Real Politics: A Manifesto for the 2024 Election

Real Politics: A Manifesto for the 2024 Election (Or Any Other Election)

I recently posted an essay declaring (somewhat exaggeratively) that there are no politics anymore in 2024. I did this by taking a rather harsh look at the current events and activities of mainstream, mass-media based politics, as exemplified by the two Presidential candidates for the two main parties. 

But of course, there is a lot more to politics in 2024 than Trump and Kamala. There is even more to national electoral politics than Trump and Kamala: personally, I plan to vote for Peter Sonski of the American Solidarity Party for President this November. Neither Trump or Kamala, though, has actually done any governing in the last four years, in a nation with massive ongoing social and economic crises and a world with numerous ongoing, extremely bloody wars. These ongoing crises and wars are still in the care of Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin, and (more hopefully) numerous governors, mayors, city councilors, and local school board members throughout the world. When we think of politics in 2024, we should think, first and foremost, of these people: and, speaking ideally, not think of Trump and Kamala at all.

Still, as I argued in the preceding essay, there is certainly less to politics in 2024 America than there has ever been before, as polling and television and the Internet alike all show very clearly: more people than there have ever been before paying rapt attention to only the latest news on the two Presidential candidates for the two main parties, and otherwise not engaging with any political issue or candidate or official at any level at all. And of course, the two trends are nearly correlatives, since the more the mass media is full of stories about Trump and Kamala, the less room there is for anything else: even discussion of the actual laws and officials doing most of the governing for most Americans.

Still, when all is said and done, I feel the need to justify myself from the charge of merely being a political opportunist declaring a plague on both the two largest houses while ignoring the rest of the village entirely--or worse, a centrist. Someone might well say to me what a critic said of Chesterton's Heretics when it was published, that he will defend his own beliefs when he has seen me defend mine. Chesterton responded to this challenge by writing probably the most widely read work of Christian apologetics in the 20th century, Orthodoxy. I can only respond by writing this blog post. 

At the outset I should say that this will not be an attempt to defend the broader, theoretical bases of my own approach to politics. I have done some of that otherwise in this blog, on many occasions and in tedious length and yet without giving what most would regard as a proper exposition of what I think and why. Perhaps I will get to that theoretical exposition one day.

Instead, this essay/blog post/manifesto will be something closer to what I would, ideally, like to see from political candidates in the 2024 election: a list of issues and broad programmes to address them that could actually be implemented politically in America today. As I declared not too long ago, I think that in a democracy political candidates ought to largely be engaged in acknowledging the pressing problems of the citizenry at large and trying to fix them. I firmly believe that all of the below issues are real, pressing issues in American life which ought to be dealt with politically--and which could in fact be meaningfully addressed by the actual American political system in 2024--and which, furthermore, are not issues that are constructed according to the symbolic binaries that presently define American political life, or which would necessarily and intrinsically appeal to only one side of the American political spectrum and alienate the other. Of course, if and when these issues became mainstream political issues, they could and would no doubt be processed in these terms, for basic structural reasons if nothing else.

Please note that the below proposals do not really cover foreign policy, which is not only arguably the most important impact America has on the world, but also is the issue that is most determined by actual Presidential elections. Foreign policy, though, is one of the issues least addressable via democratic means, which is why, even in America, it is run on a basically monarchical model; and, in any case, I have covered the basic issues of present-day American foreign policy elsewhere in this space. The below proposals also do not directly cover immigration policy, which, at least as currently debated, most boils down to more fundamental debates and structural issues with American foreign policy and economic policy. To deal with its complexities fully would take an essay of its own, however.

My own politics are radical enough that the below proposals--though far more radical than anything a major American party has proposed since the New Deal--are actually far less radical than I would ideally aim to achieve if there were no constraints at all on my decision-making (which is of course absurd). I do, however, genuinely want to implement all of the below proposals; and so might you.

Take what you can get; and what you can get here, from me, should not be taken for more than it is worth.

Animals: or Housing Reform

The worst Supreme Court decision of the last fifty years was decided this year, and, in keeping with American life in 2024, got virtually no press coverage. 

I am speaking, of course, of Grant's Pass v. Johnson, in which, by a remarkable 6-3 majority, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that punishing homelessness with criminal penalties did not constitute a cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution.

