You are oversimplifying and by doing so basically disguising an argument that seems to be that more wealth should be transferred from coastal cities to the interior. How about the interior elects some reasonable governments, engages in trying to educate their populace, put some regulations in so they can build some decent communities and try to attract talent -- how about the interior starts trying to compete rather than blaming their woes on the federal government while seeking to increase their outsized (and poorly managed) federal handouts (which gets funneled disproportionately toward their tiny economic elite because of their states rights motivated insistence on the freedom to form corrupt local governments.)
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      >How about the interior elects some reasonable governments, engages in trying to educate their populace, put some regulations in so they can build some decent communities and try to attract talent -- how about the interior starts trying to compete rather than blaming their woes on the federal government while seeking to increase their outsized (and poorly managed) federal handouts (which gets funneled disproportionately toward their tiny economic elite because of their states rights motivated insistence on the freedom to form corrupt local governments.) Well, this also requires that the Feds enforce antitrust law.[1] [1] -- http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...
- facetube 10y ago
  There's some surprisingly-literal survivorship bias here.
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  I'd actually disagree. The post-war era until the collapse of the Soviet Union had a pretty clearly delineated narrative, regardless of how truthfully we adhered to its precepts(or even how reprehensible they were in retrospect). I think it's only once we embraced the intellectual indulgence of the "End of History" that we set ourselves up for failure. As Authoritarian Capitalist regimes rose to world power in the 90s and 2000s, we failed to see them as a threat to our democratic institutions (having wrongly conflated Capitalism and democracy), until they were at our doorsteps
mindcrime 10y ago
Neoliberal Capitalism has failed to create the circumstances necessary for large swathes of the population to survive, Wait, what??? Capitalism has been ludicrously effective at creating wealth and raising standards of living. What it hasn't necessarily done is guarantee equality or ensure that the very lowest (economic) class of citizens have a SoL that's above the baseline that a lot of people want. And given that Capitalism isn't a prescriptive system anyway, that's hardly surprising. It's also less than surprising given that we don't live (at least in the US and most of the Western world) in a truly capitalistic society to begin with. Most of this world is a mixed economy which features massive government regulation and other elements which work against pure laissez-faire. Personally, I don't consider a certain measure of inequality to be a problem, with the caveat that nobody is artificially restrained from achieving economic success. To me, we aren't waiting for "the left" (whatever that is) to present some new anti-capitalist plan... we're waiting to find a way to evolve society so that we can avoid the extremes of inequality that we have now, and create that baseline SoL for everyone. And I see no reason to think that Capitalism isn't the foundation those things should be built on. The biggest thing that worries me right now is the whole "technological unemployment" issue. I remember worrying about that as far back as 7th grade... and while, so far, robots haven't replaced jobs to such an extreme that it's rendered human labor useless, one does wonder what will happen if/when that comes to pass. And there, to be honest, I will say that I'm not sure if the Capitalist approach will be workable. But on the flip-side, I'm not sure what other approach we can construct that doesn't require use of violence to redistribute wealth. I've been trying to think about what something better might look like, and I hope people more versed in these subjects than I are doing so as well. Likewise. Mainly I wish I had more time to think about this stuff.
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  I agree that living standards have been raised, but if massive inequality and a corrupt political order has been created in tandem, this is something like the pursuit of short term profits over continued viability. If nothing else, the failure to take action on climate change under this ideology should demonstrate this. If the system is unable to meaningfully address existential threats, any other guarantees it makes about the future ring false. And less abstractly, this of course ignores the emergent downward trends in American lifespans, wages, and job security.
ebiester 10y ago
Any alternative the Left (as opposed to "democrats") is immediately dismissed as similar to socialism. If it involves state control, it's communism. If it's a planned economy, it's communism. If it puts restrictions on the market economy, it's socialism. If it suggests increasing taxes, it's socialism. If it aims to shape market behavior, it's socialism. If it comes from someone who has previously suggested one of these previous ideas, it's socialism. The luddite argument is that we should stop progress because it is too drastic a change. (most of) the Left is not advocating that. However, there is a strong argument to say what got us here is causing more problems than solutions, and the same solutions dismissed earlier are now within range of implementation. I'm not suggesting whole hog Cockshott's "Toward a new Socialism" -- most people here could tear it apart justifiably. One interesting idea is that the government charges full externality and market costs for the resources it controls, rather than the cost to maintain those resources, and distributes the excess as social credit. (Basic income suggests that one can live on it - social credit is the distribution of social wealth, but is not necessarily livable to start.) But again, that has government involvement implications, so it must be socialism.
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  Anything described as Socialism will be politically untenable until the Baby Boomers die off. While Millenials are open to alternative economic arrangements, anti-Communist sentiments are probably too deeply engrained in the older generations to ever be undone. That doesn't mean there isn't room to move in this direction. But I think it's going to have to be along the lines of "saving Capitalism" like we had in the New Deal era. Putting a literal floor of survival with things like basic income and nationalized healthcare, while preserving markets for their creative capacity in industries like science and technology.
  - gdulli 10y ago
    > Anything described as Socialism will be politically untenable until the Baby Boomers die off. Yeah. That's why Trump would have had such a field day with Bernie about his socialism. Which Trump would have conflated with communism etc.
