If We Want The Resistance To Succeed, We Won't Let It Be Hijacked By The Neoliberals

The words on the sign above are of course fake. But the message it articulates is very real. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the other corporatist members of the DNC, in addition to having engaged in the infamous tactics to undermine Bernie Sanders' campaign that we learned about from Wikileaks, naturally did nothing to stop the numerous incidents of voter suppression and electoral fraud which were perpetrated throughout the primaries by lower-ranking Democratic officials.

This subtle coup against the Democratic candidate who was supported by the majority of their party's electorate, along with the terrible strategies used by the Clinton campaign to win over that majority, is one of the many actions establishment Democrats have taken which played a major part in Donald Trump's election. While you'll never see them admit it, the vast majority of the American people do not share the corporatist, morally relativistic worldviews of establishment Democrats, and this made them the worst ones possible to be in charge of stopping Trump from winning.

So after the election, these Democrats took the only wise course of action: try to fashion themselves as the leaders of the resistance movement to Trump.

While the fiasco of the Democrats' 2016 defeat has convinced some of those who supported Clinton in the primaries that they've been pursuing a dead-end political brand, most of them still aren't willing to acknowledge the deep problems with the current Democratic Party, as evidenced by how all the corporate Democrats who might run in 2020 have the combined support of 45% of the Democratic electorate. And once again, the minority within a minority of the "liberal" oligarchs who fund and organize the charade of the Democratic Party establishment are trying to make claim to the role of opposing Trump and the GOP so as to further their ulterior motive of maintaining the economic and political status quo.

Their attempts to hijack the anti-Trump movement are predictable and occasionally amusing. One of the neoliberal Democrats' media gofers Keith Olbermann has dramatically photographed himself with a concerned expression while draped in an American flag, with the sleek logo of "the resistance" featured in front of him; the neoliberal Democratic mega-donor George Soros has had disturbingly significant involvement with the organization of the Womens' Marches; and establishment Democrats have generally been shamelessly eager to use policies like Trump's Muslim ban to point the finger at progressives who didn't back Hillary Clinton-and that's including those who didn't support her in the primaries.

And once again, the neoliberal Democrats' campaign to make their left-wing opponents compliant by branding themselves as noble allies in the fight against the greater evil is endangering our chances to actually defeat the greater evil. As I've illustrated in depth by pointing to the public opinion polls which show the vast majority of Americans support Sandersism's supposedly radical goals and the inscrutably populist nature of Trump's victory over Clinton in the Rust Belt states, appealing to the left, not the "mainstream" center, is in most cases the best way to win elections these days. And the old guard Democrats' refusal to acknowledge this is already hurting the Democrats' hopes for fighting Trumpism on the electoral level.

"We may very well have one chance to save our party and begin winning elections again," assessed the decidedly Berniecratic Santa Rosa Democratic leader Sarah Coutu in a letter to The Progressive Army regarding the tactics that pro-establishment Florida Democratic officials used last month to shut out reformers in their state. "Florida plays a huge roll in nationwide elections. The Florida Democratic Party had this one chance to recover from the huge losses on November 8th and prove that they were serious about change. I personally feel they have instead sealed our fate to another 8 years of losing elections. Today feels like the beginning of what others are calling 'Trump’s World'. Before today [when the neoliberals took ill-earned victory in the race for the Florida Democratic Party's next leader], there was hope we could start winning elections in 2018 and thereafter, bringing the party back to the people, uniting our forces across the entire party to stand strong against the republicans. I’m afraid we have just opened the door for Trump to do catastrophic damage to our country, with no force to stand against anything he wishes to do."

These so-called resistance leaders aren't putting up much of a real fight to Trump and Friends on the civic level, either. Far too many Senate Democrats have voted to confirm Trump's cabinet nominees, something that I think will prove to be just the beginning of a saga of over-compromises that corporate Democrats, in their eagerness to be "pragmatic" and generally not rock the boat, will make towards the Trump administration. After all, these types of Democrats have no real incentive to block Trump's agenda of increasing racial inequality, perpetuating unnecessary military conflict, escalating the class war on the bottom 99.9%, ending civil liberties, and further making the American pretense of democracy irrelevant, as they themselves for the most part represent all of these goals.

This folly on their part, I expect, will soon become a danger not just to progressive values but to our very republic, as Trump is sure to take on a truly fascist bent when the next major terrorist attack inevitably occurs.

Those who don't represent these things, thankfully, are doing everything they can not to let this movement whose prospects for success are our only hope of saving the planet from ecological meltdown be co-opted and neutered by such narrow and self-serving interests. The Berniecrats have already made great gains in wresting the California Democratic Party from the neoliberals, as well as in many smaller facets of the Democratic Party throughout the country. And while the old guard has managed to occasionally strike back as mentioned three paragraphs above, their only line of defense is evidently an ability to rig the process in their favor which seems to only reach so far. They may be able to set some political booby traps for the progressive insurgency, but stealing every election is all but impossible for them to do. And so the Sandersists, with their unparalleled nationwide network of grassroots activists, are by far in a better position than the establishment is to win elections both within and outside of the Democratic ticket, as well as to influence the actions of those in power generally.

In November, James Howard Kunstler wrote regarding the 2016 election: "Daddy’s in the house and he busted straight into the nursery and now the little ones are squalling in horror. Mommy was discovered to be a grifting old jade who ran the household into a slum and she’s been turned out to solemnly await the judgment of the courts, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The kids on campus have gone temporarily insane over this domestic situation and some wonder if they’ll ever get over it." Well, since then the kids have for the most part managed to regain sanity and start directing their panicked energy towards getting mommy out of the house, who's refused to obey her eviction notice. And when they finally get her out of the picture, they can focus on getting daddy, who's not as strong as he looks, tied down to the nursery floor. Then it's playtime.

Democrats Are Trying To Fight Fascism With Fascism Lite

In recent weeks, Democrats and others have responded to Hillary Clinton's loss by creating what James Kunstler describes as "The Deepening Deep State." Amid legitimate concerns over the effect that fake news has had on this election, those with the power to regulate online traffic have taken actions which infringe on free speech. For instance, the solution to fake news that Google and Facebook have come up with is cracking down on sites which they deem, based on often unfair standards, as unreliable.

What's really troubling about this rush towards censorship, though, is that the U.S. government is joining in. On November 30, the House passed a bill, called H.R. 6393, which, if approved by the Senate, will empower the state to follow Google and Facebook's precedent by censoring websites that they consider part of Russia's disinformation campaign. This measure, as you can imagine, would also open the door for online censorship on the part of the state.

And the justification being provided for these actions is similarly worthy of suspicion. The Washington Post's evidence for certain websites being tied to the Russian government is highly questionable, as is the CIA's supposed proof for Russia's role in the DNC email leaks. 