Allow me to step back for a moment. I am (speaking theoretically for a moment as I said I was not going to do) someone who believes (as do the Popes and the Church Fathers and Aquinas and the Catholic Church) that human law is a rational, prudential application of the universal natural law to particular circumstances and a particular society. 

Human law qua prudential is necessarily imperfect, limited in scope, and tailored to particular circumstances. However, to be a law at all, in even the minimal sense necessary to be complied with, a law must be rooted in nature; which means, first and foremost, the nature of reality itself, and then the nature of human beings. This is not to say that there exists within nature (or anywhere else) a code of straightforward laws applicable directly to every situation in human life without the exercise of prudence: it is to say, rather, that human law is an exercise of human practical reason, and that practical reason, to be rational, must take into account the nature and ends of the things it is attempting to legislate for, which is to say, principally human beings.

First and foremost, human beings are rational animals; that is, they are beings who aim at knowing and receiving the good rationally and interiorly and hence freely. For this reason, one of the basic axioms of law is that it aims to educate, guide, and correct human behavior, and not merely to regulate and direct it in its totality. There is no law telling me how to cook my omelette; and even such laws as aim to prevent me from poisoning said omelette and offering it to my employer require and presume my voluntary concurrence. 

A nearly universal outgrowth of this axiom is the principle that the law criminalizes and punishes primarily human voluntary actions, and not merely human involuntary statuses or attributes or particular human existences.

There are any number of things that human beings do and are that are, in general terms, inconvenient or annoying or even painful for other human beings. If I am driving home from work, my presence on a well-travelled highway may cause a great deal of annoyance and inconvenience to my fellow man; if I am extremely attractive, my presence in a public place may cause discomfort to other people inadvertently attracted to me; if I am very tall, I may prevent someone from hanging a shelf or chandelier in an otherwise convenient and aesthetically positive location. If I have a third eye in the back of my head, this may prevent children from engaging in wrongdoing behind my back. And so on and so forth. 

Nevertheless, we generally do not attempt to criminalize any of the above statuses, even despite the fact that there are readily available remedies that, in theory, I am failing to take in each of the above scenarios. I could, in general terms, not go to work, or switch jobs, or even arrange my commute to drive home several hours after everyone else. I could put acid on my face or otherwise disguise and disfigure myself to prevent inadvertent attraction. I could have surgery to shorten my limbs and/or spine. And I could have my third eye removed, or else wear a little eyepatch on the back of my head (which all the cool kids are doing this Brat Summer).

Still, though these statuses can be characterized as voluntary insofar as the above people fail to choose to make use of these remedies, we rightly describe them as non-voluntary in the conventional sense targeted by legal punishments. We do not punish people for being tall, or attractive, or for commuting to work, or having three eyes, or anything remotely similar. And indeed, this is so for an even more basic reason, namely, that none of the proposed "remedies" are in fact consonant with the actual nature and hence ends of the human beings involved, and that some of them positively contradict those ends. If I stop going to work, I will not be able to afford to pay rent, and will become homeless; if I drive home two hours later than everyone else, I will spend less time with my friends and family; and if I have surgery to shorten my legs or reduce my attractiveness or remove my third eye, the result will be a painful process resulting in bodily mutilation. All this is, one hopes, simply common sense. 

When it comes to homelessness, however, this basic common sense has, apparently, broken down. The status of "not having a home" is in fact punishable by law in many towns and cities throughout America, including both "conservative" and "progressive" localities. This despite the fact that this status is in no straightforward sense voluntary, and indeed in common sense terms (backed up by polling) is usually treated as actively involuntary, as something that the overwhelming majority of homeless persons would avoid if they could. Even more disturbingly, most actual laws attempt to get around the optics of punishing poor people for being poor by criminalizing not homelessness itself, but rather the allegedly voluntary acts of eating, sleeping, or defecating on public and private property. 

The Supreme Court justices, like all historical sophists, made use of just this logic in arguing that that the actions punished by such bans are voluntary enough (since homeless people are acting when they eat, sleep, and defecate) and unbiased enough (since these actions could in theory be performed by non-homeless people also), and contending these bans are simply one tool in the toolkit needed by localities to address this crisis, a way to ensure that homeless people in fact take advantage of the pathways available to them to escape homelessness. (The existing case law allowed such laws to be enforced where there were sufficient shelter beds available for all homeless people in a locality; the Supreme Court majority, though, pooh-poohed at this requirement as overly restrictive.)

