Nearly three years after my failed attempt to connect Americans and Russians toward creating an ecologically and ethically sound economy during the winter and spring of 1990, Bill Clinton defeated the Machiavellian president and former head of the CIA, George H.W. Bush.

I wrote to Robert Reich, who was slated to become Clinton’s Secretary of Labor. It was an attempt to salvage something from my experience, and see if the incoming Clinton Administration could implement the vision that took me to the Soviet Union during the short window of opportunity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended.

I didn’t expect a reply, but to my surprise, Reich not only wrote back, but said they had considered my proposed strategy for a latter-day Marshall Plan for Russia. (One that would also spiritually and intellectually benefit a moribund America.)

Reich said they had decided to take a multilateral approach, with a focus on trade with China. I appreciated and kept the letter, but had a bad feeling about the future, which has turned out much worse than I could have imagined.

Robert Reich has been back teaching at Stanford for years. He also writes a column for the Guardian. In a desperately hopeful last piece at the end of this annus horribilus, Reich writes, “The Trumpian nightmare has awakened much of the US to the truth about what has happened to this country – and what we must do to get it back on the track toward social justice, democracy and widespread prosperity.”

How could we have really been on track before and ended up where we are today?

“Outrage has been growing,” he intones, and “we are beginning to mobilise – not all of us, of course, but the great majority.”

That’s simply wishful thinking, and Reich’s last sentence undercuts his own premise: “I’d like to believe that the horrific darkness of this past year is a necessary prelude to a brighter and saner future.” This sentiment, which carries as much weight as a children’s book, fills me with sadness and foreboding.

The horrific darkness of the past year was not necessary, and it isn’t a prelude to anything but more darkness without a much deeper reckoning with the internal rot that’s manifested at the top in America. Indeed, without a revolution at the core of the culture.

The evil twins Trump and Netanyahu in their matching blue suits and red ties met at the Mara’s Florida house yesterday. The disgraced US president called for the pardon of the disgraced Israeli prime minister.

Historically, once barefaced evil is in power, only three things can remove it – death, war or revolution. The death of dictators changes little, war will change nothing, and political revolution is out of the question. But psychological revolution is very much in question.

Opposites contain the seeds of each other, and though resistance is necessary politically to a point, it inevitably produces more internal conflict when a social and political system has collapsed.

And that is the great denial of many people on the left -- that a system that failed to prevent the rise of a pathological liar and tyrant like Trump, much less protect the climate, the poor, and marginalised people of color, has not collapsed. “The opposition” is intact and growing, Reich and the hope peddlers keep telling us in a frantic attempt to convince themselves.

Opposition minorities, much less majorities, only apply to intact peoples and democracies. Progresssives can point the finger at the far right’s lies and cruelty ad nauseum, but it will change nothing. The reckoning has yet to arrive, since it isn’t between the good people of the majority opposition and the bad people in the minority supporting Trump and his clique.

The rot in America stems from decades of the people looking away, or not looking at all at the evils the government in our name have been perpetrating abroad. It stems from decades of unexamined principles of the consumeristic pursuit of happiness for me and mine, and the moral atrophy it ineluctably produced in the American people as a whole.

The reckoning is with the inward “numbness” that overcame America over thirty years ago, and to which the vast majority of people, across the political spectrum, have adapted by becoming dead. Sparks of decency on an individual level are a good thing, but they are exceptions that prove the rule, not the sign of “the mobilisation of the great majority.”

“Solidarity” has become a cliché, encompassing everything from taking real risks to protect an immigrant neighbor from being swept up in ICE’s net, to the feel-good protests this year.

There are very real economic hardships for the poor, and middle class, such as health care, food assistance, and childcare. But how can progressives talk about “standing on principle” when the chief concern of the majority of Americans is the “affordability” of their beef for BBQ’s, or how much crap they can buy at Christmas, or whether jammed flights run on time?

The proverbial chickens have come home to roost, and the rot Reich smells emanates from the corpse of the body politic. Liberals are light years away from the mourning that precedes a rebirth when they speak of protecting the system that gave rise to the likes of Trump, Vance and Miller.

What would a rebirth of the people look like? It will require the birth of a new culture, in which lies and cruelty aren’t opposite sides of the same coin as truth and kindness. Rather, the present reality is understood, met and negated within and without, allowing truth and kindness to prevail.

Martin LeFevre

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