In other words, if there's a government campaign to spread false information which advances a corrupt agenda, it's likely coming from the U.S. government. And needless to say, the Democratic establishment is very much participating in this cynical effort. This tactic, in addition to being McCarthyite, is what Glen Ford, the editor of Black Agenda Report (one of the supposed Russian propaganda websites listed by the Post), rightly calls "Fascism with a Democratic Party Face."

"The term 'fascist,'" writes Ford in an explanation for this charge of his, "is bandied about today more than at any time since 1969, but there is little discussion of what fascism actually looks like in the 21^st century. The truth is, it looks like Democrats and Republicans; it operates through the duopoly, the political apparatus of the ruling class. Donald Trump’s fascism is largely the residue of the fascism of apartheid America, under Jim Crow, which had many of the characteristics of – and in some ways presaged – the “classic” fascism of pre-World War Two Europe. The establishment corporate Democratic and Republican brand of fascism is far more racially, sexually and culturally inclusive, but just as ruthless. And, at this moment in history, the corporate Democratic fascists are the more aggressively warlike brand."

And indeed, these Red-baiting antics are just the latest in a long series of similarly authoritarian actions that Democratic elites have taken since their shift to the right began around forty years ago. The modern Democratic Party, as Ford iterates, is a branch of the corporate state which (not coincidentally) has also emerged throughout the last forty years, and this fact has naturally led it to adopt the same fascist tendencies as the institution that it serves.

Namely, though the Democratic Party isn't classically fascist as Ford acknowledges, its brand of fascism takes on a more subtle form than that of Donald Trump: inverted totalitarianism.

The invertedly totalitarian method of fascism, as I've focused on in detail before, gains consent from those it oppresses not through nationalist propaganda, but through convincing the population that they are not in fact being oppressed. And the Democratic Party's political model of making its neoliberalism and militarism seem acceptable to its largely anti-corporatist, anti-war base perfectly fits inverted totalitarianism's description. For decades, the Democratic establishment has used an abundant means of propaganda tactics to keep the left from revolting against it, from the always useful "but the Republicans are worse" excuse to an outright effort to keep the Democratic base ignorant of its party's true agenda, and for the most part, this has effectively kept the Democratic Party safe from replacement or reform.

And even as this dynamic heads toward what will most certainly be political extinction, with most on the left now working to fundamentally change the Democratic Party for the better or, should that plan fail, build a third party such as the Greens, Democratic elites are evidently doubling down on the inverted totalitarianism.

From David Greenberg, the L.A. Times columnist who recently argued that Democrats don't need to shift away from their current economic elitism because, as he insists, their message has "always included a central commitment to economic fairness along with social inclusion and equal rights," to Nancy Pelosi, the re-elected House minority leader who thinks that Democrats don't need to be set on a direction which supports America's working families because "our values unify us and our values are about supporting America’s working families," establishment Democrats are continuing to deny, against all evidence, that their party has become too neoliberal to succeed.

The reason I'm leveling these complaints against the Democrats when a party that's even worse is about to come to power is that, as we've seen in the case of the 2016 election, the current Democratic Party's model of status quo centrism is no match for the populist right. And if we want to defeat right-wing populism in time for the pivotal 2020 election, we'll need to work towards the rise of the politically formidable ideological model presented by the left.

Hopefully by then, this site won't be shut down on suspicion of it being a Russian fake news outlet.

The End Is Near

The aversion that so many are feeling towards President-Elect Donald Trump is unquestionably justified; I don't think it's necessary to reiterate the countless reasons he is an extremely divisive leader and a generally dangerous individual. But amid the fear among women, racial minorities, and other groups that are being threatened by his presence, there's another demographic that feels (I suspect) uneasy these days: the members of the corporate elite.

Trump's success was largely a result of the enormous class inequities that have appeared in recent decades. By redirecting people's economic concerns towards immigrants and Muslims, while also bringing up some legitimate issues such as the unfairness of the U.S.'s current trade policies, he ran with success against the establishments of both major parties. And while Trump doesn't pose any real threat to the benefactors of the neoliberal paradigm, his victory, I believe, has forced them to reckon with the instability of the political status quo that they've created; if someone like Trump can run for the highest office and win, what about when a genuine enemy of neoliberalism tries to do the same?

Indeed, when such an event materialized earlier in this election in the form of the Bernie Sanders campaign, the response from the representatives of establishment economics was easy to guess; there's clear evidence that during the primary season, the corporate media, the Democratic leadership, and their allies on Wall Street regarded Sanders as a threat and worked to undermine him. Thomas Frank, in an essay about the anti-Sanders bias of the operators of publications like The Washington Post (and by extension economic elites in general), assessed that "For the sort of people who write and edit the opinion pages of the Post, there was something deeply threatening about Sanders and his political views. He seems to have represented something horrifying, something that could not be spoken of directly but that clearly needed to be suppressed."

And while Sanders has since been (illegitimately) vanquished, the subjectively horrifying thing that he represented has only gotten more powerful. What Frank and I are referring to, of course, is the possibility of the public becoming unable to tolerate the current economic system and successfully overturning it.

Well, in the following paragraphs, I'm going to provide some very good reasons for their fear being valid. This piece focuses on the past, present, and future of the neoliberal economic and political order, with the latter subject being what reflects my essay's title.

How we got here

At no point in America's history has the economic system been ideally fair. Even during the 1960's, when income inequality was by far at its lowest point in decades, Martin Luther King JR. felt a need to address economic injustice, calling for an economic bill of rights, a universal basic income, and a strong labor movement. But relatively speaking, the second third of the 20th century was a very good period for the middle and working classes.

After the Great Depression, which was a result of the enormous economic inequality that defined the early 20th century, America's leaders were forced to change how the wealth was distributed. In the 1930's, amid overwhelming public pressure, FDR changed his economic approach from the unrestrained version of capitalism that had previously dominated the political debate to Keynesianism, enacting reforms which reigned in corporate power and greatly reduced poverty. And for the next four decades, this economic paradigm persisted, with both parties for the most part upholding the policies of the New Deal.

It must have been no coincidence, then, that it took a full generation for society to start returning to the old order of corporate rule. Starting in the late 1970's, many academic and political leaders, too young to remember what happened when markets weren't sufficiently regulated and income inequality wasn't kept at a low level, advocated for policies which would return the economic system to its 1920's form. This newly mainstream breed of economic thought, which emerged mainly on the right but was also very much embraced by the Democratic Party, is essentially a perversion of capitalism in that rather than giving all people an equal opportunity to succeed economically, it allowed for corporations and the wealthy to re-write the rules of the game to their benefit.

This societal model, which I've discussed in detail in a past article, was not capitalism as it's often been characterized, but a newer and far more dangerous economic ideology called neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has for the most part dominated the actions of government officials starting with the at-the-time unusually pro-business Carter Administration, and since then America (as well as many other countries, whose governments have also adopted neoliberalism in recent decades) has drifted ever closer to oligarchy.

