Yves here. While it’s a plus to see writers on what is left of the hollowed out left still thinking about how to effect large-scale change, it seems we are past the point where mere resistance will do.
Also it is worth noting that when he was campaigning in the Republican primaries, Trump regularly took not just populist, but progressive position. But after he became the Republican candidate, he moved hard to the right. I’m not even sure this was a plan because there is evidence to support the notion that Trump saw his run as a huge brand building exercise. But Trump being Trump (and particularly coming to love the adulation of crowds) and having a candidate he could sink his teeth into in the form of Hillary, became enamored with the project. Recall that election night when Trump was announced the winner, he looked shocked and not happy.
And do watch the Clinton clip. The smugness, it burns.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
The real resistance occurred in 2016. It failed in both parties.
–Yours truly
I’d like to put three things before you and let you consider what they mean.
The Failed Revolution of 2016
The first is something I wrote, presciently I think, in 2017, after the Trump election had advanced beyond shock, and before the liberal response was cemented in. The piece, “The Resistance, the #Resistance and Harvey Weinstein,” said in part:
“All this has led me to wonder what the goal of this professional #Resistance really is. The Restoration of Democracy to America? Or the Restoration of Mainstream Democrats — the anti-Sanders, anti-progressive, “you can’t have that” crowd — to power again?
“If just the latter, the nation may sink more slowly beneath the neoliberal waves than it would under solid Republican rule. But progressives will still have an enemy armed, enabled and in the field against them.
“The real Resistance, of course, occurred in 2016, in that year’s electoral revolt against the money-bought in both parties, and it failed in both parties. Mainstream Democrats successfully fended off the actual populist in their race, Bernie Sanders, whom they hate even to this day. Mainstream Republicans successfully elected their “populist,” the fake swamp-drainer Donald Trump, and his voters are getting nothing they wanted in terms of relief from the relentless greed and austerity they rebelled against.
“The nation, meanwhile, is left with a still-unsatisfied populist anger, waiting like an abscess to erupt. What form that will take in 2018 and 2020 is anyone’s guess. Failed revolutions, like bad meals, often come back stronger.”
It closes:
“Is the anti-Trump #Resistance, the professional broadcast version with its behind-the-scenes security state actors, simply setting us up for a Restoration of those — a Pence, a Biden — who “weep tears of admiration for their own virtue” as they tank or attempt to co-opt the next Bernie Sanders, or re-destroy the last one? And if they do, will America weep tears of thanks, or something else?”
To answer the first question above, look no further than the selection — by “liberal” Nancy Pelosi — of progressive-hating Democrat Hakeem Jeffries as the next leader of the Party in the House.
To answer the second, read on.
The Resistance Voters of East Palestine
Next, this editorial from Krystal Ball, on the rail disaster in East Palestine OH, and more importantly, on the particular way both parties are complicit in it. She starts with a common theme from many liberals, that Trump voters deserve what they get.
Here’s the piece:
Note that, unlike what liberals like Joy Behar believe, Trump voters aren’t a solid bloc of 74 million racists and “enemies of American democracy.” But they are a (radically misled) part of the real resistance, people who are increasingly upset that American democracy is a thing only its owners and funding classes enjoy.
To see what that resistance looks like, watch her editorial. Of course it’s misled resistance, this voting for Trump. Trump voters got nothing they wanted in terms of relief from the relentless greed and austerity they rebelled against.
But what were their choices? Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and the rest of the management class of the Democratic Party offered no “resistance alternative” of their own — and celebrated the fact that they neutered their most viable alternative, Bernie Sanders (see clip at the top).
That celebration will bite them, bite us all. The discontent is not going away. How do I know? Read on.
The Fed Attacks the Littles for the Bigs’ Mistakes
The beatings will continue until the storm outside is over. By which I mean, the inflation-caused economic crisis the Fed is addressing can only get worse given what the Fed is trying to do. Its analysis is that the “littles,” as one CEO described us, got too much money from Covid relief, and that now has to be clawed back through lower wages and job destruction — the inevitable result of relentlessly rising interest rates.
As Robert Kuttner noted, “[R]educing [inflation] all the way to 2.0 percent would require an unemployment rate of 7.4 percent, more than double the current rate.”
Thomas Ferguson and Servaas Storm have a different analysis. You can read the whole thing — their takedown of the mainstream (wealth-serving) analysis, the data that shows the true causes of today’s inflation, and their proposed solutions.
