Toward Omaha

on the search for shared values

A story you can tell locally and nationally, but I’ll start with a quick local version, followed by an invitation. The invitation is the important part.

The summer is increasingly looking like a moment when a series of economic and political disasters will coalesce. I’m hearing stories from local business owners, in my small town in the Los Angeles suburbs, about unpaid rent and utility bills — with some people suggesting that maybe half of local businesses aren’t sure about making it through the year. Energy costs growing rapidly, supply chain problems metastasizing, consumer spending driven by the last of the helicopter money and not looking sustainable. Meanwhile, our city council meeting this week looked like this:

Wearing masks in the third year of a pandemic, and going deep on the important role of a small suburban California town in European military affairs. But they also talked about a regulatory scheme for condiments:

This is government, now, these lost and useless people: an endless series of diversionary expeditions and symbolic performances that carefully ignore anything of substance or value — gestures about nothing, some as calculated diversions and some as the mere empty noise of a governing class that has nothing to offer. Government portrays, dimly and poorly, moving from symbol to symbol, while real action happens under cover of darkness. Click on this link if you have the patience to watch Interior Secretary Deborah Haaland shrug and stare blankly at a series of policy questions, not noticeably knowing anything about anything. I could give other examples, but why bother? I think a majority shows up to the discussion now believing that the news is a game, politics is empty, and we’re burdened with a governing class that only knows how to break things and impede most useful forms of human activity. The puppet show is a puppet show. Hope you’re noticing the Sussmann trial, by the way.

So let’s just move to the next step.

I recently mentioned the Omaha Platform, the formal party platform of the 19th-century Populist Party, not because they came up with good prescriptive measures that merit adoption, but rather because they offer the model of people who tried — who tried — to break out of the available avenues of discourse and action to find another way through a crisis. They said what they saw, in plain speech, and offered a set of proposals for dealing with it, and they did it in a political channel they created themselves.

So I propose that we all — all, in spreading circles, hopefully in a project that grows — look for a shared set of flat-ass rules, a list of must-protects that large numbers of people can agree to across lines of identity and status.

As things fall apart — and things are falling apart — what will you absolutely not stand for? What will you not give up, not walk away from?

Here are mine, or at least a start at mine:

The decline of the family is the result of political and cultural choices that harm us individually and weaken us socially. Jim Jones attacked family relationships because doing so made people more vulnerable. Healthy people protect family roles and connections. And so, for example, the legislation in California that frees 12 year-olds from a connection with their parents is all shameful and evil.

The hypersexualization of childhood is cruel and sick, and must be fiercely resisted.

The attack on free speech as white nationalism and a relic of an unfair society is a scam, a way of erecting barriers to resist power. The ability to write and speak openly is the foundation of a healthy politics and a healthy society.

Start with those — with people who are embedded in the context of family, with healthy relationships and an undamaged sense of self, able to speak and discuss without fear. That’s where I start.

Oh, and corporate power and state power belong in separate silos. It’s a real stretch, I know, but I think gleichschaltung may not be a healthy approach — as in, for example, government mandates that people consume the products of pharmaceutical corporations.

I welcome yours. If we wrote a new Omaha Platform, what would it say? If we could build our own politics, what would we do with it?