For the past forty years, cuts to the social safety net, tax reductions for the wealthy, privatization, deregulation, so-called free trade deals, and at the root of it all an increased involvement of money in politics has resulted in the highest levels of economic inequality on record, with half the people in the country living in poverty and much of the rest not being too far ahead as they own very little wealth compared to those at the top. And while Americans very much want to end this feudalistic version of society, because their government is naturally controlled by these same corporate forces which control the economy, their opinions alone don't have much of an impact.

In recent years, though, that's begun to change.

The unraveling of neoliberalism

For quite some time during this period of modern-day robber barons, those who oppose neoliberalism, though very much in the majority, have largely been outside the mainstream of the debate. But an oppressed population can't be expected to remain helpless forever, especially when the oppression becomes increasingly prevalent, and the pot of public resentment towards the current economic order has started to reach a boiling point.


The first major sign that a revolt against neoliberalism is on its way may have come in 1999, with the outbreak of protests in Seattle over the U.S.'s entering into the World Trade Organization. Since then, shows of resistance towards the economic order have appeared whose levels of success would have been impossible in earlier stages of the neoliberal era; most notable among them the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2016 and the Democracy Spring demonstrations that took place this spring.

So it's no surprise that in this election cycle, the economic policies of government officials have started to match up with the wishes of the people.

Firstly, 2016 has been an unusually good year for advocates of a minimum wage increase. In March, California's governor decided to raise the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022, and four states voted on Election day to raise it to $12 an hour by 2020. Similar actions have been taken in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and Washington DC.

And even the election of Donald Trump was in some ways a victory for the lower classes; there's a slim but present possibility that he'll bring back Glass-Steegal, and his protectionist stance on trade has made it so that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is now dead along with America's involvement in past trade deals like it. Indeed, Bernie Sanders has expressed optimism in some areas in response to Trump's victory, saying "To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him."

Cornel West agrees that a new era has befallen the nation this year as a result of the policies of the past forty years, saying in an op-ed this month that neoliberalism was "brought to its knees" on Election Day. But as even Trump's supporters will come to realize in the next few years, there is much more that needs to happen before economic change can come.

2020 vision

Despite the parts of Trump's agenda that I mentioned, the fact remains that on January 20, 2017, the 40th anniversary of the neoliberal era will involve the inauguration of a president who may do more damage to the economic interests of the bottom 99% than any of his predecessors.

I believe he has the potential to do unprecedented harm in this area not because of his intention to repeal Obamacare, or his trickle-down tax plan, or his vision of a drastically reduced social safety net. The worst thing that I expect to happen to the lower classes under Trump is a financial crisis comparable to the Great Depression.

Unsurprisingly, amid 1920's-level income inequality, there is 1920's-level risk for economic collapse. The economies of the U.S. and many other countries have become highly financialized, making global markets ripe for a dramatic downturn. And perhaps even more importantly, worldwide debt outside the financial sector is at an unprecedented $152 trillion, obviously adding to the possibility of economic catastrophe.

"Nothing is priced correctly, especially money," writes James Kunstler on the current economy's lack of sustainability. "It’s all kept running on an ether of accounting fraud. We can’t come to grips with the resource realities behind the fraud, especially the end of cheap oil. And the bottom line is the already-manifest slowdown of global business. The poobahs of banking pretend to be confounded by all this because everything — their reputations, their jobs, their fortunes — depends on the Potemkin narrative that ever-greater economic expansion lies just around the corner. Not so. What waits around the corner is a global scramble for the table scraps of the late techno-industrial banquet."

When this crash hits sometime in the next few years, it will be disastrous. But it will also present a great opportunity for finally defeating the neoliberal forces which helped create it. The magnitude of the wealth that will be lost in this event, along with the unprecedentedly unfair state of the economy that it will take place in, will without a doubt provoke an effort on the part of the populous to overthrow the corporate state which has a very good chance of succeeding.

This revolt will be part of what the anthropologist Peter Turchin views to be the next major wave of social upheaval, which he's found occurs in cycles throughout history. And according to Turchin, American society's next bout with revolution is set to occur in or around the year 2020-which is shortly after the next recession is likely to happen and the date of what's expected to be the most consequential election in our lifetimes.

In short, 2016 has been just a foreshadowing of the seismic political and social changes that indications say will befall society in the years to come, with the culmination expected to arrive in 2020. The neoliberal order, in spite of all the wealth and power it's consolidated, is ultimately as subject to insurrection from the masses as all the other tyrannical regimes throughout history.

And in the process of its death, many possibilities will appear for improving society that go beyond redistributing the wealth; goals like withdrawing from America's perpetual wars, enacting laws to protect the environment, and even ending the two-party system will become very much doable when the population is mobilized for change on the level I expect it to be in the coming years. And when this happens, hopefully those objectives will also include the proposals of Dr. King.

Waking Up From Our Neoliberal Nightmare

On November 9, after Hillary Clinton is likely elected, those who I suspect will be celebrating the most are not the millions of people in the lower and middle classes that largely voted for her out of fear of Donald Trump-it will be the heads of Wall Street, corporate America, and the rest of the economic and political establishment, who are eager to see their empire keep smoothly humming along. Because while both candidates can of course be relied upon to help the interests of big business, Trump's annoying habit of disrupting markets by simply being a major presence on the national stage makes Clinton Wall Street's favored option.

And so, as most Americans give themselves a (largely unenthusiastic) pat on the back for vanquishing Trump and getting a woman into the White House, things go back to business-as-usual. The president-elect and the other representatives of the corporate state can get started on planning the latest series of wars, anti-worker trade deals, corporate tax cuts, and other policies which will further the interests of the super-rich. For most people, the fact that Trump has been avoided will ultimately come as little comfort; either way, the 2016 election will be yet another defeat for those who are being hurt by the unrestrained model of capitalism that most countries have embraced for the last four decades or so, and a victory for those who benefit from this economic system, whose relatively little-known but important to understand name is neoliberalism.

This term, though not to be confused with capitalism, can be considered the logical conclusion of it; whereas capitalism merely allows private corporations to be the chief players in the economy, neoliberalism takes things many steps further by saying that corporations and the wealthy have more rights than ordinary people. Another way to describe it is an economic system which is based purely on competition. In a neoliberal society, if anyone gets ahead or falls behind in the economic game, the rules are essentially re-written to favor the winner and punish the loser.

Anis Shivani assesses how neoliberalism, which originated as a term in the 20th century and was more or less implemented for the first time during that period, is different from past economic systems that have favored elites in his brilliant article This Is Our Neoliberal Nightmare: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, And Why The Market and the Wealthy Win Every Time:

Neoliberalism has been more successful than most past ideologies in redefining subjectivity, in making people alter their sense of themselves, their personhood, their identities, their hopes and expectations and dreams and idealizations. Classical liberalism was successful too, for two and a half centuries, in people’s self-definition, although communism and fascism succeeded less well in realizing the “new man.”

