Genuinely Progressive Politics

For my final submission as an undergrad in the writing program here at the U of MN in 2002, I wrote a compilation of poems against a war that we had not yet entered, and which I knew with absolute certainty we would enter. I remember the feeling of powerless as my representatives responded to my letters with the platitudes popular at the time, that "Saddam can give up his weapons of mass destruction and avoid this war", and "we're not necessarily going to war."

Years later, my initial outrage over the war has been tempered, distilled and refined into an altogether different outlook. As events have changed on the ground for our forces, in the region of southwest Asia, and in the United States, so has my anger and determination changed course.

I recognize unequivocally that the U.S. can not count immediate retreat or withdrawal or "redeployment" of its forces from Iraq among its options. The options are simply not possible, they must be dismissed, and the culture of sixties activism reinactment must step aside now and let the march of time leave its customary mark of change on U.S. politics. It were the cruelest and most inhumane of actions if we abandoned our allies in Babylon, leaving them to twist in the wind.

For all the bandying about of the word "progressive" by Democratic candidates, I can't name a single political candidate in any race who I'd consider a future-focused leader. What I see in "progressive" politics is a crop of wilting sixties throwbacks trying to hold on to "progress" made between the end of the second world war and the Reagan administration as validation of their worth in contemporary debates. Get over yourselves. The actions, beliefs and answers from that era can do nothing for us in the post-9/11 third millenium. That's not progress, that's regress. And not a small amount of regret, I might add.

A vision of thirty thousand square miles of swamp land and scrub pine forest in northern Minnesota, winding little dirt roads and the slow recession of dry-rotten farmsteads crumbling to paper in an unpopulated rural wasteland is anything but "progressive". Farmers sitting at the end of the driveway, making diesel fuel from jugs of leftover cooking oil they bought off the local diner is not a "progressive" future. Thousands of acres of quaking aspens hushing the slow squeak of a copse of windmills is not a progressive or future-focused vision for Minnesota. It's a romantic fantasy of an eighteenth century Pennsylvania Dutch colony. Get over it.

The age of cheap petroleum and carbon fuel sources is coming to an end. Get over it. We have options, real progressive options coming out of our ears. And establishing a new economic infrastructure for post solar power-generation and transmission is something that the United States is more than capable of doing for itself. Kennedy challenged the U.S. to walk on the moon, and we did it. I'm challenging the U.S. to walk into an era where the sun is no longer the sole source of all energy here on Earth.

I mean, think about it. Oil. where does that energy come from? Chemical bonds stored up by plants and eaten by animals in organic molecules, then left to rot for a long time, right? Okay, but the energy in the plants came originally from the sun. Wind energy comes from the sun, as it heats up certain parts faster than others, the air swirls around. Simple enough, right? Hydroelectric power comes from the water cycle, which is solar driven. Solar power comes from the sun. Coal comes from fossilized plants, which get their energy from the sun. Wood power comes from the sun. Up until this point, with the exception of the handful of fissile power plants which have ever existed, all of the economic energy in human history has been derived from the sun.

Well, we only get so much of it per year. That, by and large, never changes. Now we're releasing those chemical bonds stored up for millions of years, and on the horizon we see a future where we can't get easy solar energy anymore. What do self-styled "progressives" propose?

More of the same. "Biofuels" made from corn, which amount to the equivalent of burning wood again. Throw in some windmills and a couple of solar panels, and everything will be happy and green, right? Not quite. Show me a solar-powered bessemer forge. Show me a solar-powered airplane. On-demand solar just doesn't scale to the needs of modern civilization. But wait! What about hydrogen fuel cells? Sorry, no dice. Those are just fancy batteries. They don't actually produce any energy. They just store it up for a bit.

No, the options on the table are anything but "progressive". No vision for the future of our country can responsibly gloss over this matter, and no solution to our problems in the middle east can do so either. I see them both as having a common solution. And that solution rests in the development of post-solar power production technologies, which we must export to the entire world.

This truly progressive vision is concordant with the conservation movement, but not dependent on it in any way. Promising advances in boron-hydrogen fusion technologies are within our grasp, dangling just before our eyes. Sonofusion advancements in Big 10 Universities in the last three years and innovations made by Bell Labs in harnessing the Casimir force hold similar promise. Dense and renewable power, no radioactive waste.

Now, a promise isn't the same thing as a guarantee, but the people who strike gold in this world are the ones who show up and dig. Fifty years from now we could live in a world in which every small town from Brainerd to Baghdad both ways hosts its own fusion reactor, and intercontinental flights are propelled by streams of ionized boron.

You want peace in the middle east? How about building real economic infrastructure so all those desperate and frustrated young men in Palestine and Syria can get married, buy farms, raise families and build schools without fear of depopulation and the wars that follow? How about greening over the desert with fusion-powered desalination plants? You can't wreck a civilization's economic means of existence and then just leave. You have to build them up better than ever before in history, give them hope and promise. Our forces should leave Iraq in better condition than the hometowns they left behind. When our soldiers can turn home to a nation that exports power to the world, they can do so with honor and pride. Don't we owe them that?

There are worse fates, after all, for a soldier and war veteran than to become an industrial or civil engineer. The end of oil is our opportunity for peace and prosperity, but not if we embrace a romantic fantasy of the "way things used-to should-be". "Progressive" politics must disengage with the backward-looking impulse that defines it. Greens, Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, everyone under the sun (and especially those who can see past it) have an equal stake and opportunity under "progressive" banner.