From the introduction (emphasis mine):
We assess four supply side factors: imports, energy prices, rises in corporate profit margins, and COVID. We argue that discussions of COVID’s impact have thus far only tangentially acknowledged the pandemic’s far-reaching effects on labor markets.
We conclude that while all four factors played roles in bringing on and sustaining inflation, they cannot explain all of it. There really is an aggregate demand problem. But the surprise surge in demand did not arise from government spending. It came from the unprecedented gains in household wealth, particularly for the richest 10% of households, which we show powered the recovery of aggregate US consumption expenditure especially from July 2021.
The final cause of the inflationary surge in the U.S., therefore, was in large measure the unequal (wealth) effects of ultra-loose monetary policy during 2020-2021. This conclusion is important because inflationary pressures are unlikely to subside soon. Going forward, COVID, war, climate change, and the drift to a belligerently multipolar world system are all likely to strain global supply chains.
Our conclusion outlines how policy has to change to deal with the reality of steady, but irregular supply shocks.
The authors’ solutions include “vigorous antitrust policy, tight limits on commodities (futures) markets, and other targeted (microeconomic) regulatory measures including strategic price controls and limits to speculation in commodity markets, along with major investments in public health and renewable energy.”
But our world is ruled by the rich, who win either way. Do they want limits on commodities markets, limits on speculation, price controls, and stronger antitrust policies? We all know none of this will happen, at least at scale, so long as the donor class owns the government.
So the beatings will continue till supply chain disruption is over, because of course high wages caused that sad event to occur.
The Bottom Line
The lesson here is simple, and nothing new: Much of the Trump resistance at the voter level is real resistance to the same things real progressives also oppose — the relentlessly advancing, immoral rule by the rich, whose predatory governance benefits only themselves.
Those resistance voters, in East Palestine and elsewhere, should be encouraged to join with us. They should not be cruelly vilified as people like Behar do. She and her ilk would keep us all apart. We should unite.
The future looks unbright, however. Will the wealthy allow those who live in the world to run it?
Or will they let wealth disparity, war, and climate change to go unaddressed until chaotic revolt breaks the world apart?
On those answers all our futures turn.
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perhaps serendipitously, from the sidebar of one of yesterdays links:
“From another perspective, the neoliberal high triumphs, to the extent that it imposes its own conceptual maps and its own political symbology on the low, ensuring that the latter always orients itself towards the interior of the steel cage of capitalism, without ever becoming aware of the necessary exodus. In this respect, the dyad of right and left coincides with an artificial political prosthesis of consensual adhesion of the low to the project of the high, of the dominated to the hegemony of the dominant, of the Servant to the tableau de bord of the Lord. This prosthesis is forcibly imposed, thanks to the symbolic violence organized by intellectual groups. The objective is, on the one hand, the capillary control of consensus and dissent within the steel cage of the capitalist mode of production; and, on the other hand, the vigilant and supervised maintenance of identity ideologies of belonging for electoral periods, so that the latter, under a false pluralism, allow the neoliberal order to reproduce itself imperturbably without any electoral possibility of really questioning its integrity.”
https://www.thepostil.com/beyond-the-right-and-the-left-against-the-financial-oligarchy/
eavesdropping and conversations in the proverbial feed store parking lot, circa 2015-2016, revealed that the hard core partisans of Team Blue and Goptea were both full o’ shite…and were seen as such by non-party people….ie: those who sometimes voted with either party, but were increasingly aware that something was amiss, and eventually arriving at the (nebulous) idea that there’s just one party, with 2 corporatist, imperialist, and antihumanist wings.
but the internal buttons in each cohort of this mass….the hoi polloi…are well worn…push them in this order, and they come a runnin back into the fold.
a viable “third party” movement of actual people, for people simply can’t compete with MSM/SocMed…as well as the hundred years of Mindf$ck they’ve been so well conditioned in.
when i talk about my autarky/think like a state project with random folks…there’s usually a glimmer of understanding of the necessity of, essentially, a new “tune in , turn on , drop out”…but it quickly is inundated by the enormity and hypercomplexity of the invisible cages we all live in.
sadly, i’ve arrived at the opinion that it’s all gotta collapse, utterly…ere anything new can arise.
and how frelling weird is this?:
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1628140283169804320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
“President Trump announces plan for immediate mass firings of “warmonger” bureaucrats at the State Department and Pentagon if he’s reelected President in 2024.
