When we say we need to strengthen our democracy, just what do we mean? Make it strong enough to support a few dinner plates? Or strong enough to support an entire banquet table? We must make it stronger, but how much stronger? Strong enough to do what, exactly?

Commentators have long observed that we lack the "political will" to take on our biggest challenges effectively. Can we take on economic inequality and reduce it to levels that the great majority of our citizens would find acceptable? Can we take on climate change, and halt it before it does us irremediable harm? Many of us just can't imagine that we will be able to muster the political will to do such difficult things at the scale and speed needed, so we set about reconciling ourselves to defeat, to envisioning the failure of our democracy, or even the collapse of our civilization. Or, finding that too painful to contemplate, we lie to ourselves, engage in magical thinking, and tell ourselves that we'll muddle through, finally get serious when things become sufficiently dire, and we'll pull our fat out of the fire before it is too late. Somehow.

So, being unwilling to accept defeat or engage in magical thinking, I'll endeavor to answer these questions concretely. Starting with what our democracy must be strong enough to do, the discussion below will then consider what it would take to make ourselves collectively strong enough, willful enough, to do what must be done.

I'll suggest a list of what we must do below, but before going into that, as you read the list, consider that most of these things will take decades to accomplish, that tacking back and forth between trying and not trying as we change political administrations and ideologies won't get us there, and that accomplishing some of the items on the list but not others simply won't work out politically.

As you read through this list, think of success as a twenty-five-year project followed by a fifty-year project, understand that success will require a disciplined and sustained effort rather than reversing course every few years, and grasp that we'll really need to succeed at all (or most) of the items on the list if we expect to succeed at any of them.

And, to make this exercise a bit clearer, I'll more-or-less arbitrarily attach words denoting scale to most of the big tasks listed. Of course, we shouldn't take these words too literally, but without some sense of scale, we won't know if we must make our democracy strong enough to support just a few dinner plates or strong enough to support an entire banquet table piled high with food.

What We Must Do to Succeed as a Nation and to Survive as a Civilization

By 2050, we will need to accomplish the following:

• Hold climate chaos in check by cutting human net carbon discharges to close to zero. Since some specifics won't be doable (like breeding cows that don't belch), we'll need to remove large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make up for the things we cannot do.

• Keep overall environmental sustainability within reach by preserving critical ecosystems, cutting species extinctions to a fraction of today's levels, and generally keeping the soils, the oceans, the lakes and rivers, and the forests and grasslands alive. At present, we are slowly, or perhaps not so slowly, killing the planet.

• Rebuild a large portion of the physical structure of society, our buildings, infrastructure, and machines, retiring many of our existing investments early, before they are fully amortized.

• Establish a much less unequal society, both nationally and globally. And less unequal in this context applies to wealth, income, power, pride, and dignity.

• Reduce warfare, the threat of warfare, and the peace made possible only by an unending armed standoff. Cut military spending to a fraction of today's levels.

• Disassemble the American empire without triggering war.

• Create a politically and physically workable policy to handle a tsunami of migrants into the US.

• Create a politically and physically workable program to relocate 500 million people from newly uninhabitable areas over the balance of the century. Maybe a billion.

• Create a credible and workable plan to preserve national and global economic stability. The requirement to rebuild everything will be vastly stimulative, but there will inevitably be losers as well as winners. The losers will have to be made whole, or political agency will collapse into instability and conflict.

• Integrate Artificial General Intelligence into the fabric of society without losing track entirely of what is and is not reality.

• Tax the very rich at extremely high levels, both in terms of wealth and ongoing income, to pay for all this. And the merely well-to-do must have some of their luxuries taxed away as well, as those funds will also be required for social investment.

• The prison population will need to be cut by at least half overall, and that is after imprisoning those getting away with anti-social criminality today.

Perhaps some of these items are exaggerated. But certainly, other difficult tasks have been omitted from this list.

But we are only just getting started, because the list to be accomplished in the fifty years that follow, to the year 2100, is equally if not even more difficult.

By 2100, we will need to accomplish the following:

• Finish all the above, because even if we make unbelievable progress, much will remain to be done. It is very unlikely, even being very optimistic, that we will really get the above finished by 2050. And what has been accomplished will have to be protected against backsliding.

