Yesterday, I received two requests for donations, one allegedly from Obama for the DNC; the other for a Democratic congressperson and candidate whom I won't mention by name. Both requests suggested I needed to give money to "save democracy" and "fight Republican right-wing laws". The request from the congressperson suggested that their district was being targeted by Republicans. Neither request gave any indication whatsoever as to what either the DNC or the congressperson was FOR. I put both requests into the scanner but saved the envelopes and used them to send a letter saying: "I may give you money when and if you tell me what you are FOR. What is your position on health care? Do you believe in a single payer system? What is your position on housing costs? Do you have a plan to deal with the speculation by large real estate companies that is one reason why it costs so much to buy a house? Do you have other proposals for making safe, affordable housing available to all of us? How do you feel about the Republican attempt to change the SNAP requirements? More long term, what is your plan for dealing with food insecurity and, at the same time, a distribution system that is strangling the family farmers who grow at least a part of our food? What steps will you take to prevent starvation of the children of Gaza?"
I also have an unopened e-mail which is allegedly from Kamala Harris. When I open it, I will deal with it in the same way.
As a red-state Democrat, I concur with this diagnosis of the Left. This static, hierarchical mindset did come about slowly over time. For multifarious reasons, the politics of wielding power did turn into mere abstractions and what I call office politics. That is, the policing of each other's behavior for a performative conformity divorced from substantive ideas put into action. I think of it as national Democrats trying to get an A from their professors instead of trying to get into office.
As a citizen of Texas, I can make a case that national Republicans did the very same thing in reverse. Here I sit in the laboratory of American autocracy with Republicans looking voters in the eye and saying - "your wants and needs do not matter". Similar to Democrats, Republicans aren't engaging in public service. They too perform without substance. They too engage in office politics within the party. They too look down on their base.
Where Democrats took their misguided framework from the ivory tower, Republicans took theirs from the dungeon, complete with padlocks, shackles and torture devices. Republicans also have a static, hierarchical mindset, but their template reverses the Democrats' template. Unlike Democrats, Republicans focus on getting into office using faux populist promises thus correctly diagnosing everyday voters' grief. Once they have enough structural power to do so, Republicans drop the mask and bare their teeth. They tell even their own voters how it is going to be and threaten them with punishment for not knuckling under.
Either way, democratic representation of the people is barely functioning. And voters know it. They are crying out for something they cannot name, but neither party cares to listen - yet. In Texas and other red states there are green shoots. People instinctively know how the power is flowing in this country and they are objecting. They realize that, once again, they are own their own and they are undertaking to DIY democracy.
This analysis cuts through the pretense and gets to the heart of what many have felt but struggled to articulate: tolerance has become a shield, not a solution. The use of identity as a diversion from class struggle, the substitution of vibes for vision, has eroded trust and created an emotional vacuum. It’s not apathy. It’s grief masked by irony. The question you pose, what if we stopped performing tolerance and started building power, is exactly where the conversation needs to go. Thank you for this sharp and necessary critique.
I suppose that for those who have no concept of how government works, who have that fire in the belly for their causes, it must be disheartening to find out that simply electing a new president or representative doesn't result in a sea of change. Perhaps these people are the same ones calling for Trump to be impeached as if the actual process has any chance. Its not the politicians that have let the people down, its the American public that has rewarded those that either lie or coddle the voters. Telling people that the others need to pay their fair share, that the benefits they receive are deserved but others are fraud, waste, or abuse. The American public has been treated like a toddler because, either thru willful ignorance or stupidity, they don't realize the world is a complex place with competing interest and people with differing views or interests aren't necessarily bad or evil, they just have different wants and needs.
The trouble is you are blaming the people. Look deeper. The control of giant corporations over the mainstream media has expanded 10 fold or more since I was a young adult (1970s) and it was bad enough then.
School curricula have always pushed a facile patriotic perspective.
I agree with I with that. Still, unless we are willing to disavow human agency it remains that the electorate decide what happens. Elections are still decided upon popular vote for the most part and not won by the amount of $ raised.
May I just say that I no longer believe in two party politics.
I support rank choice voting. Maybe not only a FOR list but an AGAINST list.
I support having to have a coalition government.
I want to be able to give a vote of no confidence.
