Progressives Lack Ambition
The root cause of the social dysfunction allowing the rise of authoritarian leaders is a fundamental lack of progressive ambition.
Since the advent of Reaganomics and the rise of the neoliberal movement, the working class in the west have fallen ever-further behind the obscenely rich. We, collectively, have the resources to end homelessness and hunger in our countries. We have the ability to end child poverty, make higher education and public transit free, switch our entire energy economy to renewables, and arrest the climate change crisis. Instead, we permit a small segment of society to own a solid majority of our collective wealth.
Progressives know and feel it, and worry about our collective ill-being. We see it in a national housing crisis, in health care that can’t keep up, in retirement plans that are increasingly pipe dreams rather than real achievable goals, in a postal service seen by our leadership as a failing business rather than as a necessary infrastructure.
Supporters of MAGA and their Canadian counterparts mostly see the same things; they know that our countries do not work for them. They, too, viscerally experience it in the form of stagnant wages, declining health care and a failing social safety net.
Rural Canada in particular is the base of support for the ever-further right. In these areas, the federal government is so uninvolved in solving the economic and social issues that the hoarding of wealth has caused that their only real government interaction is from increasingly draconian firearm policies. These are policies that largely put the burden on rural residents to solve urban crime problems, and at that only in the most performative sense.
The urban crime problems are caused by the same collapsing social infrastructure that is causing rural Canadians to feel abandoned, driving them to turn to ever-more radical views on who to blame and how to solve the problems. The left and the right experience the same overall structural problems, but come to vastly different conclusions about their underlying causes.
Lack of investment in early childhood education and lack of equal access to quality primary, secondary, and post-secondary education is known to produce uneven outcomes later in life, resulting in lower incomes and higher crime rates in the communities that are shorted, compounding the problem across generations. The resulting association of poverty and crime causes a vicious circle of prejudice.
In rural Canada, the poverty is more generalised. Whole communities are significantly poorer than their urban counterparts. For many, the mills and small factories that kept their communities going have long been shuttered, often left derelict as a constant reminder of the prosperity that once was. Agricultural areas are under constant pressure as farming is a hard business in which to eke out a living in the first place, with long hours, fixed expenses, but unpredictable and volatile revenues.
The most promising youth from the country generally migrate to the city looking for opportunity, and rural regions see cities as having become wealthier at their expense. There is a resulting tension between urban and rural that is not easy to address.
The right blames poverty and crime on individual weakness; the left blames poverty and crime on collective weakness. Neither is seriously addressing the fact that none of this is an accident; that the billionaire class have destroyed our information environment and our vernacular, moved our major sources of employment off-shore, are forever trying to convince us that we are taxpayers being robbed by a pointless government rather than citizens sharing in a collective ambition, and that private enterprise has all the answers.
Wages have been stagnant for so long that few people are still willing to work in tough jobs for them. Migrant labour has replaced higher wages on farms, coffee shops, meat packing plants, and numerous other industries. The former workers blame the migrants for being willing to work those jobs, not the business owners for being unwilling to pay for them, creating another level of misdirected social tension.
Tax codes benefit investors over workers. Buying and maintaining a car to commute to work is not tax-deductible. Having the business be the registered owner of the boss’s car is. Rent payments don’t apply against credit scores. Mortgage interest payments for private homes are not deductible even though they are, objectively, a cost of investment while businesses that borrow do get to deduct their interest payments.
As former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich posted this week:
The 400 richest Americans are now worth a record $6.6 trillion. The entire bottom 50% of America is worth $4.2 trillion. Read that back. Our problem isn't a lack of resources. Our problem is ever-expanding inequality.
We can solve all this. The right and the left are not as far apart as we all seem to believe. We share the collective feeling that our society is failing us, but disagree on how we got there.
Blaming immigrants, liberals, gays, Muslims, Jews, or whatever particular bias sells today isn’t going to solve our collective problems, but it makes for easy explanations. Those with obscene amounts of money who are selling out our entire society for their own benefit are well-motivated to direct our blame toward any vaguely identifiable group other than themselves.
Those who have bought into this propaganda that there are people poorer to them or inferior to them or different from them in some way who are the cause of our problems are, like those on the left, looking for explanations and solutions, and are not seeing any.
Our progressive leaders for the most part aren’t especially progressive. Beholden to the money that fuels politics, they are hard-pressed to push for genuinely progressive policies. It does not have to be this way.
US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the only president ever to have won four terms in the United States. He brought in the New Deal, raised taxes in ways we cannot begin to comprehend today, heavily weighted toward those who could afford to pay them, and ushered in a generation of collective prosperity that spilled over into and influenced their allies.
We need to stop chasing oligarchy-peddled policies from an ever-rightening centre and follow the lead of American progressives like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Zohran Mamdani who are unapologetically proposing to restore tangible progress to progressives. Conspicuously absent on that list are any Canadians.
We must reclaim the narrative. It is time to make ‘taxpayer’ a bad word and reclaim the whole concept of citizenship, of government as a force for good, and of our social and economic structure being in the interests of all. To show that if we work together, we can grow and prosper together, to recognise that the tension of our society is completely contrived by those who have a vested interest in pitting us against each other for their own benefit.
With a tangible, positive vision for the future that understands that the status quo does not work, those who are looking both to the radical right and the disappearing progressives for both explanations and leadership can be brought together.
Our economy and our society do not work for the majority any more. Accepting the status quo, and being seen to accept the status quo, won’t fix it. We can no longer afford to be embarrassed to promote and defend radical structural change.
It’s time to regain our ambition, to show that we can tear it all down and rebuild something that works for everyone, to put progress back into progressive.