The reinvention of the "American Dream" in the middle of the Great Recession was one of the topics on the Aug. 29 episode of Fareed Zakaria's often informative, if usually ideologically unchallenging, CNN show "Fareed Zakaria's GPS" (see minute 31:27]). In the segment, author and business professor, Richard Florida, explained how economic crises often spur new waves of innovation and new ways of organizing life in America, what he called a "great reset." Florida's claim offers an important starting point for discovering big changes under way now and imagining what may be possible tomorrow.

While close scrutiny of some of the historical contexts of his ideas exposes flaws in his argument, generally, Florida made some valid points. His argument went like this: The decades of the Great Depression and the economic crisis of the 1870s "were the most innovative decades in American history." He argued, "What happens in these crises is America, particularly, invents new ways of living and working." He cited the transition from rural life to urban, industrialized life after the 1870s as his primary example.

The Crash of 2008 and Historical Materialism Florida's linkage of economic crisis to innovations in capitalism and social change generally are worthy of a hearing, but they don't come from a working-class perspective. (The analysis in "The Crash of 2008 and Historical Materialism" works better.) Florida cited data indicating that Americans are giving up on homeownership as an essential feature of the American dream and are looking for new ways to build communities, including returning to cities. Maybe this re-urbanization signals an important new demographic trend. But what is the big substantive change? That isn't explained in the segment with Zakaria. For a fuller development of Florida's ideas, one would have to go to his book.

Before rush out and spend the $10 or so to download Florida's "The Great Reset" onto your Kindle, however, I propose accepting his general argument and highlighting here some important possible big changes that are already happening. If urbanization, industrialization, and bureaucratic rationalization of life and ideas followed the 1873 crash, and globalization of markets, elevation of regulatory schemes (in the U.S. government and in international bodies like the World Bank, IMF, UN), and consumerism as true Americanism followed the Great Depression, what follows the Great Recession of 2007? Not all of the data is in yet, but there is strong evidence that the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession under the Obama administration will likely be as meaningful in terms of regulation and infrastructure development and modernization as the New Deal under Roosevelt, as well as significantly larger in dollar amount.

Despite his acceptable historical generalizations overall, Florida's ideological alignments peeked through. Aside from ignoring the fact that depressions and recessions hurt working families on a massive scale and typically take decades to recover from while the rich and powerful are often able to martial enough resources to squeak by, he offered no materialist explanation for these major changes, but rather saw big changes as "natural" and "organic" to American life. In addition, Florida gave little in the way of analysis of the new imperatives, logics, or demands of capitalism, as a system, behind the changes and seemed to insist the best solutions to problems and innovations do not center on radical alterations in the system of capitalism itself. Indeed, Florida's "great reset," as he told Zakaria, is not a "big top-down government reset." In other words, along with the positives, the crises that plague capitalism and unevenly impact social groups because of class, race, gender, etc. – particularly in America – are a natural part of life and outside the parameters of human control or design. And while Florida advocates major transformation in social life, he favors the status quo in terms of the property arrangements, and even seemed to express a preference for the ideologically conservative levels of public oversight and regulation that held sway in what he says is the outgoing social order. Simply put, Florida apparently advocated a discredited political superstructure with its old rules in a new social order founded on an unchanged economic system. So really what's the difference?

I agree that big changes are imminent and probably already underway. Rather than clinging to worn-out political, economic, and social ideologies, however, it's time to turn the page, especially on the discredited ideas of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism

The 2007 recession and subsequent financial crash of 2008 prompted the widespread delegitimation of the economic ideologies and policies most closely associated with the Republicans and the global right generally, commonly referred to as neoliberalism. (For further analysis of the connection of neoliberalism and the global right, see British economist Grahame Thompson's book "The Political Economy of the New Right." [1990])

I know, it's confusing. Republicans are neoliberals? Neoliberal, in this sense, refers not to being some new-fangled version of Jane Fonda, but to the general trend in economic and political thought originating with capitalist ideologies that insisted only the marketplace can bring freedom, and governments should leave them alone, literally laissez-faire. Capitalism works best – or only – when markets are allowed to self-regulate. Government or regulatory interventions are oppressive and cause economic problems.