I want the people to be empowered to make up their own ranking of how tax dollars are spent. In aggregate % categories like
WAR/DEFENSE, INCLUDING diplomacy, foreign service and NASA, homeland security etc
EDUCATION birth to life long learning,
ENVIRONMENT to include EPA, CLIMATE CHANGE, BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT…,
BASIC RESEARCH, that once developed cannot be patented by corporations
CIVIL RIGHTS, voting protections, court systems, increase the Supreme Court bench and limit terms, policing turned into guardianship not soldiers
There is a worldwide movement afoot that admits that civilizations rise and fall. The old and new are slowly trading places. I am inspired by organizations like Second Renaissance and many others. This is getting too long.
I agree with the article’s central claim: liberalism abandoned its material ambitions—Medicare for All, organized labor, public housing—and replaced them with a politics of optics and mood. But I’d go further and ask why those ambitions were abandoned. My suspicion? They became too expensive, too complex, and ultimately failed to address the root causes of the middle and working class’s decline.
To me, those root causes come down to two things:
1. Money in politics—which quietly bought laws that hurt consumers and workers,
2. A failure not of capitalism, but to ensure capitalism actually functions.
On the first point: the problem isn’t always glaring. A copyright extension that adds a dollar to the cost of a Disney doll doesn’t break a household — but multiply that logic across industries and decades, and you get death by a thousand cuts. Every subtle tweak tilts the system a little further from fairness.
On the second point: capitalism only works when there’s genuine competition. But we’ve stopped enforcing the guardrails that make markets free and fair. Take the Robinson-Patman Act, meant to prevent suppliers from giving big players unfair pricing advantages. Its enforcement has all but vanished — and with it, many small businesses: grocery stores, drugstores, local shops. We call it “vulture capitalism,” but the vulture shows up only after the failure. The real problem is that we’re not practicing capitalism at all.
Worse, inequality itself undermines competition. The system assumes a fair start, access to information, and open opportunity — none of which are at all in place. What we have isn’t free-market capitalism; it’s an oligarchy with good PR.
If liberalism wants to regain its soul, it shouldn’t abandon capitalism — it should restore it, with meaningful rules, fair starts, and aggressive action to get money out of politics. Yes, that’s an uphill fight. But here’s a difference I’ve noticed: when Republicans believe in something — no matter how unpopular — they hammer it relentlessly until the landscape shifts, often by misdirection because their strategy is 'divide and conquer'. Democrats, by contrast, tend to pivot the moment polling turns cold. It’s not just about belief; it’s about backbone.
I agree with you, we don’t need more vibes. We need conviction — and the courage to stick with it.
Capitalism can’t tolerate competition — never has, never will. Capitalism is synonymous with “profits over people”, bigger companies squeezing out smaller companies, divide and conquer, buying influence in the political “marketplace”.
There will never be fairness under capitalism.
(What will a fair system look like? Look to all the bottom-up community-based initiatives in this and other countries)
I understand where your critique is coming from — there’s a long history of capitalism being undermined by the very forces it’s supposed to restrain: monopoly, regulatory capture, and wealth buying political power. But that’s not capitalism by definition — that’s what happens when we abandon its rules.
Competition isn’t just compatible with capitalism — it’s foundational to it. Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism at all; it’s monopoly, and Adam Smith warned us about that centuries ago.
When we allow monopolies to crush smaller players, or permit lobbying to write the rules in favor of entrenched interests, we aren’t witnessing capitalism in action — we’re watching it fail to defend its own principles.
If we want fairness, we need to demand real capitalism: open markets, anti-trust enforcement, and transparency. I respect community-based efforts, but bottom-up doesn’t mean we should throw out the scaffolding of a system designed — when guarded — to give new entrants a chance.
In any case, we have different viewpoints RE capitalism.
You are focused on the theory of capitalism as advanced by Adam Smith and others and want to see it reformed so that its practice is consistent with its theory.
I am focused on the practice of capitalism as described by Karl Marx and others, believing that all the unfairness is inherent and that it can’t be reformed; it must be replaced with an inherently fair system that embraces and encourages bottom-up initiatives and systems.
Thanks for that, and I appreciate the clarification. I think we’re actually not that far apart. When capitalism fails to protect fair competition — whether through monopolistic consolidation, regulatory capture, or sheer economic power — it’s no longer functioning as the system it’s supposed to be. It becomes something else entirely.
What I keep coming back to is this: fair, open competition is the oxygen capitalism breathes. When markets stop being competitive, it’s not capitalism succeeding — it’s capitalism breaking down. And I suspect many of the community-based initiatives you mentioned thrive precisely because they’re reintroducing values of fairness, access, and human-scale cooperation into systems that have lost them.
That’s not a rejection of capitalism’s principles — it might actually be their rescue.