It cannot be emphasized enough that neoliberalism is not classical liberalism, or a return to a purer version of it, as is commonly misunderstood; it is a new thing, because the market, for one thing, is not at all free and untethered and dynamic in the sense that classical liberalism idealized it. Neoliberalism presumes a strong state, working only for the benefit of the wealthy, and as such it has little pretence to neutrality and universality, unlike the classical liberal state.

I would go so far as to say that neoliberalism is the final completion of capitalism’s long-nascent project, in that the desire to transform everything—every object, every living thing, every fact on the planet—in its image had not been realized to the same extent by any preceding ideology. Neoliberalism happens to be the ideology—unlike the three major forerunners in the last 250 years—that has the fortune of coinciding with technological change on a scale that makes its complete penetration into every realm of being a possibility for the first time in human history.

Perhaps it's this aspect of neoliberalism, wherein corporations and the state work together to concentrate power and resources, that has made it so that inequality is now higher than it's ever been in American history. And according to Shivani, it can only get worse from here. "Neoliberalism has its end-game in sight," he writes, "letting inequality continue to escalate past the crash point (meaning the point where the economy works for most people), past any tolerable degradation of the planet (which is being reconceptualized in the shape of the market)."

In this piece, I'm going to discuss why I believe the future will in fact be the opposite of what he describes.

The reasoning behind Shivani's prediction (which he admits is only speculative) of a long-term victory for the corporate state is that neoliberalism, it seems to him, is too powerful an ideology for people to turn against. The economic elite, by getting so many in the lower classes to buy into neoliberalism's philosophy of profit at any cost, has essentially persuaded much of the public to surrender to its oppressors. In a culture that puts individual gain above all else and considers things like human beings and the environment to be commodities, it can become easy for those who are being left behind in the neoliberal system to rationalize its existence.

What I feel Shivani doesn't sufficiently take into account is the fact that, for the most part, such a culture does not exist in America.

The most recent Gallup poll on income inequality shows that only 31% of Americans do not think wealth should be more equally distributed. Another survey from Gallup shows just 21% of Americans think the rich pay their fair amount in taxes, while 15% think they pay too much. So is the case with virtually every other issue, from the idea of universal health care to ending the wars to raising the minimum wage to reforming campaign finance; the majority of Americans, in spite of the neoliberal propaganda that elites have tried to sell to them for so many years, know which kinds of policies benefit them.

But perhaps as Shivani was also meaning to point out, the surveys notwithstanding, the public has yet to stage a serious effort to overthrow the neoliberal order. Americans have believed in things like redistributing the wealth and raising taxes on the wealthy for about as long as neoliberalism was the dominant system, and yet no successful effort to challenge it has materialized.

I addressed this seemingly discouraging fact in my previous article, wherein I argued that because the current levels of economic inequality so closely resemble that of past unequal eras, which were followed by populist uprisings that brought inequality back down, our society is on the cusp of just such a revolt. This somewhat outdated chart (inequality has gotten worse since 2013) illustrates my point:

It's hard to look at that picture and not think that a turning point is near.

However, that piece mainly focused on the effects that I believe this coming period of class revolt will have on electoral politics. And as everyone should know when attempting to bring about true systemic change, this is just one aspect of the larger movements that will need to take place within society before meaningful improvement occurs.

Even the political future that income inequality has led me to believe will be realized in the next several years, wherein America's two corporate parties are overtaken by a populist party, is not enough; due to Republican gerrymandering, America's liberal party, be it the Democrats or the Greens, will have zero chance of taking the House until 2030. We can't wait until then to try to make Washington work for the people; in addition to electing Greens to high positions in government, we'll need to persuade the Republicans who will control congress for the next decade-and-a-half to stop helping their wealthy donors. And in this article, which can be considered a follow-up to my last one, I'll discuss how that is completely doable.

A good case study to use in this guide to reversing inequality in the 21st century is the last period of major economic unfairness, which took place in the 20th century. This era, whose levels of income disparity can be observed in the chart above, indeed required factors much bigger than electoral politics to make it end. After more than a half-century of increasing economic exploitation under the proto-neoliberal ideology of classical liberalism, the economy fell apart. The Great Depression, which, like many other economic collapses, was caused by economic inequality, can be considered the "rock bottom" that this debt-dependent, economically concentrated society needed to turn itself around.

It's no coincidence that income inequality in the 20th century peaked in 1928, the year before the crisis started. Peter Turchin explains how the aftermath of the recession led to redistribution in his essay Return Of The Oppressed:

The US elites entered into an unwritten compact with the working classes. This implicit contract included the promise that the fruits of economic growth would be distributed more equitably among both workers and owners. In return, the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged (no revolution). The deal allowed the lower and upper classes to co-operate in solving the challenges facing the American Republic — overcoming the Great Depression, winning the Second World War, and countering the Soviet threat during the Cold War.

The really notable thing about this change of attitudes among the country's leaders, though, is how it didn't take an overthrow of the political establishment to change how the government worked.

During that time, both parties, as is the case now, were in service of big business. The representatives of neither party were willing to challenge the centers of power, with Franklin Roosevelt being no exception. At the time of Roosevelt's first presidential campaign in 1932, he was in fact a fiscal conservative who was funded by Wall Street and considered a balanced budget to be more important than helping the American people in their greatest time of need. As the populist anger of the public loomed ever larger during his term, though, he and the rest of the Washington establishment decided to change their economic approach, enacting the New Deal policies that brought down income inequality and began a thirty-year period where keynesianism was the dominant ideology in American politics.

But then, of course, came society's new and latest descent into inequality. Starting with Jimmy Carter's pro-big business policies, neoliberalism became the driving force in the actions of most government officials, eventually leading to the sad state of affairs that we're in today.

What remains to be seen, though, is exactly what the fall of neoliberalism will look like. The events that brought about the downfall of classical liberalism are set to repeat themselves soon, with a possibly Great Depression-level economic collapse sure to take place sometime within the next president's first term. Due to the unwillingness of government officials to meaningfully reform the country's banking system after the 2008 crash, along with the many other factors that make the global economy unsustainable (income inequality being a notable player), the continuation of the status quo that Hillary Clinton's presidency will bring is certain to result in a breakdown of the fragile, largely illusory economic order that elites have constructed.

"The potential for wrecking markets and currencies around the world is extreme at this moment," wrote James Kunstler last month, who thinks that this crash will happen quite soon. "It may only be a matter of whether it happens before or after the election. Then we’ll see what happens when financial institutions can’t trust each other. Trade stops. Economies crumble. Pretenses evaporate. If it gets bad enough, the shelves of the supermarkets go bare in three days and you’re living in a permanent hurricane disaster without the wind and rain. Believe me, that will be bad enough."