“I am the President who delivers peace.””
sigh.
One of the most bizarre experiences of my adult life was watching the Right become the party of reason and peace. Johnny Rotten said something to that effect. Of course, this is an illusion. But when your opponents are child mutilating war mongers who still manage to moralize, it’s real easy to sound like the voice of sanity. I agree: things are going to have to collapse before anything new will form. I hope to be on the other side by the time that comes to pass.
Yeah, he’ll appoint peaceniks like Bolton and Pompeo to clean house.
I would suggest a new saying to go along with ” tune in, turn on, drop out”, and that would be . . .
” tune out, slow down, slack off”.
> . . . until chaotic revolt breaks the world apart?
I lack the imagination as to how that could happen. We are micro monitored by the second and the instant resistance is detected by the elite the police hammer is smashed into the resistors heads, as recent history shows when the attempt to hold Wall Street criminals to account failed spectacularly and the President at the time volunteered to be the pitchfork absorber for the criminals.
I doubt that a real chaotic revolt will happen in the surveillance happy USA. What may happen is isolation into smaller groups, who if they can get organized may attempt autonomy from the Federal Government. If they are isolated enough, and organized enough that they would pose a real threat to attacking forces, it may work.
Or the federal side will wait or burn them out. You would have to be large enough and organized enough.
You might be amazed at what the parent of a starving child would do. Maybe edit “chaotic revolt” to “chaos” I will admit.
Things are already at a breaking point, but they can obviously get much much worse here before a revolution is feasible or seen as necessary by the majority. But you can be certain that climate chaos will make it much more likely to happen… Everyone I know (in my bubble) younger than 40 has polarized to the left in the recent years. Having no organized left wing party (non-electoral) is the main problem, and I don’t see how that will change soon, but many recognize that capitalism is destroying their present & future.
What would the authorities be able to do about uncivil obedience, grudging obedience without cheerful compliance, passive obstruction, buy less, do less, target buying and doing towards white hat good actors and then gray hat neutral actors and away from black hat bad actors ( don’t patronise any non-unionised Starbucks, don’t patronise Amazon if you have another choice), etc.
More home production of some food, turn suburbia into Suburbistan, start up a Suburbagrarian Ethic and make it materially real, more barter, etc. etc.
Different people could try that in different ways if they want to, and if they don’t, then they won’t.
Stay registered to vote but don’t vote out of some sort of misplaced sense of “civic bligation”. We don’t have any “civic obligation” to comply with an Upper Class BizNazi Occupation regime which destroys every bit of “civic space” it can touch and pollute. A hundred million people staying registered but not voting most of the time, and then suddenly emerging to conduct mass voting-raids to destroy a well-scripted election here and there would also be an excercise of power. Malcolm X spoke about that.
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/the-ballot-or-the-bullet-speech-transcript-malcolm-x
We’ve effectively armed every last would be Barney Fife and the thin blue line is painfully aware that they are outgunned and outnumbered by oh so many Walter Mitty Sobchaks, if things come a cropper why oh why would you want to self-identify as a cop, when all you gotta do is dress in civies instead?
“…it seems we are past the point where mere resistance will do.”
The question is – what to do? What can the average citizen do?
Best…H
Governments receive legitimacy by democratic vote , once that vote is reduced to a choice of which group of ‘criminals’ should appear to be in control it has become an illusion – boycotting elections as a step toward delegitimising the situation might not help but at least it offers the scant reward of not supporting it.
Other than that the options seem little better than those available to the serfs of the Middle ages – just to endure , I wish I could offer you more .
To the extent possible, one can gradually try to detach from the system that feeds the oligarchy. To the extent possible, downsize now and use resources freed-up by the downsizing to build personal resiliency. That will look different for each person. For me, it has been developing skill at plant propagation and trying to recruit others into that. Some of the people who have allowed themselves to be recruited are actually recruiting still others.
(At a macro scale, one might worry that mass downsizing would be deflationary, but if accompanied by local resiliency building, it might stimulate parts of the economy that produce things that are useful for local resiliency. My redirected expenditures, for example, have benefited companies that sell seeds and plant propagation supplies and gear.)