Nice framing, Evelyn, and fair. Good observations in comments, too:
--What do Dems stand for
--Democratic representation barely functioning
--Identity politics gives everyone a veto
--Need for fair capitalism
At the end of the day, Trump got elected because the American voters are at the end of their rope. Government doesn't work for them (see Dunkelman's "Why Nothing Works" for liberals' culpability). They were willing to take a flyer with someone who offered radically change.
A clear path to successful government serving the common good isn't clear. That's the Democrats challenge. They'll also need a rare display of courage to articulate it before they ask for the vote.
You might be right — maybe there’s no such thing as fair capitalism.
But until we have something better and workable to replace it with, the urgent task is to reform and supplement it. That means guardrails like Social Security, Medicare for All, Jack Kemp’s “Fair Start” ideas, negotiating all drug prices for everyone, enforcing Robinson-Patman and antitrust laws, Dunkelman's ideas on enhancing government's capacities, and other programs/protections that protect dignity, strengthen government and expand opportunity within the system we have.
Many people are devoting their lives to building (mostly small scale and localized, for now) systems that can ultimately replace capitalism (if capitalism doesn’t destroy the planet first, which is a big “if“😩)
Unfortunately, the power of capitalism is so huge, and the system works so hard to stymie the people’s efforts, it makes the job of building new systems 200 times harder than it ought to be.
In any case, I am your staunch ally in all efforts to reform our system, and I trust you are my staunch ally in all grassroots efforts to build parallel, truly fair systems that ultimately can amalgamate to replace capitalism.
Thus, despite major differences in focus, we are on the same overarching page. We are allies.
The system is very skilled at turning folks like you against folks like me. We are branded as far left, socialists/Marxists/communists, dogmatic, ineffectual…
The branders have tons and tons and tons more power under this unfair system than the branded.
We —you and your folks and me and my folks— must remain united.
Thanks for the conversation. This is all I have time for.
Yesterday, I received two requests for donations, one allegedly from Obama for the DNC; the other for a Democratic congressperson and candidate whom I won't mention by name. Both requests suggested I needed to give money to "save democracy" and "fight Republican right-wing laws". The request from the congressperson suggested that their district was being targeted by Republicans. Neither request gave any indication whatsoever as to what either the DNC or the congressperson was FOR. I put both requests into the scanner but saved the envelopes and used them to send a letter saying: "I may give you money when and if you tell me what you are FOR. What is your position on health care? Do you believe in a single payer system? What is your position on housing costs? Do you have a plan to deal with the speculation by large real estate companies that is one reason why it costs so much to buy a house? Do you have other proposals for making safe, affordable housing available to all of us? How do you feel about the Republican attempt to change the SNAP requirements? More long term, what is your plan for dealing with food insecurity and, at the same time, a distribution system that is strangling the family farmers who grow at least a part of our food? What steps will you take to prevent starvation of the children of Gaza?"
I also have an unopened e-mail which is allegedly from Kamala Harris. When I open it, I will deal with it in the same way.
As a red-state Democrat, I concur with this diagnosis of the Left. This static, hierarchical mindset did come about slowly over time. For multifarious reasons, the politics of wielding power did turn into mere abstractions and what I call office politics. That is, the policing of each other's behavior for a performative conformity divorced from substantive ideas put into action. I think of it as national Democrats trying to get an A from their professors instead of trying to get into office.
As a citizen of Texas, I can make a case that national Republicans did the very same thing in reverse. Here I sit in the laboratory of American autocracy with Republicans looking voters in the eye and saying - "your wants and needs do not matter". Similar to Democrats, Republicans aren't engaging in public service. They too perform without substance. They too engage in office politics within the party. They too look down on their base.
Where Democrats took their misguided framework from the ivory tower, Republicans took theirs from the dungeon, complete with padlocks, shackles and torture devices. Republicans also have a static, hierarchical mindset, but their template reverses the Democrats' template. Unlike Democrats, Republicans focus on getting into office using faux populist promises thus correctly diagnosing everyday voters' grief. Once they have enough structural power to do so, Republicans drop the mask and bare their teeth. They tell even their own voters how it is going to be and threaten them with punishment for not knuckling under.
Either way, democratic representation of the people is barely functioning. And voters know it. They are crying out for something they cannot name, but neither party cares to listen - yet. In Texas and other red states there are green shoots. People instinctively know how the power is flowing in this country and they are objecting. They realize that, once again, they are own their own and they are undertaking to DIY democracy.
