250 years is enough
Some thoughts on a birthday that nobody seems to want
Back in 1981, at the end of her breakthrough top-40 hit, “Kids in America,” Kim Wilde promised us that a new world was coming. I can only assume that some adults, at the time, heard that promise and decided to do everything in their power to make sure that this new world would never actually arrive.
As a result, for the past half-century, both Wilde’s career—and America itself—have been trapped an a kind of perpetual adolescence. Even as we have grown older, well past the age of majority, we kids have stayed kids. Though we supposedly entered the public conversation, with our votes and our dollars, the real decision making (what R.E.M. would later call “the only vote that matters”) seemed to reside elsewhere.
We are constantly offered the next shiny thing, and the two-party system that is most relevant to our condition seems to be the elephant of the belly on the one hand, and the ass of the Id on the other. We live, in name only, locked in the dungeon of ourselves that the Apostle Paul warned us about back in the third chapter of Philippians.
I though about this as I listened to an interview with Brad Lander on NPR: “The rise of democratic socialists and what it means for the [Democratic] party.” Lander is the nominee for New York’s 10th congressional district, and he was a long-time member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and now considers himself an ally of the group, even as he has stepped away from direct membership.
“Socialism” is a wonderfully reliable bete noir for Americans thinking about America. We seem to be able to bear any indignity, suffer any burden, so long as we can say, in the end, “At least we’re still capitalists.” The market is the virtue that covers all manner of sins, and functions (for us) in the place of any other “universal class” that might be invoked, whose struggles might lead us all to a brighter day.1 As long as we take care of the market, so goes the wisdom, all other social goods will naturally follow.
It hasn’t been working out very well, however. The market continues to grow and grow, its belly continually rubbed and filled, and yet all around us, in the non-market space that we might casually refer to as “the real world,” death and destruction reign. We are in 45th place in terms of life expectancy, when compared to other nations (notably, Cuba is above the USA on this list—but don’t tell Marco Rubio). We are a police state and a surveillance state. While the financial markets continue to soar, the real economy (the one that affects real people) is on the verge of collapse.
It remains to be seen whether socialism (however defined or implemented) is a mark of a real departure from this death culture, or if it is just the next shiny thing that voters are flocking to in order to feel some sense of agency in an increasingly terrifying world. My sense, though, is that even if all the socialists near and far are running in good faith and mean what they say on the campaign trail (let us not forget the likes of John Fetterman, beloveds), it will not be enough. Socialism, however it is currently available, is a patch to an operating system that is now flawed beyond repair.
This sentiment is summed up well in a recent interview with Elie Mystal, who notes that our July Fourth celebrations are in honor of a “White Man’s Declaration of Independence”—a document that utterly failed to imagine that liberty and justice could really be available for all:
(The quotation I reference starts at 28:00, but the whole conversation is worth your time)
Before his death, Pope Francis would often remark that we had been living for centuries in a “epoch of change,” but what was needed now was instead a “change of epochs.” These overtures to socialism might be the near edge of that new world, or they might be the last gasps of this one. Either way, we slouch onward to Bethlehem, hoping that the center might hold for just a little longer. Good luck with that.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about here, spend some time reading through G.W.F. Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right. It’s not the first place this idea of the “universal class” occurs, but it is largely the source where folks like Karl Marx and Pope Francis, among others, get their ideas about the matter. If you want to dig deeper still, check out the works of utopian socialists Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, who both believed that the moral and philanthropic education of the ruling class would “trickle down” to improved conditions for all.