In the late 20th century in the U.S., beginning with Reagan, the neoliberals, reacting to the successes of the New Deal and Johnson's Great Society in improving the lives of working families and inspired by right-wing economic libertarianism and previously discredited laissez-faire blather, won political power. They exploited patriotism and stoked fears of nuclear war with the Soviets aimed at military build-up and cobbled-together alliances with religious fundamentalist movements to gain power. Their real goal, however, was to advance the idea of the unfettered marketplace mainly by eliminating social programs and regulatory oversight that benefited working families and the poor.

This too followed a logic of capitalism. They believed that both the power of the state and the resources it is able to mobilize and rationalize should be returned to the capitalists in order to maximize profits. They sought to accomplish this goal not through the expansion of productive capacity and new innovations, but rather through massive redistribution upward (massive social wage cut, rich tax cuts, government subsidies to corporations) and through the formation of free spaces in which market speculation and manipulation can happen unfettered. But support for the "free" market is a pretense; only those sections of capital most closely aligned with the Republican Party benefited. In fact, public organizations as well as non-corporate, non-state actors were not recognized as equal market participants. The coercive authority of the state shifted from regulating financial markets to attacking labor unions, for example.

Naturally – if anything could be said to be natural – abuses, corruption, excesses, and general harm became a matter of course in this post-Reagan neoliberal reality. Enduring war, financial scandals, political corruption, environmental and health degradation emerged as symptoms of the general disease of neoliberalism, a world of unfettered capitalism.

Both deregulation and the social wage cut for working families are direct causes of both the Great Recession itself as well as its depth and endurance. Unfettered speculation that led to the bubble in the deregulated housing market sparked the financial crash of 2008, but the 30-year stagnation in wages for most working families (notwithstanding temporary improvements in the mid-1990s offset by noticeable declines in the 2000s) ensured the general economic contraction that began in December 2007 would become the deepest recession in 80 years. This general stagnation of working-class wages, the slashing of the social wage, and the dramatic five percent drop in middle-class incomes during the Bush years can be traced directly to the neoliberal policies advanced most fervently by the Republican Party.

So neoliberalism has been discredited; now what?

Public opinion polls suggest that between one-fifth and one-third of Americans view socialism as a solution to the problem. While I agree with this minority, it is clear that most people do not, and that even of those who view socialism positively, no consensus as yet exists on what that means. And those who spend much of their time discussing socialism in meaningful ways are often, for good reason, more fascinated with social and political developments in other countries or remain cynical about or disinclined to engage, for no good reason, the political realities in the U.S.

Instead of focusing solely on the intellectually abstract exercises associated with big "-ism" words, then, a more detailed look at what is possible and what is happening is worthwhile. Below, following Richard Florida's general thesis, I detail some of the big changes emerging in three vital social arenas: healthcare, energy, and foreign policy. I would emphasize from the outset that these three areas are linked in material and ideological ways, which I will elaborate below, that makes treating them discretely as nothing more than a rhetorical gesture at ease and clarity.

Health reform

First, no more defining example of the abuses of "free" markets can be found than in the health insurance industry in the U.S. From their beginnings, the corporations that dominated this industry avoided the fate of just about every other major capitalist organization in the mid-20th century: regulation and government oversight. After decades of spending literally billions, not to improve the quality of care or access to it, but to block "socialistic" efforts to regulate health insurance, the health insurance industry has just this past year suffered the first major blow to its autonomy.

With the passage of health reform, it is possible to show how the new law creates a potential arena for major new innovations in how this aspect of American life is rationalized and distributed. Regulation or elimination of the profit-creating schemes developed in the insurance industry are only one set of such changes, however. New technologies and the rationalization of distribution through a variety of schemes up to and including government-sponsored programs are other key ingredients. The logical – and moral – outcome is the complete removal of healthcare from the "free" market altogether.

