The "Fore-Shock" Test

 
In March, 2017, I attended a three-day Climate Reality training session in Denver.  I remember many moments from that weekend - none more than the moment when Al Gore told us his understanding of change.  I didn't write down his precise words, but it went something like this: 

In life, change happens very slowly.  For a long, long time, it doesn't seem to be happening at all.  And then, suddenly, it happens all at once.

It's been five years since I heard Mr. Gore say this, but I've never forgotten his insight.  This year, I think, that promise is being fulfilled, right before our eyes.  Change, long so slow in coming, is beginning to happen.  And perhaps it's even accelerating.  Whether we like it or not - whether we're ready for it or not - we appear to be entering an age of revolution.

Since 2017, most of us have been living through hard times.  But they've also been slow times.  Times of hunkering down at home.  Times of caution.  Times when nothing - the availability of KN-95s, the re-opening of schools, the approval of vaccines, the end of the Trump administration - seemed to happen fast enough.

Now, my historian's instinct tells me we're about to start living through times that will move at a very different pace.  If I'm right, we'll need to keep in mind Dickens' words about the French Revolution.  Such times can be - at once - the best and worst of times. 

The worst part will, almost certainly, involve the baked-in consequences of our rapidly heating and dangerously over-populated planet.  There will be extreme weather events.  In portions of the world, centuries-old agricultural patterns will be disrupted - forcing millions of people to migrate in search of a way to make a living.  There will be wars over water, over arable land, over borders. 

In many cases, these changes will not - at least at first - appear to threaten our own way of life here in the Northwest.  But our respite will be brief, and we'd be wise to prepare ourselves for the worst.

If you're not in the habit of following the news on climate change, you'd be wise to start - because that news no longer consists of dire predictions for the future.  Events are transpiring daily - some big, some small, some which seem merely curious.  And if you keep an eye on these things, over a few months, patterns will begin to form.  A bigger picture will emerge.

You'll begin seeing the certain events as fore-shocks of a coming age of change.  The sense you make of all this will be for you to decide - but following climate news will be a kind of personal Rohrschach test.

Personally, for some years now, I've relied on The Guardian as my primary news source in many areas - climate among them.  I like that The Guardian is free, with virtually no firewalls.  The Guardian does, occasionally, ask for voluntary contributions - and I contribute.  But I like having the choice.

I also like that, being a British publication, it's far more globally-oriented than most US sources.  I especially like that I can use it to watch PMQs.  (If that's not your thing, no worries.  But I love it.) 

Moreover, while I'm a lot more centrist than most of The Guardian's opinion writers, I greatly admire George Monbiot, the paper's main observer on climate matters.  He's incredibly well-informed, generally manages to offer a fresh perspective, and somehow contrives to present terrifying news in a calm, rational tone. 

The Guardian also features a Climate Crisis section - with several new stories every day.  Today, for example, there's a story about rising suicide rates related to climate "doomerism" - focusing on the April 22 death by self-immolation of Wynn Bruce, an American Buddhist and climate activist who set himself ablaze on the steps of the Supreme Court.  Wynn's self-sacrifice reminded me of the protests of Vietnamese Buddhists at the height of the war in Southeast Asia.  Those protests were dramatic, but seemed to happen in another world.  Wynn was a 50-year-old photographer from Boulder, Colorado.  

Today's other stories are less sensational, but they illustrate the wide reach of the climate crisis.  One is about a large study of sleep habits around the globe.  In parts of the world where air conditioning and electric fans are not widely available, there seems to be correlation between hotter nights and serious sleep loss. 

Another story involves a 50% decline in the harvest of the tiny seeds used to make Dijon mustard - due to heating in the areas of France and Canada which provide the greatest part of the world's supply.  

Now, I can easily imagine how climate deniers would dismiss each of these stories.  A man who sets himself on fire might be mentally ill.  The fact that millions of people in India and equatorial parts of the Third World are missing sleep won't necessarily cause comfortable First-Worlder to lose sleep.  And one can, I suppose, live without Dijon mustard.

But two or three stories a day - some catastrophic, some on a more personal level, some even curious - and you start to realize that the worst of times might well be upon us.

At the same time, there's beginning to be reason for hope from - of all places - the world of politics. 

Just today, news comes from Australia's national elections.  After nine years in power, the Liberal Party - which is actually a conservative party with a disgraceful record on climate - is out.  The Liberals' loss doesn't seem to have come about because their traditional rivals - the left-leaning Labor Party - did especially well.  The real change comes from new seats won by the Greens, and even more, from successful challenges to Liberal incumbents from centrist, climate-oriented candidates running as independent "teal" (blue-green) challengers. 

