Policy follows deeper social power structures, not the other way around. Moving the US to a social democratic model requires the difficult work if ground-up organizing principled anticapitalist formations. Social democracy has always been a capitalist attempt to head off socialist power, to coopt the workers’ organizations into legalized structures that can be controlled by a capitalist-owned state. If you want social democracy, the way is to apparently organize with a communist party in a movement that fails to innoculate itself against capitalist cooption.
So, it is actually the antithesis of waiting for a policy change or announcing a desire for one. If you simply say, “this is a good policy for us workers”, the ruling class will say, “you and what army?” and they will correctly call your bluff just like always. They have to be unable to call your bluff because you straight-up are not bluffing.
Campaign finance perhaps.
That would be my answer as well. Followed by ranked choice voting during federal and state elections.
So citizens united and super pacs?
Campaign finance was already an issue before citizens united and super pacs. It’s an order of magnitude worse now, but just rolling those back doesn’t solve the problem.
I heard an idea that I liked. Give everyone the first $50 of their taxes back as a token usable only as a political donation. That would be more than enough money to swamp the political funding that existed prior to citizens united. I’m not sure how it would stack up now, though, and am too tired at the moment to go figure it out.
I’ve read some on publicly funded campaigns which makes sense to me. Without the repeal of Citizens United, there would still be those types of mega donations but maybe pass a law so that they get taxed to shit and rolled back into the public campaign funds…
If we did more to address wealth inequality, a lot of other problems get better. Like, it could be technically legal to spend a billion dollars on advertising a campaign, but that won’t matter if no one has a billion dollars to spend.
I had a half joking conversation with some friends at the bar a while ago where we had this idea: every year we calculate the 10 richest people who have more than some factor more than the poorest people. If they don’t give up their wealth to get under the threshold, then we kill them, and distribute their stuff.
That’s it. It’s really just “eat the rich” with extra steps.
For me number one would be to let trade unions do their job without restriction. In the US I think that would mean abolishing so-called ‘right to work’ laws as a priority.