mindslight 10y ago
Both "The Left" and "The Right" establishment have been in solid agreement on the economy for the past several decades - an ever-faster treadmill driven by inflationary monetary policy. With technological progress prices should be dropping at an unprecedented rate, but yet our leaders deliberately reverse the progress. "Full employment", with its implication of never being able to save to gain economic bargaining power, is their explicit policy. The plebs aren't seeing gains from globalization because anything they manage to save just gets channeled upwards through increased economic rent! Left and right are fundamentally just different ways of analyzing a situation, and they're generally both valid. But mass media has polarized us into believing they represent diametrically opposed tribes, when the actual divide is distributed liberty versus centralizing oligarchy. The oligarchy holds its power by keeping the masses fighting each another over bikeshed politics, and this last election was no exception. The real disruption of this system is not going to come from more false prophets flying blue or red flags (sorry Trump supporters, you bought into the same simulated disruption that Obama won with), but from bottom-up organization of individuals coordinating through p2p communications infrastructure (left thinking) and asserting their rights for themselves (right thinking).
KirinDave 10y ago
I'm not a fan of the foreign policy and aspects of domestic surveillance that neoliberalism has brought America, but I do want to push back on one part: > Neoliberal Capitalism has failed to create the circumstances necessary for large swathes of the population to survive If you look at the states in the union that have embraced neoliberal capitalism, their economies are in substantially better post-recession state than their counterparts, often have more effective social services, and generally are considered to be central to the revival of the American economy (even as they overturn huge swaths of it). This is not an accident. Each of these states has carefully prioritized their spending and law to attempt to remain relevant in a rapidly changing economy. California is a shining example of this. California prioritizes a strong state university system, immigration & trade, and extremely aggressive pro-worker laws that enable very small businesses to compete with very large businesses directly. New York has done similar things and keeps broadening things like its non-compete laws. Similar stories exist about more aggressive state-level health care and public health initiatives. Many (but please, of course not all) people feeling they're left out of this can and should first look to how their state elected officials have utterly failed to steer their state towards relevance before pointing to quite frankly outright benign federal regulation. People arguing "Obamacare made it too expensive to run a business" were the same people who said, "Employers shouldn't have to pay for meaningful employee health care despite that being the only feasible way for people to get it in America since the Nixon administration." States COULD address this, and anyone can point to the blue states doing it and how their economies ARE the positive growth metrics of America, but instead the argument is about further eroding worker protection and stability in those states. GOP and Trump politics, despite claiming to be pro-business, are really very aimed at protecting large companies at the expense of small business owners and newer companies. A great example of this is the way Wyoming is not only stopping all subsidization of renewable energy (despite it being a fantastic business proposition for the state where its environmental and footprint impacts are MUCH smaller than in other states, they've become a wind energy powerhouse with only modest cost to the taxpayer), but starting to introduce subsidization for the coal industry despite that industry already receiving heavy federal subsidies and producing far fewer in-state jobs (especially over projections going forward). This is ultimately an anti-competitive, anti-capitalist agenda. We cannot simply be complacent with the idea that "neoliberalism is prosperity." But we should definitely point out that things like decreasing the individual burden for core services and giving workers more freedom demonstrably improves the economies that do this. We can no longer say, "That sort of works for France but look at how bad their employment system is." We've been running a comparison for a long time now and we can see that better education, less concern for health care and education costs actually work in the US system even when implemented partially and in a half-assed way. We need to assume a planned economy to take that to the next step. Certainly the UK can show that its health care system has an outstandingly positive effect on the # of people employed (or self-employed).
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Right now, I don't see anything like a new vision of the future coming out of the Left, just (in my view)a justified horror at the direction the country is heading. I've been trying to think about what something better might look like, and I hope people more versed in these subjects than I are doing so as well. We've been working that out[1]: full automation, the reduction of waged work hours, and universal basic income as the road through and past capitalism. I would add workers' cooperatives and very strong antitrust laws, to strengthen the autonomy of firms that drives market economies[2]. [1] -- http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/inventing-the-future/#.WJZDdVdMKIM http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/inventing-the-future/#.... [2] -- https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  Interesting! Thanks for the links!
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    This platform has also gotten memed as "fully automated gay space luxury communism."
gdulli 10y ago
Voters chose to listen to fear-mongering about immigrants taking their jobs rather than face the difficult truth that the Democrats saw and tried to help them deal with: we need education to stay ahead of automation. But building a wall sounds fast and easy and someone else does it. Free education takes years of work. The tragedy is that there wasn't more substantive debate about it, but this cycle was a circus of emails and Trump defending the size of his dick.
lhopki01 10y ago
I think the ultimate success of the reaction to Trump is dependent on the Left positing a new, viable economic alternative. There is an viable economic alternative already. Look at countries like Sweden and Denmark. They are very rich developed countries that have an alternative model. The problem to many people in Anglo-Saxon world is that that model is based on high taxes to support a very comprehensive social security net.