All of these sophistries can, however, be dispensed with very quickly according to the same logic laid out above. Eating, sleeping, and defecating may be to a limited extent voluntary according to the place and time of their carrying out; but they are, in general terms, absolutely necessary acts for the basic maintenance of human life. More than this, they are in general good acts, acts according to and for the flourishing and happiness of the human person. To criminalize, for a whole class of persons, the fundamental acts necessary for life and happiness is to simply criminalize the life of those persons.

Of course, many would no doubt declare that they have no such intentions, that in fact such criminalizations are merely the necessary (but unfortunate) means to ensuring the happiness and flourishing of both local communities and homeless persons themselves. After all, for anyone to defecate or sleep or eat in a public place is to cause inconvenience and harm to all those around them, including homeless persons themselves. 

Chesterton long ago pointed out the sophistry of framing laws that theoretically apply to everyone, but in fact, both in design and in practice, are applied only to the poor: and this sophistry is present sevenfold where the acts in question are, for some people, necessary for living. That such laws, as Chesterton was well aware, date back in some form to the English Reformation--including the "hideous sense of fun" with which vagabonds were punished in England for "lacking visible means of subsistence"--but that in no way makes them more consonant with the practical reason and natural law on which human law is necessarily grounded. Such laws are, fundamentally, more a crime against reason than even the good, since they attempt to separate out the intention and reality of law in a manner that is fundamentally self-contradictory and unworthy of rational beings. 

The crime against natural law, against the human person itself, comes in the use of law, not as a tool, a means, for the ends and necessities and good of human beings, but as a tool against this good. That human beings, legal citizens, eat and sleep and defecate and, in short, live, is the evil which the law seeks to correct, the crime which it seeks to punish. 

Of course, even here, common-sense, cynical Americans might well point out that the law is not in reality seeking to correct the existence of citizens, of actual members of the political community and stakeholders in its common good; for while homeless people may be legal citizens of these United States, they are not treated as such either by the government or by themselves. 

Fundamentally, one might rationally argue, the problem of homelessness in America is precisely the existence of large numbers of people, alleged legal citizens, who in fact and in reality lack any stake in the actual common good of the communities in which they inhabit. It is this lack of a share in the common good that leads to most of the (very real) inconveniences and harms caused to communities across America by the homelessness: people sleeping and defecating in public, leaving drug needles in parks, vandalizing buildings and equipment, begging for money, yelling or otherwise harassing people, setting up tents and shelters on sidewalks and in general acting in ways contrary to those expected of citizens of a particular locality whose basic mode of life, and not any laws to the contrary, leads them to live in houses, walk on sidewalks, recreate in public parks, and not ask for money from strangers on the street. The legal fiction may say that homeless people are citizens like any other; but the reality of law and political community is that they are, unavoidably, no such thing, and can not rationally be treated as such.

This basic, underlying reality--that the laws of our nation presume, but do not state, that citizens as such are persons with a certain minimum amount of property--is also one with a long history in the laws of Europe since the Reformation. The "Problem of Landlessness" has been a capital-P Problem, at least in the Anglo-sphere, since the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and has generally been addressed with laws that at least tacitly acknowledge that poor people below a certain threshhold are not citizens in the same sense as anyone else, but people with special responsibilities, liabilities, and (occasionally) privileges, chief among them the universal liability to force and coercion whenever their existence negatively impacts the common good or convenience of real citizens.

As Chesterton pointed out over a century ago, such regimes, while ubiquitous in England and America for centuries, would if taken and applied literally and pervasively constitute a resumption of the principles of ancient slavery--especially when combined, as they often have been, with "work-houses" and other coercive methods for dealing with the landless poor by forcing them to labor for wealthier citizens. 

This "dual-citizenship" or "slavery" model has been the predominant method of dealing with landlessness since the English Reformation; but it is not really, I think, what is fundamentally at work in the present move toward the overt criminalization of homelessness, the drive to punish and repress and clear away homeless persons from public and private land no matter the goals or the consequences. In fact, this model was far more present, ironically, in the previous legal regimes and court decisions that the Supreme Court struck down, which allowed for the criminalization of homelessness in a given area provided there were sufficient available shelter beds in that area. 

