Tldr: the Western neoliberal “neutral state” has no higher value than tolerating each other’s values, and no higher goal than promoting free market capitalism.
It is a society that tells each person to find their own ideal of the good life, to succeed and fail on their own - and it is an implicit ideology of “merit” that tells people who fail that it’s because of their own lack of merit. You lose because you’re losers.
And if your job gets shipped overseas, your factory gets shut down, and your doctor gets you addicted to opioids, tough, that’s just the free market at work, loser.
It was inevitable that the neoliberal, globalist neutral state would create its populist, nationalist backlash in the form of MAGA - an ideology that admits the neoliberal capitalist system is broken, that gives its followers a powerful vision of “the good life”, an America dominated by family, faith, and patriotism, and gives them an ideal to fight for.
And even if we beat MAGA, if the left doesn’t articulate its own vision of the good life, give Americans something to hope for in strive for, and just goes back to the Clinton / Obama / Biden capitalism with humane characteristics, another MAGA or worse will inevitably spawn.
This is not an article about solarpunk, but it’s an article about why solarpunk - or something like it - is desperately needed in America today. Because solarpunk provides a vision for the future, and a definition of what the good life is, an ideal to strive for, that the American left has been missing for a long, long time.
(I have a lot more thoughts on this essay, for example, about how clearly it makes the point that Biden’s student loan forgiveness attempts were huge mistakes - but read!)
Tldr: the Western neoliberal “neutral state” has no higher value than tolerating each other’s values, and no higher goal than promoting free market capitalism.
Not entirely correct.
The idea was to recognize richness and strength in diversity but also to recognize it for what it is: we’re different, we’re not all the same. And then to realize that these difference were a source of strength and growth. For this realization to work, we also had to learn not just to accept differences but to welcome them. That’s what it should have been about… and that’s exactly not what happened, and not what we’ve been taught, alas.
And even if we beat MAGA, if the left doesn’t articulate its own vision of the good life
This is why when you have people like Mamdani coming out of nowhere and being blisteringly successful
