After all, the only change that Republicans, or whatever is left of Republicanism, want is to make sure that the only change allowed is one that weakens any opposition to their masters being able to increase their profits. Which is demonstrably all measures where you, as a part of the many, have less power, and they, as part of the monied few, have more. And do go ahead and bet the farm on that assertion. Because you are betting the farm, and everything else you hold dear, whatever you do now.
And for the Democrats?
Well, you have to ask yourself this important question: If there is no Republican Party, as we used to know it, any longer, than how can there be a Democratic Party any longer? And you have to ask that question exactly because Democrats, since after FDR, and the "New Deal" ran its course, and we won WW 2, became nothing more than a loyal opposition party to the Republicans; which is certainly why I have been referring to them as Republican Light for so long. Sure, they've always said, Capitalism has problems, but it's nothing good legislation, and good institutional care of that legislation, can't fix. And for a while, after WW 2, there was hope that they, along with a host of moderate Republicans (think guys like Rockefeller in New York, or Washington State's ex governor Dan Evans), could do exactly that.
A funny thing happened along the way, though, after the rush of the Fifties, and our manufacturing supremacy started to vanish with the beginnings of the sixties, and the rest of the world caught up to us economically; especially in Europe and along the Pacific Rim.
Which is nothing more than to say world competition took off big time, and the two biggest developments of the modern world began to take hold: 1. The burgeoning ability to transfer technical ability (at the loss of the viability of human skill to compete anymore as a commodity) to any low wage areas of production, so that, more and more, anything can be made anywhere (thus eliminating a key component to the old logic of locality specialization that was a cornerstone of Capitalism for at least a century. And 2: the new developments in containerized, large scale shipping; so that distance between markets, and areas of production, became a completely secondary issue; something it had never been before to anything approaching what super container ships, as well as the railroads, and trucking, standardizing on the containers, could do, if properly organized into something that would eventually be called "just in time delivery."
And so now we have a Democratic Party that is still stuck in the late fifties, early sixties, on what can be done with legislation, and the old notions that Capitalism just needs to be controlled with a steady, technological, and reasonably people oriented, hand (don't want the people expecting too much now, do we). Still thinking that it can be controlled at all when, its very mutation, by new technological developments, makes such control an impossibility. And ever more so now precisely because the competitions have become oh so much more desperate these days; so much so that it is quite appropriate to refer to them as very dangerous competitions indeed, threatening our very existence. And that all assumptions as to Capitalisms continued smooth functioning have been rendered completely useless.
No, the problem Millennials face is the same one we all face. And that is simply the fact that all of the old ways of conducting social organization must be reexamined. And that this must be done because the tremendous differences between old forms of instrumentality, and the new ones we've been dazzled with for decades now, demand it. Demand it because you can't run an electrified, super instrumentality, ability system, with thinking that dates back to horse drawn carts, water wheels, pulleys, levers (think also of big sticks there), and the inclined plane in its simplest form. You simply can't. And the growing chaos all around us now amply demonstrates this.
So the bottom line here is this. If you want real change you are going to have to demand it yourself, and you're going to have to do it by changing old notions of what constitutes a political party, to make it conform to the new millenium. And this time it really does need to be a movement that grows from each community up; by the working folks in each community. And it's going to need to realize that nothing is going to work unless we can come up with a new "Grand Compromise" between what has always been nearly diametrically opposed points of view about the world; the very things that have separated the Right and the Left for about forty or fifty years now. A Grand Compromise that balances the rights, and responsibilities, of both the individual, and the many, so that both get a good portion of what they think is important. And, as it happens, I have spent the last 20 years at least, trying to come up with a place to start this process. I'd like to think I have succeeded in that, incomplete though this effort has been even now, at this late date. But incomplete or not, it may well be a good deal better than the nothing we have as an alternative so far. Unless, of course, somebody still wants to try and defend Capitalism.
Whatever we do, though, we better do it pretty damned quick. We may only have as little as eight years left to do as much as we can to keep the poles from losing all of their ice. So that we can keep a cold sink in existence at both poles. So that sufficient temperature differentials can be maintained to keep critical ocean, and air, circulations going. Because once those circulations change big time, not even having hell to pay may bring them back.
And that is why you are betting the farm no matter what you do.
