There’s a thing about me I don’t like. I come across as acerbic, caustic, negative, altogether critical. That’s not me. I love three things in life, disco, my little puppy Snowy, and my partner, and there’s nothing that makes me happier spending a day with all three. But when it comes to this — writing, thinking, doing the work of understanding the future…well, especially when it comes to America, my friends, I’m forced into the uncomfortable and unwanted position of being a harsh critic.

And yet I don’t say anything good because, well, I haven’t had anything good to say. Trump? Ryan? McConnell? Their minions, enablers, and flunkies? Are you kidding me? These guys will be remembered by history as presiding over something very much like a collapsing Weimar Republic. Which brings me, thankfully, to some long welcome good news.

Elizabeth Warren. Day after day, week after week, she just knocks it not just out of the park — but sends the ball hurtling out of the decrepit, dead galaxy of American politics. Proposal after proposal, idea after idea — each one radical, transformative, and a little bit brilliant — to fix what’s really broken in America. Phew. Sweet relief. I have nothing critical to say, for once. Nothing negative whatsoever. LOL — what the? Umair, what happened to you?!!11 But this isn’t about me. Let’s think about all this for a second.

All this, because there’s a lot of it so far. The most recent announcement was basically to erase student debt, by a kind of massive debt jubillee. Then there’s the idea to for 40% of corporate boards to be made of actual employees, not just Other Companies’ CEOs or vulture fund managers. Then there’s the idea for the government to manufacture the basic medicines that corporations won’t, because they’re not profitable enough to meet ever spiraling “share price targets.” Then there’s the idea for a network of public childcare centers. And then, and then, and then. I could go on.

Are you getting a sense of the scale of all this yet? It’s not being discussed enough — because, of course, she’s a woman, she’s an intelligent woman, she’s a fierce woman, and the American political establishment, whether cable news or lobbyists or Beltway insiders is basically a drooling, smirking frat house. Bros talking about bros celebrating bros for being bros. Yawn, eye roll. They’re not talking about it because, well, frankly, it’s way beyond them.

Elizabeth Warren’s ideas, in whole, make up a plan to finally turn America into a truly modern country, my friends. Elizabeth Warren’s proposals, taken together, amount to something very, very much like a Marshall Plan for a collapsing, ruined society. They are the most radical and transformative — and most brilliant thing — to happen to American not just in our lifetime, but quite possibly ever. It learns from the greatest lesson of the 20th century — and hopes to apply it to America.

Yes, I mean every word of that — and you can judge for yourself if you agree or not shortly.

Now, at this point, sometimes, Americans interject — “our society’s not collapsing!” Sorry, yes it is. Longevity’s falling, incomes are shrinking, happiness is plummeting, suicides are skyrocketing. These mega trends aren’t true anywhere else in the world, apart from maybe North Korea. Then there are the other trends, the sociocultural ones, the weird and gruesome ones — school shootings, murder-suicide epidemics among the elderly, old people working at Walmart. I read the other day that 20% of American kids don’t drink water at least once a day. What the? You get the point. America is as close a thing to a collapsing society as a rich country has ever been in human history.

(And yet the truth is that nobody forced that fate on America. American collapse is a self-inflicted tragedy. The Soviets didn’t do it. A bullet didn’t need to be fired. It’s a thing made of capitalism, of supremacy, of patriarchy. Supremacy made Americans — enough of them — say: “I won’t pay for their schools and hospitals! Those dirty, filthy people are beneath me! Why, they used to be my grandparents’ slaves!” Capitalism made Americans believe that everything could be solved with greed, selfishness, markets, and corporations. And patriarchy made it impossible for anyone but pedigreed white dudes who repeated all the above, ad nauseam, the old refrains of “self-reliance” and “individual responsibility” and “free markets” and so on, to get any kind of attention or influence whatsoever.)

The fact — and you’re not going to like this — is that while the rest of the rich world, notably Europe, modernized, America never did. It never went anywhere — and so today, it’s going backwards, having reached the limits of its old paradigms and attitudes of capitalism, supremacy, and patriarchy.

Let me make clear what the word “modernizing” really means. Europe gave people expansive, robust public goods — public healthcare, education, retirement, incomes, savings. All these things — within the span of one human lifetime — lifted European living standards to the highest point in human history, ever. That’s a stunning achievement — because at the beginning of that one lifetime, Europe was a ruined, devastated, collapsed society, wrecked by war and hate, ravaged by holocaust. And yet by about 2000 or so, there hadn’t been a happier, richer, healthier society — ever, period, full stop.

Are you seeing the lesson — and the parallel — yet?

The greatest lesson of the 20th century, one of the greatest in human history: Europe in just one human lifetime, build the world’s most genuinely prosperous societies, ever, period — by modernizing, giving people expansive public goods — that were written into constitutions, made legal obligations, and finally turned into shared social norms and cultural values. Today, if you ask the average European — “should people not have healthcare?”, they’ll look at you like you were either crazy, an imbecile, or…an American.