This analysis cuts through the pretense and gets to the heart of what many have felt but struggled to articulate: tolerance has become a shield, not a solution. The use of identity as a diversion from class struggle, the substitution of vibes for vision, has eroded trust and created an emotional vacuum. It’s not apathy. It’s grief masked by irony. The question you pose, what if we stopped performing tolerance and started building power, is exactly where the conversation needs to go. Thank you for this sharp and necessary critique.
I suppose that for those who have no concept of how government works, who have that fire in the belly for their causes, it must be disheartening to find out that simply electing a new president or representative doesn't result in a sea of change. Perhaps these people are the same ones calling for Trump to be impeached as if the actual process has any chance. Its not the politicians that have let the people down, its the American public that has rewarded those that either lie or coddle the voters. Telling people that the others need to pay their fair share, that the benefits they receive are deserved but others are fraud, waste, or abuse. The American public has been treated like a toddler because, either thru willful ignorance or stupidity, they don't realize the world is a complex place with competing interest and people with differing views or interests aren't necessarily bad or evil, they just have different wants and needs.
The trouble is you are blaming the people. Look deeper. The control of giant corporations over the mainstream media has expanded 10 fold or more since I was a young adult (1970s) and it was bad enough then.
School curricula have always pushed a facile patriotic perspective.
I agree with I with that. Still, unless we are willing to disavow human agency it remains that the electorate decide what happens. Elections are still decided upon popular vote for the most part and not won by the amount of $ raised.
May I just say that I no longer believe in two party politics.
I support rank choice voting. Maybe not only a FOR list but an AGAINST list.
I support having to have a coalition government.
I want to be able to give a vote of no confidence.
I want the people to be empowered to make up their own ranking of how tax dollars are spent. In aggregate % categories like
WAR/DEFENSE, INCLUDING diplomacy, foreign service and NASA, homeland security etc
EDUCATION birth to life long learning,
ENVIRONMENT to include EPA, CLIMATE CHANGE, BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT…,
BASIC RESEARCH, that once developed cannot be patented by corporations
CIVIL RIGHTS, voting protections, court systems, increase the Supreme Court bench and limit terms, policing turned into guardianship not soldiers
There is a worldwide movement afoot that admits that civilizations rise and fall. The old and new are slowly trading places. I am inspired by organizations like Second Renaissance and many others. This is getting too long.
I agree with the article’s central claim: liberalism abandoned its material ambitions—Medicare for All, organized labor, public housing—and replaced them with a politics of optics and mood. But I’d go further and ask why those ambitions were abandoned. My suspicion? They became too expensive, too complex, and ultimately failed to address the root causes of the middle and working class’s decline.
To me, those root causes come down to two things:
1. Money in politics—which quietly bought laws that hurt consumers and workers,
2. A failure not of capitalism, but to ensure capitalism actually functions.
On the first point: the problem isn’t always glaring. A copyright extension that adds a dollar to the cost of a Disney doll doesn’t break a household — but multiply that logic across industries and decades, and you get death by a thousand cuts. Every subtle tweak tilts the system a little further from fairness.
On the second point: capitalism only works when there’s genuine competition. But we’ve stopped enforcing the guardrails that make markets free and fair. Take the Robinson-Patman Act, meant to prevent suppliers from giving big players unfair pricing advantages. Its enforcement has all but vanished — and with it, many small businesses: grocery stores, drugstores, local shops. We call it “vulture capitalism,” but the vulture shows up only after the failure. The real problem is that we’re not practicing capitalism at all.
Worse, inequality itself undermines competition. The system assumes a fair start, access to information, and open opportunity — none of which are at all in place. What we have isn’t free-market capitalism; it’s an oligarchy with good PR.
If liberalism wants to regain its soul, it shouldn’t abandon capitalism — it should restore it, with meaningful rules, fair starts, and aggressive action to get money out of politics. Yes, that’s an uphill fight. But here’s a difference I’ve noticed: when Republicans believe in something — no matter how unpopular — they hammer it relentlessly until the landscape shifts, often by misdirection because their strategy is 'divide and conquer'. Democrats, by contrast, tend to pivot the moment polling turns cold. It’s not just about belief; it’s about backbone.
I agree with you, we don’t need more vibes. We need conviction — and the courage to stick with it.
Capitalism can’t tolerate competition — never has, never will. Capitalism is synonymous with “profits over people”, bigger companies squeezing out smaller companies, divide and conquer, buying influence in the political “marketplace”.
There will never be fairness under capitalism.
(What will a fair system look like? Look to all the bottom-up community-based initiatives in this and other countries)
I understand where your critique is coming from — there’s a long history of capitalism being undermined by the very forces it’s supposed to restrain: monopoly, regulatory capture, and wealth buying political power. But that’s not capitalism by definition — that’s what happens when we abandon its rules.
