Rescuing A Noble Experiment

Sara Robinson from Campaign for America's Future offers the following five ways to make America Fascist-Proof. What I love about her ideas is the discussion of how social justice and equality have to be at the foundation of moving in a more positive direction.

Here is what she suggests:

1: Ironically, passing health care reform would be a colossal trust-builder, as I've argued before. The right wing knows this, which is precisely why it's recruited the very people most likely to benefit from reform to fight as their shock troops against it.

2: We need to re-establish the rule of law. You cannot have a credible democracy as long as there's so obviously one standard of economic and civil justice for the rich and well-connected, and a very different one that's designed to make victims out of everybody else.

3: We need to get serious about investing in education. It's well understood now that our broken health care system is right on the bottom of the barrel among industrialized countries; but most of us don't realize that our schools are in the same comparatively wretched shape.

4: No democracy in history has ever survived with our current levels of inequality. There's no reason for the middle and working classes to trust anything about a system that's so clearly rigged to suck money straight out of their pockets into the tax-free offshore bank accounts of the wealthy -- who, of course, turn right around and use that money to buy off our government, so they can suck up even more of our economy for themselves.

5: We need to focus on restoring our basic liberal institutions. In 2005, Chris Bowers noted that progressive ideology has always been disseminated through four major cultural drivers: the universities (and related intellectual infrastructure); unions; the media; and liberal religious organizations. Knowing this, conservatives set out back in the 1970s to undermine all four of these institutions -- and over time, they've largely succeeded in blunting their historic capacity to disseminate and perpetuate the progressive worldview.

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