I guess we'll have an "imagination Christmas" this year

Fascism is capitalism turned all the way to 11. To defeat it, it is on us to burst the oligarchs' bubble and build a better future for people and planet.

Today is Black Friday - the official start of the holiday shopping season, the highest and most holy holiday of American capitalism, an orgy of economic overconsumption following a day of caloric overconsumption. The National Retail Federation reports almost 187 million Americans are expected to shop over the five day period from Thanksgiving Day through “Cyber Monday,” a record. But I hope you’re not buying a goddamn thing.

Multiple groups are organizing economic boycotts to take place over the same period. One, called Mass Blackout describes itself as a “coordinated economic shutdown—a collective refusal to participate in a system that profits off our pain, exploits our labor, and buys our politicians.” They are calling Americans to stop online or in-store shopping (except for small businesses); stop work; stop streaming, cancel subscriptions, and abstain from digital purchases. They encourage consumers to support small, local businesses only and pay in cash if they must spend. I’m on board with this, though refusing to work is an impossibility for most people. A less ambitious, but more targeted - and perhaps more realistic - campaign organized by some of the groups behind the “No Kings” protests is calling for a boycott of specific companies that have enabled some of the Trump administration’s worst abuses. Specifically, this action is directed at Target, “for caving to this administration’s biased attacks on DEI”, Home Depot for colluding with ICE, and Amazon for their monopolistic business practices, dangerous working conditions, and Jeff Bezos’ financial beneficence toward the regime.

And again, I’m down for all of this. But frankly, I don’t know if we need to tell people not to spend money on frivolous crap this holiday season - their wallets are already doing that. From Newsweek:

…household debt hit a record $18.6 trillion in the third quarter of 2025, having climbed $228 billion from the second quarter.

Credit card balances alone jumped $24 billion, reaching an all-time high, while the share of balances in serious delinquency—90 days past due—climbed to a nearly financial-crash level of 7.1 percent.

Auto loans tell a similar story, with serious delinquency rates at 3 percent, the highest since 2010. And a spike in resulting defaults has triggered a wave of repossessions in 2025, with 2.2 million vehicles already repossessed, per figures from the Recovery Database Network (RDN), and forecasts of a record 3 million by year’s end.

Student loan delinquencies, often a precursor to broader consumer financial troubles, have accelerated at an unprecedented pace. Rates surged to 14.3 percent in the third quarter from only 0.8 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, a historic spike caused by the expiration of pandemic-era payment pauses. According to a separate analysis of Department of Education data by the American Enterprise Institute, 5.5 million student borrowers are in default on their loans, with another 3.7 million over 270 days delinquent.

“Delinquencies, defaults, and repossessions have shot up in recent years and look alarmingly similar to trends that were apparent before the Great Recession,” the Consumer Federation of America said in a recent report.

Taken together, the numbers paint a picture of an American consumer in deep distress, and an economy that may be teetering on the edge of another collapse.

And it’s not just auto loans, student loans, and credit cards. Americans are even falling behind on their utility bills, with nearly one in twenty households staring down a disconnect notice as winter looms.

Yet, if you look at the messaging coming from the corporate class, they’re not worried about us freezing to death, they’re worried we’re “hoarding” our devices, refusing to go even further into debt for a marginal phone upgrade to pad their bottom line.

It’s time to grind this dystopian nightmare to a halt.

Fascism is the logical endpoint of unrestrained capitalism. Lenin said fascism is capitalism in decay. And if you’re still wary of quoting Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov from years of red scare brainwashing, how about a more recent observation from Professor Richard Wolff, who observed it is “the extreme of capitalism - having produced its own negation, its own opposition, its own self-destruction that calls forth the fascist alternative.” That is, fascism is enforced capitalism.

My grandparents’ generation sacrificed to defeat fascism. They rationed - limiting civilian use of meat, sugar, butter, canned goods, rubber, leather, heating fuel, and gasoline for the war effort. They grew their own vegetables in “Victory Gardens,” producing 40% of the country’s fresh produce supply by 1944. They salvaged raw materials through scrap drives. Over 400,000 Americans sacrificed their lives.

