But, And, And ...
The ongoing American story will not be halted.
I have been describing a likely scenario for the resolution of our present political struggle. I have one more comment to make.
For many of us the likely resolution, a completion of a partisan realignment cycle, will not be ideal. It places the present Democratic Party in the Center, as a broad coalition of center-left moderates, serving the interest of many wealthy economic interests as well as token(?) adjustments to the “safety-net” and a more or less traditional foreign policy.
It will be a Party of sober realism. Workable compromises on immigration and climate change. A multilateral foreign policy with the customary “go it alone” exception to protect “American interests.”
It will be a shift from the Clinton/Obama/Biden orthodoxies, but incremental and protective of existing interests. The reforms passed by the Biden administration will be implemented in areas of infrastructure, education and childcare. They will likely be extended. We may, God help us, still be ensnared in a long war of attrition in Ukraine.
That is not say it will be viewed as a Party opposed to progress. Momentum alone is forcing more changes in our way of life than even the present stalemate can contain—technology policies, water issues, education reform, marginal changes in the tax rate, improvements to the transportation grid and harbors and waterways.
It will be American politics as we have known it, the potential effectiveness of government severely limited by a Constitutional structure that does not provide full internal popular sovereignty. We will have our democracy such as it is. Larger segments of the population will have to do with “bread and circuses.”
Automation will routinize production and standardize product. Inequality will take new forms but not diminish. Freedom will be granted and promoted within a framework of American values that privilege consumption and limit communal goals.
And within this grey framework, exceptional discoveries of science, remarkable achievements of art, individual pathways of freedom for those that dare to embrace their uniqueness and complexity, will abound.
There will be barbarians at the gates. There will be prophets in the streets. Some parts of the social/economic map will be little noted and largely avoided. It will be America. Still a promise. Still inspiring. Still an amalgam of genius and frivolity, hope and greed, kindness and suspicion. Large. Larger than we will realize and still heading toward the future led by unequal portions of saints and sinners.