The big transition, or "reset," coming out of this crisis that signals new patterns in how Americans live their lives may be centered not on a government "takeover" of healthcare – for now Florida may be right on this point – but on a rationalization through the formation of a mixed system of private and profits ventures designed to provide the most affordable access possible (not completely equivalent to universal healthcare with free access). Still, the idea that healthcare is a basic civil right emerged as a dominant theme in the contentious and poisonous ideological atmosphere engulfing the health reform struggle.

One part of health reform even hardline Republicans gave only token resistance to was the public investment in healthcare infrastructure. Republican Party leading lights like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, of course, denounced new healthcare technologies and community centers funded by health reform and the recovery act as scary "big brother" invasions of privacy and abortion factories respectively.

For the typical American, however, interactions with these innovations have provided vastly different experiences. Many people who have visited their doctor recently may have noticed her or the nurse tapping their medical data into a laptop computer. With this new technology, a patient's history can be stored on instantly accessible databases. Trends in a patient's medical profile can be pulled up immediately; the most recent information about cholesterol levels, diet, and medications, even local trends in communicable diseases, can be immediately studied. Some of the great medical mysteries can be instantly revealed, improving the quality of the care by providing patients and families with the latest knowledge about how to care for themselves and each other.

Seems like putting this data on computers is a big duh, right? Until now, with passage of investments as part of President Obama's health reform (and the recovery act), however, the recourses and capacity to do so on a grand scale have been absent for most parts of the country. Even access to high-speed Internet is still unavailable for an estimated 36 percent of the country. Obviously new health technology and more community centers, which right now serve 17 million Americans, will change the way millions of Americans live their lives, access and use healthcare, socializing both the investment and benefits of a transformed health industry.

Energy

One of the most noticeable linguistic shifts in recent years in public discourse has been the discarding of the words "petroleum" and "oil" as key ingredients of economic development and global power in favor of the word "energy." On the one hand, this shift resulted from the ongoing public disapproval of petroleum as a polluting, exploitative industry that drives much of U.S. foreign policy. On the other, the use of the word energy signals a broader recognition of the needed diversity of the industry to satisfy pubic needs and demand.

The drive for a coherent "energy policy" only barely hides the huge internecine battles within the capitalist class itself for hegemony in a changing industry. While Dirty Coal and Big Oil fight to maintain government preferences (subsidies and deregulation – the sum total of what the Republicans call "energy policy"), emergent and innovative technologies like renewable electricity from wind and solar power and alternative fuels (biofuels) have earned serious new investments under the Obama administration.

A former Lansing, Michigan area owner of solar power manufacturing business recently explained to me some of the historical trends and conflicts in this field. He said that in the 1970s, especially with the election of President Carter, enterprising types like himself jumped full tilt into the clean energy industry. "By the end of the 1970s one could open the phone book and find literally dozens of solar power-related businesses just in the mid-Michigan area alone (where he established his business)," he recalled. After Reagan infamously took down the solar panels format the roof of the White House signaling the government's lack of interest in promoting that emergent industry, however, the number of renewable electricity-based businesses collapsed to almost nothing in just a few short years.

Simply put, this historical episode revealed laissez-faire ideology to be little more than a myth used as a fig leaf to cover a serious struggle for power within the capitalist class. The alliance of the Republican Party with Big Oil (notably this alliances crosses partisan lines but the general configuration put here remains pertinent), and the Democratic Party's general preference for alternatives represents on a basic level this fundamental intra-class rift in the energy sector. This rift is sure to intensify as President Obama has recently called for eliminating tax subsidies for major oil companies in order to pay for new investments in job-creating infrastructure development.

