WHAT IS MISSING FROM THE (PAROCHIAL) PROJECT 2028
- Gonzalo Santos
- 49 minutes ago
- 3 min read
The Project 2028 supported by the 50501 People's Movement is excellent as far as it goes, restoring & deepening American democracy, extending the social contract, reining in the plutocracy, and restoring the free press; but it is not as comprehensive, audacious and bold as it needs to be - it falls short of including audacious proposals on two urgent, unavoidable, strategic sets of issues: (1) the international geopolitical & geo-economic questions of peace and just global governance; and (2) the international (migration) & domestic (ethnic/gender) social questions of peoplehood.
1. REDEFINING THE ROLE OF THE U.S. IN TODAY'S MULTIPOLAR WORLD TO CONTRIBUTE TO - NOT SABOTAGE - GLOBAL PEACE & GOVERNANCE AND THE QUEST FOR SYSTEMWIDE SOLUTIONS TO SYSTEMWIDE PROBLEMS (including climate change, nuclear proliferation, global inequalities, pandemics, and asymmetric development). This requires abandoning all longstanding U.S. imperialist goals and embracing a higher plane of global democracy. It means reigning in and winding down the U.S. military industrial complex. It means restructuring the United Nations to truly reflect and represent the world in all decision-making bodies. It means foreswearing unilateral interventionism and sanctions. Etc. etc.
2. LAUNCHING A SECOND RE-BIRTH OF PEOPLEHOOD IN NORTH AMERICA. The birth of nation-states in the Americas in the late 18th century and early nineteenth century was a world epochal event that unfolded, molded, and contributed to the rise and demise of British global hegemony, starting with wars of independence in the former colonies of British North America, and Spanish/Portuguese/other European colonies in Latin America & the Caribbean.
The unresolved contradictions of the original design - slavery & caste inequalities, and the role of religion and property foremost - let to further, now civil, wars and the "rebirth of the nation" in country after country (the U.S. in the early 1860s, Mexico in the 1910s, etc).
Furthermore, these "civil wars" propelled the rise of U.S. hegemony - first in North & Central America, and then throughout the Western hemisphere and, after WW I & II, onto the whole "Free World." The design of the nation-state - its definitions of citizenship, who fully belong and who did not, what social, political, and economic rights were the people entitled to - went through a dramatic transformation.
By the mid-1960s a clear design seemed to have emerged, in tandem with the culmination of U.S. global hegemony: the construction of the so-called "Multicultural Society" which included not just all ethnic groups and indigenous nations, but women and other gendered/disabled "minorities."
As U.S. global hegemony began its inevitable decline, first from the geopolitical & economic convulsions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this "liberal" multicultural society model began to be challenged by the rise of a "conservative" backlash. As all attempts - economic and military - to shore up declining global hegemony failed in successive "liberal"/"conservative" regimes, the central issue of peoplehood polarized into two opposing camps of increasingly bitter social/political contestation: ethnic/gender relations, the so-called "culture wars", and immigration policy. We have all seen the whole social & political life of the U.S. go into a tailspin over these issues, landing us where we are today under Maga Trumpism: a white/male/Christian supremacist revanchist movement that has captured the state and is demolishing the Multicultural Society like a wrecking ball. Concomitant to that is the redirecting foreign policy towards an aggressive reassertion of outright imperialist dominance of the entire Western Hemisphere (we are in the early stages).
Both developments as heading towards violent failures - domestically and internationally.
It behooves the progressive forces that are battling the now-dominant Maga Trumpist fascist/imperialist project, to incorporate bold new ideas of the redesign of peoplehood in the 21st century Americas, the expansion of citizenship and social contract beyond national borders and into transnational, regional regimes of belonging and welfare. A second rebirth of peoplehood is urgently needed for our convulsed North America and for other regions of the world, that finally addresses human migration and ethnic/gender relations in the context of a wholly integrated, but still inconclusive and malfunctioning world economic & geopolitical order.
Until and unless we incorporate the burning issue of peoplehood in North America, the now-convulsing U.S. nation-state will flounder and fail to restore social peace and harmonious regional integration with its neighbor countries. Shared immigration policy for the region - an entirely new migration regime for North America - is a necessary condition to move forward, both domestically and internationally.
