Your focus on best practices beyond existing agendas, at a meta level, is what the new paradigm is about. Thank you for articulating it in these terms. But what do you think will get people off the agenda track to that meta level?

The spirituality of the left bears within itself a deep retributivism. This is why the left is so inactive and so strangely complicit with the prison problem. A retributive spirituality produces a tolerance for imprisonment as punishment, which will already remain a superficial and illusory kind of enforcement that produces crocodile tears and nothing but the lowest level of avoidance. Ultimately simply a bad behaviorism, it also is in bed with war machines.

The “new paradigm” has to have the following features:

* intractable problems must be recognized as occurring in a situation in which conservatism and the right have “one foot in the good”. The Iraq wars, for example, and the usually forgotten but most lethal sanctions on Iraq had feet in the good: never reducible to imperialism (the dominant caricature wielded so fruitlessly by the left), these massive, institutional measures, like the prisons, retained positive and righteous (and not mere “right”) features: they dealt with brutal dictators, installed democracy (and not simply new bad guys to play with) and issued in the name of safety.

The new paradigm has to include two essential and irreducible features: thought must be elevated as a value to the point that it is able to transcend the cartoonish level of caricature and reduction, with its hopes for a return to simpler times and argumentation. Nonviolence, the other of these two insurmountable desiderata, must be held out and maintained in thought. In so doing, it may then develop its almost automatic prima facie developments and inherent destiny, that of the deconstruction of retributive justice and the limiting of both caricature and, ultimately, the division between the right and left that ultimately reduces change to a matter of forces and taking sides in order to push agendas. Don’t worry, it yields a leftism anyhow, but it does so because of the best practices it evolves.

At a practical level, the dominant theme should become best practices. Programs and policies should be vaunted because they are best practices and not — even never — because they are “left”. This enables the humanization of discourse and contest.

We Americans have been living in a most luxurious way here this last half century. So I think people are ambivalent about real change, deep change, change that would make the cycles you speak of obsolete. I’m talking about societies that are not neurotic, but that have hygiene and a few other good things that have come out of the “age of progress.”

Carol Burnett says that “Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.” (And yet we have an overpopulated planet!) We can birth a new way of life.

Marx did not live in our time and place. What’s required now are loving and creative whole systems thinkers considering everything from psychology to conservation to design. I am drawn to the philosophy and practicality of permaculture.

The Left Forum covered a lot of ground, many topics, many fragments with a rallying cry for victory over capitalism, but without a vision and discussion of what comes along with that, what comes after, how to handle such a victory. What’s the offering? Not clear.

What’s needed is practical whole systems thinking and design by people who are psychospiritually mature and loving and whose work can really show the way, rather than show eloquence or ideology or identity.

Plato: Symposium circa 385–380BC

I have always noticed since starting to hang out with people on this side of things that it is so so easy for them to be divided-and-ruled. There are so many identity issues that people wear on their sleeves. And they easily fall into the trap of being easily offended. I have seen people break down panel discussions with important topics of information for us about other cultures and other countries because of unfortunate choices of words made by the uninitiated or unsophisticated, only to drag us into a long emotional discussion about our own sick culture, which we already know about!

I have also read quotes about how easily the labor movement leaders in the 1960s-70s allowed themselves to be divided-and-ruled over gender and sexual preference. There is a famous quote of some labor leader denigrating the New York Delegation to the Dems saying something like “only 1 labor leader, 4 fags, and 4 women…” etc. They don’t see they do it to themselves, and wonder why the money has been redistributed to the Top.

A George Pataki fundraiser event has all the colours of the rainbow present, rich ones, American Dream type immigrants, with no Kosher food, but awkward off-colour jokes from gangly older white men clearly out of place in midtown Manhattan and speaking with Freudian slips from the unconscious, but nobody takes offense. Everybody is there for ONE reason, not identity politics, but LOW TAXES! Which they’ve got all these decades!

There are a lot of issues with this Left Forum. The one that bothered me the most was how easily people said “let the system implode”. They disengage from all the levers we have to use to make this constitutional democracy work. Especially the Courts. When I suggested in a session the use of litigation to push constitutional interpretation, I got my head bitten off by an Old Communist! Trouble is, their idealized collapse will be very ugly here.

An old 1950s Regnery Press book I have here showcasing the German executive class behind the NAZI industries and white washing capitalism basically said “the left and communists offered no alternative, they wanted Hitler elected so the whole system would blow up and their Marxian dream come true.” I don’t know how true that was then, but I am certainly hearing echoes of it at Left Forum amongst those old folks!

Their desired breakdown will be a social collapse I doubt any of them really can imagine. There is no real left alternative power to counterbalance the hard right for all these divide-and-rule reasons you cite, unlike when FDR pushed through his New Deal. The backers of McCarthy took care of that, which means people like these old communists will be in jail in a few years if the 2010 Midterms with Citizen’s United unleashed is any gauge! They should think it through a little more, and be grateful we have a nominal constitutional democracy to salvage here, in which we could have more plurality of political viewpoint and balance of power if we challenged using all the levers available to us, rather than a single party totalitarian communist system. We have a single party totalitarian capitalist system now. From the vibe you get from some of these people, they definitely want Totalitarian, and they definitely don’t value anybody with a new viewpoint post Marx/Trotsky! Trouble is totalitarian doesn’t work. It creates another Oligarchy and eventually topples over! They don’t get that!