These signs indicate the pendulum may be swinging away from old energy aligned with the Republican Party machine. According to Time magazine writer Michael Grunwald, the Republican Party's aversion to clean energy notwithstanding, one of the big changes America may be going through as a result of the 2008 crash is how it manufactures, distributes and consumes energy.

Grunwald writes, Obama's policies represent "the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world's largest venture-capital fund." Nearly $100 billion since February of 2009 have been allocated for clean energy alternatives such as wind, solar, new mass transit, electric cars, new battery technology, biofuels, "smart grid" technology, and R&D in the field. Grunwald noted that investments in related infrastructure, such as expanded broadband access (which administration officials have correctly compared to electrification in the South under the New Deal) and institutionalized research facilities, are "game changers" that will permanently "reset" how Americans live their lives.

Of importance also is the administration's effort to regulate carbon emissions produced by outdated energy technology and Big Oil and Dirty Coal. While climate legislation that would create an EPA-administered marketplace for carbon emissions (and generating billions for investments in cleaner and clean alternatives) has stalled in Congress, the administration has pushed forward with direct agency regulation of emissions under its Clean Air Act authority.

Of course, Grunwald's optimistic claims and the success of comprehensive climate legislation, which could put the seal of permanence on this energy transformation, depends most immediately on whether or not Republicans, who typically deny the need for transforming the energy infrastructure, regain their former political dominance, or even return to control parts of the government with effective veto power over these changes.

In the bigger picture, the intra-class struggle over energy can benefit the working class. Right now, leadership in the drive for public investment in "green jobs" (in alliance with the venture capitalists who want to foster the emergent clean energy sector) as a remedy to the unemployment crisis has revitalized the labor movement. Capital alone cannot drive this big change in how Americans live their lives; it will be the level and quality of involvement by working people, not just in doing the work that creates this change (e.g. building wind turbines, creating paper-free healthcare records systems, or retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency), but in the political struggle over the socialization of its benefits that will determine how working families ultimately experience that "great reset."

Foreign policy

Will the Great Recession drive big changes in how the U.S. relates to its global neighbors? Unfortunately, a clear conception of how this might play out hasn't been fully envisioned by strategists of a non-imperialist U.S. foreign policy. With a few exceptions emerging in the labor movement in recent years around criticisms of "free" trade agreements and human rights crises, the coherent formation of foreign policy concepts has been almost the exclusive domain of the ruling class and the specific capitalist interests into which it is divided.

On occasion, such as with the case of the war in Iraq, the peace movement and its working-class allies have successfully forced, along with a confluence of events, an alteration in that policy. More rare, however, has been the formation of comprehensive alternatives that match the scope and depth of policy initiatives managed and concocted in ruling-class think tanks.

Those of us who are proponents of a non-imperialist U.S. foreign policy spend so much time on the short end opposing war, nuclear build-up, and excessive and wasteful Pentagon spending that little time is devoted to formulating a comprehensive policy outline. Thus, most alternatives to war and military build-up in ruling circles center on things like "smart power" and non-military forms of intervention that hardly measure up as non-imperialist. So far, "anti-imperialism" alone remains an unsatisfactory alternative as it contains little in the way of constructive and positive policy alternatives. Unfortunately, many on the left who rigidly define themselves as "anti-imperialists" tend to disapprove of the formulation of policy alternatives and to characterize such proposals as "liberal" or as concessions to the imperialists.

Former Cuban President Fidel Castro's recent description of the U.S. military industrial complex (M.I.C.) – really a profit-motivated multinational and technological complex of corporations – as un-Constitutionally transcending the personal authority of the Commander-in-Chief, a judgment that coincides with the warnings of outgoing Republican President Eisenhower almost 60 years ago (earning him affiliation with the Communists in the minds of hardline John Birchers), deserves to be kept in mind by those who would strategize a non-imperialist foreign policy. That power nearly always ensures that military and defense-related industries feed unfettered at the trough of the public treasury and, as evidenced by the slight punishments for the hundreds of identified atrocities committed by the private security contractor formerly known as Blackwater, now XE, almost always avoid serious public scrutiny and government regulation.