The least we can do is quit buying unnecessary shit.

Today’s neofascist economy is a bubble, and it is up to us to burst it so we can built something better, more sustainable, more human.

To quote Ned Flanders, “I guess we’ll have an imagination Christmas this year.”

But I’m not talking about pretending we got a pogo stick or a hula hoop, I’m talking about imagining a new economic and social order that serves people and planet over profit.

The defining failure of Democrats during the Trump era is not one of messaging, or fundraising, or media. It is a failure of imagination. The gooey liberal center has not offered an alternative to late-stage capitalism. They offer a hollow identity-politics veneer slapped over the same material conditions that led us to this point. To paraphrase the hardest-working man on Substack, Wajahat Ali, they seek not reformation but restoration. Democrats have become the conservative party.

Now, there are some groups working on wide-ranging policy platforms for the Democratic Party, but the most prominent of these suffer the same unoriginal, uninspired, impotent thinking that got us into this mess.

The so-called Abundance agenda dresses up trickle-down Reaganism in TED Talk optimism, promising that if we just deregulate enough, markets will shower us with housing, energy, and innovation. But abundance never asks who owns that housing, who controls that energy, or who captures the profits from that innovation — because its biggest funders, from the Walton family to Koch-backed networks to tech billionaires, are the same people who’ve spent decades fighting unions, gutting public goods, and blocking any shift of power from capital to workers. It treats inequality like a supply glitch, not the core design of the system. Left critics see abundance for what it is: a way to expand markets for private actors while avoiding the public investment, worker power, and democratic control that real shared prosperity actually requires.

Then you’ve got Project 2029, a blueprint for the next Democratic presidential administration, unimaginatively named after the Heritage Foundation’s Christian nationalist playbook, Project 2025. This isn’t a bold new vision — it’s the same old characters trying to rebrand as something new and forward-thinking. The lineup says everything: Andrei Cherny, whose fintech “climate” company was accused of green-washing and hidden fees; Neera Tanden and her corporate-funded think-tank network that has spent years fighting progressive priorities; genocide-apologist Jake Sullivan and Jeffrey Epstein associate Larry Summers. This is the Clinton-era, Third Way, donor-friendly wing of the party coming back for another lap, recycling the same market-first, corporate-aligned, austerity-adjacent worldview that helped hollow out the Democratic base in the first place. Quoting Jacobin, “the Project 2029 brain trust now tasked with saving the Democratic Party is quite literally composed of the same line-up of people who brought the party to its knees in the first place, handing Donald Trump power not once, but twice.”

I brought up WWII and I think of that generation, their sacrifice, and what they built in the aftermath. It wasn’t perfect. There were many shortcomings and many blindspots. But they built things. They put in place systems and structures that fostered the growth of a middle class that comprised two thirds of Americans in 1980 but now represents less than half. The names above are the same folks who dismantled those structures and now claim to have the solutions. Phooey!

No new ideas.

No soul.

No imagination.

So it is up to us progressives, socialists, and leftists to conceptualize a better world. This must be our gift to the American people this Christmas.

Some are already working on this. Several months ago, I spoke with Max from UNFTR.

Episode 83: Unf*cking Indiana

In that discussion, we looked at his Five Non-Negotiables platform, a “progressive vision for a just, equitable, and sustainable future.”

The 5 Non-Negotiables represent a bold, unified framework for progressive transformation—policies that are not merely idealistic, but essential.

These are policy pillars that every progressive can get behind. Each one addresses a systemic failure that has left millions behind, and taken together, they form a roadmap for equity, security, and sustainability.

Those five pillars: housing first, a civilian labor corps, Medicare for all, election integrity, and climate action represent a compelling vision for America. I came out of that conversation determined to craft a state-level analog for Indiana.

Then Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” passed.

