Do you have many mental pictures in your head of exact moments in time and what was going through your head then?

I remember being on a plane taking off from snowy Zurich last November 7. I’d read previously about the concept of Universal Basic Income and the Swiss referendum on UBI last year. It intrigued me, so I set out to read everything I could about it on flights to and from Switzerland. On the long plane ride back, I read Thomas Paine, Henry George, some pieces about the Nixon proposal, Bertrand Russell, and some contemporary proponents like Guy Standing. I remember as we flew over Long Island Sound, the shadow of the Swissair jet gliding over the surf and shore, thinking that the next 4 years, likely to be much like the previous 4 with divided government shepherded by moderate liberal caretakers in the Obama mold and caught in stalemate, could provide a pause during which we reassess which policies are most imperative for our future, given the threat of climate change and global economic precariousness and transition brought on by a new automation revolution. Maybe nothing could be done during this peaceful logjam, but we’d be ready when the damn broke with a new vision for a just society for us to transition to.

Over a year later we’re calling furiously to stop the eventual raising of taxes on those who can least afford it and fretting as a pedophile prepares to possibly enter the Senate due to cultural and political tribalism in part disguised as religion.

This certainly wasn’t what any of us expected.

I’ve been reflecting over the past month on the past year in America and the reality of a President Trump. As an avid reader of alternate history and speculative fiction, I continually find myself considering the question: “what would the past year of a Clinton presidency looked like?” And not necessarily from the perspective of what a Clinton government would have accomplised (likely little with a GOP congress), but what time has been lost pertaning to new ideas and policies given the activism and action dedicated solely to rear-guard action against the Trump regime in protection of social justice.

This look back became even more painful for me given the admittedly unexpected revelation from this past year that Hillary Clinton, who was roundly criticized by the left for running a tepid campaign centered on the behavior of Citizen Trump, almost ran on a platform of Universal Basic Income (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/12/16296532/hillary-clinton-universal-basic-income-alaska-for-america-peter-barnes). Her proposal would have been inspired by the existing Alaskan Permanent Fund and the proposals in the book With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough by environmentalist and entrepreneur Peter Barnes. To go with that, apparently Clinton had become obsessed with the idea of massive scale disruption caused by automation and the AI revolution on the campaign trail, but was advised against addressing the issue by staffers (https://www.inverse.com/article/36412-hillary-clinton-ai-automation).

It was these and related issues I was more than ready to hash out with the left (and to appease basic income advocates who insist that we remain less partisan for now, those on the right an center who are interested). Whether basic income or a jobs guarantee was the best way to ensure economic security. Whether we should fear AI as a step towards the Skynet system from the Terminator movies or whether we should embrace and encourage automation on the road towards a sort of automated luxury communism, as some have called it, with tongue only slightly placed in cheek. What the taxation and funding of said program could accomplish, one popular example being the taxing carbon to not only fund a basic income or carbon dividend, but also to hopefully disincentivize pollution until the point which it has mitigated the effects of climate change by eliminating carbon emissions (though eventually necessitating a new funding source). Taxing robots, taxing data, taxing financial transactions. And this is all just what could have been pertaining to ideas around basic income. It all could have been an opportunity to revive the marketplace of ideas that the Occupy movement attempted to create in 2011, but never quite turned into a political program.

Instead, it’s hastily organized protest actions to protect the basic rights of immigrants, LGBTQ persons, and the poor. It’s frantic calling to the members of a solid GOP majority to please not vote to rewrite the tax code spefically to punish left-leaning constituencies. It’s refreshing Twitter to see if some sort of unlikely salvation will come to us from a former FBI director, as a sort of Hail Mary sent up to bring us “one weird trick to impeach a President.”

Back to that airplane. There’s dozens of Bertrand Russell quotes I could use to end this on a more positive note, to not make us look back angrily at what we could have done with our time had we just been disappointed in a Clinton presidency rather than fearing the end of the republic. But perhaps the one I’ll always inevitably come back to is this: “The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.” My whole idea of us “losing time” isn’t helpful in this moment. The future is what we will ultimately make of it with the ideas that are lying around. But there’s nothing stopping us from making sure those parts of ideas aren’t good ones, even when faced with despair. Forward.