Such rulings, it should be said, still fundamentally treat homeless persons as non-citizens subject to special liabilities and privileges. "Homeless shelters" in America are a categorical grouping of a wide variety of distinct public and private institutions with little or no oversight or standards or even features in common. Practically all of them are in basic essence highly coercive, with strict standards, requirements, rules, curfews, etc, infractions of which are punished with expulsion and/or property confiscation; many impose religious practice standards; many forbid all smoking, drinking of alcohol, etc; many have work requirements; and many in fact charge money of those who live in them, either directly or via deductions from paychecks. In many cases, these requirements are rational given the standards under which they must operate; but even very good and well-run homeless shelters are categorically and experientially much closer to prisons, workhouses, or concentration camps than free hotels. 

A basic condition of citizenship in any civilized nation, it should be said, is that citizens are not liable to compulsory internment. Even the most "liberal" laws in America, though, presume that it is licit and in fact desirable to force homeless people, either directly or by criminalizing their basic bodily functions, to accept interment in coercive institutions that will keep them away from the general citizenry and, ideally, put them to work for said citizenry. 

The Supreme Court decision, however, goes far beyond this basic concept, by rejecting any limitations on governments' right to punish homeless persons at any time for any reasons, regardless of whether there in fact are even institutions available for them to be interned in. They can be punished, fined, imprisoned, driven out, for eating and sleeping tout court. 

In this, we have gone far beyond the concept of citizenship. Roman law recognized a distinction between the ius civile ("civil law") applicable only to citizens, and the ius gentium ("law of nations") and ius naturale ("natural law") applicable to all persons, even slaves. Though far from corresponding to the developed Catholic understanding of the unity of the human race, the good nature of human beings, and the universal duty of charity to all people, this framework nonetheless provided certain moral and legal duties and requirements applicable beyond the bounds of citizenship and group-membership. While the ius gentium focused on relations among members of different peoples, who might come into conflict but were assumed to be by default in a state of peace requiring them to respect each other's persons and properties, the ius naturale was in Roman law an extremely limited concept applicable only to those features and functions common not only to all people but to animals as well: which is to say, eating, sleeping, defecation, and reproduction. In these limited respects (his basic rights to eat, sleep, shit, have sex, and bear children), the slave and citizen were equals. 

The present legal principles put forward by the Supreme Court, and embodied already in many laws and basic understandings, contradict not just the law of citizens, but even more the basic rational senses of law applicable to all human persons and animals. It is in fact too mild even to say that this legal regime treats the homeless as animals. Even animals, while they may be shot or castrated where the good of human beings demands it, are not liable to fines and punishment for their specific acts of eating, sleeping, and reproducing. Animals, too, may beg for food when they lack it without specific legal punishments. 

What is most remarkable about the present "common sense" legal treatment of homelessness is that it is in fact centered on a denial to homeless persons of the rights embodied in natural law in the Roman sense, as well as in the Catholic and Medieval senses: namely, the right to live in the only way an animal being can, by eating, sleeping, and defecating. 

A law that punishes human beings, rational animals, with fines or imprisonment for merely living is a law so fundamentally opposed to the nature of law itself that I would argue that not only can it never be rationally obeyed or respected, even minimally, even for the sake of public order, but it also fundamentally calls into question the legitimacy of any government capable of enacting it and justifying it. 

For the only possible rational explanation for such a law is that the government in question is not concerned with the good of human beings at all--that it exists by and for some other purpose, such as maintaining property values or increasing shareholder stock gains or merely maintaining itself in operation, by and for itself, forever. And such a government is not a government at all, but something else--something inimical to human life. 

Homelessness, though, is a very real problem, and one of those bevy of real political issues that in any reasonable polity would be at the forefront of political thought and debate. A reasonable estimate might be that there are 8 to 10 million homeless persons in America in the present day, scattered throughout the 50 states but largely concentrated in the major cities and coastal areas. 

Allow me to be clear: homelessness is not a new issue in America or Europe. Nor is it a remotely insoluble problem. We know enough about this problem to know that interning homeless people in shelters or prisons is not going to have a very great positive impact on homelessness; but we know very well what would have such impacts. 

Even modest efforts to provide free services and income and incentivize the building of low-income housing have had measurable impacts on homelessness. The current prevalence of homelessness in America, particularly in major cities, is driven almost entirely by the very recent and extreme rise in housing costs driven by a for-profit renting market catering to the wealthy. This housing market, though, is far from a free market in the abstract sense, but is largely supported and shaped by public policy; and public policy in virtually all major American cities earlier this century was reasonably successful at getting landlords to provide vast amounts of cheap, low-quality housing to the very poor. Somewhat more rationally, 20th century European governments dealt with homelessness through a mix of social welfare programs and the mass building of public housing: and they were largely successful. 