This monstrosity dumps every cost, obligation, and political consequence onto the states while Washington walks away. It centralizes power in the federal executive - bypassing Congress, courts, and governors - but then pushes the actual implementation onto states and localities without providing the revenue or infrastructure to handle it. Cuts to federal safety-net programs shift the burden to state Medicaid rolls, state hospitals, state schools, and county agencies already stretched to the bone. And when Trump vows to ‘take over’ crime and education from Washington but slashes federal oversight and funding, states are left with the blame, the bills, and none of the tools. This is a budgetary statement of federal abandonment: a top-down order for chaos that leaves states to clean up the wreckage with money they don’t have and systems he’d cripple by design.

The betrayal knocked me on my ass. The truth is, only the federal government has the financial wherewithal to fund the ambitious programs the citizens of this state - and this country deserve. No state-focused progressive platform can succeed without support from Washington, so as the Hoosier left begins to imagine a unifying framework in Indiana we must keep in mind that we must also sweep progressives into federal office.

Still, we must present a bold vision, something much bigger than, “at least we’re not those guys.” So Indiana - and every captured “red” state - imagine with me something I’m tentatively calling HVIEW - a basic outline for a state-level blueprint dealing specifically with those issues left to the states. And at no point do we need to reinvent the wheel. “Blue states” are doing these things. Our failures are policy choices and better choices already exist.

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H is for Healthcare - Public Health, Mental Health, and Reproductive Freedom

Indiana ranks poorly on health outcomes because we’ve gutted local health departments, limited care access, and criminalized reproductive healthcare.

This pillar promises:

• A statewide public health system that actually has money

• Crisis response, addiction treatment, and harm reduction

• Reproductive rights protected in state law

• Paid family and medical leave

The pitch: Blue states with strong public health systems live longer, healthier lives. We deserve the same.

V is for Voting - Fair Maps, Easier Access to the Ballot, and Honest Government

Indiana’s gerrymandered legislature does not reflect Hoosiers; it reflects politicians picking their voters. This is fixable.

This pillar demands:

• Independent redistricting

• Citizen-led ballot initiatives

• Automatic and same-day voter registration

• Expanded early voting and universal mail voting

• Nonpartisan election administration

• Expanded ethics, anti-corruption, and transparency laws

The pitch: States with strong democratic institutions have better policy outcomes. Indiana can stop being an outlier.

I is for Infrastructure - Housing, Transportation, and Clean Energy

Hoosiers struggle with housing costs, crumbling roads, outdated transit, and pollution. Other states have figured this out.

This pillar delivers:

• Affordable housing through zoning reform, tenant protections, and public/nonprofit housing investment

• Climate action with 100 percent clean energy targets

• Statewide transit and safer streets

• Clean water, clean air, and environmental justice protections

• Modern infrastructure connecting rural and urban Indiana

The pitch: Indiana deserves towns and cities that don’t just survive - they thrive.

E is for Education - Early Childhood, K-12, Higher Ed, and Vocational Training

Indiana has starved its public schools and handed money to private vouchers; states that actually invest in kids consistently outrank us. This pillar covers:

• Universal pre-K and childcare

• Fully funded public schools with fair, needs-based formulas decoupled from local property taxes

• Strong teacher pay and retention standards

• Community school wraparound services

• Tuition-free community college or technical pathways

• Expanded 21st Century Scholars program for public universities

The pitch: Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New Mexico treat childcare and education as public goods, and their outcomes are dramatically better. Indiana can too.

W is for Workers - Fair Taxation, Good Jobs, and Labor Power

Trickle-down tax cuts and corporate subsidies created by Indiana Republicans haven’t made us prosperous. In fact, they’ve kept wages low and hollowed out towns.

This pillar includes:

• Progressive tax reform that lightens the load on working families

• A Minnesota-style Child Tax Credit to slash child poverty

• Higher minimum wages, paid sick time, and labor protections

• Union neutrality agreements for companies receiving state subsidies

• Targeted public investment in clean energy, advanced manufacturing, and rural economic revitalization

The pitch: States that invest in workers - not corporations - are thriving. Indiana can shift from low-wage/low-expectation to high-wage/high-opportunity.

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Are these possible right away? Probably not. But we need to present people a positive vision for the future, tell them where we’re going and lead the way there. Forward, not back. Reformation, not restoration. MAGA Republicans destroy. Centrist Democrats conserve. We build.

Now, let’s turn our imaginations into action.