euyyn 10y ago

I think that the plenty of industry jobs in developing and manufacturing renewable energy systems that Clinton proposed is a pretty nice vision. Blue collar jobs where the coal industry was gone, pushing America to be the world leader in these technologies which are arguably the future.

qnix 10y ago

If you go look, you will have a hard time picking a 50 year period in history, where everything was going well, a nice clean "vision" was neatly laid out and everyone got on board and did their bit. Just ask your parents and grandparents. It never happened. And they didn't have to deal with zillion different over-optimized, hyper efficient propaganda machines pumping fear into the ether 24*7, and they will still tell you times were chaotic. But they survived and things got better.

refurb 10y ago
This is a great point. It seems like human nature to look back with rose colored glasses. I hear people say how great the US was 20 or 40 years ago. Do a search for news back then and you'll see the same doomsday news article and constant fretting for the future of the country. It was so bad you'd think the world was falling apart. I always liked this view: "The world is falling apart!" "When was the last time it wasn't?"
api 10y ago
You are excluding the middle. It wasn't perfect back then by any stretch, but it was possible to make a good living and all economic growth and innovation was not hyper concentrated in less than five unaffordable coastal cities. If you live in one of these places and have not spent time in the interior you don't get it. For an example look into the first, say, ten companies to offer viable home computers. They were in places like Albaquerqie (MITS), Dallas (Tandy), Philadelphia (Commodore), Atlanta (Compucolor), Boca Raton (IBM's PC group), etc. as well as Apple and a few others in the Bay Area. Today they would just about all be in SF/SV with maybe one token in Seattle. Everything is like that. Regular jobs leave the interior for other countries or are replaced by automation, while high end jobs all go to to LA, NYC, SF, Seattle, and Boston. I am in LA and grew up in Cincinnati and am as guilty as the next person. It's hard to swim against a torrent. When I go back there I see people stockpiling guns and talking about the new record for heroin deaths. Young people talk about escaping. This is also bad to a degree for people in rich coastal cities since all this is driving real estate hyperinflation there. No jobs or unaffordable housing: pick one. For average people things have become tangibly worse. It started in the 70s, accelerated after 2001, and became a visceral downward spiral after 2008. Trump and Sanders talked about this. Nobody else cares or even sees the problem.
- breatheoften 10y ago
  Colorado is pretty nice. You are oversimplifying and by doing so basically disguising an argument that seems to be that more wealth should be transferred from coastal cities to the interior. How about the interior elects some reasonable governments, engages in trying to educate their populace, put some regulations in so they can build some decent communities and try to attract talent -- how about the interior starts trying to compete rather than blaming their woes on the federal government while seeking to increase their outsized (and poorly managed) federal handouts (which gets funneled disproportionately toward their tiny economic elite because of their states rights motivated insistence on the freedom to form corrupt local governments.)
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >How about the interior elects some reasonable governments, engages in trying to educate their populace, put some regulations in so they can build some decent communities and try to attract talent -- how about the interior starts trying to compete rather than blaming their woes on the federal government while seeking to increase their outsized (and poorly managed) federal handouts (which gets funneled disproportionately toward their tiny economic elite because of their states rights motivated insistence on the freedom to form corrupt local governments.) Well, this also requires that the Feds enforce antitrust law.[1] [1] -- http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...
facetube 10y ago
There's some surprisingly-literal survivorship bias here.
alphonsegaston 10y ago
I'd actually disagree. The post-war era until the collapse of the Soviet Union had a pretty clearly delineated narrative, regardless of how truthfully we adhered to its precepts(or even how reprehensible they were in retrospect). I think it's only once we embraced the intellectual indulgence of the "End of History" that we set ourselves up for failure. As Authoritarian Capitalist regimes rose to world power in the 90s and 2000s, we failed to see them as a threat to our democratic institutions (having wrongly conflated Capitalism and democracy), until they were at our doorsteps

