There is a culture war in America, roughly along urban-rural lines, (or liberal-conservative, secular-religious, educated-ignorant, rational-superstitious, etc.), and I think liberals have been reluctant to participate. Meanwhile conservatives have fought tooth-and-nail against every form of progress. Healthcare, education, they never gave up fighting abortion. They even bring it to trivial & ridiculous issues, like “the war on Christmas” and Starbucks’ cups.
And they’ve pretty much won, liberals aren’t going to take back congress any time soon, let alone the many state legislatures conservatives control. So instead of the federal government, or even the state government, let’s use municipal governments!
I was looking at this cartogram of the 2016 election and how virtually all of the urban areas are blue, and started thinking, “hey, if they want a culture war, let’s have a culture war!” The big cities are already the economic drivers, and right now they subsidize all the rural areas. The cult of idiots are intent on destroying healthcare, social safety nets, progressive goals of all sort. So let them have that. The cities should pick up the slack, take care of people themselves.
First we’ll need to demonstrate progressive policies really can work. Higher wages—we should end homelessness by simply giving every homeless person a home. Decriminalize drugs & focus on rehabilitation efforts. Reform the bail system, use “day fines” to make things more progressive. Figure out how to circumvent mandatory sentencing. Deal with immigration in a more sensible way.
But then we should go further. The cities should aggressively recruit young people from the rural areas to work in the cities.
I guess a major hurdle will be dealing with gentrification. We need to end poverty in the cities, raise the poorest, least fortunate, up to the standard of living everyone deserves.
Implement the Second Bill of Rights as conceived by FDR.
We’re always saying how the blue states subsidize the red states anyway, right? And the conservatives want to destroy government, and at the moment we don’t seem able to stop them. The cities can take care of themselves. With vertical farming we can even make them food independent.
The GDP of New York City is more than a trillion dollars; LA, more than $700 billion, Chicago, more than $500 billion. There’s no reason that cities should have any poverty, they should be more than capable enough to provide the least fortunate among them with food security, housing security, health security—all of the things that every human deserves.