While at this, and as Lambert is wont to write, “stay safe”. Put a little of the redirected expenditure into N95s for yourself and others. That’s a part of the economy we don’t want to disappear
Lead the money around by the nose. Support those things we wish to see continue existing.
Maybe spend less money buying new things and spend the money saved on paying thing-fixing experts to fix the things we already have. That grows the thingfixer economy.
Maybe enough people supporting enough “artisans” can fund an artisandustrial reaction against the hyperindustrial revolution.
And maybe set ourselves free from the most rigid forms of binary thinking. Not strictly either/or but less and more ( less of this and more of that). Fuzzy grayzone binary thinking or even trinary thinking where suitable.
Just some thoughts . . .
Find an international organization that had the theory and strategy to actually effect change. Most of the left today lacks that theory, and so we see ineffectual movements like BLM spring up repeatedly. There is a huge history of brilliant thinkers who have detailed much of our current problems.
For a starter,I suggest learning about the Russian Revolution. It is a great example of what is possible with the right theory and organizing in place.
Religion dignifying itself as “theory” isn’t an answer, either. We’ve seen what scientific management does to lived experience every time it gets its Puritanical hooks into it, and perhaps the mutual ruin of the classes is a much better subjective outcome than allowing the PMC to exist.
We need real theory, the stuff they deride as “post-modern” to hide their fear of the entire German Protestant world order breaking down. We need to answer “What is value?” and, more importantly, “Why value?” i.e. why create and dignify encompassing totalities at all, if not to preserve the ancient system of entitlement to the labor power of others under the laughable fantasy that it might be redeemed.
Many people think that the Russian revolution(s) didn’t turn out very well, regardless of what theories it may have embraced.
I mentioned this way back in 2016… there is a reason that nearly every NYS county that voted for Bernie in the primary was won by Trump in the general election. I strongly suspect those same people are still not happy with things today.
There were more Trump voters in the city, both times, than the Democrats would like to admit. They especially would not like to acknowledge how many would not fit in the MAGA deplorables category.
I don’t know that he would have enough to win NY, but I would expect him to do much better here in 2024 against Biden. The state may be trying to ease the crash, but all the support programs that have or are disappearing will drive more people away. (This is going to have a huge effect on the economy that extends far beyond those who have been receiving aid.)
I agree. Teaching in the NYC public schools (and not in Staten Island), I saw a lot of quiet/stealth support for Trump, and among a wider range of people than most might like to admit. If he keeps hitting home runs, as in his trip to East Palestine, some of that support will become much more public.
The author writes, “Trump voters got nothing.” Really? I got several thousand dollars worth of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance during Trump’s presidency. As I’m an independent contractor, it was the first unemployment assistance I ever received.
Didn’t Trump voters get this too?
Yes. Trump was/is dangerously incompetent and undependable, but he did get me freed of a huge penalty for not buying junk Obamacare ‘insurance’, a tax paid directly to insurers. And simplified my taxes a little bit.
Biden seems to talk a good game, but has yet to improve my lot in any way. Talks union, but crushes the railworkers. Talks anti-monopoly, but nothing has actually happened. I figure anti-monopoly is just a new way to raise suitcases of money from new corporate ‘sponsors’.
For several years I was an organizer for Socialist Alternative (the organization behind Kshama Sawant in Seattle if you all are familiar with her.) We have an understanding that the “middle” section of people are usually the most open to hearing about viable alternatives to our capitalist system. By “middle” I mean definitely not hard left activists, and definitely not hard right activists. But that 80% in between is filled with people who are just generally upset with the system but are not so calcified in their views to be closed off to visit alternatives for example, fascists and anarchists).
At the same time today I was an organizer, there was a black general contractor working on the house next door to mine in Michigan. We were talking politics one day and I came away very confused why a black man could support such an overt racist as Trump. It took awhile before I realized that he was so disillusioned by mainstream politics that he would support someone so vile as Trump just because he represented an alternative.
aye.
as i repeated at the time, the feedstore workers…although they had voted GOP since Clinton(Farm Bill, btw—and, if they voted at all…)…were not really married to the whole Gop agenda.
they were just afeared of the “Far Left” clintonists…and “precious bodily fluids” and etc were deployed to get them all riled that they were under attack(their faith, jobs, families, and what little autonomy they still had)
but GOP, in its Tea Instar, went too far for these folks….and didn’t do any of the things the original Tea Movement(ie: Ron Paulist and adjacent) said they would do.
wages remained not enough, debt encroached, the DMV still sucked, and on and on.
but here comes Bernie,lol….
i still look at that time as a lost opportunity, snatched away in a bipartisan manner by greedheads and asshats who despise all us little people in the most ecumenical fashion…ergo, in a Class Based formulation of In/Out.
