“The vision thing”

Recently Laura Flanders had on AOC and Chomsky:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6M9VxHLqV8

As an interview-ending question she asked each of them about “the vision thing.”

The phrase started during the late 1980s when George H. W. was trying to replace Ronald Reagan and was chastised for not having any overarching vision of where he wanted to see the country go.

He could have chosen from:

The early Thomas Jefferson: A decentralized country of independent and self-reliant pastoralists.

Alexander Hamilton: A new, vibrant, secular, modern geopolitical power.

Karl Marx: A highly productive, rationally planned, egalitarian commonwealth enjoying democratic abundance.

The early Bill Clinton: Influenced by Amitai Etzioni, an idea of incorporating a communitarian dimension into what he called the “Third Way.”

Barack Obama: Multiculturalist social democracy.

Donald Trump: A nationally-focused, economically strong USA.

AOC: Cooperatives. “We can live into the new society if we scale them up.”

Noam Chomsky still harks back to the New Deal period. That’s kind of depressing. The vision is almost a hundred years old. It hasn’t been realized. Things have mostly gone in the other direction.

SW: After a long period of forced downscaling and devolution we’ll wind up living (again) in diverse, localist-oriented bioregions.