Is vs. Ought

     I've been having a lot of conversations lately with some of my fellow citizens on the farther end of the Left part of our political spectrum. Now, as a card-carrying northern Jacksonian member of the labor wing of the Democratic Party, this means I am to their right, despite, by objective measures of political preferences, being well to the left not only of the American people, but of the people even of Massachusetts, which is not Montana in terms of political coloration.
     So I think my interlocutors will agree that they do not (for the most part), and could not fairly, regard me as some manner of DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) Centrist, let alone anyone on the Right side of the aisle.
      Okay. Well then, it seems we must get to the nub of the problem: so we each give our respective answers to the questions: what is the problem? And: what is the solution?
      Now, if your answer to the first question is: what problem? Or: "government-run healthcare makes me sick!", I'm afraid there sha'nt be much of a conversation to be had. These answers indicate almost a sensory difference between us in the perception of the Times, of the Age -- die Zeit. So well you may be, on a personal level, a nice person -- you may not beat the dog (or tie him to the roof) -- but it doesn't seem to me productive to have a discussion with a person whose worldview is just thoroughly unmoored from the world of verifiable, observed facts. It could be about the carbon capacity of the planet or the math of social benefits, but a fidelity to a commonly-sensorily-perceived reality, with agreed upon (Newtonian or Einsteinian, or, you know, Arithmetical!) mechanisms, is a basic sine qua non to any kind of conversation that goes beyond the old Anglo-Saxon words. ("Tree", "Water", "Fight", etc.).
      So now: that I speak to those who agree that there is in fact a problem and that basic principles of modern empiricism ought to be cleaved to in the discussion thereof; now we go back to our two questions.
      1. What is the problem? The problem is modern capitalism and its consequences, especially its ecological consequences. The intersection of capitalism, population growth, and hydrocarbon economies is a disastrous one for the planetary future. Even the richest men must surrender to geologic time.
      I think most of my compatriots will agree with this, though not all. For political reasons, the President praises "free enterprise", and yes, it's good at 'wealth creation': but upon closer examination, irrespective of the distribution of that wealth, we can see that it was often simply stolen, as from India by England (how did the richest textile industrial region in the world go to buying cheap Manchester muslins in the space of 150 years? At the mouth of a Brown Bess musket). In other cases, it is simply borrowed from our unborn descendants, from posterity: I speak not, of course, of the strange fetishism among the Von Mieses types against government debt (or social security), which, in relying on the productive capacity of the economy in the future, has ever been a useful instrument of State in times of war or crisis -- a truth known, at least to some, since the 1690s and ratified even by Madison against Hamilton's restless shade after the War of 1812; no, I speak of our ecological borrowing, of our borrowing of the capacity of the atmosphere to sustain, not only to sustain our economic life, but to sustain our lives. At the very least, lives worth living. Lives not mired in the nightmare of +5C (or do we think, with the Cargo Cult of the libertarians, that the markets shall function, though the ports be under water?)
      2. What is to be done? Well, here we have another basic divide. The question is essentially Reform or Revolution, is it not? I am averse to the inevitable loss, shock, and sorrow of revolutions -- so let us see if reform can be our way. Is it too far gone to reform? Perhaps. But we shall only know if we try it. Why not reform first, then revolution?
             Moreover, and in a once and future republican society, the tools, the weapons at hand, in favor of reform, must inevitably be the greater. We have at hand the great institutions of State, of the Parties, of the labour unions, of the Press, of Public Opinion -- even, perhaps and if rightly tamed, of the great Industrialists (tho' never mere Speculators); ought we not use these, which are in the world-historical scale mighty swords and ploughshares alike at hand? Especially given the fact that this is exactly a global problem, the destruction of the institutions of State that would accompany any purely Revolutionary change would inevitably exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the Crisis of Climate. Or how are we to enforce our treaties if we are struggling for control of the police power? (Or what, more realistically, of the likelihood that White, with the Bigger Guns, may defeat Red -- and black and brown -- in any revolutionary war?)
         
          So that is my "for now" answer to my friends on the revolutionary Left. The dialectic of radical people's movements and popular left-center politicians has moved every reform in American history, from the Revolution through Abolition through the Establishment of the Social State by Roosevelt -- indeed, through no less a figure of left-wing opprobrium of Lyndon Johnson was the Civil Rights revolution effected.

          Come, my friends -- 'tis not too late to dream a newer Democratic Party. And if it be too late to prevent a rise of the global temperature, it is not so late that it might not be catastrophic -- but only if we act to move toward a carbon-neutral economy. And isolated screeds and contempt for public opinion -- whatever its deficiencies -- shall not get us there. The People will come to us when the facts are made fully and forcefully known.
      This is my affirmation; this is my belief.