The sheer power of the M.I.C. isn't the only social force to contend with regarding foreign policy. With 28 million veterans in the general population and a general positive feeling about them, mostly of working-class background and orientation, patriotism and loyalty to service members are often and easily manipulated by Republican Party leaders to promote build-ups, interventions, and wars. While the peace movement has taken this aspect of U.S. culture into account, effectively building organizations of pro-peace veterans in the process, principled anti-imperialists and non-imperialist strategists have yet to take this under serious consideration in their own rhetoric. While there are complicated legal, human rights, and ethical issues that will remain unresolved here, the reduction of U.S. troops to "dupes" or even criminals is indefensible, especially in consideration of the "poverty draft."

Despite the almost insurmountable power of the M.I.C. and the popular "structure of feeling" towards patriotism and military service, as Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams might have called it, and the realities of the power of the M.I.C., the Obama administration has risked its political capital to set in motion some major changes. At the outset, he proposed the biggest slow-down in military spending since the end of the Cold War's "peace dividend." He ended combat operations in Iraq and signaled his intent to begin troop withdrawal from Afghanistan next year. He called for major reductions in the world's nuclear arsenals, a proposal that earned him a Nobel Prize for Peace; and he successfully negotiated a new nuclear weapons reduction treaty with the Russians. In addition, Defense Secretary Gates has put on the table $100 billion more in cuts to help reduce the deficit, a proposal that incomprehensibly has been more or less ignored or viewed cynically by the left.

Enduring support for service members is combined with strong emotional patriotism among the general American population. In addition, and perhaps even more critical to our analysis here is the fact that the historical alliance between the U.S. state and corporations with profit-motivated interests in other parts of the world – a relationship formed out of the logic of capitalism to seek access to labor and commodity markets in other parts of the globe – has promoted also a history of animosity among both competing capitalist and nationalist forces in various parts of the world. The intricacies and dynamics of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the very hot wars in the satellite states provide prime examples.

Consider Afghanistan, for example, in which the U.S. has fought a war now for almost nine years. The very forces that have been labeled as "enemies" were given material aid and training by U.S. operatives and surrogates in the 1980s during the "holy war" against the Soviets. The mujahideen earned one of few exceptions to widespread Islamophobia in U.S. popular culture and politics in those years, with numerous Hollywood movies like Rambo III and major media personalities like Dan Rather celebrating (sometimes with doctored footage) their anti-Soviet activities.

Unfortunately the pro-Soviet regime which had seized power in 1979, despite excellent policies that expanded educational opportunities and healthcare access, promoted economic development and trade, broke down traditional gender barriers, tried to shift power from local religious leaders to secular authorities with a redistributive land policy and more, failed to win broad popular support and fought internecine conflicts that exposed its authoritarian and coercive character. To save itself, the regime called for Soviet intervention, knowing the USSR would go to great lengths to protect a friendly government along its southern flank in a region with important natural resources and rapidly shifting global allegiances. Now, the forces that Reagan touted as freedom fighters, after seizing power as the Taliban and providing a safe haven to the perpetrators of the Sept. 11th attacks, are a threat so imminent they require, according to proponents of intervention and war, a military force of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and the full array of powerful war-making technology the U.S. can wield to kill even in the remotest part of the country.

Terrorism strikes fear, and Americans have become professionals at being afraid, even if at times they are able to suppress it in favor of focusing on work and family issues, watching good movies or entertaining sporting events, getting involved in civic activities, or thinking through the immediate cause of anxiety. Republican Party-affiliated media at FOX News and talk radio have tried promote a culture of fear by linking all Muslims to the Sept. 11th attacks and have succeeded in convincing most of their audiences that President Obama poses a grave danger by siding with those who favor "Islamization" of America. Fear, thus, can become a material force that governs the nature and parameters of foreign policymaking, a fact that cynics dismiss at their peril and demands a special attention to national security issues.

