"Where do we go after Trump?
This question becomes more pertinent as the soap opera administration seeks its own dramatic demise.
Yet before they can seize power from the president and his now subservient party, the Democrats need to agree on what will replace Trumpism.
...Yet this conflict could resolve itself in a new, innovative approach that could be best described as oligarchal socialism.
Oligarchal socialism allows for the current, ever-growing concentration of wealth and power in a few hands — notably tech and financial moguls — while seeking ways to ameliorate the reality of growing poverty, slowing social mobility and indebtedness. This will be achieved not by breaking up or targeting the oligarchs, which they would fight to the bitter end, but through the massive increase in state taxpayer support.
- Conflicting visions
But the tech oligarchy — the people who run the five most capitalized firms on Wall Street — have a far less egalitarian vision.
Greg Fehrenstein, who interviewed 147 digital company founders, says most believe that
- “an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people.
- Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ’gig work‘ and government aid.”
- The socialist challenge
They appeal to progressives by advocating politically correct views on immigration, gender rights and climate change, while muzzling conservatives both inside and outside their companies.
But now the socialists have raised the ante for progressive credibility.
Going beyond green and identity issues, they are raising issues that impact most families.
Arguably their strongest case can be seen in health care, now the top issue with voters, according to Gallup. In some states, notably California, socialists are also backing a drive for rent control to help families cope with high rents and low wages.
A focus on such basic issues could reorder not just the Democratic Party but the country itself.
Faced with limited future prospects, more millennials already prefer socialism to capitalism and generally renounce constitutionally sanctioned free speech — not something you like to see in what will soon be the largest voting bloc in the country...
- A New Deal for oligarchs
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