What Kunstler thinks things will look like in the aftermath of the (somewhat dramatized) scenario that he describes is similarly pessimistic: "Hillary, if elected, will not get to play FDR-2. Rather, she’ll be stuck in the role of Hoover, the Return, presiding over a freight elevator of an economy with a broken cable. Expect problems with the US dollar. Expect 'emergency' actions. Expect the unintended consequences of those actions."

That may well be the case. But given how the public is sure to react to this disaster, I believe major governmental reforms will result from it as well. After the collapse occurs, the economically populist movements that we've witnessed in the past several years such as Occupy Wall Street and Democracy Spring will likely experience massive reboots, with hundreds of millions of people across the country from all sides of the political spectrum coming together in opposition to the destructive and tremendously unfair economic system. This revolt, in addition to resulting in the rise of a populist third party, will force the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties to comply with the demands of their base, with President Clinton and the other corporatists in Washington suddenly taking on a less neoliberal approach to governing amid overwhelming public pressure. At least to an extent, and not by choice, Hillary may get to "play FDR-2" after all.

Of course, such dramatic changes in the right direction will not come easily or quickly, and that will create additional problems. Economic inequality tends to lead to the rise of fascist regimes, and Trump's campaign only represents the beginning of what will happen to American politics as faith in established institutions and  the ideological "center" continues to erode in the coming years; reactionary populism is bound to succeed in future elections in addition to progressive populism, and the next time the political demons that neoliberalism has summoned have an opportunity to come out, they will have a much better chance to win than has been the case in 2016.

"There must be many others out there like myself wondering who will emerge from the rubble?" writes Kunstler regarding the person who's waiting in the wings to fill the role of Trump's ideological heir four years from now. "I suspect it will be someone we haven’t heard of before, just as Bonaparte was unheard of in France in 1792."

Thankfully, though, as Peter Turchin concludes in his essay, such a fate for our society, wherein the public reacts to income inequality by blowing up the system rather than changing it, is entirely avoidable:

Our society, like all previous complex societies, is on a rollercoaster. Impersonal social forces bring us to the top; then comes the inevitable plunge. But the descent is not inevitable. Ours is the first society that can perceive how those forces operate, even if dimly. This means that we can avoid the worst — perhaps by switching to a less harrowing track, perhaps by redesigning the rollercoaster altogether.

In any case, though, the neoliberal paradigm's chances of surviving the next five or ten years is the same as the chance a car will continue traveling upward after it's reached the top of a hill. Those who have been left behind by neoliberalism already want it replaced by something better, and while economic meltdown appears to be the only thing that can motivate them to take sufficient action, it will all be worthwhile in the long run.

Jill Stein Wins First Debate

I've heard that a thousand years is but a blink of an eye in the mind of The Lord. But for most Americans, 160 years is far too long a time since their country's electoral system last saw meaningful reform.

And once again, it looks like they'll have to wait before they see it again. The Green Party's Jill Stein and her fellow third party candidate Gary Johnson are unable to qualify for access in the presidential debates, leaving the partisan duopoly alive and well for this election cycle. When the first debate takes place tomorrow, all that most Americans will see is a performance between an even more unlikable version than usual of the two figureheads of the corporate state that the dominant parties produce every four years, wherein each of them are hypocritically playing off of the other's flaws in what James Kunstler describes as "a Punch and Judy show."

What won't be mentioned during this affair is that most of the audience sees it for what it is-a puppet show-and soon they'll be asking to watch something different.

To give comfort to those among the record number of people that will be watching these sad spectacles who aren't satisfied with the choices presented to them, I've put together an analysis of why the debates were not arranged fairly, why the parties that run them hold little power over the future of electoral politics, and why, whether Jill Stein attends them or not, she will be the winner of this and the other debates.

The first one on the list may be the most important to establish.

Third party candidates should have been able to attend the debates

Aside from the fact that giving all of the major candidates a fair opportunity to contribute their views is simply good for democracy, Stein and Johnson should have been allowed to attend because contrary to what CNN will tell you, they've earned their right to do so.

As of the 2000 election cycle, the Commission on Presidential Debates-a private organization run entirely by Republicans and Democrats which, since 1987, has controlled how the debates are run-has ruled that a candidate must poll at around 15% or more to get on the debate stage. It sounds like a reasonable enough requirement, but a deeper look into the dynamics of presidential politics reveals it to be unfair towards outsiders. An Ipsos Public Affairs Report has found that for a candidate to gain that much support-especially when they aren't running on the ticket of one of the two major parties-they would need to spend around $250,000,000. Ross Perot, who's independent 1992 campaign spent the equivalent of less than half of that, was able to get into the debates while polling at 9%.

What's most troubling about how the CPD has run this process, though, is not that it's used an unreasonable rule, but that it's actually worked around that rule to further tip the playing field.

An investigation by the writer John Laurits has found that the CPD's vetting process for the candidates, in addition to involving that 15% rule, has clearly seen a large degree of bias. So begins Laurits in his explanation of why there's something deeply suspicious about how the CPD has run the debates this year:

The problem is that the CPD gets to handpick the 5 polls that are used to determine whether 15% of voters support them or not. Now, a reasonable person might assume that they’d pick transparent, unbiased organizations to conduct high-quality polls, especially since they’re a non-profit raking in millions from undisclosed donors to do this exact thing. Instead, they chose the #!@%ing corporate-media. Yes, the 5 polls are conducted by the same jerks who gave Donald Trump about $2 Billion dollars in free media attention — ABC-Washington Post, CBS-New York Times, CNN-Opinion Research Corporation, Fox News, & NBC-Wall Street Journal, all of which contain at least one of Hillary Clinton’s major campaign-donors. Which doesn’t sound corrupt at all.

These five polls, Laurits discovered after looking into them, have all been conducted in a way that seriously calls their reliability into question, from the Fox News poll having underrepresented independents to the CNN-ORC poll's having done the same with independents. The other three polls that the CPD used, though lacking transparency, seem to include similar problems.

The result, of course, is a successful effort on the CPD's part to downplay how much support Stein and Johnson really have. I am not saying that they both secretly have above 15% of the support, as that would (unfortunately) be wishful thinking, but they do have more than most people think. Thanks to the five polls mentioned, the Real Clear Politics average puts Jill Stein at 2.8% and Gary Johnson at 8.5%, but a more reliable McClatchy/Marist poll puts Stein at 4% and Johnson at 10%. That's enough to qualify them for the debates under more reasonable circumstances, as well to put them within striking distance of the 5% of the popular vote they'll need to win this year so that their parties can qualify for federal campaign funds in 2020.