• We will need to greatly reduce poverty, establish economic viability, end the current explosive population growth, and preserve critical ecosystems in the poorest countries of the global south.

• As global population growth comes to an end, we will need to deal with the “pig in the python” problem of supporting an aging population before a sustainable distribution of age cohorts is established.

• We will need to end that aspect of economic growth that depends on ever greater extraction of biological natural resources from the living environment. In fact, we’ll need to reduce extraction of biological resources to sustainable levels.

• We will need to establish a permanent international peacekeeping force larger and more powerful than the much smaller national militaries that remain, because our species, cut into nations and tribes as it is, will always be prone to slip into fighting.

• We will need to develop and accept a system of international governance.

• We will need most citizens to maintain an unending engagement in civic life and democratic governance, because we will always be tempted to reach for authoritarian and autocratic solutions whenever big problems become too threatening.

To do all of this, or even half of this, is simply inconceivable today. To build, then sustain the political will to do all this will require an entirely new approach to politics, and to that we will turn next.

A New Politics: Making the Inconceivable Conceivable

I'll start from the results end, and work backwards. First, and critically, we'll need to expand the electorate by cutting the non-voting share of the population at least by half. In cultural terms, voting will need to be understood as not merely a right, but as an obligation. In rough numbers, voting will need to approximate 75 percent of the eligible population, and this must apply to off-year elections and local elections as well.

We will have, as a portion of the total voter turnout, an unreachable core of zealots and fanatics of all stripes. This includes of course the hard core of MAGA Republicans, but it also includes extreme libertarians, anarchists, fascists, and communists (of the totalitarian variety), and religious fanatics. I'll take a guess that this unwinnable-under-any-circumstances portion of the voters may represent 20 percent of the total.

Then we have another hopeless group. This consists of voters with IQ's below 60 as well people with other disabling problems, including addicts, the mentally ill, and the sociopaths and psychopaths (the real predators) among us. This may add up to 5 to 10 percent of total voters.

So, we'll be left with 70 to 75 percent of total voters in the possibly winnable column. To maintain the consistent majority support needed to set and hold a constant direction through the inevitable ups and downs we will face, we need to craft a politics that can first motivate the current non-voters referenced above and then win the ongoing and comprehending support of at least 60 percent of the total voting population.

This gives us a target, and I'll turn next to the strategies, policies, and programs we'll need to embrace to win this level of support for an agenda of social transformation. For perspective, this is roughly the level of support Democrats enjoyed through the 30 years between 1935 and 1965, when Democrats (and a few liberal Republicans) controlled all branches of the national government.

The Critical Elements of Success

To be successful in building a politically stable majority supporting change, we need a radically new attitude. Many liberals and progressives have vilified the Trump voters – and sometimes conservative voters in general – and we will need to win support from at least some of them to succeed. We too often regard all of them with distain. We paint all of them with the same brush, and we call them stupid, call them racists or sexists or similar terms of condemnation. We disrespect them blatantly, and they fully understand this. To have any chance of winning over some of them, our attitude needs to be transformed by empathy and understanding into an attitude of respect. We’ll never win any of these people if we continue to insult them all as we often do today. More >>

Another critical pillar of Democrat’s political success must be to make our governments at all levels serve the core interests of the entire population, but most centrally, the bottom half of earners. Right now, half of our fellow citizens are struggling just to get by, and they often see little hope of meaningful change through voting for Democrats. This half of our population owns only about 2.5 percent of all wealth and earns less than 15 percent of all income. To win the real and lasting political support from this half of our citizens, Democrats should aim to increase their share of wealth 10-fold and their share of income to at least 30 percent. More >>

The final pillar of our success going forward is fighting and overcoming the bias and discrimination that divides our society into factions unable to cooperate, to make common cause. This means dealing with racism, sexism, and a range of other biases and related discrimination involving age, religion, sexual orientation, and social class. We must ensure that men and women of all races and backgrounds can participate fully in the much more widely shared prosperity we must create. More >>

There are many other things we must do, many other steps we must take. But these three are central. Our success depends on respecting our fellow citizens again, on building prosperity for the vast majority rather than just the upper half, and on defeating the longstanding biases that continue to exclude too many from enjoying the lives they deserve.

D.C.
Published:September 2023
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