Progressive Politics During Moral Confusion

Following my negative reviews of the book Abundance, written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, I feel obliged to not just be a naysayer but lay out my own vision on the politics and governance for the Democrats. This is it, although this is not the primary focus of this blog.

In our current moment as Democrats in the wilderness, there are a lot of schools of thought going around. Many want to return to the politics of a decade ago of Barack Obama. There are also marxists, unionists, anti-trusters, civil right champions, the new Abundance crowd, and plenty of people that just will be happy with a constitutional republic of any flavor.

I have more personal sympathy for some of these factions than others, but I think this moment calls for a reorientation from agendas to strategy. The challenge we have is that Americans are prosperous but we have legitimate and serious complaints. Calcification of power and privilege throughout much of society both deprives us of liberty and creates tangible burdens.

In our politics, this has manifested as a profound moral confusion. When plans are set to make progress, they are often stymied and produce backlash. Also, the incremental progress being proposed, much less achieved, is small enough that it does not create sustained coalitions to build upon incremental progress to move greater distances.

The formula in place currently is to go from our coalition and their problems, to policy, to campaigning to legislating and governance. The problem is this machine broke in its ability to serve coalitions due to calcification and now those coalitions are drifting in moral confusion. We need to reimagine a new process that works when coalitions of shared interest cannot sustain it.

A politics of coalitions of shared interests rests upon a foundation of moral clarity. When there is little disagreement about the valid interests of members of society, the only remaining question is how to balance them when they come into conflict. I am optimistic of what a democratic process would result in when such an analysis is undertaken, based upon a societal moral clarity.

Our party has been shifting towards a moral coalition versus a coalition of shared interest now for a decade. Aside from women that have more moral clarity on average generally, there are 3 classes of voters that form the base of it: black voters, millennials, and the educated. Together, this coalition makes up around half of the population. So far, the main shared moral clarity is the fall of the Republican Party from an opposing coalitional party to a party driven by a degenerate morality and under the control of the American with the maybe the worst character, Donald Trump.

The answer to moral confusion is a party of moral clarity. We must reimagine our political process so that from building our coalitions in elections, to messaging to voters outside of that coalition, to wielding the tools of government, we are constantly reinforcing and building upon it.

In a society with pervasive calcification of existing interests, plans are great but will generally fail for reasons you could not have easily foreseen. Starting my fracking analogy off, your drill bit will almost certainly break, no matter how well thought out your planning of where to drill. We need a new approach.

While any single plan of an individual, a business, an organization, or a government is likely to fail in our calcified society, water always finds the cracks. Small openings where there is a bit of space for liberty are always being found.

My proposal is that we should adopt the strategy of allowing and encouraging the discovery of these cracks and then providing the added pressure of the considerable weight of our coalition behind them, through the cultural power of our coalition, in our campaigns, and through our governing power.

The merits of this approach is it replaces planning which is likely to be stalled by the same calcified society we are trying to overcome with strategy geared towards success. What we need is the moral clarity to identify where pressure should be applied.

The aim is to create a virtuous cycle where victories can be accumulated which will create greater general optimism for finding ways to cope with the calcification of interests, and a greater moral credibility of our politics and the results that can be expected of our political power.

Very importantly, it is a stepping back from coalitional goals. If suppliers are being bullied by a few powerful distributors like Walmart and Amazon, that is a morally clear case of economic liberty. This is an issue that does not map cleanly on to any coalition of shared interests in our party but may be in alignment with the moral clarity in the same way it may be towards the power of labor unions. If suppliers find tactics either in their business practices or through litigation that are promising, we should apply that same moral clarity towards the restriction of their liberty they seek to be addressed.

The power of moral clarity is it cannot be contained or dismissed to any coalition of interests within society, and until it is not a point of dispute, it has the potential to win over continuously expanding majorities.

Returning to the start, we need to rethink that the Democratic Party needs to settle around a shared agenda, versus a shared strategy. If we take the strategy of political fracking, applied with moral clarity and an eye towards the liberty and prosperity of Americans, then we could set the foundation for a return to a broader shared moral clarity.

I do not expect this mode of operating would continue indefinitely. There is an excellent chance that we will be ensnared in a battle on one or multiple fronts. Whether that ends up being first about the unreasonable suppression of unions or about courts preventing the regulation of monopoly power, different factions of the Democratic Party may ultimately be more correct about the next unifying and dominant issue that is the centerpiece of our agenda. Whatever issue that it ends up being, we must first establish credibility that we have the tools to break through and that we have the moral clarity to be trusted.

It should become nearly irrelevant what a democrat thinks ideal policy in America should be. What should be important is a passion for aiding the pursuit of liberty within our nation of laws.