And though Johnson, the Liberitarian, is admittedly more likely to accomplish the latter than Stein, she's already winning the race in a different sense.

The Green Party's agenda is backed by the majority of Americans

As these efforts to shut out Stein and Johnson were being coordinated behind closed doors, I assume that the CPD's main reason for excluding the latter candidate mainly had to do with him being a threat the traditional party model. Because ideologically, Johnson and his party are perhaps even more corporatist than both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (though I do admire Johnson for being more honest than Clinton, since unlike her he openly admits supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Citizens United).

As you can see, that fact hasn't stopped him from winning against the vastly more progressive Stein, even with young people. But don't take this as a sign that Johnson's agenda itself has more support; his advantage can mainly be explained by the media's blackout and smear campaign against Stein, along with the fact that Johnson's campaign has been able to outspend Stein's by taking money from big donors.

In reality, support for the Green's self-described eco-socialist agenda is very strong, especially with millennials. To prove it, I've created a list that compares the major issues included in the Green Party's platform to the situation of American public opinion.

• A living wage. 78% of Americans support raising the minimum wage, though only 48% favor an increase to $15.
• A universal right to social security. 85% of Americans think that social security is important to ensure that retirees can be financially secure, and 81% don't mind paying social security taxes if they know that it will help those who need the program.
• A universal right to education. 62% of Americans want college to be tuition free, and 48% would be willing to pay higher taxes to make it so.
• A universal right to health care. 58% of Americans would prefer a single-payer, universal health care system over Obamacare, including 41% of Republicans.
• Switch to renewable energy. 73% of Americans favor wind and solar power over oil and coal, with 67% willing to pay higher taxes in order to help the transition.
• Environmental justice. 56% of Americans think that the environment should be prioritized more than the economy, and 59% think stricter environmental regulations are worth the cost. 
• Sustainable agriculture. 92% of Americans think that sustainable farming practices are at least somewhat important, though only 52% avoid buying genetically modified foods and 52% prefer organic food.
• Democratize business. 83% of Americans think that the top one percent have influenced the economy to their advantage, 70% think that free trade deals like the TPP should not be allowed because they hurt American workers, and 70% think it's very important to regulate business.
• Democratize banking. 58% of Americans are in favor of breaking up the large financial institutions, with 61% having opposed the Wall Street bailouts in 2008 (both of which, if I may editorialize, they are absolutely right about).
• Progressive taxation. 61% of Americans think the wealthy pay too little in taxes, and 52% think the government should redistribute the wealth by taxing the rich.
• End corporate welfare. Though little polling data exists on this issue, a survey from 2011 found that only 29% of voters support corporate welfare.
• End America's perpetual wars. 78% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the War in Afghanistan, 59% think that the War in Iraq was a mistake, and 76% are against sending conventional ground troops to fight ISIS.

And predictably, on virtually every other issue, from ending the War on Drugs to affordable housing access to the elimination of nuclear arms, Americans side with the Greens. The problem, of course, is that the American party system doesn't allow for the views of the majority to be represented.

But not for much longer.

The future belongs to the Green Party

Given all the facts mentioned so far, we can say that Jill Stein and her party have won the moral debate, and that they're the rightful winners of this election. And since third parties have been left out of the political process for a long time, and the views of most Americans have aligned with the Greens for roughly just as long, we've been able to say the same during all the election cycles in recent memory. But none of that has been able to change the fact that the Green Party continues to mostly lose the electoral battle.

However, as you may be able to guess from this site's title, I believe that the wind will be at the Green's backs in future elections. As I made the case for in a past article, through a number of factors (most of which have to do with Clinton and Trump), by the time the next national survey of party affiliation is taken next year political independents will outnumber Democrats and Republicans combined. This possibility is further strengthened by a July poll that found 55% of Americans want a third party. That's significant because at the beginning of the year, 55% identified as either Democrats or Republicans.

Add that to the fact that such a trend is certain to continue, that the American progressive movement is continuing to gain strength, how the problematic health care system that the two parties have produced will drive more people to look for a better option as their insurance costs rise in the coming years, and how the historic wealth gap is bound to lead to a populist uprising, it's very much reasonable to expect the rise of far-left third party in 2018, 2020, and beyond. In order to help make this happen, I recommend you vote for Jill Stein this November (as long as you're in a non-swing state, at least), and support the down-ticket Greens who are also running this year.

If this sounds like wishful thinking, don't just take my word for it. Take the word of Robert Reich, the respected economist and former Washington insider who predicts that the Greens (or at least a different party with the Green's agenda) will "prevail in 2020." Or Jerry Kremer, the Empire.com journalist who wrote an op-ed that stated "It is possible that if both parties can’t find a more meaningful message by 2020, an independent candidate will emerge who will take away voters from both parties and win the White House." Or Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, who wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal all the way back in 2011 that predicted the "Death of the Duopoly" in terms of American two-party politics.

I could list dozens of other examples wherein mainstream, credible political observers have looked at the same factors that I mentioned and predicted the collapse of the traditional party model. An internet search for "death of the two-party system" yields numerous articles that back up what I've been saying. Though we all of course tend to interpret things through our own ideological lenses (some of these writers have claimed that the newly prominent third party will be centrist or even conservative rather than leftist), everyone who has taken a good look at the state of American politics have come to the conclusion that the current party system is not sustainable.

I know, this is all stirring stuff. But as we've seen during every other time the masses have tried to take over the political system during times of control by the elites, it would be naive to assume such an upheaval is guaranteed to materialize. Something radical might need to happen before the electorate becomes jolted out of its usual apathy and fights for a Green victory.

The good news is, the exact kind of event that could have such an effect is coming our way.

Well, to be more honest, it won't feel like very good news when you first hear it. I am speaking of a catastrophic financial crisis, fueled by a dept-based global economy that's made dangerously unstable by stock market bubbles, excessive monetary power for the world's central banks, and a banking industry that's rendered unregulatable by a failure on the government's part to break it up, which will wreak havoc over the unsustainable economic model that the two Wall Street-funded, neoliberal parties have produced. And when this crash hits, the supporters of status quo politicians will be faced with their moment of reckoning.

It's impossible to say when exactly this collapse will occur. It could easily happen sometime this year with one of the market disruptions that are expected in the next few months-the Federal Reserve raising interest rates in December, the fast-approaching rise in oil prices-but given how the stock market is in such a similar position to how it was right before the last economic crash, along with the other factors I mentioned, we can say that this crisis is imminent.

To tie this all together, I'll offer you another quote from that jaded political commentator James Kunstler: "In history, elites commonly fail spectacularly. Ask yourself: how could these two ancient institutions, the Democratic and Republican parties, cough up such human hairballs [Clinton and Trump]? And having done so, do they deserve to continue to exist? And if they go up in a vapor, along with the public’s incomes and savings, what happens next?"

