BEYOND THE COLLAPSE VI: TALKING ABOUT POLITICAL INITIATIVE

Now that people are making their way home from the early anti-Trump mobilizations, many feel the initiative has been lost. The same paralysis that permitted the rightwing grab of institutional power in plain sight seems to be returning, leading progressives and liberals to feel abandoned to a situation beyond their grasp. This reading of the present dynamic, while a boost to

one’s sense of fatalism, is deeply flawed. Its primary use is as a cautionary tale about how we go astray when we lose a sense of context.
The present crisis results from progressive challenges over several decades to mainstream American values and practices. The power and persuasiveness of

that critique in time eroded popular commitment to the society among all sectors, producing a nation that no longer believes in itself. Because progressives were unable to carry through on the creation of post-industrial alternatives, and returned for a variety of instrumental reasons to the support of existing arrangements, they — and the rest of us — have failed to realize that the making of new histories is in our hands.
Older progressives and liberals, having traded in their earlier commitment to systemic change, now express repeated hope that popular protests and electoral campaigns will repel the reactionary surge. Ever larger forces of opposition including more and more young people, taking the civil rights and

anti-Vietnam movements as models, will they believe bring the political system back into alignment. At the very least, this strategy will keep at bay those dark thoughts about what failure would mean.
How can one tell them (though at some level they already know) that their hopes are misplaced? Perhaps a vast and single-minded popular insurgency would shift the balance of power, but there are far too many progressive-minded individuals, including legions of young people, who are not committed to preserving the present organization of society. The generation gap, in other words, is far wider than anyone imagines. This is in part because no one bothers to ask young people for their views, in part because young people realize this society has never cared what they thought, making decisions for them instead and presuming their ratification.
Younger generations have grown up in a society of profligate wealth and resources, unparalleled educational opportunities and career options, a society that promised freedom and self-realization and lives of creativity and fulfillment, that claimed to care about and support service to the less fortunate and to all of us. But what they see is a system buried in growing

mounds of broken promises they are told to get over. The accumulating failure to revitalize the society, to open it up to broad empowerment and self-direction, the ever greater and more punishing hierarchies, its drone like education and corporate strait-jackets, has — whatever their scripted responses convey — wilted their internal sense of commitment. As a result, they have increasingly migrated away, urgently seeking to avoid being trapped in the downward spiral of diminishing expectations.

They should not be faulted for wanting futures brighter than the one we have provided. And their sense that renewal must be found in new places was a lesson passed to them from their elders. While post-war progressives and liberals may have forgotten, they were the ones that advocated bailing out of a cultural and social matrix that could no longer deliver on vital dreams and aspirations, long before conservatives turned against the system. As this vision spread throughout American society, many people began to reimagine the kinds of individuals and communities we were capable of becoming.

That search for new solutions was not accidental. Americans had in the past professed a shared belief in both ever greater personal well-being and the fuller social realization of freedom and equality. So long as these remained abstract ideals realizable only in the distant future, individuals presumed they possessed goals in common. But with unprecedented prosperity and cultural liberalization in the post-war period, the meanings Americans gave to these core values sharply diverged. Was personal well-being a continual increase in economic production and consumption while maintaining the traditional values of hard work, patriarchy, rigid gender demarcations, institutional and generational hierarchies, and lives of instrumental productivity? Or was it possible to evolve new conceptions of individual well-being and self-actualization less constrained by industrial-era priorities? Were equality and freedom personal shorthands for one’s quest for privilege and power or the framework for a shared sense of mutual empowerment, dignity, and fulfillment for all?
Many who came of age in the sixties began to imagine and create lives that were no longer compatible with the cramped, conformist, workaholic, rigid and routinized practices long assumed to be an unavoidable cost of maximizing economic growth and institutional efficiency. What had to earlier generations been a beacon, a model, of the free society, had become a cage of antiquated assumptions about materialism, work, social roles, and status as the sole bearers of meaning. As a result, they began to seek fulfillment not

through standard pathways and measures of success and engagement but in more directly meaningful involvements.
As their everyday lives no longer measured up against the potential of post-industrialism, doubts and reservations spread about the existing order, leading many to begin withdrawing their unquestioned commitment. In other words, the system that progressives and liberals now try to persuade us to save (that ironically its own loyalists have now abandoned) is a system that in their own hearts they no longer accept as the answer. And the young can sense this loss of faith, for it is a faith that no longer calls to them, a faith they will sheepishly admit they have learned to mistrust.
It was during this period of psychological disinvestment that conservative and reactionary elites mobilized to take over the instruments of control. And as the momentum of change stalled, as the challengers could no longer defend and advocate for new kinds of lives and communities, the monopolization of power became easier.
Marches will not recover that vision any more than new seats in the House. Only by dedicating ourselves to forms of sustained initiative that pick up from our deeper dreams will we advance the goals of a good society and lives of

meaning. And it is this sense of initiative that the right-wing counterrevolution beginning with Reagan and peaking with Trump has been trying mightily to crush. Its partisans know that, if they can strip away and seal off the last vestiges of empowerment, economic security, and belief in a humanized future, they will have taken control of our destinies and foreclosed these once imagined changes.
The Reaction has demonstrated it will go to any lengths to forestall change, but it must fail. It will fail because it possesses no plan beyond the futile effort to obliterate all forms of initiative. A window into this underlying dynamic is provided in the 2016 film Neruda. A cat-and-mouse chase featuring the radical Chilean poet being hunted by a member of the fascist police, the movie explores how the forces of authoritarianism are driven not by any independent vision but rather by the resentful inability to imagine and create lives of meaning. The criminalization of and subsequent hunt for Neruda represents the effort to expunge the tellers of transformative and inclusive stories. Haunted by their moral and spiritual vacancy, their vast cisterns of nihilist self-inadequacy (and envy) can only fuel a dynamic of destruction. Once we understand this, we can understand that the initiative lies with those who can tell new and transformative tales.
Without any support to create stories of their own, many young people now flounder amid contradictions that immobilize them. They see — and often support — communities targeted by the repression which are organizing and fighting back. Yet they know it is absurd to fight for a middle class that serves a corporatized and militarized elite with a death grip on the system when winning won’t amount to much more than losing, delivering the same continual assaults on one’s spirit and sense of potential. It is absurd to fight

for the dispossessed when no one will give up a shirt though they have a closet full of garments. It is absurd to give one’s heart and mind to a day job needed to stave off the vice of student loans, to spend the only life one has marching, canvassing, protesting, blogging to repair the structures that build and monitor one’s cage.
The forms of human potential and social justice that emerged with post-industrialism are as within our grasp as they ever were. For those who foresee a great potential face-off, however, there will be no Runnymede, no Bastille, no D-Day. The challenge now is to reconnect with these dreams, with initiatives everywhere, large and small, within or beyond the grid, whether clearly delineated or experimental, emerging wherever we look.
The initiative for change has not been lost. What we can learn from a longer perspective is that initiative is on the side of change, that the demand for a significant shift in priorities has been in motion for nearly a half-century, and moreover that it is this very initiative that has generated the crisis of the present system. Out of this crisis new convictions and forms of imagination will emerge from the commitments we undertake. We no longer need the present system to fill out our expansive visions of our best selves and a fulfilled world, we need ourselves and each other.
