Reforms in the 21st century.

According to Halstead & Lind, we may be about to face a big era of reforms similar to the one we witnessed at the beginning of the 20th century:

Clearly, the first years of the new millennium are not one of the great ages of political reform, like 1782-1800, 1860-76, or 1932-68. Rather, the first years of the twenty-first century in the United States can be compared to the first years of the twentieth. Then, as now, the challenge was to adapt American society to a new phase of technological civilization —the second industrial era in the 1900s, the Information Age in the 2000s. Then, as now, it was becoming clear that systemic change, not merely incremental reform, was in order.

But then as now systemic change was not yet possible. The reformers of the late nineteenth century like the Mugwumps and the Populists shared a vague sense that things were not right, but they failed to correctly analyze the situation. The Mugwumps, ignoring the transformation of the industrial economy, tended to assume that most problems resulted from political corruption. Their favored forms were important but limited to the democratic process, like the secret ballot. The Populists, by contrast, feared industrial progress and sought to preserve an America of family farms. Like the Mugwumps, they tended to blame the side effects of industrialization on elite conspiracies rather than on structural change. Populists therefore favored this or that crackpot panacea —the nationalization of the railroads, or a currency based on bimetallism. The parallel with the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century is almost exact. The contemporary equivalent of the old Mugwumps were obsessed with campaign finance reform and gimmicks like term limits, to the exclusion of more important reforms. And the hard-core Populists of our time, represented by Patrick Buchanan, sought to restore an earlier economic and social order by means of industrial protectionism.

(Halstead & Lind: pp. 212-213).

I still think Gramsci described it best when he tried to define the concept of crisis:

When the old is dead, the new cannot be born.

That is precisely what happened at the beginning of the 20th century, and it's now happening once more: the old is dead (or about to die), but the new is not fully born yet. We can already begin to see the shapes the new world will take, but they are not completely defined yet. On the other hand, while it's becoming increasingly obvious that the old way to deal with things is not acceptable anymore (i.e., it's not sufficient, it fails to provide us with the answers we need), we still stick to them out of fear not so much of what's to come as fear of the unknown. We are indeed in the middle of a large transition between two different forms to understand and organize the world, moving away from the old industrial paradigm and closer to the information age. We can already see some of the characteristics that will define the new future, but cannot fully grasp them yet. Thus, our reaction is, at least partially, one of fear and disbelief. We cannot rule out desperate attempts to hit the brakes and return to a more comfortable past (i.e., populism and protectionism in a different, more up to date guise). But, in the end, the new information age and its new rules will come one way or another. Our best bet is to adapt to it by implementing the needed reforms. That's what Halstead & Lind propose in their book. When everything around us falls apart, we cannot stay put. There are basically two possible reactions: either we make a desperate attempt to hit the brakes, and we will be smashed to smithreens by the unstoppable advance of social and economic evolution, or we make an effort to constantly ascertain the main features of that new world that's fastly taking shape in front of us and implement the reforms to adapt to it and make the best out of it.