It all depends on what you want to happen. But in the meantime, rest assured, Jill Stein is the true winner of this debate.

Why The Greens Are Going To Win

Late in the 2016 Democratic primaries, Huffington Post contributor Frank Huguenard wrote an article titled "Why Bernie Is Going To Win." Aside from the technical reasons he gave for why he believed Bernie Sanders' nomination was inevitable, such as his opponent's at-the-time certain FBI indictment, his main argument had to do with something far bigger. The emotions of fear and uncertainty that politicians like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have always used to succeed, concluded Huguenard, are no longer strong enough to be sufficiently exploited, which means that Sanders, someone who appeals to people's hopes rather than their more base emotions, is destined to become the next president.

For now, the institutional powers that Trump and Clinton are apart of have succeeded in stamping down the effects of this shift in public consciousness. But the shift itself has not gone away.

The societal transformation that Huguenard describes is just one of the reasons I believe that a massive surge in support for a populist and environmentalist alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties-which, by default, will likely be the Green Party-is certain to occur in the coming years. To echo Huguenard, the writing is on the wall, with an economic collapse coming soon which will destroy all notions that the Democrats are the party of the people, the two major parties rapidly diminishing in an electoral shakeup that will create a political vacuum, and the Green Party being our only chance to defeat Trumpist neo-fascism. All of these factors point to an astronomical rise for the Green Party, and I've gone so far as to put together a projection of how it could very well play out.

But this article is not meant to be a sequel for Hueguenard's earlier prediction. Because though I have high hopes for the Greens' victory in 2018, 2020, and beyond, as we've seen, there's always a possibility that such electoral upheavals can be suppressed when the oligarchy controls the process.

This article is an extension of the deeper part of Huegenard's point, which is that regardless of who runs the government, our society-and our species-is experiencing deep and meaningful changes for the better.

The strange series of ideas I'm about to present to you have nothing (directly) to do with electoral reform, the Green Party, or anything else you may have expected to be reading about. They instead have to do with the following animation.

This shape is called a hypersphere. Aside from being fun to look at, it's a visual representation of the nature of human history.

Think of the progress that mankind has made-population expansion, technological advancement, economic growth, and the other factors that have worked to create modern civilization-as if they were those lines that make up the hypersphere. As the lines are moving on the sides of the shape, not much about their structure is changing. This reflects the very long period in our species' past where the several million people on the planet were operating in technologically basic, mostly anarchical lifestyles that went virtually unchanged throughout the lives of both their grandparents and grandchildren.

But as the lines continue to move, they begin to come closer together, and the shape that they make turns into an increasingly narrow tube. The same is also the case for humanity's advancement, in that around 5300 years ago with the invention of writing, the pace of progress became exponentially faster. By 150 years ago, communication had advanced to instant transmission from long distances in the form of the telegraph, weaponry had advanced to firearms, and scientific knowledge had advanced to a full awareness of our planet and solar system's form. By 20 years ago, those three factors had advanced to the World Wide Web, atomic weapons, and an awareness of the structure of the universe itself had entered the general consciousness.

But these trends, along with the many other products of human advancement that are shaping the world, would have to one day come to a halt. Endless acceleration is impossible, and at some point human progress will need to pass through that extremely narrow area in the center of the hypersphere and start traveling back towards that steady, slow period it started out in.

And in a lot of ways, we've already passed through that threshold. Population growth won't start to decrease until an unclear number of decades from now, but since 1960, its rate has peaked and is moving ever closer to stagnation. Perhaps not coincidentally, the rate of economic growth, as well as social, scientific, and technological progress, has experienced a similar shift, having gone from a sharp climb to a relative plateau.

And as Jay Weidner, one of the authors of the presumptuously named but fascinating collection of essays The Mystery Of 2012 thinks, this could all amount to something positive. "In the Golden Age," he writes, referring to the period that humanity is entering as it breaks through the bottom of the historical funnel, "each day, each month, each year appears to be longer than the previous day, month, and year. Time is expanding in the Golden Age, and with that expansion, the anxiety and tension of the Iron Age [the age of rapid advancement] will disappear. It is a paradise, especially for those who survive passing through the wormhole, the null point at the center of the hyperdimensional sphere."

Indeed, our final destination in this wild ride through the singularity appears to be a return to a simpler, and in many ways more pleasant, time. The consequence of living in this extraordinary moment in history, where time moves at an unprecedented rate, is that those who live through it are forced to keep up. The manifestations of this phenomenon-especially apparent in America-have been schoolchildren wasting countless hours of their childhoods by doing an excessive amount of flawed academic work, workers putting enormous amounts of labor into jobs that pay them well below the fair equivalent, and a consumer-based culture that drives these people to frantically pursue superficial and often useless products. All of these things will give way to a more sane and happy society as the era that brought about their existence fades.

The big question, though, is what kind of price we'll have to pay to get there.

As I mentioned before, something has changed about humanity's general mindset. For the first time, the majority of people no longer hold the worldview that defines everything wrong with the previous age, which is to say the belief that greed, punishment, and exploitation are always necessary behaviors. Polls show that most Americans want to protect the environment, avoid military conflicts, have a society free of social prejudices, and an end to the massive gap in wealth. They've moved past the old paradigm's illusion of individual detachment, where each person's goals, problems and interests are a matter of no one other than themselves, and embraced the reality that every person is part of a global community as well as a global ecology. And they know that in order to survive, they must take care of their fellow human beings along with the planet itself.

In other words, they're ready to live in a society that fits the model of the bottom half of the hypershere, where the short-sighted thinking and reckless, material-based ambition of the top half no longer defines how humans wield their power.

But when you actually look at the state of the world, things appear to be moving in the opposite direction. The Democratic elite's rejection of Bernie Sanders has caused a major setback for the government's ability to meet its climate goals, with the best environmental candidate for president (with a realistic chance of winning, at least) now being Hillary Clinton, someone who's entire political philosophy goes against the actions she would need to take to fix the problem. And with the earth's average temperature having gone up more than 1.4 degrees since pre-industrial levels, not far from the 2 degree mark that scientists agree would do irreversible harm to the stability of the climate, it looks like the idea of leaving our world safe for future generations is so last decade.

And the inevitable transition to renewable energies, the one thing that may well ultimately save the species from total extinction, will be what causes it a lot of short-term trauma. As the world's fossil fuel reserves become increasingly less likely to be used in the following decades, due to both shrinking supplies and an increased effort from the masses to abandon a lifestyle that's killing the planet, it will trigger an unprecedented backlash from the oligarchy. Nafeez Ahmed explains this ominous possibility in his piece We Could Be Witnessing The Death Of The Fossil Fuel Industry-Will It Take The Rest Of The Economy Down With It?

Eager to cling to the last vestiges of existence, the old centers of power will still try to self-maximize within the framework of the old paradigm, at the expense of competing power-centers, and even their own populations.