Competition isn’t just compatible with capitalism — it’s foundational to it. Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism at all; it’s monopoly, and Adam Smith warned us about that centuries ago.
Competition is a cornerstone of capitalism. The International Monetary Fund describes capitalism as an economic system where private actors own and control property, and prices are set by supply and demand in markets—a process that inherently requires competition. The IMF says "competition, through firms’ freedom to enter and exit markets, maximizes social welfare, that is, the joint welfare of both producers and consumers" https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/06/basics.htm#:~:text=Pillars%20of%20capitalism,facilitates%20proper%20functioning%20of%20markets.
When we allow monopolies to crush smaller players, or permit lobbying to write the rules in favor of entrenched interests, we aren’t witnessing capitalism in action — we’re watching it fail to defend its own principles.
If we want fairness, we need to demand real capitalism: open markets, anti-trust enforcement, and transparency. I respect community-based efforts, but bottom-up doesn’t mean we should throw out the scaffolding of a system designed — when guarded — to give new entrants a chance.
Oops… pushed send by mistake
In any case, we have different viewpoints RE capitalism.
You are focused on the theory of capitalism as advanced by Adam Smith and others and want to see it reformed so that its practice is consistent with its theory.
I am focused on the practice of capitalism as described by Karl Marx and others, believing that all the unfairness is inherent and that it can’t be reformed; it must be replaced with an inherently fair system that embraces and encourages bottom-up initiatives and systems.
And I understand where you are coming from, Glenn.
(I should have opened with “capitalism can’t tolerate fair competition…”. That would have made my comments a bit more clear.
Thanks for that, and I appreciate the clarification. I think we’re actually not that far apart. When capitalism fails to protect fair competition — whether through monopolistic consolidation, regulatory capture, or sheer economic power — it’s no longer functioning as the system it’s supposed to be. It becomes something else entirely.
What I keep coming back to is this: fair, open competition is the oxygen capitalism breathes. When markets stop being competitive, it’s not capitalism succeeding — it’s capitalism breaking down. And I suspect many of the community-based initiatives you mentioned thrive precisely because they’re reintroducing values of fairness, access, and human-scale cooperation into systems that have lost them.
That’s not a rejection of capitalism’s principles — it might actually be their rescue.
If politics is all about power, then you better rethink the Dems position on gun control
Nice framing, Evelyn, and fair. Good observations in comments, too:
--What do Dems stand for
--Democratic representation barely functioning
--Identity politics gives everyone a veto
--Need for fair capitalism
At the end of the day, Trump got elected because the American voters are at the end of their rope. Government doesn't work for them (see Dunkelman's "Why Nothing Works" for liberals' culpability). They were willing to take a flyer with someone who offered radically change.
A clear path to successful government serving the common good isn't clear. That's the Democrats challenge. They'll also need a rare display of courage to articulate it before they ask for the vote.
No such thing as fair capitalism. —as I replied to Glenn Pape above.
You might be right — maybe there’s no such thing as fair capitalism.
But until we have something better and workable to replace it with, the urgent task is to reform and supplement it. That means guardrails like Social Security, Medicare for All, Jack Kemp’s “Fair Start” ideas, negotiating all drug prices for everyone, enforcing Robinson-Patman and antitrust laws, Dunkelman's ideas on enhancing government's capacities, and other programs/protections that protect dignity, strengthen government and expand opportunity within the system we have.
I believe we are on the overarching same page.
Let me explain.
Many people are devoting their lives to building (mostly small scale and localized, for now) systems that can ultimately replace capitalism (if capitalism doesn’t destroy the planet first, which is a big “if“😩)
Unfortunately, the power of capitalism is so huge, and the system works so hard to stymie the people’s efforts, it makes the job of building new systems 200 times harder than it ought to be.
In any case, I am your staunch ally in all efforts to reform our system, and I trust you are my staunch ally in all grassroots efforts to build parallel, truly fair systems that ultimately can amalgamate to replace capitalism.
Thus, despite major differences in focus, we are on the same overarching page. We are allies.
The system is very skilled at turning folks like you against folks like me. We are branded as far left, socialists/Marxists/communists, dogmatic, ineffectual…
The branders have tons and tons and tons more power under this unfair system than the branded.
We —you and your folks and me and my folks— must remain united.
Thanks for the conversation. This is all I have time for.
Carry on !
Agreed — and thank you.
I’ll carry on with a deeper sense of who’s out there in this shared challenge.
Until the next thread — in spirit, in alliance.