I would ultimately support much more radical efforts, fundamentally transforming the economy and the housing market alike; but if homelessness were considered a national political issue, a pressing political issue, then no doubt a number of proposals would be put forward and debated, and at least something would be done about it. And almost no matter what was done, at the national level, it would have a real impact on the problem of homelessness in America.

The real issue of homelessness in 2024, though, is not even that people hate the homeless, or wish to drive them away: it is that they simply do not care. Localities by themselves could not resolve the larger problem of homelessness: but even localities are choosing, in 2024, to simply drive the homeless away or (at best) imprison them, knowing there is no political will or interest for any effort more strenuous.

At the moment, there simply is no national conversation on homelessness and how to deal with it. States and localities are left alone to deal with it as they think best; and even Supreme Court decisions barely impact the public consciousness. 

This must change; and this is a real political issue which should be urgently dealt with and debated in the 2024 election.

Criminals: or, Prison Reform

Of course, the punishment of people for eating and sleeping is merely part and parcel of a broader crisis in American society, in American culture itself, whereby tools of coercion and confinement have become our main means for dealing with anything and everything--including acts that are and would be, in any reasonable society, crimes to be punished by the state.

I am frequently struck by the fact that the concept of "prison reform" is not present in American public life; indeed, it seems not even to be a term that people have heard of. Prison reform has been, off and on, an issue in European and even English politics since at least the 17th century, and continues to be so today. In America, though, even advocates of the imprisoned seem unaware of it. 

This is certainly not because we do not have enough prisons in America. As has been frequently pointed out, at the latest since the BLM protests, America has one of the highest rates of incarceration of any in the world: indeed, for most of the past few decades, it has had the highest rate in the world, but in the past few years (due to the pandemic and mass incarceration regimes elsewhere) has been overtaken by El Salvador and perhaps 1-2 other authoritarian states in other parts of the world. Still, no other democracy in the world has anything resembling America's prison population; most European states have less than half per capita, and in fact most US States taken separately would have higher per capita incarceration rates than any major democracy in the world. Taken in absolute terms, America has a higher prison population than any other nation in the world, with more than double the prisoners of China and India. 

Nor is the number of imprisoned people the only remarkable thing about America's approach to crime and punishment. The conditions in America's prisons are, put simply, worse by an order of magnitude than those in any developed nation. Massive overcrowding is common, as is the physical and sexual abuse of inmates by guards or other inmates--to such an extent that "prison rape" has become a stale, middle-class joke employed by both progressives and conservatives with, seemingly, no self-consciousness. When I was in high-school in Alabama, there were multiple overcrowding scandals and several scandals involving publicly-acknowledged mass rape and sexual abuse of prison inmates--which barely scratched the public consciousness. Nor is Alabama at all unique in this respect. All this is not even to begin to deal with the more basic problem of the lack of medical care, physical and mental, and of basic rehabilitation, recidivism, or job programs for inmates serving even very short sentences for petty offenses.

Then there is the phenomenon of the privatization of prisons and of prison labor more generally. Privatized prisons run for profit have frequently been exposed as not only inhuman in their treatment of inmates, putting them to use for difficult and degrading labor without regular safety or working standards, but also frequently poorly-run and understaffed more generally. And the use of prison labor in America is not only normalized, but has almost no limitations or basic oversight of the sort one would expect for any kind of work program, let alone a public one. 

At the latest thanks to the BLM protests, law enforcement and mass incarceration have entered at least vaguely into the outer perimeter of American political consciousness; but largely as a "radical," left-wing-coded movement to "abolish prisons" or "defund the police." Yet America's prisons are straightforwardly failing to achieve any of the purposes such a system is supposed to serve by any standards, conservative as well as progressive, religious as well as secular. 

If the purpose of prison is imagined as rehabilitation of malefactors into good citizens, then recidivism rates, buttressed by the difficulty prisoners find in acquiring any type of employment after their punishment, and even more by the acknowledged phenomenon of American prisons turning people into drug addicts, lifelong criminals, gang members, and terrorists would presumably be a problem. If the purpose of prison is imagined as a rational system of limited moral retribution for particular moral crimes, then the chaotic conditions and wanton torture and rape meted out to prisoners would, presumably, be a problem as well. Even if the purpose of prison were imagined merely as the protection of the general public by keeping "dangerous people" away from them, then, again, the revolving wheel of recividism and the nature of America's prisons as training grounds for violent and psychopathic behavior and recruiting grounds for gangs and terrorist organizations would, again, be presumably considered an issue.