And they will deflect from the root causes of the problem as much as possible, by encouraging their constituents to blame other power-centers, or worse, some of their fellow citizens, along the lines of all manner of ‘Otherizing’ constructs, race, ethnicity, nationality, color, religion and even class.

Have no doubt. In coming decades, we will watch the old paradigm cannibalize itself to death on our TV screens, tablets and cell phones. Many of us will do more than watch. We will be participant observers, victims or perpetrators, or both at once.

Don't get too worried, though-humans may be too busy fighting each other during these next few years to think about the climate or resource depletion. As an article titled Here's How World War Three Could Start Tomorrow (written a year ago) articulates, the world's nations have become not just more advanced in their levels of weaponry as history has entered its most active period in the hypershere, but they've grown more competitive with each other in their roles as world powers. Until some larger force comes into play that returns them to a more limited state, the risk of major global conflict will be ever-present.

However, the most immediate danger we'll be facing during our departure from the bottom of the historical funnel has to do with the main driver behind climate change, exploitation of natural capital, and war: money itself. About that economic crisis I briefly touched on earlier...I'm not joking. All of the evidence, from the fact that the housing market hasn't been this high in a decade, to the stock market having been behaving similarly, to the economy itself having been re-wired by the Wall Street bailouts eight years ago to be more vulnerable to collapse, points to the coming of what some think will be the greatest crash in history.

And that crash may have already started.

In the last 24 hours, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped 400 points, and the stock market, which experienced its least active period in 20 years from July 24 to September 9, has went through its biggest drop since the aftermath of Brexit. We'll have to wait and see if these events are the first in the quick succession of catastrophic shortages in currency that I expect to occur this fall, but even if we see little more such activity in the next few days, a true disaster is about to hit. And when the Federal Reserve tries to intervene, well...as the jaded observer in world events James Howard Kunstler puts it:

Events, not personalities, are going to demonstrate where things are at in the late-stage techno-industrial crack-up at hand. The shamans at the Federal Reserve have exhausted their repertoire of incantations for levitating the financial markets and, more ominously, the value of the US dollar. The prankish god they serve has arranged things so that the very faith needed to sustain their illusory influence will run down the drain as November 8 creeps closer. They must be getting awfully nervous down at the Eccles Building.

To sum it all up, we are about to enter, as the title of one of Kunster's books describes it, "The Long Emergency." Humanity, which largely bought into the societally unsustainable methods of conducting themselves during their feverish tenure through the hypersphere's top half, will as a result find the transition into the grand cycle's next phase to be difficult and confusing. When our past mistakes catch up with us, starting with this year's financial crisis, will we finally wake up to the deep flaws within our system and step up to change them? Kunstler doesn't think so. As he also says in that article, "We’re too unused to reality. We’d rather crash and burn than change anything about our behavior, or even our perception. Both Trump and Hillary are perfect avatars for this date with a hard landing. The disorder both of them are capable of inducing will be a spectacle for the ages."

I have good reason to believe Kunstler is wrong.

In the interests of brutal honesty, all of the events that I just described are likely to occur in the next few decades, and some of them (like the ecological collapse, the recession, and the depletion of traditional energy sources) are inevitable. But as I was careful to make clear the whole way through, I believe that human beings will survive it all. And yes, I believe civilization will survive as well.

I live in northern California. In addition to being one of the best-performing regions for both Bernie Sanders and the Green Party, there is another aspect of the region that the rest of the country can learn from: how its residents choose to manage their community. Though they reluctantly participate in the fossil fuel-based, import-driven system that affects all corners of modern civilization, there is a highly apparent effort among the general population to change how their economy functions. In addition to a wide demand for solar panels, bicycles as a means of transportation, and other practices that reduce one's carbon footprint, it's the way that the area produces much of its food that helps the likelihood of a sustainable future.

Organic, local farming, a method of food production that many, if not most, people in my area eagerly embrace, will prove to be an important part of healing the wounds we inflicted on the earth in the previous age. Because, as Nafeez Ahmed also explains in his article:

The idea of removing carbon from the atmosphere sounds technologically difficult and insanely expensive. It’s not. In reality, it is relatively simple and cheap.

A new book by Eric Toensmeier, a lecturer at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, The Carbon Farming Solution, sets out in stunningly accessible fashion how ‘regenerative farming’ provides the ultimate carbon-sequestration solution.

Regenerative farming is a form of small-scale, localised, community-centred organic agriculture which uses techniques that remove carbon from the atmosphere, and sequester it in plant material or soil.

Using an array of land management and conservation practices, many of which have been tried and tested by indigenous communities, it’s theoretically possible to scale up regenerative farming methods in a way that dramatically offsets global carbon emissions.

This means that if we can get all the inhabitants of the industrialized world to adopt northern California's approach towards agriculture, as well as decentralize the economy in most other areas, such as breaking up the banks so much that they operate on a local level and democratizing how business functions so that the workers control the wealth that they produce rather than the corporate executives, civilization can and will be saved. As history begins to move into the other side of the hypersphere and the old order violently implodes in on itself, if the methods that I propose are widely implemented, we'll be able to salvage the positive elements that the previous age produced-electricity, the internet, modern methods of scientific research-by simply detaching ourselves from the old, unsustainable lifestyle and building a new utopia of localized, and at the same time hyperconnected, communities.

Which, at last, brings us back to my original point: that even if Bernie Sanders or the Green Party aren't here to enact the legislation to help create such a world, we'll be able to create it ourselves.

Even as the old centers of power play out the final stages of their irresponsible game, a new model of societal function is emerging, and not just in my hippie-populated hometown. As Gal Alperovitz' recent article 6 Ways We're Already Leading An Economic Revolution reports, society is doing just that. To sum up the piece, thanks to the efforts of ordinary people in places like Philadelphia, North Dakota, Greensboro in North Carolina, Boulder, and more, we are seeing the creation of a system called the Pluralist Commonwealth, where local communities are free from control by bankers and big business, resources are produced and exchanged on an economically and environmentally sustainable level, and all methods of economic and militaristic imperialism are irrelevant. In other words, the makings for a very bright future.

And so several decades from now, after the Greens have (most likely) succeeded in transforming politics and the values that they represent have transformed society regardless, the grand cycle of time will have been completed. Humanity will have emerged from the insane vortex of the hypersphere's central point with both more knowledge and more wisdom than ever before, and in spite of a depleted (but still usable) supply of oil, an economy that they largely had to start building from scratch, and a damaged climate, they're ready to begin the long, collective healing process and continue living in peace far into the future.

Maybe I'm wrong in my political predictions. Maybe the Greens will be held back by the establishment just like Bernie Sanders was, and the phrase "See You In 2020" will become a sadly ironic memory. But if what I just described doesn't sound like a victory for the Greens' agenda, I don't know what does.