mindcrime 10y ago

Neoliberal Capitalism has failed to create the circumstances necessary for large swathes of the population to survive, Wait, what??? Capitalism has been ludicrously effective at creating wealth and raising standards of living. What it hasn't necessarily done is guarantee equality or ensure that the very lowest (economic) class of citizens have a SoL that's above the baseline that a lot of people want. And given that Capitalism isn't a prescriptive system anyway, that's hardly surprising. It's also less than surprising given that we don't live (at least in the US and most of the Western world) in a truly capitalistic society to begin with. Most of this world is a mixed economy which features massive government regulation and other elements which work against pure laissez-faire. Personally, I don't consider a certain measure of inequality to be a problem, with the caveat that nobody is artificially restrained from achieving economic success. To me, we aren't waiting for "the left" (whatever that is) to present some new anti-capitalist plan... we're waiting to find a way to evolve society so that we can avoid the extremes of inequality that we have now, and create that baseline SoL for everyone. And I see no reason to think that Capitalism isn't the foundation those things should be built on. The biggest thing that worries me right now is the whole "technological unemployment" issue. I remember worrying about that as far back as 7th grade... and while, so far, robots haven't replaced jobs to such an extreme that it's rendered human labor useless, one does wonder what will happen if/when that comes to pass. And there, to be honest, I will say that I'm not sure if the Capitalist approach will be workable. But on the flip-side, I'm not sure what other approach we can construct that doesn't require use of violence to redistribute wealth. I've been trying to think about what something better might look like, and I hope people more versed in these subjects than I are doing so as well. Likewise. Mainly I wish I had more time to think about this stuff.

alphonsegaston 10y ago
I agree that living standards have been raised, but if massive inequality and a corrupt political order has been created in tandem, this is something like the pursuit of short term profits over continued viability. If nothing else, the failure to take action on climate change under this ideology should demonstrate this. If the system is unable to meaningfully address existential threats, any other guarantees it makes about the future ring false. And less abstractly, this of course ignores the emergent downward trends in American lifespans, wages, and job security.

ebiester 10y ago

Any alternative the Left (as opposed to "democrats") is immediately dismissed as similar to socialism. If it involves state control, it's communism. If it's a planned economy, it's communism. If it puts restrictions on the market economy, it's socialism. If it suggests increasing taxes, it's socialism. If it aims to shape market behavior, it's socialism. If it comes from someone who has previously suggested one of these previous ideas, it's socialism. The luddite argument is that we should stop progress because it is too drastic a change. (most of) the Left is not advocating that. However, there is a strong argument to say what got us here is causing more problems than solutions, and the same solutions dismissed earlier are now within range of implementation. I'm not suggesting whole hog Cockshott's "Toward a new Socialism" -- most people here could tear it apart justifiably. One interesting idea is that the government charges full externality and market costs for the resources it controls, rather than the cost to maintain those resources, and distributes the excess as social credit. (Basic income suggests that one can live on it - social credit is the distribution of social wealth, but is not necessarily livable to start.) But again, that has government involvement implications, so it must be socialism.

alphonsegaston 10y ago
Anything described as Socialism will be politically untenable until the Baby Boomers die off. While Millenials are open to alternative economic arrangements, anti-Communist sentiments are probably too deeply engrained in the older generations to ever be undone. That doesn't mean there isn't room to move in this direction. But I think it's going to have to be along the lines of "saving Capitalism" like we had in the New Deal era. Putting a literal floor of survival with things like basic income and nationalized healthcare, while preserving markets for their creative capacity in industries like science and technology.
- gdulli 10y ago
  > Anything described as Socialism will be politically untenable until the Baby Boomers die off. Yeah. That's why Trump would have had such a field day with Bernie about his socialism. Which Trump would have conflated with communism etc.

mindslight 10y ago

Both "The Left" and "The Right" establishment have been in solid agreement on the economy for the past several decades - an ever-faster treadmill driven by inflationary monetary policy. With technological progress prices should be dropping at an unprecedented rate, but yet our leaders deliberately reverse the progress. "Full employment", with its implication of never being able to save to gain economic bargaining power, is their explicit policy. The plebs aren't seeing gains from globalization because anything they manage to save just gets channeled upwards through increased economic rent! Left and right are fundamentally just different ways of analyzing a situation, and they're generally both valid. But mass media has polarized us into believing they represent diametrically opposed tribes, when the actual divide is distributed liberty versus centralizing oligarchy. The oligarchy holds its power by keeping the masses fighting each another over bikeshed politics, and this last election was no exception. The real disruption of this system is not going to come from more false prophets flying blue or red flags (sorry Trump supporters, you bought into the same simulated disruption that Obama won with), but from bottom-up organization of individuals coordinating through p2p communications infrastructure (left thinking) and asserting their rights for themselves (right thinking).