It truly is a Class based formulation of In/Out, and it never gets old. I think of the hysteria over critical race theory or stoking fear of trans people. Gotta keep everyone riled up over cultural issues so they don’t think about economic issues.
I’m greatly disappointed in Bernie. He had a chance to forge a third party coalition and present a real challenge to the two party system, but he capitulated. He folded back into the Democratic party and became a puppet again
what happened is that trump pulled the rug out from underneath the clintonites, that were sure what they did was right, and would lead the world into the 21st century, sure sounded cult like to me, and to millions of others.
the clintonites just can’t figure out what happened, and their response is typical. if you listened to bill in the 1990’s, he sounded a awful lot like these guys.
https://www.oxygen.com/true-crime-buzz/how-the-hale-bopp-comet-inspired-a-mass-suicide
“Hale-Bopp’s approach is the ‘marker’ we’ve been waiting for — the time for the arrival of the spacecraft from the Level Above Human to take us home to ‘Their World’— in the literal Heavens,” the site states. “Our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion — ‘graduation’ from the Human Evolutionary Level.”
I saw something similar in Philly years ago. My then supervisor, a black woman, was a proud Republican. This was a mystery to me at the time. Aren’t all black voters Democrats?!
Then I met one of the local Democratic politicians. He came to visit our adult education school. He was rude, condescending to the staff and the students, didn’t give the talk he was supposed to give, and between him and his entourage pretty much wiped out the bagels we had set out for everyone.
I talked to my supervisor afterwards and expressed my dismay. She explained that the local Democratic party was a gang of hustlers and thugs. Once the pretty campaign talk was over, they did nothing for their community but make demands and walk all over people. My eyes were opened.
in the 1990’s i got the boot from the democratic party. i actually had the speaker of the house(mn. house) call me and say how dare you speak against bill clinton and his policies. she said we no longer are going to basically kowtow to you greasy hands type. we will be world leaders.
not long after that, i got a call from philly, a black lady told me she heard the democratic party was purging people all over he country, including her.
they were going to rid the party of new dealers, and she explained how economic rights, will only help secure social rights, which i agreed.
i wonder if this was the same lady?
In strictly Marxist terms, that contractor is a member of the Petit Bourgeosie, which is Trump’s real base (much more than the disaffected white working class which the media fixates on); class “trumping” race, in this instance.
The revolutions of 1848 were led by the petit bourgeoisie, weren’t they.
Also, Trump is not a racist. He’s just a typical and crude capitalist, and will exploit you without regard to your skin color. And that doesn’t mean he can’t be right about some in-your-face social and economic ills.
Read the rant he paid for in the NYC papers in the aftermath of a notorious rape and assault in Central Park in 1989, for which a group of kids (the Central Park Five) were railroaded and falsely convicted, and you might change your mind. He may not have been alone, but he was an exemplar of the extreme racial panic that episode caused.
You can find the man awful for all sorts of reasons that exclude TDS.
Thanks for the reference – may find and read it if time allows.
But I would only add, should we also call Biden and Hillary racist, for publically making all kinds of biased statements regarding blacks’ criminality in the 1990ies?
I don’t’ see anyone calling Biden or Hillary racist when criticizing them from the left, so why keep saying that about Trump? It ends up being a distraction and many fall for it and refuse to consider the unique opportunity Trump offers. Maybe that is the point?
No argument from me in that regard. It’s always been Trump’s vulgarity, and saying the quiet part out loud – as in, for example, we’re in Syria for the oil – that drives liberals insane. They need comforting euphemisms and validation of their moral vanity, and can’t withstand the delight Trump and his supporters take in not giving it to them.
Yes correct. And the post modern political world can’t understand that for the lower economic classes, economic issues take precedent on aggregate over any other issue.
Chris Hedges
That was when real resistance was damaged almost beyond repair.
wilson was a hitler prototype. nothing was going to stand in the way of the glories of free trade.
The American Left was shattered to enable the elites to drag the United States to war; that was also when the collective West itself was almost damaged beyond repair. The Mont Pèlerin Society with its the godfathering of Neoliberalism, the Communist Revolution, Fascism, the Holocaust, and so much else were all enabled or caused by the First World War.