Indeed, in much of the truly democratic world, new parties and candidates seem to be emerging to challenge existing power structures.  And often, these new people are relatively centrist on many issues, but dead serious about the climate. 

In this regard, Emmanuel Macron - just re-elected to a second five-year term as President of France - must be considered an early leader.  But this year, in the United States - and particularly in the Northwest - there are encouraging signs of centrist challenges to the two-party duopoly.  

In Washington state, Chris Vance, a former chair of the state's Republican Party, quit the GOP in 2017 and became a member of the Lincoln Project.  This year, Vance is taking steps to form a new, centrist party in Washington.

In Utah, the state Democratic Party has decided not to run a candidate against incumbent Republican US Senator Mike Lee - throwing its support behind independent Evan McMullin, a sane conservative who challenged Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in a handful of states in 2016.

And in Oregon, long-time state senator Betsy Johnson - a former Democrat - is mounting a well-funded independent campaign against the newly-nominated candidates of the two major parties, Tina Kotek (D) and Christine Drazan (R).

To the best of my knowledge, none of these American challengers is outspokenly pro-environment.  All three seem primarily concerned with staking out a position nearer the center than either of the two major parties. 

I wish them luck.  But my sense is that mere centrism will have pretty limited appeal in a time of rapid change.  The Climate Crisis is pushing its way onto the stage.  It will not be denied.  And politicians who fail to address it will - if not this year, in a very few years - find themselves talking to increasingly fewer people.

Late last winter, when I decided to run for the Oregon House of Representatives, I was motivated by two issues - the Climate Crisis, and the crisis in American (and Western) democracy.  To me, these two issues seem inescapably connected through the impact of big money and corporate corruption on our politics. 

I'll go into my thinking in later posts - and on the campaign trail.  But in terms of simple, pragmatic political strategy, it seems to me that it will be impossible to build a new, centrist movement or party on the basis of something as uninspiring as mere centrism. 

Indeed, that approach seems to be taking a tattered page out of the Democrats' and Republicans' play-books:  You don't need a vision of a better future.  You don't need to address great challenges.  All you have to do is say, "Vote for us.  We're not as bad as the other guys."

That ain't gonna work.  Not in these times.

For me, the Australian "teals" got it right.  We do need the sort of unity more centrist, problem-solving candidates can bring to the table.  And the proper starting-place is for new candidates is to address the greatest existential threats we're facing - the threat of a heating planet, and the threat of losing our ability to govern ourselves democratically, at a time when we truly need effective leadership.

At any rate, that's what I'm betting on.

Eight-score and Eight Years Ago

Three months ago, as I began pulling together my campaign for the Oregon House, I thought mainly in terms of three related isssues:  

     - My entire lack of confidence in both of our major political parties, dating back some 42 years, but growing more pronounced over time;

     - My alarm at the threat to constitutional government posed by the Republican Party's abandonment of all commitment to ethical and legal constraints - surely, even politics has some constraints - and by the Democratic Party's feeble, finger-wagging response to Republican lawlessness; and
 
     - My sense that - at a time when the gathering Climate Crisis threatens the habitability of the only planet in the galaxy known to be habitable - the United States, which should be leading the world, appears barely able even to govern itself.

I have argued for decades - in my old newspaper column, in the classroom, in conversation, and occasionally in this blog - that these three issues could be addressed if a small, but determined, group of citizens took steps to create a new and effective political party. 

Such a party, I have insisted, would have to appeal to citizens disenchanted with both major parties, and ready to take action.  Most of these people would, of necessity, find themselves in what is called the political center.  But the party need not be - and in fact, should not be - defined as centrist.  

Attempts to build "centrist" parties inevitably fail.  In democratic politics, the center is nowhere.  It is a negative space. It is defined, not by a vision for the future, but by the relative positions of the two existing parties.  And both of the two major parties are obsessed with the near-term - specifically, with winning the next election.  They have no greater idea of the future than that.

Moreover, in the United States, the political center is not a fixed position.  For decades, the midpoint between the two major parties has been shifting steadily rightward, as the Republican Party moved from the intellectually-respectable conservatism of thinkers like Russell Kirk to the ignorant, superstitious, angry populism of Pat Buchanan, then Newt Gingrich, then the Tea Party, and finally, Donald Trump. 

Which populism long since ceased to be conservatism at all, as it morphed into a kind of fascism. 

