[I think there are some important ideas here for the unterbussen "going forward," and so I'm going to leave it sticky for another day. --lambert]

Recently on Corrente there has been a discussion about how we can best recruit or build bridges with the disaffected elements of the right, commonly known as the tea partiers. I propose that we make efforts to build a left-centered new consensus that incorporates rightists, without trying to convert them over completely.

It is fairly unlikely that we will be able to "convert" significant elements of the right over to a whole heartedly leftist point of view. There are a variety of reasons for that, some of which have to do with personal temperament, and others which have to do with fundamental disagreements about values, what some would call moral values, or others would call ethical values, regardless these are basic differences. When I say consensus what I mean is a general shared system of core values, about which there can be some differences.

In the postwar era, there has been , or there was until it was broken by the Vietnam War, what was known as the bipartisan consensus. Democrats and Republicans agreed to pursue an interentionist anti-communist strategy overseas, with divergent social policies at home. And so in order to support this bipartisan consensus, Lyndon Johnson chose to continue to escalate the war in Southeast Asia, while nonetheless pursuing what might be characterized today as social democratic policies at home.

The reason that this is relevant is that there have been quite a number of discussions on Corrente regarding what we call the "very serious people" or the sphere of acceptable discourse. What I propose is that we create a new sphere of acceptable discourse. Now some people will say , gosh you're talking about excluding other people. The fact is there is always some kind of limit to any discourse. For example, I don't think it would be a controversial notion here that we should exclude the KKK.

What we really want is a new left-centered consensus. If some like David Brooks have said that the US is a center right nation, well then what we are looking for is to turn the United States into a left-centered nation. We can do that by creating a new center based around leftist ideas while understanding that many of our conservative brethren are always going to be conservative. They will always be opposed to gay marriage, to the removal of prayer from schools, to abortion, and they will have a variety of issues with, for example, increased government funding for the arts. There were the enormous culture wars in the 90s over things like the "Piss Christ" and all of these other artistic projects which were portrayed as violating good taste and common decency. And that may well be true. It may well be true that these things do violate a lot of people's norms. Enough with the exposition.

What I propose is that we have a new left centered discourse around bringing the FIRE sector to heel, and building a political economy that enriches and strengthens all Americans, an America that is more economically equitable, and produces a stronger and more vibrant economy that doesn't waste resources. Professor Bill Mitchell in Australia has been very eloquent in stating that when you have mass unemployment, those are human abilities going to waste. Those are people sitting at home who could be doing productive things. Worse yet, we are never going to get that time back. That's 40 hours a week something could be doing productive work.

We want to maximize the utilization of resources in our society, out of the efforts of humanity. We're not doing that right now.

How are we going to do that? As we've discussed, we want MMT. We want a political economy centered around an MMT understanding of our financial system. What that will do is remove the ability fo the financial elite to run the economy strictly for their benefit and not for the benefit of others. And then come things like ending the sale of Treasuries, national health care and a job guarantee. These things alone would do wonders at reversing the economic crisis in which we find ourselves.

Of course the other part of our new consensus would also be civil rights issues. There are many people in the Tea Party who are concerned about the TSA searching their stuff, grabbing their junk, zapping them with pornoscanners, and wiretapping. Many of the people who are fervent 2nd amendment supporters are concerned about these issues. I think they have hard time joining with us to articulate these concerns. Part of the problem is finding a way to explain to them how the rise of the military-industrial-financial complex has created these perverse incentives to drive the increasingly authoritarian nature of American life.

We want to reach out to the right and say we want MMT , which we want to use to break the back of the FIRE sector. We want this because it will give space for small businesses to thrive. We want to reign in the military industrial complex and the way it has led to TSA overreach and pornoscanners. We want a genuine multiparty system. We want something more than the two party monopoly. Why is a multiparty system a winner for the right wing? First of all, people could have a Christian party if they wanted. They have them in Europe and I don't see why we shouldn't have one here if that's what people want. That would also give a space for the hardcore atheist libertarians to have their own party. Many of them don't want to sit in the same party as a bunch of religious fundamentalists if they can avoid it. Naturally this would give a chance for the Green Party and socialists to be heard too.

Once we roll out this new consensus it makes it easier to reach across the aisle to the right and say look you're also being excluded from the discourse, you're also concerned about the FIRE sector, so join with us. Certainly you won't get everything you want. Some of them may say , cool, we like Warren Mosler, we like tax cuts, but we're kind of concerned about full employment. We can say, sure, I can see your point, but we think this is a way to break the back of the FIRE sector. And furthermore, if you say to people "we want to give you a job" , many of them will lunge for that. There are many people who are small business owners who are no longer able to profit from that, and they're looking for a day job. We can say to them look we'll pay 10 bucks an hour and you'll get national healthcare. So don't worry if you get hurt on the job or it turns out your kid has cystic fibrosis.

The tougher part are some of the cultural issues. I know there are a lot of people on the left who really want to see gay marriage legalized in all states. Well we may not be able to include that as part of the new consensus. It will remain contested. We may not be able to have arts funding to the degree that people want. But I think if we can agree on these economic issues, the other things will take care of themselves. Even though something like drug legalization might be subsumed under the reducing authoritarianism aspect, but it might be a tougher sell than decriminalization.

The real point of this new consensus is giving people something around which they can organize, and to understand that when we reach the point when we achieve our consensus goals, that politics as usual will begin again. People will then go back to vociferously arguing the cultural issues, and that's fair. But there isn't any point to having it out over these cultural issues when so many people are going hungry, food stamp usage is reaching record proportions, and so many people don't have jobs. Even graduate professional programs are finding that only one or two people out of hundreds have a job lined up at the termination of the program. These aren't acceptable outcomes, and if we want to do something about this, we will have to build a new consensus with others who may never fully agree with us, but nonetheless are willing to come aboard to successfully address the economic issues that are crippling the United States.