The Campaign The Left Need To Run
Why honesty is the best policy.
The left — or the center left, in more fragmented multi-party systems like New Zealand — are faced with what they feel is an impossible choice: how to run a campaign that is both popular enough to be voted on, while also addressing the problems we face?
The answer, like most political solutions, is simple to say but not to do: they need to speak the truth.
They need to be fully honest about the state the economy is in, about the state democracy is in, about how those are linked, about what has led us here, about corruption, about the devolution of democracy their past actions have contributed to. They need to tell us that they see this and they see the solution is to address it. They need to tell us the economy sucks right now not because of something the opposition is doing, but because of something that has been happening from far beyond domestic halls of power for a long, long time.
The seeds of oligarchy that are bearing fruit in the US were sown here too. Some of them were sown here first. They were sown in the UK and Canada and Australia and everywhere else we call home, everyone else we call us. It was sown from neoliberalism and Roger and Regan and Maggie and Hyek and Atlas but also before that, from Nazis, from royalty, from the oligarchy that has always existed and that was formed to protect the interests of the peerage as we transitioned to a capitalist system. It’s sown from a long history of racism and class suppression and conservatives and control of people and information and ideas.
The Democrats could have run this campaign under Bernie Sanders. By the time they ran it under Harris, it was too late.
Let Ukraine remind us: we are not alone. We are connected, we are linked, and we are one against the same forces. We are not our governments, we are our people, and any left wing platform that does not acknowledge the link between international neofascism and domestic neoliberalism is only running a populist platform that will delay an inevitable confrontation we must face fast and we must face together.
To win the election, to win the war, we must be honest.
And so must our politicians.
We have been constantly feed the importance of money and a need to hoard it, but money itself is an intangible concept and "value" can only come from an exchange of currency (money) for items of actual tangible value. Our political system is based on individual assessment of value for a multitude of complex items, when we place a dominant value on Self Interest above Community Interest we distort our individual valuation to a decision between Self and People, and that should be an ethical decision based on what is good for people compared to what can be exploited for individual benefit with detriment for people. Our politics should be a comparison between the two options good for People or good for Self with a consequence when a Self option is a direct penalty for people.
It speaks volumes that this even needs to be articulated. Thanks for doing so, and for doing it concisely.