Elizabeth Warren’s is brilliant, because it asks the question implicit in all the above. I don’t know if her team even knows they’re asking the question, but they are. That question is this. If Europe could, in the space of one human lifetime, by modernizing, build the world’s most genuinely prosperous societies — its happiest, healthiest, and wealthiest — can America finally do that, too? Can America become a truly modern society — one that finally learns the greatest lesson of the 20th century?

(I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s true that there’s a part of America that’s dead set against ever being truly modern — against ever seeing others as equals, against ever giving others true freedom, against justice in the true sense. That part of America still stands for that old mindset of supremacy. We’re number one! We are the true volk! We are the masters of the world! You know the type, I’m sure. But for too long, American politics has been subservient to this American self. But that is exactly why America never modernized.)

How many Americans want a truly modern society? These days, if polls are anything to go by — the vast majority do. Something like 70% of Americans want public healthcare, affordable education, working public transport, decent retirement. When we ask Americans — blind — what kind of society they prefer — they choose a distribution of wealth that looks like Scandinavia’s, moderate, gentle, humble, not extreme and schizophrenic, like America’s.

Americans want a kind of radical, transformative progress — they want a modern country. So why is that even though Elizabeth Warren’s the only one really offering it to them — she’s ignored, when she’s not being silenced, taunted, or mocked? We both know the answer to that question, and it’s the frat-house wolf-pack mentality of the aw-shucksing patriarchy that the American establishment is made of. The story that establishment won’t tell, then, is this one.

Elizabeth Warren’s plan is as brilliant as it is urgent, necessary, radical, and transformative. There are so many elements to it that by now it can only be best described as something very much like a Marshall Plan for a collapsing society. And yes, that does a disservice to her, so why not just call it the Warren Plan? (are you listening, Warren campaign? But I digress.)

The correct way to see Elizabeth Warren’s radical agenda, her transformative vision — and the truth is that maybe even she and her team don’t quite see it this way yet — is that it is a Marshall Plan for a society which never modernized. It is a plan to modernize a backwards, broken America — not just by investing in the places it needs investment, but first by transforming it as radically as possible institutionally. Capitalism won’t make basic medicine? No problem — let’s you and me do it, as a society. Corporations won’t give people childcare? Whatever — let’s do it together, as a people. Predatory vulture capitalism isn’t working anymore? Duh — let’s put real people on boards, not just CEOs and hedge fund managers. Do you see what I mean a little bit?

It’s exactly these changes — not just these “kinds” of changes, but exactly these changes that ignited Europe’s Great Leap in human progress. Her corporate governance plan is German. The childcare aspect is Scandinavian. The proposal for free public college is European as a whole. And so forth. Elizabeth Warren is doing something no American leader has done in our lifetimes…learn from history and the world, their most transformative, radical, and powerful lessons. And if that sounds trivial, go ahead and ask yourself why nobody else bothered to do it.

It took Europe just one human lifetime to rise from the ashes of devastation and ruin — because it created the world’s first truly modern societies. It created institutions that gave people the basics of a genuinely good life — it funded them generously — and those institutions went on to create radical new norms, values, and attitudes. Today, Europeans grimace at the idea of people without healthcare or retirement — they look in a kind of baffled amazement at Americans. But that’s because of one lifetime of progress has changed their mentalities entirely, shifted them forwards, matured them, taught them the power of a true common wealth made of genuine, generous public goods. So that one lifetime of progress is also how far behind America is, too.

But it’s not just one lifetime of any kind of progress. It’s one lifetime of the most radical and transformative progress that’s happened in human history. Marx would have been astonished to see Europe making healthcare and retirement and income rights in the 20th century — and so would Adam Smith, Hume, Bentham, and Rousseau. Europe’s Giant Leap forward in human thought, progress, ideas, morals — and economics — goes unnoticed, because we English-speakers are only supposed to celebrate capitalism and its Nietzschean ubermen — but it shouldn’t. The European Miracle is one of history’s greatest.

What the Warren’s Marshall Plan hopes to do then is to recreate the European Miracle in America. To turn America into a truly modern society, and join its peers in other rich countries, like, for example, Canada did. If it can do that, then Americans can enjoy the living standards Europeans and Canadians take for granted, too — (far) longer, happier, richer lives, fuller of meaning, purpose, gentleness, and truth, because they are less hammered with anxiety, riven by stress, broken by trauma, shattered by despair, all emotions that are too easily twisted into rage, hate, and violence.

It’s true that the old America — capitalist, supremacist, patriarchal America — will resist all that tooth and nail. They already are. Faux News and the mens’ righters (LOL) the mafia outfit known as the Presidency and so on. They don’t know any other way than the kind of fragile, infantile narcissism they’ve lived their whole lives long — “I must be the most predatory of all, because only the strong survive.” Roll your eyes, my friends — that kind of thinking dooms us all in the end.

And that should be exactly why the rest of us, my friends, the thinking, reasoning, feeling ones support Warren’s Marshall Plan for America, with all our might, passion, and fury. Every sensible American should want the European Miracle to ignite in their own collapsing society — and understand how it happened, why it mattered, and what it led to. And if they don’t…well, you don’t have to look very far for the alternative. How are the Trump Years working out so far?

Umair

April 2019