Was the #resistance™ an ‘Election Denier’ movement? Asking for a friend.
Matthew Karp in his article “Politics and Class in American Politics,” in the latest issue of New Left Review (139) has argued:
(1) the Left in the United States may be terminally broken.
(2)The class struggle social democracy of Bernie Sanders is in ruins.
(3) That downscale voters are moving Right and upscale voters are moving Left.
(4) That he sees no legislative road to major reforms of any type.
(5) And what he sees remaining are 2 flavors of Keynesianism without growth–what he calls the Neo-Progressivism of Biden and the Neo-Nationalism of Trump.
Degrowth = Regrowth
Admittedly somewhat insulting to those living on the edge, or just below it. But for those of us who have enough, a movement towards “just enough” might help to implode the system. For many years I have a piece of paper taped to the wall over my desk. It has these words: Accountability, Sustainability, Resiliency, Community. Ultimately, as some comments above note, we will have to create and nourish small local communities with the capabilities and power to govern those included within.
I hope this doesn’t read as something too dismal from a boomer who alternates between white hot outrage and an attempt at almost cliched zen detachment, but I simply see no positive future for a rotting, impossible nation state such as ours. How the implosion will come about is anybody’s guess. The hope for our grandchild is that we won’t take down the world with us.
The trouble with terms like “the resistance” is that it starts from the premise that the PMC narrative is fundamentally right–that the most important “enemy” is the likes of Trump and their supporters, always presumed to be a monolithic and alien bloc fitting elite stereotypes. So this begets the rhetorical contortion that many of the likely Trump supporters who do not exactly fit the elite stereotypes (like the people of East Palestine, literal or proverbial) somehow constitute the “hidden Resistance.”
This is delusional: the supposed “hidden resistance’s” support for Trump, if and when it does materialize in the voting booths, is very real even if the reasons may not fit the elite stereotypes. They really are so unhappy with the status quo in politics that they’ll vote for a real change–any change. It’s the problem with the elites that they (sort of) like some promises of change (Obama’s) more than others (Trump’s), not the people who want to see an actual change. If you want to win them over, offer them a real change, one that they can actually take seriously, and actually do something seriously to make that change happen in a way that the people can see. Instead, the elites–even the subset of the elites who see what’s going on better than others–think that they can be bought for symbolic peanuts. They think it has worked well in winning them minorities, but even there, it’s starting to unravel (if it hadn’t been already for a long time).
ok you wanna tax the rich, regulate the rich, imports are a problem its said, commodities prices out of control because of deregulation and free trade, whats the response?
not one word about free trade, and the so-called policies fixes will not address the facts that the rich can avoid said polices because they operate off shore so much, that regulation and taxation inside a country will not address the problems. and can import almost what ever they want to sell, avoid taxation, basically operate free of charge.
so the most important polices choices should include protectionism, capital controls, tariffs and no free trade.
its almost as if the author is a feverish believer, or someone who thinks free trade helps the poor, they are also feverish believers.
watch krystal ball, she said its the free trade stupid.
the author is short changing us. in all of his articles in the last few years, not one word about free trade that i am aware of.
We have our answer already.
Thirty years ago I tried to begin a garden. I got myself a job at a nursery, low wages but money wasn’t the object. I was with people who were growing plants; I wanted to learn about the plants, just hands on stuff. What they liked; what they didn’t like.
I have a garden now, and the time to work in it. It is small, no matter. So many times I spent money on new plants and they died on me. I kept buying what I could and putting them places. Some died, some did not. The weather helped sometimes; sometimes it did not. Three steps forward, two back.
Finally something has happened. The plants that survived started to join up. They made patterns, and I started to see what they were creating. They, not me.
We can’t make the government we want, even though we know what it should be. We just have to keep looking for possibilities and giving them room to grow. And here’s my idea. We need to remember what our resources are. This country has a history of good and bad policies. Even if it is just within our families, we have to keep the good parts alive and kicking. Keep on keeping on. Even if the leadership stinks. If it stinks, maybe it’s compost. Use it. Keep going!
One of the finest pieces of (timely, urgently needed) analysis I’ve read at this site. It’s a good example why NC is among the top sites I review repeatedly each day, and accordingly tweet out its articles.