My own general beliefs on crime and punishment in general and prison and law enforcement in particular are more radical than that of most of the general population of America. Yet basic straightforward "prison reform" programmes of the type carried out regularly in European societies since the 17th century--funding increases and government inspection and regulation of prisons to improve conditions for inmates, sentencing reform to reduce the punishment for minor, petty, and non-violent crime and keep such people separate from more violent criminal populations, and various rehabilitative programs aimed at preventing recividism and helping prisoners find jobs and communities after their imprisonment--would, I think, be both straightforward to implement and broadly serve the stated goals of virtually every group in American society.

Ultimately, however, I fear that the real reason for Americans' rejection of prison reform is far more basic, and far more disturbing. Implanted deeply in the American consciousness is a kind of perverted secular Calvinism, whereby sin is treated not as a moral matter at all, but rather as a matter of status--one either is a good person (elect) or one is a criminal, and this not due fundamentally to any actions or choices at all. If one is thinking of crime and punishment in moral terms, as limited retribution for limited offenses, one would be very careful not to either punish the innocent, or to inflict more or other retribution than a person is actually due--recognizing, as Chesterton said, that officials and the public at large are themselves morally responsible for every punishment and every moment of imprisonment or pain they inflict on their fellow citizen, and must pay for it it before God and man. 

In America, though, we do not, generally speaking, think in these terms. Rather, a good person is simply good, and is not morally responsible for any of their actions, let alone actions inflicted on criminals. A criminal, though, is simply a criminal, fundamentally worthless, worthy in principle of infinite pain and infinite punishment, but most fundamentally simply unworthy of any concern or effort or expenditure whatsoever by good people.  In the (brief) public debates on prison conditions brought about by the above-mentioned scandals in Alabama, the remarks made by people opposed to caring or taking any action to prevent the mass torture of prisoners again and again boiled down to some variant of "why should we waste our time and money and effort on criminals?" Like homeless people, one is no longer the subject of law, not even the ius naturale of eating, sleeping, defecating, let alone the ius gentium of not being wantonly raped or murdered. This, like the treatment of the homeless, is not most fundamentally an outgrowth of malice or hatred, but of simple indifference--indifference raised to the point of rational and moral principle. 

Insofar as such a basic, irrational, amoral indifference to human persons becomes embedded in public law and conduct, political society as such becomes impossible. Both to prevent this fundamental illegitimacy of law and the violent dissolution of the American polity, and for its own sake, prison reform ought to be one of the principle issues discussed in the 2024 elections.

Lonely Hearts: or, Community Reform

America in 2024 is, in human and historical terms, a unique society in many ways. Both of the foregoing issues, though, although they are fairly unique in practice and in extent, in general represent merely extreme treatments of fundamental human problems of every human society: poverty and crime and punishment. 

In one way, however, America, and the broader post-modern society presided over by it, is becoming unique in a way that would seem to transcend human history and civilization itself: our treatment of the fundamental, natural features of human life, of human beings who are most fundamentally rational social eating sleeping and procreating animals. 

My viewpoint on the so-called "culture war issues" (which, as of 2024, are no longer for the most part the main issues along which the culture war polarizes) is neither moderate nor conflicted: I am an unreconstructed Catholic who thinks there are two natural unchanging sexes, opposes abortion under all circumstances, and believes that marriage between one man and one woman is the natural foundation of human society as such. Nevertheless, that is not really what I want to write about here; both because they have been written about by me and others frequently elsewhere, and because I do not really think deviations from this moral system are at all unique in human history or even in Catholic history. Even abortion, as I have argued elsewhere, is best seen not as a unique modern aberration, but as a modern, technological replacement for the historically widespread (though impossible to justify morally) human practice of infanticide. Laws rendering it illicit and preventing people from profiting from it are necessary and have good and measurable impacts, but its prevalence is ultimately grounded in more fundamental structures and moral issues endemic to modernity and human life more generally.