So far, a description of existing realities doesn't help us fully understand how innovations in foreign policymaking could change the way we live, vis-a-vis Richard Florida's thesis. An end to war, military budget cuts, and nuclear weapons reductions may not themselves seem like they add up to innovative changes, but living without war enables us to shift our priorities. Right now, those priorities are focused on the need for job creation, a fear that has for most people outstripped anxieties about what may be brewing in Afghanistan. Still, we're talking about the absence of destruction (through war) rather than the presence of innovation.

A non-imperialist foreign policy might resemble the stated foreign policy of China, a subject that also comes up in an earlier segment of the Zakaria show, though viewed through a distorting lens of that country's supposed threat to U.S. global leadership. (As if a shared, multilateral leadership would be such a bad thing.) As China tells it, its foreign policy, termed "peaceful development," stems from its desire for internal economic development based on building peaceful, mutually beneficial global economic relationships created not through coercion and military might but through shared interests. As a result, Chinese companies and development institutions have invested in projects in Africa, for example, where the U.S. simply has, for the past decade, failed to show much economic interest.

China has been forced to build up militarily out of ongoing pressures from the U.S. M.I.C., but those who interpret these as threatening signs really misunderstand Chinese goals. While U.S. capitalists and pro-imperialist ideologues tend to include military build-up in the general category of economic growth (if you cut it, they say, it will cost jobs), China's leaders say that sort of economic activity as mostly negative and destructive. Military contractors exist to maximize profits, just like every other capitalist corporation; but in order to create new orders, old equipment has to be ordered, used, and new demand must be created. Such a theory of creative activity may work when talking about cellphones or ham sandwiches, but if its cruise missiles, their only use-value is destructive and violent.

(Discussions of how to handle the complicated trade, currency and debt relationship between the U.S. and China cannot be resolved here except to say that both governments can most effectively address each others' concerns at the bargaining table rather than non-diplomatic discourse, i.e., military gestures.)

A non-imperialist foreign policy would start, more broadly, from the stance that the national sovereignty of other countries includes their right to determine the level of socialization of their economic development, not simply adherence to absurd abstractions about "free" markets imposed by outsiders. In other words, neoliberal interventions should be discarded in favor of cooperative global exchanges.

To address national security issues adequately, a non-imperialist foreign policy must envision it as multifaceted issue comprised of more than simply unilateral militarization, or having bigger and deadlier weapons. U.S. national security also involves multinational engagement of issues of even economic development, sovereignty, unbiased concerns for democratic and human rights, fair approaches to environmental sustainability, support for equal treatment in international organizations, and prioritization of diplomatic efforts.

Then what?

Unlike the significant changes that have been set in motion domestically in the areas of health and energy, the major transformation in our lives resulting from potential new foreign policy concepts have yet to be realized. The power that seeks to maintain the status quo, centered in the M.I.C., is so great real change will depend on the effectiveness of the unevenly matched social movements (premised on broad concepts of alliance) for peace, fair trade policies, and cooperative international arrangements. Ideals and hopes for cooperative, non-imperialist relationships will have to be themselves transformed into imperatives and necessities.

One such necessity is the reality that success in making meaningful change in the health and energy fields depends in no small way on saving the resources now expended on military build-up and war. A new energy policy, many proponents of alternatives convincingly assert, will make interventionism less of an imperative. Creating the resources to sustain innovative transformation will require non-hostile international relationships undisturbed by the threat of war or violence – just to cite some of the possible linkages and relationships among these fields. If economic development with high rates of socializing the benefits of such development replace profit as motive for participation in and sustenance of the big changes in these three fields described above, deeper political and economic transitions would be realizable. Human beings may grow to enact and thrive in a world of lesser inequality and greater democracy.

(Photo by Leoncillo Sabino, courtesy Flickr, cc by 2.0)