KirinDave 10y ago

I'm not a fan of the foreign policy and aspects of domestic surveillance that neoliberalism has brought America, but I do want to push back on one part: > Neoliberal Capitalism has failed to create the circumstances necessary for large swathes of the population to survive If you look at the states in the union that have embraced neoliberal capitalism, their economies are in substantially better post-recession state than their counterparts, often have more effective social services, and generally are considered to be central to the revival of the American economy (even as they overturn huge swaths of it). This is not an accident. Each of these states has carefully prioritized their spending and law to attempt to remain relevant in a rapidly changing economy. California is a shining example of this. California prioritizes a strong state university system, immigration & trade, and extremely aggressive pro-worker laws that enable very small businesses to compete with very large businesses directly. New York has done similar things and keeps broadening things like its non-compete laws. Similar stories exist about more aggressive state-level health care and public health initiatives. Many (but please, of course not all) people feeling they're left out of this can and should first look to how their state elected officials have utterly failed to steer their state towards relevance before pointing to quite frankly outright benign federal regulation. People arguing "Obamacare made it too expensive to run a business" were the same people who said, "Employers shouldn't have to pay for meaningful employee health care despite that being the only feasible way for people to get it in America since the Nixon administration." States COULD address this, and anyone can point to the blue states doing it and how their economies ARE the positive growth metrics of America, but instead the argument is about further eroding worker protection and stability in those states. GOP and Trump politics, despite claiming to be pro-business, are really very aimed at protecting large companies at the expense of small business owners and newer companies. A great example of this is the way Wyoming is not only stopping all subsidization of renewable energy (despite it being a fantastic business proposition for the state where its environmental and footprint impacts are MUCH smaller than in other states, they've become a wind energy powerhouse with only modest cost to the taxpayer), but starting to introduce subsidization for the coal industry despite that industry already receiving heavy federal subsidies and producing far fewer in-state jobs (especially over projections going forward). This is ultimately an anti-competitive, anti-capitalist agenda. We cannot simply be complacent with the idea that "neoliberalism is prosperity." But we should definitely point out that things like decreasing the individual burden for core services and giving workers more freedom demonstrably improves the economies that do this. We can no longer say, "That sort of works for France but look at how bad their employment system is." We've been running a comparison for a long time now and we can see that better education, less concern for health care and education costs actually work in the US system even when implemented partially and in a half-assed way. We need to assume a planned economy to take that to the next step. Certainly the UK can show that its health care system has an outstandingly positive effect on the # of people employed (or self-employed).

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>Right now, I don't see anything like a new vision of the future coming out of the Left, just (in my view)a justified horror at the direction the country is heading. I've been trying to think about what something better might look like, and I hope people more versed in these subjects than I are doing so as well. We've been working that out[1]: full automation, the reduction of waged work hours, and universal basic income as the road through and past capitalism. I would add workers' cooperatives and very strong antitrust laws, to strengthen the autonomy of firms that drives market economies[2]. [1] -- http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/inventing-the-future/#.WJZDdVdMKIM http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/inventing-the-future/#.... [2] -- https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/

alphonsegaston 10y ago
Interesting! Thanks for the links!
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  This platform has also gotten memed as "fully automated gay space luxury communism."

gdulli 10y ago

Voters chose to listen to fear-mongering about immigrants taking their jobs rather than face the difficult truth that the Democrats saw and tried to help them deal with: we need education to stay ahead of automation. But building a wall sounds fast and easy and someone else does it. Free education takes years of work. The tragedy is that there wasn't more substantive debate about it, but this cycle was a circus of emails and Trump defending the size of his dick.

lhopki01 10y ago

I think the ultimate success of the reaction to Trump is dependent on the Left positing a new, viable economic alternative. There is an viable economic alternative already. Look at countries like Sweden and Denmark. They are very rich developed countries that have an alternative model. The problem to many people in Anglo-Saxon world is that that model is based on high taxes to support a very comprehensive social security net.