Where America is becoming more and more unique, though, is in the increasing polarization of our culture and politics around the lines between the sexes, the presence and increasing prominence within our society of a narrative of intrinsic conflict between men and women, and the coinciding facts that fewer and fewer people in America, relative to any other society in history, are married, fewer and fewer people in America, relative to any other society in history are born to married parents: and most fundamentally of all, fewer and fewer people in America, relative to any other society in history, have close friends or a community at all. The opioid crisis--which should by any standards be one of the top issues in any American election in 2024--and other issues connected with drug abuse, suicide, "deaths of despair," and even many forms of crime are all, relatively uncontroversially, driven by this more fundamental crisis of loneliness. 

The most prominent feature of American life in 2024, then, our biggest crisis, and hence the biggest issue that really should be a political issue, is simply this epidemic of communal and familial dissolution and failure and hence of loneliness. 

Nor, again, is this an issue that it would be impossible to ameloriate, or which would need to be dealt with in a partisan way (according to current partisanships). We have a perfectly reasonable understanding of the things that aid positive relationships between the sexes, family formation, and community more broadly: they are, put simply, a mix of economic stability and structured, ordered communal spaces where people are brought to gather in person in small enough groups to meet and befriend each other, and also where men and women are brought to gather in small enough groups in activities structured according to sexual differentiation and with an explicit goal or at least potential of forming permanent relationships. These three issues are all mutually reinforcing: since marriages flourish in non-romantic communities, while non-romantic communities naturally produce marriages, and marriages and communities in turn aid economic stability. 

Again, in most societies throughout history, governments--mostly local governments--and churches have played a central role in establishing and funding and maintaining these communal gathering spaces and activities, building town halls and clubs and parishes and hosting dances and bingo games and town halls and sports competitions and many such things. Even on the level of national politics, the ameloriation of the loneliness crisis through the targeted funding and promotion and establishing of local community institutions is perfectly possible, and, one imagines, would be widely popular with both conservative and progressive Americans. 

Such strong communities and families would, in themselves, play a major role in providing economic stability also--since they remain by far the most effective social safety net and means of mutual aid in America, and would remain so even in a society with reasonable government approaches to the above. My experience with homeless people in this regard is telling, namely that most of the people who succeeded in getting out of homelessness did so because of family, and few or none because of the government. If one added to those familial and community and religious institutions efforts to promote and protect and extend the power of labor unions and other worker organizations, the gains would be even greater: since unions have historically played a major role both in providing economic stability and means to workers and to providing them with networks of communal aid and support. 

At the very least, the crisis of community and familial breakdown ought to be at the very forefront of public consciousness, and a major political issue. If it is not, alas, it is to a large extent because both of our cultural symbolic-binary political parties are engaged in exploiting American loneliness and isolation and gender wars for their own purposes, and hence actively making the problem worse.

Workers: or, Land Reform

In all the above, I have sought, fundamentally, to present proposals that I believe would be not only immediately implementable in 2024 America, but also largely escape the grip of contemporary partisanship. However, I have to have some fun in this essay: and so may last recommendation for a major political issue for the 2024 election, while implementable, would be, unavoidably, both extremely partisan and extremely controversial with virtually everyone. 

Land reform, though, is not at all impracticable; or even necessarily partisan in the contemporary American sense. It has been carried out again and again over the last few centuries, generally with great success; and has even been carried out by America itself, and by no means by radical Leftist America. 

By land reform, in general terms, I mean the large-scale, policy-driven attempt to increase the distribution of landholding, primarily agricultural landholding, in a society by a variety of legal means, including: (1) policies and funding to incentivize and directly aid land purchases and increase the economic viability of smaller farms and businesses, (2) the giving away or sale of publicly-held lands to smaller farmers, and/or (3) the purchase or expropriation of large land-holdings and their redistribution. 

While this might strike many in America as the rankest communism, in fact Communists have virtually never made use of land reform as a policy means or goal, and it is if anything more associated with anti-Communist activity. The Tories in England, driven in part by a traditional regard for the religious agricultural society of the Irish, initiated a widespread and popular land reform in Ireland; and America after WW2 initiated a very widespread and very popular series of land reforms in South Korea and Japan that are not uncommonly seen as having laid the groundwork for the remarkable (and thoroughly capitalist) economic takeoffs of both nations shortly thereafter. Indeed, in the decades after WW2 the American government considered land reform to be a key part of their "toolbox" to defeat Communism throughout Asia by promising locals a better deal than they would get by alliance with China or the Soviets. 