During these same decades, the Democratic Party - for all its rhetorical commitment to the latest fads in acceptable newspeak - has continued to be what it has been since LBJ:  A collection of disparate tribes, pretending to be a movement.  A top-down establishment machine committed entirely to maintaining the illusion of unity in order to assure its own electoral survival.  A feckless, leaderless, rudderless asssembly of incompetents.  The Democratic Party of the past fifty years has been of no use to anyone but its own, aging incumbents - and the co-opted acolytes waiting expectantly to succeed them.

In such an environment, a new party committed merely to occupying the center would be compelled to shift steadily rightward, simply to maintain its position between a party gone mad and a party with no coherent principles.  

The third party America needs - and which the world desperately needs for America to produce - would have to be far better-defined, more principled, and more combative than a merely "centrist" party. In present-day America, where politics has become increasingly like civil war, a new party would have to be prepared to fight, and fight ruthlessly. 

Nor could it commit to a goal of "bringing people together" in some sort of join-hands-and-sing-Kum-by-ya fantasy.  America is too divided for that.  Unity will come - if it comes at all - when new leaders emerge who are capable of establishing a clear sense of movement toward some credible vision of the future. 

Think Lincoln at Gettysburg, reminding us that America must be an example to a waiting world of what free people can do - of, by and for themselves.  Think of FDR and Churchill proclaiming the Four Freedoms.  Remember Kennedy aiming for the Moon.  Remember Dr. King's dream. 

Vision.

Put it another way:  If America is ever re-united, our unity will not be the goal, but rather a by-product of pursuing some great, ennobling goal.

Today's Democratic Party is utterly incapable of providing such vision,  And the vision the Republican Party offers is dystopian.  

It is important to understand the reality of our situation.  The problem is not the Republican Party, alone.  The problem is a two-party system in which the Republican Party must be taken seriously.  The problem is a system in which the only alternative to the Democrats is run by insiders who insist on nominating the only candidate who could possibly lose to Donald Trump in 2016. 

Insiders who inist that the Democrats nominate a bland, doddering old buffer to have any chance of defeating Donald Trump in 2020. 

Insiders who look likely to lose both Houses of Congress in November - and the White House to Donald Trump, or someone even worse, in 2024.

The problem is not the Republicans.  The problem is the absence of an effective alternative to the Republicans.

The problem is both major parties - and the duopoly they have created.  The problem is our tolerance for unlimited campaign contributions from the rich and powerful.  The problem is gerrymandering.  The problem is elections in which superannuated incumbents are assured of perpetual re-election.  The problem is the system by which major-party candidates are chosen - and other candidates "discouraged" from running at all.

In short, the problem is the two-party system. 

A successful new party would have - like Hercules - to strangle two serpents in its infancy.  One red.  One blue.  There is no "better" alternative between these serpents.  Both are toxic, though their venoms differ.  Both must be strangled. 

And to do this, the new party would have so stand for, and fight for, very clear principles - even if those principles happened to be found largely in the rational center of present-day options.  The new party might be, in Michael Lind's phrase, radically centrist. 

What is important is that the new party be active,  aggressive, and audacious.  

The task of building such a party will be, indeed, Herculean.  But is there any chance such a party could be created?  

The short answer is - Absolutely, yes.  I have long argued that America's modern failure to produce a successful third party is the fruit of our schools' and universities' lamentable failure to teach our own national history.

All my adult life, I've heard repeatedly - from people holding degrees from reputable institutions - that America has never had a successful third party.  Which is nonsense.  Today's Republican Party began - in 1854 - when anti-slavery members of the two major parties (Democrats and Whigs) quit their respective parties, embraced their former rivals, and founded various state "fusion" parties. 

These new, state parties quickly evolved into the national Republican Party.

How quickly, you ask?  The new party, which began organizing in the summer of 1854, captured the White House in the Election of 1860 - elevating Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency.  By the following spring, it also commanded both Houses of Congress.  

In less than seven years, this new, third party went from zero to complete control of the Federal government, as well as the governments of most of the northern states.

Anyone who has been miseducated to believe that America has never produced a successful third-party should do a bit of research into this stirring tale. Wikipedia should suffice, but if you're serious about history, I suggest finding an old copy of David M. Potter's Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861.  It's a great book - my favorite single volume of American History. 

If you're pressed for time, Chapter Ten will more than reward your investment of a few hours.   

My point is this:  A third party is absolutely possible.  It's also absolutely necessary.

The question is:  Are Americans of our time prepared to do what our forefathers did, eight-score and eight years ago?