1. It's time to embrace discomfort. What makes Goliath unique is what makes it uncomfortable for those in power. I show that our political crisis is not the other guy's fault. We were the bad guys. Which means... we can also be the good guys. amazon.com/Goliath-Monopo…
2. Most of the dialogue these days is about how the world began to collapse when Trump got into office. Nonsense. I started recognizing serious problems with my own way of thinking when I supported the war in Iraq in 2002 because Democratic leaders and the NYT supported it.
3. Back then, I was kind of an elitist. That's what I was trained for. Harvard taught me to trust experts, and the experts taught us killing 500k people was not only the right thing to do, but the only thing to do. I believed them, and I am still deeply ashamed.
4. Meanwhile protesters - scoffed at as hippies - said the war was immoral. They were right. Years later, I saw the men in suits say that we had to give $1T to George Bush to bail out banks. It was not only the right thing to do, it was the only thing to do. I was like, nope.
5. But most of us still couldn't break from the old way of thinking, the 'quiet dogmas of the past.' We listen to experts, who were still corrupted. And I also realized the protesters, who had been right, didn't want to come in and make decisions about power. They were afraid.
6. As Dems decided to engage in mass foreclosures - and I worked in rooms where they made the decisions to do that and I saw protesters ignore the problems - I realized something was wrong with the way we thought. Not corruption, but broken ideology and a false history.
7. I realized we've had these debates before. Woodrow Wilson distrusted experts and philanthropic impulses, and supported the use of democracy to break up banks and concentrated financial power. But I didn't know that history. All I knew of Wilson was his extreme racism.
8. I didn't know how Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader pushed deregulation, or how Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg supported strong pro-monopoly rulings. I didn't know about the brutal fights between FDR and plutocrats tinged with fascism. So I wasn't ready for the crisis.
9. There is a wonderful, glorious, and strange set of debates that has taken place over how to construct a democratic society. It is riven with toxic racism, plutocracy, vibrant protests, and democratic impulses. It is there. We have handled crises very well and very badly.
10. We ended Reconstruction largely because of the financial crisis of 1873, and used a fake history - called Lost Cause history - to justify Jim Crow. In 1933 we did the opposite with the New Deal, and began the breaking of Nazism abroad and the domestic fascism of Jim Crow.
11. We must face up to what we also did in the last forty years, and the bad ideas that guided us. We must look our history in the eye and re-learn it. The real history, not the pseudo-Lost Cause version constructed to distort populism.
12. That fake history is one of consumer-ism, one that airbrushes corporate and banks out of our struggles for power, either by using the terms of efficiency and consumer welfare or handwaving away choices by lazily saying 'capitalism'. It addicted us to powerlessness.
13. Today there is no governing. Lawlessness, no response to crises across our society. So we turn to shame, to 'you need to pay attention this unsolved problem more than that unsolved problem.' What we need is not to know of corruption but the righteous use of democratic power.
14. Our excuses - money in politics, corrupt Congress, widespread apathy, gerrymandering, technological inevitability - are not always wrong. But they are incomplete. We had choices. We all saw our leaders make those choices.
15. We still have choices. We can reign in concentrated power. We can build a democracy. We just need to recognize that, at some level, we did not face up to the extent of the problem and our role in constructing it. We were the bad guys, which means we can be the good guys.
16. We have to get in the muck, and recognize that, despite the presence of racism and injustice, we can do better or worse. We can be the villains or the heroes. That is our choice. Let us embrace the discomfort. Let us learn who we are and who we can be. amazon.com/Goliath-Monopo…