That American agriculture is in need of land reform might appear surprising to some people; but not to anyone with a close familiarity with the actual practice of American agriculture in 2024. There are, to be sure, large amounts of land owned by large landholders in America today; the top ten landholders between them own about 15 million acres, while around 40 million acres is owned by foreign persons or corporations. In terms of US agriculture production, only about 21% of American agricultural production is produced by what the US government defines as "small family farms." 

More fundamental, though, is the structure of contemporary agriculture, driven more and more by massive agribusinesses who do not usually own the land on which farmers farm, but do have ownership rights over fertilizer, farm equipment, seeds, and/or livestock. The structure of farming in America is fundamentally driven by the debt relationships created by large agribusinesses; a fact that the rising suicide rates among farmers caught in debt traps testify to. Increasingly, even "family farmers" are closer to employees of agribusinesses than independent operators. Along with this dominance by agribusinesses has come the collapse of the rural economy in much of America and the emptying out of the countryside--the source of both a great number of "deaths of despair" and also of many of the political divides of recent decades.

Farm workers, though, are a large and growing segment of the population, constituting about 2.5 million people of whom the vast majority are Hispanic, with almost 70% foreign-born, and about 1/3rd undocumented immigrants. About 15% of farm-workers are migrants, traveling large distances to find work--but even those that do not travel for work frequently suffer from poor health and education and brutal mistreatment. They are, in general, unenfranchised, unprotected from depredations, and paid extremely poorly relative to their work. 

There are piecemeal ways to deal with all of these problems; yet even a very moderate land reform would go a long way to addressing all of them--particularly if a land reform specifically targeted disenfranchised and poorly-paid farmworkers, giving them a chance at owning the land and not merely working on it. 

Even more fundamentally, however, land reform could play a role in addressing all of the crises laid out above, by providing poor and homeless Americans with not only housing but also livelihood and a real and tangible stake in the common good, by providing incarcerated people with the possibility of labor and even ownership, and by creating institutions that tangibly require and aid in stable communal and family life. There have even been schemes put forward to use land reform to aid in other popular cultural causes, such as making reparation to Black Americans, increasing the environmental sustainability of American farming practices, and, again, assisting in stable family formation and religious community.

Nor, in the context of America, need land reform even be particularly punitive. I have, in general terms, absolutely no moral issues with the mass expropriation of land and its redistribution; but that would not be necessary for some type of land reform to take place. America, relative to almost anywhere in the world, has a vast oversupply of land, most of which is not used for anything in particular. The US government owns about 40% of the land in America, and could distribute some amount of that land. Economic reforms such as those that defined the New Deal could vastly increase the viability of small-scale farms without any direct redistribution at all. And the break-up of agribusinesses, either directly or merely by removing their power to patent seeds and livestock and control farm equipment, would go a massive way all by itself towards removing the greatest barriers to farmer prosperity in America.

Land reform, I fully admit, is a far more radical proposal than all of the above--and not only that, but a far more complex one, so complex that I am far from competent to work out the vast majority of the details involved in a proposed scheme. Any even moderately successful land reform would require making large changes to the current American food system, as well as to the American financial system in order to provide more stable sources of credit to smaller farmers. But isn't working out such details, with stake-holder input and debate, precisely what our political process is supposed to be for?

At the very least, the plight of American agriculture and the possibility of land reform ought to be a major political issue for the 2024 election. 

Conclusion: Reality

The above, from the perspective of contemporary American politics, is sheer fantasy. 

"Mainstream" American politics, though, in 2024, is, at the present writing, little more than a collection of binary symbols flowing from the mainstream to the sea; and all the above political issues are rooted in the fundamental nature of human beings as such, and, even more, are presently hurting very many very real people today. Human beings, though, in both the generic and particular senses, have little to do with politics today, alas.

That can change, however, at any time; because ultimately, the roots of real politics are themselves real, eternally present, and so require little more to get them going than a reasonable amount of attention to said reality. Here, the main obstacle is merely distraction--the distraction of false and fictitious politics, absurd and meaningless mainstream culture. 

Once we stop paying attention to these, then we can start paying attention to the actual problems and potentialities of our actual human life. That real politics may or may not look much like what I have laid out here: but it will begin and end with human nature and the real problems of real people. And it is not for theoretical completeness or justice, but for the real good and happiness of those people that it is worth working for.